Isn't this (i.e. classifying 3d objects under rotation, distortion etc) already basically solved? It's the sort of thing you assign people MSc projects to do...
That is a slide towards corporate government, commonly known as Fascism.
Corporatism doesn't mean that corporations take over the government. It's a political/economic system where groups of people are held to be the basic units of society, rather than individuals. These groups (which can include unions and the like) are referred to as corporations, but not in the sense of publicly traded limited liability companies, but in the sense of the Catholic Church being a "corporate entity." These corporations could have some kind of official representation, and could be tied to some state-granted monopoly. Under Fascism in Italy, these entities were mere extensions of the state, and bowed to its wishes. In other countries that have practised corporatism, such as Australia, it has taken a softer tone: there "the accord" had unions promising wage restraint in exchange for greater welfare commitments. In this case, as in others, it was more an extension of collective bargaining, which can occur alongside a relatively free, capitalist country.
Authoritarian policies are permanently pushed by the various gov't departments (particularly the Home Office), for a number of reasons that are easy to guess. When they get their way, it is because the respective minister is too weak/naive to stand up to them. For instance, Charles Clarke and David Blunkett, both seen as very authoritarian Home Secretaries, have all given statements expressing quite different views... when out of office. They were essentially inept ministers, not authoritarian ones.
"I will only say this, that if the measure before us should pass, and should produce one-tenth part of the evil which it is calculated to produce, and which I fully expect it to produce, there will soon be a remedy, though of a very objectionable kind. Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers. At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe, or the Pilgrim's Progress, shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress? Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living."
-- Thomas Macaulay, House of Commons 1841, debating whether copyright should be extended to 60 years after an author's death.
How close do you think he got? I'd say pretty much on the money.
When was the last time you walked into a retail store and a salesman handed you a brochure and said "I'll be at the register if you need me." Shouting RTFM is the second most ineffective way to sell your technology next to calling potential converts imbeciles.
You did begin by calling everyone a condescending dumbass.
What I said was still true. You were given reasons. You just chose to ignore them, and be insulting.
Frankly, no one, including yourself, ever mentions a reason WHY I should switch. I think you should eat pickles for breakfast! Why? *silence*... dumb ass.
This thread began with a link to a site listing reasons.
Maybe people are condescending to you for a reason?
There are a little over 8.5 million registered Wikipedia users and just under 150,000 active users (users who have a logged action in the past 30 days). In other words, 98.3% of users have become inactive.
His entire analysis is based on this ridiculous figure, which he then completely misinterprets.
Why measure "activity" in such a stupid way? It basically avoids any serious analysis of the data. Can he not look at total contributions? If he did then a power-law distribution is likely to emerge. This is the important thing to bear in mind with websites like this: the contributions are unconstrained. Go to any website like this and you'll see the same pattern: a few people with loads of contributions, and loads of people with practically nothing to their name.
However, even if we take his "oh noes! 98.3% inactive!" bullshit figure at face value, I fail to see this as a negative thing. It's like Steve Ballmer trying to abuse Linux by saying that most of the contributors only submitted one patch. Disaster! Completely irrelevant though: what matters is if that patch was any good. If I correct a typo on an article, and do nothing else, ever, people who subsequently read that article have benefited from my contribution, but this guy would see it as an unqualified disaster.
So basically what he's asking for, retaining users by paying them, won't work. It won't retain users, and it won't boost contributions -- in fact it could well drive them away by forcing people to enter their credit card details, where at the moment you don't even have to log in. Furthermore, it's less than obvious that retaining users is a good idea. There have been stories on/. before arguing that the most useful contributions to Wikipedia come from the least active users. There have been far more stories detailing the political bullshit some of these "active members" get up to, as well, which leads me to suspect that paying these guys to keep them around is the last thing Wikipedia needs.
The TV licence is anyway ridiculous when you consider the populist direction that the BBC has taken in the last 10 years.
While I'm tempted to agree with you, if the BBC were to do as you ask then it could (and inevitably would, in many cases by the same people) be argued that the license fee should be revoked because nobody's watching it.
Steam is a horror show. It's not the idea, exactly. It just has the "OpenOffice on Linux" effect. That is, every time you try to play any of the games you've got on it, you have to download and install yet another fucking update, which will soak up half an hour, so you might as well go have lunch instead.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't this (i.e. classifying 3d objects under rotation, distortion etc) already basically solved? It's the sort of thing you assign people MSc projects to do...
That is a slide towards corporate government, commonly known as Fascism.
Corporatism doesn't mean that corporations take over the government. It's a political/economic system where groups of people are held to be the basic units of society, rather than individuals. These groups (which can include unions and the like) are referred to as corporations, but not in the sense of publicly traded limited liability companies, but in the sense of the Catholic Church being a "corporate entity." These corporations could have some kind of official representation, and could be tied to some state-granted monopoly. Under Fascism in Italy, these entities were mere extensions of the state, and bowed to its wishes. In other countries that have practised corporatism, such as Australia, it has taken a softer tone: there "the accord" had unions promising wage restraint in exchange for greater welfare commitments. In this case, as in others, it was more an extension of collective bargaining, which can occur alongside a relatively free, capitalist country.
