You're kidding, right? Paulette Cooper and other journalists who have been Scientologists but have targeted by the Church might disagree.
I wouldn't have as much of a problem with the Church if they were just harsh with their own members. But they have an official policy of aggressively attacking non-members who they feel pose a threat. Really, I think people should have the freedom to be self-destructive. If they want to ruin their lives in Scientology.. oh well. That's their decision. But the Church is very aggressive about crushing opposition.
The point was that dead tree Encyclopedias are less expensive to the average citizen (granted, this only applies to sufficiently developed nations) than Wikipedia is.
Only if you are buying a computer for the sole purpose of accessing Wikipedia, which no one does.
It costs money to obtain a computer, and connect it to the internet. However, walking into a public library and pulling an Encyclopedia off the shelf is still free-as-in-beer.
It's also far more expensive in terms of travel time, far less convenient, and not really any more accurate.
On the other hand the library has a lot of non-encyclopedia resources, so props for that.
I don't know why this reply is labeled redundant except to show a bias against stating a legitimate concerns and problems with Wikipedia. It sounds like there is a broken mod system here on/. as well. Not that this is also stating the obvious.
I think the mod system does work, just not on the micro/immediate level. As I look at it now, the grandparent comment has been modded up insightful instead of Redundant. Even if the only reason it was modded up was a moderator saw your comment, agreed, and modded up the grandparent, it still had the desired effect -- an insightful/informative comment was (eventually) moderated up. Granted, it's not purely efficient, but I see this sort of thing happening pretty often. I read at the threshold of 0, and tend to go through stories a few days after posting, and it's not all that often that I find a comment posted at 0 or 1 (modded down) that I think "man, this should be at 4 or 5!" Yeah, some comments get modded down that make you think "what was the mod thinking?" And such comments eventually tend to get modded back up again.
When the Chinese writer wants to contribute about Heilongjiang, I'll be right there supporting them. But it's not going to be anyone who's been with Wikipedia all this time. Those people have already written everything they know. The original post is about the current editors leaving. It's finished for them.
Now figure out a way to get Jing Gu to write about Heilongjiang.
Does anyone finish learning, though? No one can write down everything they know, sit back and say "I'm done." There's always more to learn -- not just in areas you haven't explored before, but because you will always be correcting old bad information and updating the areas you know with new information you've since become aware of. Even areas that you might think would be "settled" are rarely static, such as the fields of History, English Language, or the Theory of Gravity. I'm hard-pressed to think of a single discipline where you're "done" and that field doesn't change from that point forward.
Hmm, I wonder if this is more a publicity stunt in relation with their current funds drive?
Yes, that's definitely very insightful. For the past few years, in November and December, wikipedia does its annual scrounging for more money -- and oddly there's been a rash of wikipedia-related articles at the same time. Sometimes pro, sometimes negative. But bad publicity is still publicity and still part of the marketing machine.
Not really. If I actually thought Wikipedia was dying, I'd certainly be more hesitant to throw money at it.
I kinda've want to go in there and take one of their stress tests so I can fuck with'em, but haven't yet.
The thing is, no matter what you do in the stress test, it plays into their hands. You seem to feel fine? You're secretly conflicted and auditing would help remove the final obstacles to you becoming Clear. You molest your family? Yeah, you're screwed up, but it's something that a few courses shouldn't be able to handle. Perhaps you're a psychopath? Well, that's unfortunate, but classes and auditing will clearly give better results than psychotherapy or psychiatry.
The folks in public are used to dealing with screwed up people who are honest about it, and screwed up people who are trying to act like regular people pretending to be screwed up (this is how they will see you). That's their job, and they're looking forward to LRH's 'tech' making you a better person.:P
Just the other day, actually. Many Scientologists are bloody awful at keeping their love for LRH out of everyday interaction.
All I want to do is get on with what I do; I don't want to go learn management as taught by LRH, and I think it's worse than cheeky to try to force me to do it. I am not interested in relearning my discipline as taught by L Ron Hubbard. It's creepy to inject your love for a pulp scifi author into everyday life, let alone into the everyday lives of people - colleagues and people with whom you do business - who don't subscribe to your UFO cult.
Sorry. But it's true.
