FYI, I think the correct wording is that Denmark hasn't yet appealed formally. The summary is misleading with the whole talk about appeals, but this letter itself doesn't seem to be an appeal.
However, this quote from TFA suggests that Denmark is still intending to appeal:
"'Jacob Holmblad [the recipient of the letter, and ISO Vice President, and managing director of Danish Standard] will appeal directly, because he has one foot in each camp,' explains Morten Kjærsgaard to Computerworld."
Here's a page that tracks add-on compatibility: http://people.mozilla.com/~polvi/threedom/status-bars.html . Note the "bug" links, which send you to bugs tracking the status of the most popular add-ons. I found it interesting that Firebug incompatibility is actually blocking the final public release of Firefox 3! (See here, note the "blocking-firefox3" flag.) I think they're being quite careful with making sure the most popular add-ons are available.
There could be a bit of a "long tail" problem, though. There is a huge number of smaller add-ons which should strive to be compatible at release-time, too.
I took a course with Steve Squyres (the principal investigator for the rover mission) in the fall semester. According to him, you can't look to Earth extremophiles as evidence that life can arise in these conditions. Extremophiles apparently all have adaptations such that, inside their cells, they can do their chemistry in 'normal' (non-acidic, non-salty,...) conditions. If life were to arise in extreme conditions, they'd probably need totally different chemistry.
There's certainly a possibility of some exotic form of life arising in extreme (for us) conditions, but we shouldn't be expecting it to be possible, as there's no evidence that it can happen.
The Second Life viewer, which is open source, has loads of pie menus, and it's the primary method of interacting with objects in the world (other than just clicking on things). It's not a window manager, but it's still something.
Hopeful to find the ARML version?
on
I Will Derive
·
· Score: 1
Out of seriousness, it's very similar to another I Will Derive that was done for a long-ago ARML song contest. It had great snipplets that went something like "the expansion of sine alpha plus e to the pi... / But I am resolute / to Lagrange and substitute /...carry the psi... / what's the square root of minus i!? / I will derive!".
But this one was shorter (to fit within a time limit of a minute or half a minute). It was passed down to me through my county's math team coach for NYSML and ARML. Too bad, it's probably been lost to the ages...unless someone here happens to remember or it? *hopeful*
Someone please mod parent flamebait and/or offtopic; I can't think of any more appropriate situation to do so. Nobody really cares to know that much, nor wants a third party shoving it in their face.
(Mod me offtopic too if you'd like, but I needed to call the parent out - it's just too mean-spirited.)
Ars Technica actually seems to support the methodology of this report...assuming I've gotten the right matching. I can't seem to find the original reference of either article, but the quotes all focus around "chemicals". I have the suspicion that TFA is conflating the earlier Apple/Nintendo-bashing report with this one, which apparently took samples from consoles and tested for bad chemicals:
Greenpeace is once again beating the drum for cleaner electronics, and is this time focusing on the current generation of gaming consoles. While Ars was skeptical of the methodology used when Greenpeace dinged both Apple and Nintendo for their environmental practices, it seems like the organization has learned its lesson: in this case Greenpeace actually purchased consoles for testing, and conducted primary research out of its Greepeace Research Laboratory and two other independent facilities. The results were mixed. The quoted article is here: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080520-greenpeace-enviro-friendly-consoles-easily-achievable.html
TFA is not hypothetically arguing that passive consumption (i.e. watching sitcoms) should become useful effort. TFA is observing that the shift from passive to participatory is already taking place, and is extrapolating that this shift will continue.
The reason is obvious to me - after 40+ hours of working in a week, most people I know want to relax and not think much; passively watching TV is the perfect outlet. Your 'obvious' point is precisely the assumption which is countered (I think, quite successfully) in TFA. The observation of the article is that this "relax = not think much" way of life is now evidently being replaced with a desire for thoughtful participation. And even a 1% shift creates a gigantic amount of 'surplus' desire to create. And so, this 'cognitive surplus' is becoming available to be 'mined'.
