Of course corporations are greedy. That's unquestioned; they're supposed to be greedy. But CEO income has practically nothing to do with it. It's a minuscule fraction of money spent.
Only hard drive manufacturers use the decimal meaning with bytes. Everyone else, such as operating systems (where we see probably 90% of the size specifications that we encounter), uses the binary powers. And as I recall, disk manufacturers have been successfully sued for their misleading terminology, which makes their drives smaller than they claim they are.
When you are also an employee of a company and your salary (and indeed employment) is the responsibility of that board . ..
Pardon me, but is Jimbo actually an employee of the Foundation? He isn't listed under their current staff. My impression has always been that he receives no money from the Foundation, except perhaps for travel expenses or the like (and many people receive money for travel expenses to go to Wikimania, for instance, plus I assume all Board members are repaid for travel costs for face-to-face meetings).
Even if he was an employee, when you spend a grand total of $107,122 on salaries and wages in a year (which must pay a full-time lawyer/CEO, two full-time developers, two part-time sysadmins, and four others), I can't imagine that Jimbo is making very much money off the WMF. Remember, he made a fair bit of money off Bomis, and probably is making a bit off Wikia too. He owns a Ferrari (although I hear it's broken). This doesn't seem like a big conflict of interest here.
Of course, it's also mere coincidence that in the last Wikimedia election, Jimbo also sent out a public missive encouraging people to discuss nominated candidates on the Talk page. He then proceeded to tell people who he thought they should vote for (conflict of interest, that sounds like some novel concept/other/ boards have to deal with!). Somewhat unsurprisingly, contradiction or dissent therefrom was rather vehemently howled down on said page.
Is there some rule or law against campaigning by existing board members in board elections? I don't see why merely having a position of authority or respect means there's something wrong with endorsing someone.
Of course Jimbo exerts a great deal of influence on the WMF. Nobody disputes this, so I don't know what you're getting at here.
Founder of wikipedia? Not so - co-founder would be more accurate. I'm sure Larry Sanger would appreciate it if you could make this small but important distinction in your press efforts.
Surely you're aware that whether Larry Sanger should be called a cofounder of Wikipedia is a contentious matter of opinion. Of course, since Sanger dropped out of the project while Wales stayed on in influential roles, it's inevitable that Jimbo's opinion will be more often cited by Wikipedians. That doesn't mean it's not a legitimate point of view. It depends on what exactly you consider a "founder" to be.
Your post is contradictory. You imply that Wales is nothing to do with Wikipedia in your first sentence
He says Wikia has nothing to do with Wikipedia. That's correct, it doesn't, at least formally. They share the same software and their extensions to it often go in MediaWiki's repository, plus Jimbo is the president of one and the God-King of the other (and others have served on boards of both at times). Other than that, and similar vehicles (wikis) of achieving their rather different goals, they're unrelated.
Wales is, de facto, pretty much a supreme authority in Wikipedia's day-to-day operations, when he cares to involve himself. Nobody's said anything to the contrary, or if they did they misspoke (or were misinformed).
Did Wales, or did Wales not, overrule the Wiki Foundation on this matter? Simple question.
The Wikimedia Foundation is the legal owner of Wikipedia and cannot be overruled by Jimbo Wales, who is merely a lone board member and President Emeritus. If the Board resolved to overrule Jimbo, he would be overruled. Jimbo did overrule the community consensus, as he periodically does. All Wikipedia members are shareholders of the Wikimedia Foundation, but they do not have direct power: they elect a majority of the Board to two-year terms, that's it. See the Foundation bylaws.
How about if . . . the kernel of the method is something which operates based on a historical or other time dependent variable. The spam merchants can't go back in time - and if any method they devise take a couple of years to actually get anywhere then they are not going to bother (these folks work on the quick buck, and the amount of time also means the search engine has a very large lead time to change things).
That would mean that relevance rankings are perpetually outdated. Not acceptable.
While it is true that we are born selfish, Freud explained why very well, because we cannot differentiate betwen our own ego and anyone else's for a couple years, and our own ego isn't fully developed until about age five. By that time we have a firm root in selfishness and it takes work to change it.
. ..
I'd call it junk science, but even that name would give it too much credit.