Oh God. Where the fuck do you work where that nonsense is part of the management?
Protest the wrongdoings of the Church of Scientology all you like but do it without engaging in illegal activity
"Illegal" is a construction of the political class, and has no bearing on "right" or "wrong".
How about this then: DDoS attacks, whether against the Church of Scientology or against Aunt Margaret, are morally wrong.
They always have collateral damage, whether it's unaffiliated people at the same data center whose bandwidth is swamped, or the people unaware that their PCs are part of some botnet. The people who put together these botnets aren't knights in shining armor or noble partisans looking to free the people from oppression. I put them in the same category as the Church.
Don't DDoS. Period. Not against the despicable church, not against anyone.
I don't see request for Tor by default [ubuntu.com] in Ubuntu.
Probably because that would be irresponsible for Ubuntu or indeed any distro to do such, at least if Tor would be acting as an exit node. It would be irresponsible because if you're running Tor, you'd better be fully aware of what that means, including that you'd be legally responsible for the traffic that flows through your node, at least through the exit node. An Ubuntu user shouldn't have that active by default (I'm assuming that's what the suggestion you linked to said, it was a bad link), having his computer used for other peoples' file sharing, degrading his bandwidth when he doesn't even know the service is running.
Let me tell you, the fastest way to destroy Tor would be for all the child porn collectors to use it exclusively.:-P
Uh, no they can't. The base software on the N900 does come an xterminal program. The N900 is "locked down" (I use that term very loosely) to prevent a casual user from inadvertently screwing up their phone. But for the knowledgeable user, you can gain a root shell on the N900 quite easily. If you have root, well, you own the device.
iPhone users who jailbroke their phones owned their devices too. It just meant that they could no longer apply updates. Then more and more things came out that required those updates to install or work.
It's not a zero-sum game, though, and although some of Apple's iPhone policies improve things for the users, many, I would argue that most, don't.
This has nothing to do with being big fish or little fish.
I've seen, several times though, that Apple DOES treat it like a zero-sum game, and it's one of the reasons they still haven't gained all that much traction in the corporate world.
The real issue there is security, not prosperity. Having lots of kids is an unconscious hedge against the fact that most of them will die without reproducing.
It's also hedging your bets that some of them will be able to take care of you in old age.
Well sometimes you have to take a nice idea and try and make it work. Thanks to the US (largely) being a dickwad this interesting experiment totally failed.
And the reason for that was because Kyoto did not do what the grandparent suggested, which was that "People buying (and throwing away) stuff should be forced to also pay for the pollution produced by the waste and manufacturing of the goods." The Kyoto agreement basically said that the industrialized world had to pay for the cleanup the effects of the non-industrialized world, and that developing nations, who might want to, say, get all their power through coal or gas, would not be held to the same standard.
If the people who create pollution do not have to pay for the pollution cleanup, then you don't get far at all with reducing the amount of pollution. In fact, we see this model failing in non-environmental areas as well: When people who do -Activity X- don't have to pay -Cost of Activity X-, they don't feel the need to clean up their own act.
Regulation is inevitable unless each person gets their own ipod-sized electric meter to carry around. I'm serious.
But... in your case, don't you already know how much energy you're using? You get the power bill, you can read your meters. From your post it sounded like your family knows how much energy they use, but just don't care.
Meh, I've bought every TV I've ever owned from craigslist. Either that or I've had it handed down to me by friends and/or family. That being said, I could give less of a damn about whatever my state government does to regulate TVs (yes I live in California). The simple fact of the matter is that, unless you have some kind of techno-pene compensation obsession, you really don't need the latest and greatest and biggest anything. Mediums like craigslist and ebay have opened up the entire state (and for that matter, world) into one big tax-free bazaar. I can find a TV I want in Maryland, pay the dude to ship it, and have it in a couple of weeks. If I don't want to pay shipping, I can wait two weeks and find something comparable 2 hours away. So go ahead government, drive up consumer taxes. Drive up regulation. Try to micro manage everything. I have no incentive to listen to your BS or buy into your system anymore =P
You realize of course, by law you are required to report out of state shipping and pay sales taxes on them on your state tax form? Most Californians don't bother to, but.. still, it's the tax law.
