There's profanity, and there's unnecessary profanity. As an admin, I will remove unnecessary profanity, because, well, it is not necessary and people from all religions, colors and planetary origins yell at us if we don't, and because it is generally possible to write an encyclopedia without resorting to meaningless augmentatives.
But in cases where profanity is actually important to the context, there is not need to delete it. CTRL+F for "Cornyn" in John McCain, for example. There should be a "Fuck you!" nearby that I won't be removing any time soon. I'm not sure if that still meets the definition of "cleansing," but if we can live without "fuck", we will live without it. If we can't, we'll live with it, because Wikipedia is not censored. And hey, it's not only me who would do that; the respective guideline on profanity in Wikipedia reads (emphasis mine):
Words and images that would be considered offensive, profane, or obscene by typical Wikipedia readers should be used if they are informative, relevant and accurate, and should be avoided when they serve no other purpose than to shock the reader. Including information about offensive material is part of Wikipedia's encyclopedic mission; being offensive is not.
I want to grab it myself actually. I'm being serious when I say it's to check to see if anyone I know might need to be concerned some of their pictures are now in the wild. I just know some of them are stupid enough to put up stuff they should not have. You're talking about 44,000 accounts in here. Unless the leaked pictures have some sort of metadata that points back to the original UID, in which case you could theoretically run a script, you're going to have to look one-by-one at the 17 GB of pictures. Are you sure you want to do that?
Actually, since the Federal budget is public domain, so something like this might fall within the purview of Wikisource, one of Wikipedia's sister projects...
Um... no. Not only will Bush remain in the Oval Office until January 20, 2009, but FY 2009 extends from October 1, 2008 (which is even before the general elections) to September 30, 2009. (ref)
So Hillary showed a moment of (probably unscripted) humanity. So what? Does this make her any more qualified to be President? Actually, yes.
There are no questions about Clinton's experience and ability to manage the country. In the worst case scenario, she can figure out what to do about a particular situation over pillow talk, because you literally "buy one, get one free". One of the more poignant issues surrounding her candidacy, though, is that she is perceived to be as cold as a concrete bench in winter. Just watch any of the late-night comedy shows (ideally a re-run before the WGA strike): they all reflect popular culture's view of her as something between a Borg and a Vulcan. The emotional outburst actually showed to some people that she isn't like that, which erodes on one of her handicaps.
It might not make Hillary more competent. It makes her more electable, though.
I was intending to vote for her anyways due to her positions on issues, but that "moment" solidifies my intention to vote for her, because she doesn't have that "steel lady" perception anymore, or at least to not such a great extent.
Okay, I didn't know that part of the history. Well, the older contributions before the change should be able to be used with GPL v3 because that is the way they were originally licensed. That said, I don't think it is as problematic to remove the "later" clause to future code contributions as it is to add it, since the former is just a change in the terms of use, and the second is an expansion of the permission of the license. By removing the clause, you still are using the code within the permissions granted by the original contributor (v2, when it is acceptable to use v2 or later); while by adding the clause, you would be using the code outside the permissions granted by the license (*only* v2). In either case, the code contributed before the removal of the or later language remains under GPL v2+, so I guess you could theoretically grab an old version of the kernel, before the language was removed, and license it as GPL v3.
The game is that, I could take one of my friend's photos, and put it up on the likes of Wikipedia. Then, my friend turns around and sues Wikipedia for infringement. In other words, the claim is that the license somehow makes it possible to "game the system", but, as you already pointed out, I don't see how that isn't possible with any license. And Wikipedia would claim that they would be protected by the safe harbor provisions of Section 512 of the DMCA, punting the lawsuit back to B...
Okay, this is way outside my area of expertise, but the wording of section 14 of the GPL (http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl.html) makes releasing software under the "or any later version" clause appear to be an option, not a requirement.
In any case, that would be irrelevant. If somebody released his or her code under GPL v2 *only* (which appear to be the terms of copyright release that Linus asked for), then he cannot switch the copyright license of existing kernel code, because it is not his property. The original authors would need to be the ones to release it under the less-restrictive "or later". He *can* change the terms of acceptance for future code by including the "or any later version" clause, but that cannot apply retroactively to code that did not include that more-inclusive permission.