You're citing Freud as authoritative and then accusing others of junk science? I agree that the study was pretty pathetic, but at least they tried to perform concrete analyses. Freud did not practice anything remotely approaching science. Everything novel he came up with was either false or untestable. His beliefs about the roles of things like child abuse are directly traceable to people being hypnotized or pressured until they confabulate stories of abuse and end up actually believing them. He has corrupted the public perception of psychology, perhaps indelibly. A field that should be scientific sports many Ph.D.s who believe and practice utter tripe with no grounding in reality.
To address your more specific point, Freud did not explain selfishness at all, let alone "very well". A real explanation, a model, will make predictions about how the outcome will change if the circumstances change. Otherwise it's worthless, postdiction. Freud's claim about the ego not being developed makes no predictions at all and is consequently useless, unless there is either some way to measure the ego's development independently of its personality effects, or some way to influence its developments. If neither of those is the case, the statement "we cannot differentiate betwen our own ego and anyone else's for a couple years, and our own ego isn't fully developed until about age five. By that time we have a firm root in selfishness and it takes work to change it" is equivalent to "people under age five are always selfish and people over that age have to work to not be selfish", which is blatantly obvious to any human being.
Two snowflakes can be really alike, woohoo. I mean, this must be a breakpoint of science as we know it. Or is it ?
Leave the snowflakes alone, try to research if we can get something to fuel our cars after a decade or two or try to find the cure for utter stupidity. Hearing something useful coming out from science is rather rare these days, probably because really interesting stuff is not published or wouldn't interest the business giants like oil producers.
I once heard that in 1943, someone predicted that two fields that were too theoretical to ever have military applications were number theory and relativity. Number theory is critical to modern cryptography, and both special and general relativity are necessary for GPS to work as accurately as it does.
The pursuit of knowledge has value vastly beyond its immediate applications.
Except that the sonic boom caused by bullet is not pinpointable. When the bullet flies supersonic, it's creating those sonic booms the whole way (or until it drops below speed of sound). For example one of my sniper trainers was crazy enough to go downrange when another trainer shot a supersonic round with silencer (both were sufficiently good at their trade to have enough trust) and he said that sound of the shot came from completely different direction from where the shooter was.
Things that fool humans may not fool carefully-designed machines. Machines, after all, can have superhuman calculating and sensory power. Soldiers are the ones to ask about the feasibility of a soldier pinpointing a sonic boom from a bullet; researchers are the ones to ask about the feasibility of a machine doing that. I don't know a whole lot about acoustics, to be honest, but pinpointing the direction a sound comes from should be fairly easy. See sibling's comment on echoes: remember that sound isn't very fast, only a few hundred miles per hour/a thousand or so kmph. It would take on the order of a millisecond to travel a foot, easily within the range of detectability. And once you have the direction at any given moment, calculating the trajectory is trivial.
It is also possible to know the direction of a shot by only the flight sound of the bullet, but that requires several 'listening posts' and a central computer to calculate, but this only gets the direction of the shot, not the distance.
If you have two or more sensors, you can theoretically triangulate to get the exact position at any time. Even if you only have one sensor and can only detect direction, you can estimate distance from the speed of that type of bullet and the time travelled.
I think that this robot is the number one target for snipers. Shoot it first and then you're home free unless there is a second one:). I probably wouldn't shoot anything else, but this robot before exiting the area, because $150,000 is probably the most damage I could make with a single bullet:).
That's why it's either going to be heavily armored or inside a heavily armored vehicle, presumably. It's not too hard to stop a bullet from damaging a robot; how many inches of steel to stop the highest-powered hand-held rifle around?
Well, I'll hardly deny that the terms were chosen to have positive connotations. If you like, you could call them propaganda or whatnot. But given the definitions of the terms as commonly used in the context of the self-styled "free software" movement, the GPL still advances the goal of free software without irony.
It seems like a majority of software for Apple today does not support 10.2; you even need 10.3.9 in many cases. Whereas in general most software will run on Win2k, WinXP, and Win2k3, much of it also running even on NT4. Most of the software will also run on Vista and presumably much of what is written for Vista will still work on XP and other, older versions of NT.