I don't think you're getting the original parents' point. Yes, people who really really really want an unefficient TV will still be able to get it. His point of course is that most people who are going to be buying large TVs won't care enough to go through the effort of going out of state. Will some? Yeah, sure. But you can see the general trend of the A/V market (again, not the high high end market) is that convenience trumps quality.
False dichotomy, as always with these kinds of arguments. Whenever somebody argues "either-or", you need to think of that.
In this case, we need both - reduction of energy consumption and new, more environmentally friendly energy sources.
I don't know if it's that much of a false dichotomy because the bolstering of one takes away from the importance of the other. If you can greatly reduce energy consumption, then people are going to say "Hey, these coal plants, they aren't as bad as they used to be. We don't really need to replace them." Replace old dirty power plants with cheap, renewable energy and energy use will go way up, just because people will feel less guilty for using it.
How about you start with real problems instead of imaginary ones? There's no problem with power consumption. Hence, no need to do anything about it.
Really? That's your argument? Why don't you head over to this information map and see just how much power in the US is generated from coal, a major emitter of CO2:
Spolier: Over 10 states generate over 90% of their power from coal.
While I agree with most of what you say, it seems to me that a far far worse problem than simply energy consumption is the energy generation method. Yes, it would be great if we could reduce the amount of energy consumed. But even more important than that is to get -off- of coal as an energy generator.
If you want to move well within our society here in the states, you need to be able to at least be able to speak and understand English. It is our official unofficial language (why the hell can't they just codify this and end all arguments?).
Because there are a lot of citizens with political power in the United States who don't speak English or sympathize with non-English speakers and don't think they should be forced?
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Neither does CoS without the subject's consent.
You're kidding, right? Paulette Cooper and other journalists who have been Scientologists but have targeted by the Church might disagree.
I wouldn't have as much of a problem with the Church if they were just harsh with their own members. But they have an official policy of aggressively attacking non-members who they feel pose a threat. Really, I think people should have the freedom to be self-destructive. If they want to ruin their lives in Scientology.. oh well. That's their decision. But the Church is very aggressive about crushing opposition.
The point was that dead tree Encyclopedias are less expensive to the average citizen (granted, this only applies to sufficiently developed nations) than Wikipedia is.
Only if you are buying a computer for the sole purpose of accessing Wikipedia, which no one does.
It costs money to obtain a computer, and connect it to the internet. However, walking into a public library and pulling an Encyclopedia off the shelf is still free-as-in-beer.
It's also far more expensive in terms of travel time, far less convenient, and not really any more accurate.
On the other hand the library has a lot of non-encyclopedia resources, so props for that.
Zionism is an actual political agenda. It's not "all Jews" nor is it code for "those god-damned Jews" as you seem to be implying.
I don't know why this reply is labeled redundant except to show a bias against stating a legitimate concerns and problems with Wikipedia. It sounds like there is a broken mod system here on /. as well. Not that this is also stating the obvious.
I think the mod system does work, just not on the micro/immediate level. As I look at it now, the grandparent comment has been modded up insightful instead of Redundant. Even if the only reason it was modded up was a moderator saw your comment, agreed, and modded up the grandparent, it still had the desired effect -- an insightful/informative comment was (eventually) moderated up. Granted, it's not purely efficient, but I see this sort of thing happening pretty often. I read at the threshold of 0, and tend to go through stories a few days after posting, and it's not all that often that I find a comment posted at 0 or 1 (modded down) that I think "man, this should be at 4 or 5!" Yeah, some comments get modded down that make you think "what was the mod thinking?" And such comments eventually tend to get modded back up again.
Just not immediately.
When the Chinese writer wants to contribute about Heilongjiang, I'll be right there supporting them. But it's not going to be anyone who's been with Wikipedia all this time. Those people have already written everything they know. The original post is about the current editors leaving. It's finished for them.
Now figure out a way to get Jing Gu to write about Heilongjiang.
Does anyone finish learning, though? No one can write down everything they know, sit back and say "I'm done." There's always more to learn -- not just in areas you haven't explored before, but because you will always be correcting old bad information and updating the areas you know with new information you've since become aware of. Even areas that you might think would be "settled" are rarely static, such as the fields of History, English Language, or the Theory of Gravity. I'm hard-pressed to think of a single discipline where you're "done" and that field doesn't change from that point forward.