Er, close, but not quite. Wikipedia has not changed its license; it still distributes its content under version 1.2 of the GFDL, with the "or later version" clause. The recent announcement was that Wikipedia was asking the FSF to modify the GFDL, a.k.a. create a GFDL v1.3 that is more compatible with the CC licenses. The FSF said, "okay, we'll see what we can do", but AFAIK, nothing has been produced yet. Wikipedia may shift to that license easily, due to the "or later version" clause, but it cannot switch to CC-by-SA without raising several issues. That said, nobody knows if Wikipedians will even want to switch to a CC-by-SA version, so that point is rather moot.
If I understand the issue with the Linux kernel, is that it didn't have that "or later version" clause in it for some period of time, but then, I really don't know about that, and I'd gladly be corrected.
That no-proof stuff was just somebody coming to whine to Slashdot that an article with proofs wasn't deleted, not the other way around. I agree about the search engine not being very effective, although you have to remember that it is Wikia who is trying that silliness, not Wikimedia.
The United States has little manufacturing base left. The American economy is completely dependant on China. That's only partially true. As the recent mess with lead paint in toys showed, the U.S. is not as dependent on Chinese goods as you would expect. As soon as the news broke, several companies began responding to public perception and shifted their production from China to other countries. Companies understand that as long as it is acceptable to produce goods in China, they can continue to do so, but if it becomes unacceptable with their clients, they have two options: They can just slim their profit margins slightly and go somewhere, or they can stick with the cheapest per-unit costs, not sell anything, or die. That's the reason that Chinese high-ranking official was executed: Because the Chinese understand too that consumer expectations are one of the determinants of demand in the Western market economies. If the name of the entire country becomes associated negatively in the mind of the final consumer, the producers will avoid or pull back their operations in the country.
This is getting rather off-topic, but in many cases there is no alternative. In several states, HOAs are protected by statute (!!!), and builders won't build a development without one. Builders can pass off some of the start-up costs to the HOAs, which makes their bottom lines look nicer. Builders will also not sell you the house unless you agree in your contract to the HOA's terms.
Whether I think that should be legal is a different issue, but it sadly is the reality, at least in Arizona.
I love it when someone from Arizona tells me that solar power is going to solve all my power problems here in northern New Hampshire. You know, I'm from Arizona, and that's funny. What's not funny is that until very recently, homeowners' associations would not let you install solar panels on the roof of your own homes. Why? Because they would look "unsightly"... and no, that's NOT a joke, sadly.
Yes, that's rather irritating. But what is simply outrageous is that there was one rather notable case (linked above), in which the HOA even had the gall to ask a homeowner to paint over the solar cells to make them match the color of the roof, or pay a fine! Now, I'm not an expert on the photoelectric effect, but I think covering the cells with brown paint may have a slight effect on their efficiency... *headdesks*
OK, so they broke the record for human-powered computing. But what was the previous record? Was there even such a thing as a previous record? How is this new record actually measured? You know that more people will now try to break the MIT mark, and TFA is rather scant on details...
So, athletes will be supervised via GPS to see whether they go to a steroids lab or not. Big deal: athletes will not go to the labs to get the cream or the clear any longer, but they will now get doped from the comfort of their own homes. The GPS transmitter won't know whether they are watching TV or watching a needle being stuck into their arm...
You answered your own question. Standardization does not equal adoption, but the State of New York is asking its CIO which format it should adopt. PDF became popular and a de-facto standard before ISO 32000 was approved, so it is important to note that a government is asking for public comment about which format to implement, regardless of ISO status.
Wikipedia's search is crapola, and everybody and their dog knows that. However, It is not because of limitations with Lucene; it is more caused by limitations with MySQL. The MediaWiki database backend stores the text of pages in an InnoDB database, and InnoDB was used because it provides more robustness during simultaneous read and write operations (or at least that is what I understood). However, InnoDB does not allow for the creation of full-text indices, like those needed for Lucene search; MyISAM databases are required for that. So, there is an expensive replication task from the text table to the search tables in MediaWiki.
Ack for hitting Submit instead of Preview by accident...
About the manual: the decision was correct, but incomplete. The complete deletion/removal reason should have been, "Wikipedia is not a host for software manuals; however, Wikibooks is, and Wikipedia does not want to cannibalize its sister project." If you point me to the manual, I'll see what I can do to move it there.
Wikipedia should become whatever people want it to be. Who knows in advance what that is? Which people, though? The Wikipedia community by itself is large enough that it can't even agree on whether the color blue is blue, so when you bring in other people, trying that becomes even more complicated. There is a fairly sizable portion of users who want Wikipedia to be only an encyclopedia that follows the Britannica model. There's a large portion of users that would prefer it to be an encyclopedia and an almanac. There's more users (me included) that don't mind it being close to a news site as well. There's even users who have said that they want Wikipedia to be their personal porn stash (I'm not kidding). The dynamic tension between these factions is what is then translated into deletion debates like these.