In context, I think you meant "forward compatibility". I.e., earlier versions of Windows can run programs mainly marketed toward later versions. In terms of backward compatibility, a lot of DOS stuff written a couple of decades back will run okay on WinXP, if you fiddle with it a bunch, and probably Apple is similar in that regard (although I don't know that for a fact).
I don't know that I've yet seen an apology from a newspaper's editors for being taken by last summer's "liquid bomb plot". They can't, of course, because they're selected by the paper's corporate owners to advance the "consolidation of power" agenda. If the media barons were to suddenly say "sorry, there never really was anything to fear, and 9/11 might have actually been a 'false flag' operation..." Well - however would George Bush justify setting up permanent bases in Iraq, and his plans to attack Iran and Syria?
Is that why all the investigators with a grudge against Bush have found money trails from the administration to the Associated Press, Reuters, the New York Times, and other such renowned Bush supporters? Presumably if they support his consolidation of power agenda, rather than (say) merely reporting the news as they see it, they're doing it for a reason. I would be interested in any evidence that the corporate sponsors -- although it would be difficult to call either the AP or the Times "corporate" in the sense of "owned by big business" -- actually have some reason to back terror scares.
I suppose you could argue that Bush is big-business-friendly, but that doesn't have anything to do with his terrorism plans. And many major news outlets are not owned by big businesses. You could certainly argue that sensationalism is good for journalists, and I'd heartily agree, but that's not much of the "selected by the media barons"-type plot you allege, is it?
Now, let's see. Why is it you refer to the news sources as "taken" by the scare-quoted "liquid bomb plot"? Because a Pakistani court decided that Rashid Rauf was innocent of terrorism charges, while still trying him for forgery and possession of explosives? I suppose he was doing that forging and explosives-possession for some reason totally unrelated to blowing up planes. Probably trying out some interior decorating, or something. And of course, Pakistani courts are entirely independent of Musharraf, just like most courts under dictators who have overthrown the last government in a military coup. I mean, they were only required to agree to never rule against Musharraf or any of his agents, and to swear an oath of loyalty to the decree that put him in power. Musharraf surely has nothing to hold against the United States or Britain, it goes without saying. I'm sure that if a Pakistani citizen were sentenced to death for terrorism against such beloved allies of the Pakistani people, the citizenry would turn out in the streets to cheer the government.
Then again, we might want to take a look at some other court systems, e.g., the British court system. Funnily enough, that's not in the habit of rendering verdicts within a few months, possibly because it takes longer than that to assemble actual evidence and an actual case. Oh well, let's just ignore them for the sake of attacking the Bush administration.
GPl is just as evil as DRM. GPL is not a public good or a public domain licence its as evil as any other form of DRM. no one should use GPL software when there are real free licences out there.
BSD is just as evil as proprietary software. BSD is not a public good or a free license, it's as evil as any other form of unfree license. No one should use BSD software when there are real free licenses out there.
See how convincing that argument is? The GPL, at least in principle, increases the percentage of software that is released under terms permitting derivative works and largely unencumbered redistribution, as compared to BSD-style licenses. Therefore, in my opinion as in many others' opinions, it is the best tactic under current copyright law for promoting the basic goals of free software, even if a situation where no or limited copyright copyright exists to begin with is superior in theory.
Is it not a bit ironic that "Open" or "Free" software advocates want to control how people write software?
If you're slightly more specific and substitute "control how people write software" with "induce others to release their software freely", then . . . no, not at all. It's not ironic, and statements to the contrary are sophistic wordplay.
If everyone overlooked petty grammar mistakes then grammar would cease to exist. Not overnight, but over time.
What you said is wrong, and what you meant is trivial. Grammar is a product of the human brain, almost all learned unconsciously. I'm sure anyone here who's looked at AI language can attest that the important parts of grammar do not boil down to simple rules that are taught in school, or indeed could possibly be taught in school. Anyone who's used state-of-the-art translators like Google's should be able to infer that too. If everyone started talking like hicks (or some other low-class group) tomorrow, we'd all be able to understand each other perfectly. The only "grammar" that would cease to exist would be the frequently bizarre and definitely unnecessary rules by up by a handful of generations of prescriptivists starting in the 1800s, and frankly, I think we could do without that kind of grammar.