Yes, that's definitely very insightful. For the past few years, in November and December, wikipedia does its annual scrounging for more money -- and oddly there's been a rash of wikipedia-related articles at the same time. Sometimes pro, sometimes negative. But bad publicity is still publicity and still part of the marketing machine.
Not really. If I actually thought Wikipedia was dying, I'd certainly be more hesitant to throw money at it.
I kinda've want to go in there and take one of their stress tests so I can fuck with'em, but haven't yet.
The thing is, no matter what you do in the stress test, it plays into their hands. You seem to feel fine? You're secretly conflicted and auditing would help remove the final obstacles to you becoming Clear. You molest your family? Yeah, you're screwed up, but it's something that a few courses shouldn't be able to handle. Perhaps you're a psychopath? Well, that's unfortunate, but classes and auditing will clearly give better results than psychotherapy or psychiatry.
The folks in public are used to dealing with screwed up people who are honest about it, and screwed up people who are trying to act like regular people pretending to be screwed up (this is how they will see you). That's their job, and they're looking forward to LRH's 'tech' making you a better person. :P
Just the other day, actually. Many Scientologists are bloody awful at keeping their love for LRH out of everyday interaction.
All I want to do is get on with what I do; I don't want to go learn management as taught by LRH, and I think it's worse than cheeky to try to force me to do it. I am not interested in relearning my discipline as taught by L Ron Hubbard. It's creepy to inject your love for a pulp scifi author into everyday life, let alone into the everyday lives of people - colleagues and people with whom you do business - who don't subscribe to your UFO cult.
Sorry. But it's true.
Oh God. Where the fuck do you work where that nonsense is part of the management?
Seriously, I'd like to know.
"Illegal" is a construction of the political class, and has no bearing on "right" or "wrong".
How about this then: DDoS attacks, whether against the Church of Scientology or against Aunt Margaret, are morally wrong.
They always have collateral damage, whether it's unaffiliated people at the same data center whose bandwidth is swamped, or the people unaware that their PCs are part of some botnet. The people who put together these botnets aren't knights in shining armor or noble partisans looking to free the people from oppression. I put them in the same category as the Church.
Don't DDoS. Period. Not against the despicable church, not against anyone.
I don't see request for Tor by default [ubuntu.com] in Ubuntu.
Probably because that would be irresponsible for Ubuntu or indeed any distro to do such, at least if Tor would be acting as an exit node. It would be irresponsible because if you're running Tor, you'd better be fully aware of what that means, including that you'd be legally responsible for the traffic that flows through your node, at least through the exit node. An Ubuntu user shouldn't have that active by default (I'm assuming that's what the suggestion you linked to said, it was a bad link), having his computer used for other peoples' file sharing, degrading his bandwidth when he doesn't even know the service is running.
Let me tell you, the fastest way to destroy Tor would be for all the child porn collectors to use it exclusively. :-P
That's true, this sort of change isn't merely going to come about through top-down fiat.
Uh, no they can't. The base software on the N900 does come an xterminal program. The N900 is "locked down" (I use that term very loosely) to prevent a casual user from inadvertently screwing up their phone. But for the knowledgeable user, you can gain a root shell on the N900 quite easily. If you have root, well, you own the device.
iPhone users who jailbroke their phones owned their devices too. It just meant that they could no longer apply updates. Then more and more things came out that required those updates to install or work.
"Because they are pro-user."
It's not a zero-sum game, though, and although some of Apple's iPhone policies improve things for the users, many, I would argue that most, don't.
This has nothing to do with being big fish or little fish.
I've seen, several times though, that Apple DOES treat it like a zero-sum game, and it's one of the reasons they still haven't gained all that much traction in the corporate world.
The real issue there is security, not prosperity. Having lots of kids is an unconscious hedge against the fact that most of them will die without reproducing.
It's also hedging your bets that some of them will be able to take care of you in old age.
Humans in the forest live just fine.
Not if they're packed into the forest with the same density that we do in our big cities.