So, something that responds to the article, please...?
A = anonymous Wiki node, B = Independent article.
A make a claim with B as a reference.
B makes the same claim with A as the reference.
Thus, both sources have technically substantiated their claim, despite the niggling li'l absence of "truth". ...except: B did not cite A. B simply claimed it with no reference. TFA just assumes that B got their information from A, but this isn't a good assumption. There's nothing to see here.
I see nothing in TFA to back any of this up - it's all speculation. Basically:
1) Anonymous users write that Sasha Cohen worked at various investment banks, without citing. One of these edits came from one of these banks (which neither increases nor decreases the credibility of the statement).
1a) TFA assumes the statement is bogus.
2) Other news sources also say that Cohen worked at these investment banks.
2a) TFA assumes that the other news sources used Wikipedia as their source, without fact-checking.
3) Wikipedia users are initially unsure about the accuracy of the statement, but then they find these news sources and cite them.
Assumptions 1a and 2a are unfounded - both are admitted to be uncertain, but then the uncertainties of the assumptions are ignored! There is no evidence that Wikipedia was actually used as the source for any of the journalists. Also, there's no evidence that this information is untrue - indeed, the contrary: there is actually evidence that it is true, because respected news sources say it, and (presumably) these published sources are almost certainly factual! TFA ignores this, because it assumes a very high probability that the journalist used Wikipedia as a source, but I think the actual probability is much lower and this does not dent the truth probability very much. The TFA tries to boost the probability by noting that there was "no verifiable information existed anywhere on the internet... prior to the 14th November 2006" - but there are plenty of other reasonable and more-probable ways to interpret this sequence of events.
For example, this could be something that one might expect to happen if there were some fact not yet On The Internet, just now emerging onto the Internet. Just because some misguided anonymous fan of Cohen adds something to Wikipedia first doesn't mean that it's automatically untrue, but simply unfit for Wikpedia until a better source is found. Then other sources emerged, and the cite is added - this whole scenario occurs with Wikipedia having information that was probably true, but simply not cited in any online source.
The TFA reasons, it's Wikipedia from an anon, without a source on the Internet previously, so all the other sources from now on are now "tainted" and it's probably untrue? What the heck? Does this mean that if reliable sources say that the population of African elephants has actually indeed tripled in the past 20 years, Wikipedia can't add it? I hope everyone can see the problems with TFA... While this scenario is interesting and theoretically possible, it's not credible or probable.
And even supposing that all these assumptions are true, it's not "evidence" that Wikipedia's doing anything wrong. The problem here is not Wikipedia, but the other news sources. It's reasonable to presume that a (theoretically) respected news source should be accurate. Maybe there's an argument that Wikipedia shouldn't respect these news sources (as TFA assumes), but that's for another day.
TFA is loading really slow, so here's a copy:
A recent post on SlashDot quotes an IT professor saying:
People are unwittingly trusting the information they find on Wikipedia, yet experience has shown it can be wrong, incomplete, biased, or misleading
After reading this, I thought it was time to write about a something I found that backs this up. An anonymous user added information about Sacha Baron Cohen (known onscreen as Ali G.) to Wikipedia on November the 14th 2006. This entry added information about Baron Cohen working for investment bank Goldman Sachs prior to becoming famous as an actor.
On November the 17th 2007 an article appeared in the Independent with the same information. The article included Baron Cohenâ(TM)s career information almost as a footnote, at the end of the article - possibly using Wikipedia as the source of his âoeGoldman Sachsâ career and other family information.
MTBF is only valid during the "lifetime" of a drive. (For example, "lifetime" might mean the five years during which a drive is under warranty.) Thus, the MTBF is the mean time before failure if you replace the drive every five years with other drives with identical MTBF. Thus the 100-some year MTBF doesn't mean that an individual drive will last 100+ years, it means that your scheme of replacing every 5 years will work for an average time of 100+ years.