None of that is to say that it doesn't annoy me when people don't put in the effort to use standard spellings, or even that I don't think that people should be corrected on points of grammar (because being able to speak and write in high-prestige standard dialects is a socially useful tool whether I like it or not). But to say that the sky will fall if people don't correct each other's grammar, or that speakers of nonstandard dialects are "wrong", is absurd.
Incidentally, I would highly recommend The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker. Very compelling book.
I remember the good old days when Netscape was a much better browser than IE.
I remember how I stuck loyally to Netscape for a few years.
And I remember the day when reviewers finally said, folks, Netscape really isn't as good a browser anymore. And I switched to IE.
Now we've come full circle. Netscape's latest incarnation is better than IE, just as its predecessor was. But it also has access to far, far less money than IE, just as its predecessor did. IE7 is just the tip of the iceberg. Microsoft is going to be the one taking back the Web, with 8 and 9, just as it took it over the first time with earlier versions. It's going to rewrite its browser so that it's faster, more featureful, more innovative, and more standards-compliant than Firefox. And then the cycle will quite possibly repeat.
Am I wrong? Maybe, and indeed, I hope so. But IE is not defeated as long as Microsoft is not defeated, and Microsoft is not defeated as Windows is not defeated. We will not be seeing the death of IE anytime soon unless Microsoft gives up on making its own browser. Giving up isn't something Microsoft is known to do often.
you'll see that Firefox usage has climbed from 8% in October (the month before the releases of Firefox 2 and IE7) to 11% in January, and that total MSIE use has dropped from 87% to 84% in that same period of time.
That's kinda natural since when you add them up they still gotta make 100%;)
I'm not sure my elementary school math teacher would agree that you have to get 100 when you add 84 and 11.
Toss a coin and let it land on the ground. What is the probability that the coin is heads up? If you answered 1/2, you do not understand basic probability theory, or statistics.
You are right. Obvious cases like the coin getting stuck in the air, or resting on the edge, must be considered, or even more if you get into the mass and surface properties of a particular coin... I know quite a few statisticians, though, who would be quite happy with an ideal coin. For them either of two possible outcomes would be equally probable, which puts us in the neighborhood of 1/2.
I suspect that the GP's point was to say that the probability is either one or zero, i.e., that he was rejecting Bayesian probability.
Tags are human assigned labels for something that we don't have better meta-data for, or where we don't want to be bothered with formalism. If you want something formal, go use a proper taxonomy/ontology and put bucketloads of OWL or RDF-schema data on your site to define relationships, or use format with well defined semantics to add information.
You are confusing formality of semantics with formality of syntax. The latter is mostly what's suggested in the article, not the former. He was suggesting that sites agree on how to handle spaces in tag names, what delimiters to use, and whether to prefer nouns or verbs, not whether you should use "Vista" or "Windows Vista".
It'll be like the Unicode standard; too complex to use in its entirety.
I think the many full-fledged Unicode implementations available would disagree that it's "too complex to use in its entirety". On the font side, certainly current computers don't come packaged with enough decent Unicode fonts, and automatic character substitution can be ugly, but these are problems that will abate with time. Doesn't Vista now have proper support for characters outside the BMP, for instance, with real UTF-16 used for internal encoding?
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Are you joking? Take Verizon, for instance. The CEO makes $11.5 million. Annual operating revenue that year was on the order of $75 billion. Or in other words, 0.015% of revenue went to pay the CEO's salary. It's a pittance compared to their income, and he's the most important damn person in the company.
Of course corporations are greedy. That's unquestioned; they're supposed to be greedy. But CEO income has practically nothing to do with it. It's a minuscule fraction of money spent.
Only hard drive manufacturers use the decimal meaning with bytes. Everyone else, such as operating systems (where we see probably 90% of the size specifications that we encounter), uses the binary powers. And as I recall, disk manufacturers have been successfully sued for their misleading terminology, which makes their drives smaller than they claim they are.
Pardon me, but is Jimbo actually an employee of the Foundation? He isn't listed under their current staff. My impression has always been that he receives no money from the Foundation, except perhaps for travel expenses or the like (and many people receive money for travel expenses to go to Wikimania, for instance, plus I assume all Board members are repaid for travel costs for face-to-face meetings).