However, I wouldn't be surprised when a page is nominated for deletion, as there is always at least one person out there who would prefer to see a particular kind of page deleted. (Apparently the submitter wants proofs to be gone, for example, and that's senseless, IMO). I'd be more surprised if they were actually deleted, which they weren't in this case. And then, even if this particular page had been deleted, it wouldn't have created a precedent for deleting other proofs, so to say that there's a movement inside Wikipedia to delete proofs misses the mark by a wide margin.
The problem is simple: If there's too much stuff crammed into one article, it becomes too big, and people don't bother to read it. Worse, if you have a really old browser (or dial-up), it just won't load, and an article that doesn't load is an article that is useless...
Aye. Moreover, Consumer Reports is in an enviable position, as their comparisons allow people to save money, be it by getting a cheaper product, or by not spending on an overpriced piece of junk. As a result of these long-term savings, the consumer sees that CR provides value to him or her, and any company that has a product that is perceived as valuable has a captive market. I know I would think, "If this magazine can save me money any time, it might be worth the purchase price."
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To be fair, Linus said that HFS+ was complete and utter crap, not all of OS X. As for HFS+, I do agree with him, sadly...
But in cases where profanity is actually important to the context, there is not need to delete it. CTRL+F for "Cornyn" in John McCain, for example. There should be a "Fuck you!" nearby that I won't be removing any time soon. I'm not sure if that still meets the definition of "cleansing," but if we can live without "fuck", we will live without it. If we can't, we'll live with it, because Wikipedia is not censored. And hey, it's not only me who would do that; the respective guideline on profanity in Wikipedia reads (emphasis mine):
Words and images that would be considered offensive, profane, or obscene by typical Wikipedia readers should be used if they are informative, relevant and accurate, and should be avoided when they serve no other purpose than to shock the reader. Including information about offensive material is part of Wikipedia's encyclopedic mission; being offensive is not.Actually, since the Federal budget is public domain, so something like this might fall within the purview of Wikisource, one of Wikipedia's sister projects...
Um... no. Not only will Bush remain in the Oval Office until January 20, 2009, but FY 2009 extends from October 1, 2008 (which is even before the general elections) to September 30, 2009. (ref)
There are no questions about Clinton's experience and ability to manage the country. In the worst case scenario, she can figure out what to do about a particular situation over pillow talk, because you literally "buy one, get one free". One of the more poignant issues surrounding her candidacy, though, is that she is perceived to be as cold as a concrete bench in winter. Just watch any of the late-night comedy shows (ideally a re-run before the WGA strike): they all reflect popular culture's view of her as something between a Borg and a Vulcan. The emotional outburst actually showed to some people that she isn't like that, which erodes on one of her handicaps.
It might not make Hillary more competent. It makes her more electable, though.
I was intending to vote for her anyways due to her positions on issues, but that "moment" solidifies my intention to vote for her, because she doesn't have that "steel lady" perception anymore, or at least to not such a great extent.
Okay, I didn't know that part of the history. Well, the older contributions before the change should be able to be used with GPL v3 because that is the way they were originally licensed. That said, I don't think it is as problematic to remove the "later" clause to future code contributions as it is to add it, since the former is just a change in the terms of use, and the second is an expansion of the permission of the license. By removing the clause, you still are using the code within the permissions granted by the original contributor (v2, when it is acceptable to use v2 or later); while by adding the clause, you would be using the code outside the permissions granted by the license (*only* v2). In either case, the code contributed before the removal of the or later language remains under GPL v2+, so I guess you could theoretically grab an old version of the kernel, before the language was removed, and license it as GPL v3.
IANAL, though, so don't do it.
Okay, this is way outside my area of expertise, but the wording of section 14 of the GPL (http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl.html) makes releasing software under the "or any later version" clause appear to be an option, not a requirement.
In any case, that would be irrelevant. If somebody released his or her code under GPL v2 *only* (which appear to be the terms of copyright release that Linus asked for), then he cannot switch the copyright license of existing kernel code, because it is not his property. The original authors would need to be the ones to release it under the less-restrictive "or later". He *can* change the terms of acceptance for future code by including the "or any later version" clause, but that cannot apply retroactively to code that did not include that more-inclusive permission.