Of course, I think this is another deceptive definition from the hard drive industry... To me, the drive's lifetime ends when it fails, not "5 years".
Source: http://www.rpi.edu/~sofkam/fileserverdisks.html
The Cornell game used rolled-up socks as a replacement in lieu of nerf guns or ammo (though I'm pretty sure the nerf guns aren't banned). Unfortunately, the game is probably dead now - it used to be at http://www.zombiesattackithaca.com/ . For the curious, here's an article on it.
It's a little dishonest to call the "presidential primaries" a single story, I think. It's many stories, all locally very important but with national impact. Locally, it's important to note that most of the states now voting had a snowball's chance in hell of actually having a decision in the primaries, so it's big and surprising to find out that they actually matter. And it's logical to "cash in" on the drama now, since it's possible that the Republicans will be so unpopular that the Democrat will win in a landslide, or the Democrats will become fragmented and give McCain a cakewalk (and so the media would be saved from complaints of "why didn't you cover the real decisions earlier?!").
Since power usage is (roughly!) proportional to voltage squared Actually, max clock speed also goes up/down proportionally to voltage. If we make the reasonable assumption that you clock the chip as high as it allows at a certain voltage, then power grows as the voltage cubed.
I think you misunderstood: Instead of trying to get the original source with "view source", use something like firebug, which shows you the current source even after client-side dynamic stuff has changed the DOM tree. This seems to be much more useful for the vast majority of cases than the normal "view source" anyway.
Actually, it probably takes one car and everyone else acting the way they currently normally do. It's theoretically possible to change the driving behavior of the majority such that these waves become dampened (like probably the LED idea above, or maybe centrally managing the cars from a single control point), though I haven't heard of anything realistic yet.
"The marketplace has been duped into believing that this is the best technology can provide. People don't have time to know, understand, or research history and find that technology really can be reliable." No. They believe it is the best the technology can provide at a given price.
Then let's fix that first quote to to "the marketplace has been duped into believing that this is the best that technology can provide for their money". So, do you believe that the market is really able to get the best for their money?
Even taking into account that investments were laid down quite a while ago, I personally don't think the industry as advancing quite as quickly as a theoretical free market would, at least in the areas that "matter", like reliability or speed. When something goes wrong, such as a cell connection dropping or experiencing extreme slowness, I doubt most people (myself included) would know what to lay blame on - the phone hardware, their position, the bus passing outside, the operating system, the cell tower, other cell users in the vicinity, radio interference, impoverished people stealing copper, some third-party app, viruses, James Bond, Bugs Bunny, or what. Some of these things even seem outside the realm of control (ex. other cell users), so there's no pressure on those things - even though a Slashdot techie might know that Company B has technology X which would alleviate the problem (Comcast and Bittorrent, anyone?). So I tend to doubt that the market is being as effective at applying pressure towards the right people as you claim it is.
For the record, the unsourced Wikipedia claim was plagiarized directly from http://www.ustreas.gov/education/faq/currency/legal-tender.html... By the way, I'm pretty sure this is not "plagiarism" in any usual sense of the word. U.S. government documents are generally in the public domain, and Wikipedia isn't claiming it as original work (it actively prohibits it), or doing anything else wrong, by using the excerpt verbatim. I'd also encourage you to fix the problem yourself, after going through all this work...but you don't seem to be very generous towards the other users of Wikipedia, so I just did it myself. And all this Wikipedia-bashing was pretty unnecessary anyway, since the argument was based upon text also was in the WP article; thanks a lot for the unpleasantness.
All land and property seized and auctioned as a result of a criminal conviction has proceeds remitted back to the government, less any real debts such as taxes owed or mortgages that need paid much like a bankruptcy proceeding. This is a bit abnormal, though. And in this case, one could conceivably say that the original owner no longer really owns that property at the time it is being liquidated by the government. It's probably in the eye of the beholder.
I would expect IP to follow the same behavior - it can be seized, and such, to produce cases like the above. But the normal case, which is more important, would be that the owner gets the money from the auction.