Even if he was an employee, when you spend a grand total of $107,122 on salaries and wages in a year (which must pay a full-time lawyer/CEO, two full-time developers, two part-time sysadmins, and four others), I can't imagine that Jimbo is making very much money off the WMF. Remember, he made a fair bit of money off Bomis, and probably is making a bit off Wikia too. He owns a Ferrari (although I hear it's broken). This doesn't seem like a big conflict of interest here.
Of course, it's also mere coincidence that in the last Wikimedia election, Jimbo also sent out a public missive encouraging people to discuss nominated candidates on the Talk page. He then proceeded to tell people who he thought they should vote for (conflict of interest, that sounds like some novel concept /other/ boards have to deal with!). Somewhat unsurprisingly, contradiction or dissent therefrom was rather vehemently howled down on said page.
Is there some rule or law against campaigning by existing board members in board elections? I don't see why merely having a position of authority or respect means there's something wrong with endorsing someone.
Of course Jimbo exerts a great deal of influence on the WMF. Nobody disputes this, so I don't know what you're getting at here.
Surely you're aware that whether Larry Sanger should be called a cofounder of Wikipedia is a contentious matter of opinion. Of course, since Sanger dropped out of the project while Wales stayed on in influential roles, it's inevitable that Jimbo's opinion will be more often cited by Wikipedians. That doesn't mean it's not a legitimate point of view. It depends on what exactly you consider a "founder" to be.
He says Wikia has nothing to do with Wikipedia. That's correct, it doesn't, at least formally. They share the same software and their extensions to it often go in MediaWiki's repository, plus Jimbo is the president of one and the God-King of the other (and others have served on boards of both at times). Other than that, and similar vehicles (wikis) of achieving their rather different goals, they're unrelated.
Wales is, de facto, pretty much a supreme authority in Wikipedia's day-to-day operations, when he cares to involve himself. Nobody's said anything to the contrary, or if they did they misspoke (or were misinformed).
Did Wales, or did Wales not, overrule the Wiki Foundation on this matter? Simple question.The Wikimedia Foundation is the legal owner of Wikipedia and cannot be overruled by Jimbo Wales, who is merely a lone board member and President Emeritus. If the Board resolved to overrule Jimbo, he would be overruled. Jimbo did overrule the community consensus, as he periodically does. All Wikipedia members are shareholders of the Wikimedia Foundation, but they do not have direct power: they elect a majority of the Board to two-year terms, that's it. See the Foundation bylaws.
That would mean that relevance rankings are perpetually outdated. Not acceptable.
. .
I'd call it junk science, but even that name would give it too much credit.
You're citing Freud as authoritative and then accusing others of junk science? I agree that the study was pretty pathetic, but at least they tried to perform concrete analyses. Freud did not practice anything remotely approaching science. Everything novel he came up with was either false or untestable. His beliefs about the roles of things like child abuse are directly traceable to people being hypnotized or pressured until they confabulate stories of abuse and end up actually believing them. He has corrupted the public perception of psychology, perhaps indelibly. A field that should be scientific sports many Ph.D.s who believe and practice utter tripe with no grounding in reality.
To address your more specific point, Freud did not explain selfishness at all, let alone "very well". A real explanation, a model, will make predictions about how the outcome will change if the circumstances change. Otherwise it's worthless, postdiction. Freud's claim about the ego not being developed makes no predictions at all and is consequently useless, unless there is either some way to measure the ego's development independently of its personality effects, or some way to influence its developments. If neither of those is the case, the statement "we cannot differentiate betwen our own ego and anyone else's for a couple years, and our own ego isn't fully developed until about age five. By that time we have a firm root in selfishness and it takes work to change it" is equivalent to "people under age five are always selfish and people over that age have to work to not be selfish", which is blatantly obvious to any human being.
Two snowflakes can be really alike, woohoo. I mean, this must be a breakpoint of science as we know it. Or is it ?