Er, close, but not quite. Wikipedia has not changed its license; it still distributes its content under version 1.2 of the GFDL, with the "or later version" clause. The recent announcement was that Wikipedia was asking the FSF to modify the GFDL, a.k.a. create a GFDL v1.3 that is more compatible with the CC licenses. The FSF said, "okay, we'll see what we can do", but AFAIK, nothing has been produced yet. Wikipedia may shift to that license easily, due to the "or later version" clause, but it cannot switch to CC-by-SA without raising several issues. That said, nobody knows if Wikipedians will even want to switch to a CC-by-SA version, so that point is rather moot.
If I understand the issue with the Linux kernel, is that it didn't have that "or later version" clause in it for some period of time, but then, I really don't know about that, and I'd gladly be corrected.
That no-proof stuff was just somebody coming to whine to Slashdot that an article with proofs wasn't deleted, not the other way around. I agree about the search engine not being very effective, although you have to remember that it is Wikia who is trying that silliness, not Wikimedia.
I really hope they do have those cards because it is illegal to not have them, if I understand correctly...
This is getting rather off-topic, but in many cases there is no alternative. In several states, HOAs are protected by statute (!!!), and builders won't build a development without one. Builders can pass off some of the start-up costs to the HOAs, which makes their bottom lines look nicer. Builders will also not sell you the house unless you agree in your contract to the HOA's terms.
Whether I think that should be legal is a different issue, but it sadly is the reality, at least in Arizona.
Yes, that's rather irritating. But what is simply outrageous is that there was one rather notable case (linked above), in which the HOA even had the gall to ask a homeowner to paint over the solar cells to make them match the color of the roof, or pay a fine! Now, I'm not an expert on the photoelectric effect, but I think covering the cells with brown paint may have a slight effect on their efficiency... *headdesks*
For the second problem, powering your computer for 30 minutes daily should be enough for most people...
OK, so they broke the record for human-powered computing. But what was the previous record? Was there even such a thing as a previous record? How is this new record actually measured? You know that more people will now try to break the MIT mark, and TFA is rather scant on details...
So, athletes will be supervised via GPS to see whether they go to a steroids lab or not. Big deal: athletes will not go to the labs to get the cream or the clear any longer, but they will now get doped from the comfort of their own homes. The GPS transmitter won't know whether they are watching TV or watching a needle being stuck into their arm...
You answered your own question. Standardization does not equal adoption, but the State of New York is asking its CIO which format it should adopt. PDF became popular and a de-facto standard before ISO 32000 was approved, so it is important to note that a government is asking for public comment about which format to implement, regardless of ISO status.
Wikipedia's search is crapola, and everybody and their dog knows that. However, It is not because of limitations with Lucene; it is more caused by limitations with MySQL. The MediaWiki database backend stores the text of pages in an InnoDB database, and InnoDB was used because it provides more robustness during simultaneous read and write operations (or at least that is what I understood). However, InnoDB does not allow for the creation of full-text indices, like those needed for Lucene search; MyISAM databases are required for that. So, there is an expensive replication task from the text table to the search tables in MediaWiki.
Ack for hitting Submit instead of Preview by accident...
About the manual: the decision was correct, but incomplete. The complete deletion/removal reason should have been, "Wikipedia is not a host for software manuals; however, Wikibooks is, and Wikipedia does not want to cannibalize its sister project." If you point me to the manual, I'll see what I can do to move it there.
However, I wouldn't be surprised when a page is nominated for deletion, as there is always at least one person out there who would prefer to see a particular kind of page deleted. (Apparently the submitter wants proofs to be gone, for example, and that's senseless, IMO). I'd be more surprised if they were actually deleted, which they weren't in this case. And then, even if this particular page had been deleted, it wouldn't have created a precedent for deleting other proofs, so to say that there's a movement inside Wikipedia to delete proofs misses the mark by a wide margin.
The problem is simple: If there's too much stuff crammed into one article, it becomes too big, and people don't bother to read it. Worse, if you have a really old browser (or dial-up), it just won't load, and an article that doesn't load is an article that is useless...
Aye. Moreover, Consumer Reports is in an enviable position, as their comparisons allow people to save money, be it by getting a cheaper product, or by not spending on an overpriced piece of junk. As a result of these long-term savings, the consumer sees that CR provides value to him or her, and any company that has a product that is perceived as valuable has a captive market. I know I would think, "If this magazine can save me money any time, it might be worth the purchase price."