...except that the blog entry, especially the whole "we believe in responsible disclosure" snark, implies that Mozilla publicly disclosed the *Opera* problem. According to the other/. comments, Mozilla didn't say anything publicly about Opera - it sounds like the Opera people saw something in the release that wasn't actually there. I don't know about you, but that sounds pretty silly to me.
Agreed, though, on linking to the original blog instead. I don't like the register's unnecessary coloring.
e)We have detailed records of the amount of fossil fuels we have consumed, so we know how much we put into the atmosphere.
We do, do we? Okay, how much fossil fuel was consumed in 1851, worldwide?
For that matter, how much was consumed in 1899 in Asia?
Indeed we do (that is, we know pretty much how much was consumed, not the exact who-did-what). It only took a quick Google, and then a dive into a Wikipedia image's cite.
In 1851, we consumed enough fossil fuel to release about 54 million metric tons of carbon.
In 1899, the world consumed enough to release about 507 million metric tons. I can't give you the specific number from Asia, though.
See http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/ftp/ndp030/global.1751_2004.ems. They express their units as "metric tons of carbon" (I assume they mean carbon atoms) so I presume you can convert it to "metric tons of X fossil fuel" yourself, based upon average percent mass of carbon in that fossil fuel.
Note that, at these early dates, even if we're off by a factor or 2 or 3, the error hardly matters compared to the thousands of millions of metric tons in the 20th century. What does 500 million metric tons make in the sum total of 300 billion?
Think for a moment: if coal has carbon-14, then the carbon-14-free carbon would be coming from *fewer* fossil fuel sources (only oil, gas, etc.). Thus it would cause an *underestimate* of the human impact (you'd end up measuring fossil fuels minus the coal impact). So now the impact from oil/gas is even bigger, making the coal impact also likely bigger. You just made it even more likely that the carbon dioxide we're adding is what's causing the increase in the air. Nice job.
Slashdot Mirror
FYI, I think the correct wording is that Denmark hasn't yet appealed formally. The summary is misleading with the whole talk about appeals, but this letter itself doesn't seem to be an appeal.
However, this quote from TFA suggests that Denmark is still intending to appeal:
"'Jacob Holmblad [the recipient of the letter, and ISO Vice President, and managing director of Danish Standard] will appeal directly, because he has one foot in each camp,' explains Morten Kjærsgaard to Computerworld."
Here's a page that tracks add-on compatibility: http://people.mozilla.com/~polvi/threedom/status-bars.html . Note the "bug" links, which send you to bugs tracking the status of the most popular add-ons. I found it interesting that Firebug incompatibility is actually blocking the final public release of Firefox 3! (See here, note the "blocking-firefox3" flag.) I think they're being quite careful with making sure the most popular add-ons are available.
There could be a bit of a "long tail" problem, though. There is a huge number of smaller add-ons which should strive to be compatible at release-time, too.
I took a course with Steve Squyres (the principal investigator for the rover mission) in the fall semester. According to him, you can't look to Earth extremophiles as evidence that life can arise in these conditions. Extremophiles apparently all have adaptations such that, inside their cells, they can do their chemistry in 'normal' (non-acidic, non-salty, ...) conditions. If life were to arise in extreme conditions, they'd probably need totally different chemistry.
There's certainly a possibility of some exotic form of life arising in extreme (for us) conditions, but we shouldn't be expecting it to be possible, as there's no evidence that it can happen.
The Second Life viewer, which is open source, has loads of pie menus, and it's the primary method of interacting with objects in the world (other than just clicking on things). It's not a window manager, but it's still something.
Out of seriousness, it's very similar to another I Will Derive that was done for a long-ago ARML song contest. It had great snipplets that went something like "the expansion of sine alpha plus e to the pi... / But I am resolute / to Lagrange and substitute / ...carry the psi... / what's the square root of minus i!? / I will derive!".