Leave the snowflakes alone, try to research if we can get something to fuel our cars after a decade or two or try to find the cure for utter stupidity. Hearing something useful coming out from science is rather rare these days, probably because really interesting stuff is not published or wouldn't interest the business giants like oil producers.
I once heard that in 1943, someone predicted that two fields that were too theoretical to ever have military applications were number theory and relativity. Number theory is critical to modern cryptography, and both special and general relativity are necessary for GPS to work as accurately as it does.
The pursuit of knowledge has value vastly beyond its immediate applications.
Wow, you have a lot more patience for long TV shows than I do.
Things that fool humans may not fool carefully-designed machines. Machines, after all, can have superhuman calculating and sensory power. Soldiers are the ones to ask about the feasibility of a soldier pinpointing a sonic boom from a bullet; researchers are the ones to ask about the feasibility of a machine doing that. I don't know a whole lot about acoustics, to be honest, but pinpointing the direction a sound comes from should be fairly easy. See sibling's comment on echoes: remember that sound isn't very fast, only a few hundred miles per hour/a thousand or so kmph. It would take on the order of a millisecond to travel a foot, easily within the range of detectability. And once you have the direction at any given moment, calculating the trajectory is trivial.
It is also possible to know the direction of a shot by only the flight sound of the bullet, but that requires several 'listening posts' and a central computer to calculate, but this only gets the direction of the shot, not the distance.If you have two or more sensors, you can theoretically triangulate to get the exact position at any time. Even if you only have one sensor and can only detect direction, you can estimate distance from the speed of that type of bullet and the time travelled.
I think that this robot is the number one target for snipers. Shoot it first and then you're home free unless there is a second oneThat's why it's either going to be heavily armored or inside a heavily armored vehicle, presumably. It's not too hard to stop a bullet from damaging a robot; how many inches of steel to stop the highest-powered hand-held rifle around?
Well, I'll hardly deny that the terms were chosen to have positive connotations. If you like, you could call them propaganda or whatnot. But given the definitions of the terms as commonly used in the context of the self-styled "free software" movement, the GPL still advances the goal of free software without irony.
In context, I think you meant "forward compatibility". I.e., earlier versions of Windows can run programs mainly marketed toward later versions. In terms of backward compatibility, a lot of DOS stuff written a couple of decades back will run okay on WinXP, if you fiddle with it a bunch, and probably Apple is similar in that regard (although I don't know that for a fact).
Is that why all the investigators with a grudge against Bush have found money trails from the administration to the Associated Press, Reuters, the New York Times, and other such renowned Bush supporters? Presumably if they support his consolidation of power agenda, rather than (say) merely reporting the news as they see it, they're doing it for a reason. I would be interested in any evidence that the corporate sponsors -- although it would be difficult to call either the AP or the Times "corporate" in the sense of "owned by big business" -- actually have some reason to back terror scares.
I suppose you could argue that Bush is big-business-friendly, but that doesn't have anything to do with his terrorism plans. And many major news outlets are not owned by big businesses. You could certainly argue that sensationalism is good for journalists, and I'd heartily agree, but that's not much of the "selected by the media barons"-type plot you allege, is it?
Now, let's see. Why is it you refer to the news sources as "taken" by the scare-quoted "liquid bomb plot"? Because a Pakistani court decided that Rashid Rauf was innocent of terrorism charges, while still trying him for forgery and possession of explosives? I suppose he was doing that forging and explosives-possession for some reason totally unrelated to blowing up planes. Probably trying out some interior decorating, or something. And of course, Pakistani courts are entirely independent of Musharraf, just like most courts under dictators who have overthrown the last government in a military coup. I mean, they were only required to agree to never rule against Musharraf or any of his agents, and to swear an oath of loyalty to the decree that put him in power. Musharraf surely has nothing to hold against the United States or Britain, it goes without saying. I'm sure that if a Pakistani citizen were sentenced to death for terrorism against such beloved allies of the Pakistani people, the citizenry would turn out in the streets to cheer the government.
Then again, we might want to take a look at some other court systems, e.g., the British court system. Funnily enough, that's not in the habit of rendering verdicts within a few months, possibly because it takes longer than that to assemble actual evidence and an actual case. Oh well, let's just ignore them for the sake of attacking the Bush administration.