Back in your bin
UK web surfers will now be "blockroll'd"
Authoritarian policies are permanently pushed by the various gov't departments (particularly the Home Office), for a number of reasons that are easy to guess. When they get their way, it is because the respective minister is too weak/naive to stand up to them. For instance, Charles Clarke and David Blunkett, both seen as very authoritarian Home Secretaries, have all given statements expressing quite different views... when out of office. They were essentially inept ministers, not authoritarian ones.
Many of the laws being introduced in the UK are clearly not intended to ever get to court. They're just pretexts for police harassment.
White blood cells can use oxygen to kill bacteria.
"I will only say this, that if the measure before us should pass, and should produce one-tenth part of the evil which it is calculated to produce, and which I fully expect it to produce, there will soon be a remedy, though of a very objectionable kind. Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers. At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe, or the Pilgrim's Progress, shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress? Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living."
-- Thomas Macaulay, House of Commons 1841, debating whether copyright should be extended to 60 years after an author's death.
How close do you think he got? I'd say pretty much on the money.
Good restaurants often only have a few options on the menu for any given day.
A doubly appropriate "redundant" moderation there!
The thing is, Grant Naylor were a great comedy team. You can see what each provided to the mix -- when Grant left, the show lost a great deal.
Suing (or extorting, threatening to sue and selling "protection") your customers has never been an effective business model.
Extortion, protection rackets and the like are a pretty successful business model. It's just normally an illegal one.
What proection are they against trolls, though? They don't infringe any patents, so what use is developing a defensive portfolio against them?
When was the last time you walked into a retail store and a salesman handed you a brochure and said "I'll be at the register if you need me." Shouting RTFM is the second most ineffective way to sell your technology next to calling potential converts imbeciles.
You did begin by calling everyone a condescending dumbass.
What I said was still true. You were given reasons. You just chose to ignore them, and be insulting.
I don't even use source control.
Frankly, no one, including yourself, ever mentions a reason WHY I should switch. I think you should eat pickles for breakfast! Why? *silence* ... dumb ass.
This thread began with a link to a site listing reasons.
Maybe people are condescending to you for a reason?
Girls get pregnant at such "porn viewing sessions"(No, not from personal experience...).
Let me guess. Heard it on the news?
Kaffiyeh. They're fairly fashionable at the moment round where I am (Manchester UK).
I liked it.
Climate patterns do have an effect on geological activity. Mostly with the pressure of water on land, and its distribution changing.
"Could care less" instead of "couldn't care less", "me either" instead of "nor I", the list goes on...
Your personal experiences mean nothing when we're talking about millions of people.
This journalist is completely clueless.
There are a little over 8.5 million registered Wikipedia users and just under 150,000 active users (users who have a logged action in the past 30 days). In other words, 98.3% of users have become inactive.
His entire analysis is based on this ridiculous figure, which he then completely misinterprets.
Why measure "activity" in such a stupid way? It basically avoids any serious analysis of the data. Can he not look at total contributions? If he did then a power-law distribution is likely to emerge. This is the important thing to bear in mind with websites like this: the contributions are unconstrained. Go to any website like this and you'll see the same pattern: a few people with loads of contributions, and loads of people with practically nothing to their name.
However, even if we take his "oh noes! 98.3% inactive!" bullshit figure at face value, I fail to see this as a negative thing. It's like Steve Ballmer trying to abuse Linux by saying that most of the contributors only submitted one patch. Disaster! Completely irrelevant though: what matters is if that patch was any good. If I correct a typo on an article, and do nothing else, ever, people who subsequently read that article have benefited from my contribution, but this guy would see it as an unqualified disaster.
So basically what he's asking for, retaining users by paying them, won't work. It won't retain users, and it won't boost contributions -- in fact it could well drive them away by forcing people to enter their credit card details, where at the moment you don't even have to log in. Furthermore, it's less than obvious that retaining users is a good idea. There have been stories on /. before arguing that the most useful contributions to Wikipedia come from the least active users. There have been far more stories detailing the political bullshit some of these "active members" get up to, as well, which leads me to suspect that paying these guys to keep them around is the last thing Wikipedia needs.
Note that it does say on that page:
SliTaz est francisée au mieux, le système peut aussi être utilisé en anglais
Which, if my old and wizened French is on form, means that it works best in French, but can also be used in English.
So, snappy, but you might get a whiff of onion now and again.
The TV licence is anyway ridiculous when you consider the populist direction that the BBC has taken in the last 10 years.
While I'm tempted to agree with you, if the BBC were to do as you ask then it could (and inevitably would, in many cases by the same people) be argued that the license fee should be revoked because nobody's watching it.
Steam is a horror show. It's not the idea, exactly. It just has the "OpenOffice on Linux" effect. That is, every time you try to play any of the games you've got on it, you have to download and install yet another fucking update, which will soak up half an hour, so you might as well go have lunch instead.