But this one was shorter (to fit within a time limit of a minute or half a minute). It was passed down to me through my county's math team coach for NYSML and ARML. Too bad, it's probably been lost to the ages...unless someone here happens to remember or it? *hopeful*
Someone please mod parent flamebait and/or offtopic; I can't think of any more appropriate situation to do so. Nobody really cares to know that much, nor wants a third party shoving it in their face.
(Mod me offtopic too if you'd like, but I needed to call the parent out - it's just too mean-spirited.)
TFA is not hypothetically arguing that passive consumption (i.e. watching sitcoms) should become useful effort. TFA is observing that the shift from passive to participatory is already taking place, and is extrapolating that this shift will continue.
So, something that responds to the article, please...?
1) Anonymous users write that Sasha Cohen worked at various investment banks, without citing. One of these edits came from one of these banks (which neither increases nor decreases the credibility of the statement).
1a) TFA assumes the statement is bogus.
2) Other news sources also say that Cohen worked at these investment banks.
2a) TFA assumes that the other news sources used Wikipedia as their source, without fact-checking.
3) Wikipedia users are initially unsure about the accuracy of the statement, but then they find these news sources and cite them.
Assumptions 1a and 2a are unfounded - both are admitted to be uncertain, but then the uncertainties of the assumptions are ignored! There is no evidence that Wikipedia was actually used as the source for any of the journalists. Also, there's no evidence that this information is untrue - indeed, the contrary: there is actually evidence that it is true, because respected news sources say it, and (presumably) these published sources are almost certainly factual! TFA ignores this, because it assumes a very high probability that the journalist used Wikipedia as a source, but I think the actual probability is much lower and this does not dent the truth probability very much. The TFA tries to boost the probability by noting that there was "no verifiable information existed anywhere on the internet
For example, this could be something that one might expect to happen if there were some fact not yet On The Internet, just now emerging onto the Internet. Just because some misguided anonymous fan of Cohen adds something to Wikipedia first doesn't mean that it's automatically untrue, but simply unfit for Wikpedia until a better source is found. Then other sources emerged, and the cite is added - this whole scenario occurs with Wikipedia having information that was probably true, but simply not cited in any online source.
The TFA reasons, it's Wikipedia from an anon, without a source on the Internet previously, so all the other sources from now on are now "tainted" and it's probably untrue? What the heck? Does this mean that if reliable sources say that the population of African elephants has actually indeed tripled in the past 20 years, Wikipedia can't add it? I hope everyone can see the problems with TFA... While this scenario is interesting and theoretically possible, it's not credible or probable.
And even supposing that all these assumptions are true, it's not "evidence" that Wikipedia's doing anything wrong. The problem here is not Wikipedia, but the other news sources. It's reasonable to presume that a (theoretically) respected news source should be accurate. Maybe there's an argument that Wikipedia shouldn't respect these news sources (as TFA assumes), but that's for another day.
TFA is loading really slow, so here's a copy:
A recent post on SlashDot quotes an IT professor saying:
People are unwittingly trusting the information they find on Wikipedia, yet experience has shown it can be wrong, incomplete, biased, or misleading
After reading this, I thought it was time to write about a something I found that backs this up. An anonymous user added information about Sacha Baron Cohen (known onscreen as Ali G.) to Wikipedia on November the 14th 2006. This entry added information about Baron Cohen working for investment bank Goldman Sachs prior to becoming famous as an actor.
On November the 17th 2007 an article appeared in the Independent with the same information. The article included Baron Cohenâ(TM)s career information almost as a footnote, at the end of the article - possibly using Wikipedia as the source of his âoeGoldman Sachsâ career and other family information.
MTBF is only valid during the "lifetime" of a drive. (For example, "lifetime" might mean the five years during which a drive is under warranty.) Thus, the MTBF is the mean time before failure if you replace the drive every five years with other drives with identical MTBF. Thus the 100-some year MTBF doesn't mean that an individual drive will last 100+ years, it means that your scheme of replacing every 5 years will work for an average time of 100+ years.