BSD is just as evil as proprietary software. BSD is not a public good or a free license, it's as evil as any other form of unfree license. No one should use BSD software when there are real free licenses out there.
See how convincing that argument is? The GPL, at least in principle, increases the percentage of software that is released under terms permitting derivative works and largely unencumbered redistribution, as compared to BSD-style licenses. Therefore, in my opinion as in many others' opinions, it is the best tactic under current copyright law for promoting the basic goals of free software, even if a situation where no or limited copyright copyright exists to begin with is superior in theory.
If you're slightly more specific and substitute "control how people write software" with "induce others to release their software freely", then . . . no, not at all. It's not ironic, and statements to the contrary are sophistic wordplay.
I hope you can do it a bit more quickly and reliably than a high schooler, though.
If that's so, it requires infinitely times less energy to not send it anywhere and to mine it on Earth to begin with.
What you said is wrong, and what you meant is trivial. Grammar is a product of the human brain, almost all learned unconsciously. I'm sure anyone here who's looked at AI language can attest that the important parts of grammar do not boil down to simple rules that are taught in school, or indeed could possibly be taught in school. Anyone who's used state-of-the-art translators like Google's should be able to infer that too. If everyone started talking like hicks (or some other low-class group) tomorrow, we'd all be able to understand each other perfectly. The only "grammar" that would cease to exist would be the frequently bizarre and definitely unnecessary rules by up by a handful of generations of prescriptivists starting in the 1800s, and frankly, I think we could do without that kind of grammar.
None of that is to say that it doesn't annoy me when people don't put in the effort to use standard spellings, or even that I don't think that people should be corrected on points of grammar (because being able to speak and write in high-prestige standard dialects is a socially useful tool whether I like it or not). But to say that the sky will fall if people don't correct each other's grammar, or that speakers of nonstandard dialects are "wrong", is absurd.
Incidentally, I would highly recommend The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker. Very compelling book.
Urban legend. Something sort of like that did happen, but that was changing pi to 3.2 (not 3) and the proposer believed that pi actually equaled that.
I remember the good old days when Netscape was a much better browser than IE.
I remember how I stuck loyally to Netscape for a few years.
And I remember the day when reviewers finally said, folks, Netscape really isn't as good a browser anymore. And I switched to IE.
Now we've come full circle. Netscape's latest incarnation is better than IE, just as its predecessor was. But it also has access to far, far less money than IE, just as its predecessor did. IE7 is just the tip of the iceberg. Microsoft is going to be the one taking back the Web, with 8 and 9, just as it took it over the first time with earlier versions. It's going to rewrite its browser so that it's faster, more featureful, more innovative, and more standards-compliant than Firefox. And then the cycle will quite possibly repeat.
Am I wrong? Maybe, and indeed, I hope so. But IE is not defeated as long as Microsoft is not defeated, and Microsoft is not defeated as Windows is not defeated. We will not be seeing the death of IE anytime soon unless Microsoft gives up on making its own browser. Giving up isn't something Microsoft is known to do often.
That's kinda natural since when you add them up they still gotta make 100%
I'm not sure my elementary school math teacher would agree that you have to get 100 when you add 84 and 11.
You are right. Obvious cases like the coin getting stuck in the air, or resting on the edge, must be considered, or even more if you get into the mass and surface properties of a particular coin... I know quite a few statisticians, though, who would be quite happy with an ideal coin. For them either of two possible outcomes would be equally probable, which puts us in the neighborhood of 1/2.
I suspect that the GP's point was to say that the probability is either one or zero, i.e., that he was rejecting Bayesian probability.
You are confusing formality of semantics with formality of syntax. The latter is mostly what's suggested in the article, not the former. He was suggesting that sites agree on how to handle spaces in tag names, what delimiters to use, and whether to prefer nouns or verbs, not whether you should use "Vista" or "Windows Vista".
I think the many full-fledged Unicode implementations available would disagree that it's "too complex to use in its entirety". On the font side, certainly current computers don't come packaged with enough decent Unicode fonts, and automatic character substitution can be ugly, but these are problems that will abate with time. Doesn't Vista now have proper support for characters outside the BMP, for instance, with real UTF-16 used for internal encoding?