Well sometimes you have to take a nice idea and try and make it work. Thanks to the US (largely) being a dickwad this interesting experiment totally failed.
And the reason for that was because Kyoto did not do what the grandparent suggested, which was that "People buying (and throwing away) stuff should be forced to also pay for the pollution produced by the waste and manufacturing of the goods." The Kyoto agreement basically said that the industrialized world had to pay for the cleanup the effects of the non-industrialized world, and that developing nations, who might want to, say, get all their power through coal or gas, would not be held to the same standard.
If the people who create pollution do not have to pay for the pollution cleanup, then you don't get far at all with reducing the amount of pollution. In fact, we see this model failing in non-environmental areas as well: When people who do -Activity X- don't have to pay -Cost of Activity X-, they don't feel the need to clean up their own act.
there's just too many people on planet earth
So the only way to cure the planet is to kill the people. You'd best do the honourable thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seppuku#Ritual
Let me know how that works out.
Oh, but he's enlightened. The world needs enlightened people, it just needs fewer unenlightened ones.
Regulation is inevitable unless each person gets their own ipod-sized electric meter to carry around. I'm serious.
But... in your case, don't you already know how much energy you're using? You get the power bill, you can read your meters. From your post it sounded like your family knows how much energy they use, but just don't care.
Meh, I've bought every TV I've ever owned from craigslist. Either that or I've had it handed down to me by friends and/or family. That being said, I could give less of a damn about whatever my state government does to regulate TVs (yes I live in California). The simple fact of the matter is that, unless you have some kind of techno-pene compensation obsession, you really don't need the latest and greatest and biggest anything. Mediums like craigslist and ebay have opened up the entire state (and for that matter, world) into one big tax-free bazaar. I can find a TV I want in Maryland, pay the dude to ship it, and have it in a couple of weeks. If I don't want to pay shipping, I can wait two weeks and find something comparable 2 hours away. So go ahead government, drive up consumer taxes. Drive up regulation. Try to micro manage everything. I have no incentive to listen to your BS or buy into your system anymore =P
You realize of course, by law you are required to report out of state shipping and pay sales taxes on them on your state tax form? Most Californians don't bother to, but.. still, it's the tax law.
I don't think you're getting the original parents' point. Yes, people who really really really want an unefficient TV will still be able to get it. His point of course is that most people who are going to be buying large TVs won't care enough to go through the effort of going out of state. Will some? Yeah, sure. But you can see the general trend of the A/V market (again, not the high high end market) is that convenience trumps quality.
Suppose thats my fault for not budgetting my energy needs.
It's not like it HAS to be the way I set up, but its not like an energy restrictive system would be terrible.
X energy per hour, and don't let me break that cap, or something. Forces me to shutoff my PC if I want to watch TV.
And you really think almost... anyone would actually put up with such a system?
Any politician who tried to actually enforce such a system would find themselves with a very short career.
False dichotomy, as always with these kinds of arguments.
Whenever somebody argues "either-or", you need to think of that.
In this case, we need both - reduction of energy consumption and new, more environmentally friendly energy sources.
I don't know if it's that much of a false dichotomy because the bolstering of one takes away from the importance of the other. If you can greatly reduce energy consumption, then people are going to say "Hey, these coal plants, they aren't as bad as they used to be. We don't really need to replace them." Replace old dirty power plants with cheap, renewable energy and energy use will go way up, just because people will feel less guilty for using it.
How about you start with real problems instead of imaginary ones? There's no problem with power consumption. Hence, no need to do anything about it.
Really? That's your argument? Why don't you head over to this information map and see just how much power in the US is generated from coal, a major emitter of CO2:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=110997398
Spolier: Over 10 states generate over 90% of their power from coal.
While I agree with most of what you say, it seems to me that a far far worse problem than simply energy consumption is the energy generation method. Yes, it would be great if we could reduce the amount of energy consumed. But even more important than that is to get -off- of coal as an energy generator.
If you want to move well within our society here in the states, you need to be able to at least be able to speak and understand English. It is our official unofficial language (why the hell can't they just codify this and end all arguments?).
Because there are a lot of citizens with political power in the United States who don't speak English or sympathize with non-English speakers and don't think they should be forced?
Brave words, AC.