Of course, I think this is another deceptive definition from the hard drive industry... To me, the drive's lifetime ends when it fails, not "5 years".
Source: http://www.rpi.edu/~sofkam/fileserverdisks.html
for (int i = 0; i 44; i++) printf("patent ");
To be fair to the original post, he said the boards would never feel like a safe haven as they used to. He never said what you're claiming he said.
The Cornell game used rolled-up socks as a replacement in lieu of nerf guns or ammo (though I'm pretty sure the nerf guns aren't banned). Unfortunately, the game is probably dead now - it used to be at http://www.zombiesattackithaca.com/ . For the curious, here's an article on it.
It's a little dishonest to call the "presidential primaries" a single story, I think. It's many stories, all locally very important but with national impact. Locally, it's important to note that most of the states now voting had a snowball's chance in hell of actually having a decision in the primaries, so it's big and surprising to find out that they actually matter. And it's logical to "cash in" on the drama now, since it's possible that the Republicans will be so unpopular that the Democrat will win in a landslide, or the Democrats will become fragmented and give McCain a cakewalk (and so the media would be saved from complaints of "why didn't you cover the real decisions earlier?!").
I think you misunderstood: Instead of trying to get the original source with "view source", use something like firebug, which shows you the current source even after client-side dynamic stuff has changed the DOM tree. This seems to be much more useful for the vast majority of cases than the normal "view source" anyway.
Actually, it probably takes one car and everyone else acting the way they currently normally do. It's theoretically possible to change the driving behavior of the majority such that these waves become dampened (like probably the LED idea above, or maybe centrally managing the cars from a single control point), though I haven't heard of anything realistic yet.
Then let's fix that first quote to to "the marketplace has been duped into believing that this is the best that technology can provide for their money". So, do you believe that the market is really able to get the best for their money?
Even taking into account that investments were laid down quite a while ago, I personally don't think the industry as advancing quite as quickly as a theoretical free market would, at least in the areas that "matter", like reliability or speed. When something goes wrong, such as a cell connection dropping or experiencing extreme slowness, I doubt most people (myself included) would know what to lay blame on - the phone hardware, their position, the bus passing outside, the operating system, the cell tower, other cell users in the vicinity, radio interference, impoverished people stealing copper, some third-party app, viruses, James Bond, Bugs Bunny, or what. Some of these things even seem outside the realm of control (ex. other cell users), so there's no pressure on those things - even though a Slashdot techie might know that Company B has technology X which would alleviate the problem (Comcast and Bittorrent, anyone?). So I tend to doubt that the market is being as effective at applying pressure towards the right people as you claim it is.
...except that the blog entry, especially the whole "we believe in responsible disclosure" snark, implies that Mozilla publicly disclosed the *Opera* problem. According to the other /. comments, Mozilla didn't say anything publicly about Opera - it sounds like the Opera people saw something in the release that wasn't actually there. I don't know about you, but that sounds pretty silly to me.
Agreed, though, on linking to the original blog instead. I don't like the register's unnecessary coloring.
We do, do we? Okay, how much fossil fuel was consumed in 1851, worldwide?
For that matter, how much was consumed in 1899 in Asia?
Indeed we do (that is, we know pretty much how much was consumed, not the exact who-did-what). It only took a quick Google, and then a dive into a Wikipedia image's cite.
In 1851, we consumed enough fossil fuel to release about 54 million metric tons of carbon.
In 1899, the world consumed enough to release about 507 million metric tons. I can't give you the specific number from Asia, though.
See http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/ftp/ndp030/global.1751_2004.ems. They express their units as "metric tons of carbon" (I assume they mean carbon atoms) so I presume you can convert it to "metric tons of X fossil fuel" yourself, based upon average percent mass of carbon in that fossil fuel.
Note that, at these early dates, even if we're off by a factor or 2 or 3, the error hardly matters compared to the thousands of millions of metric tons in the 20th century. What does 500 million metric tons make in the sum total of 300 billion?
Think for a moment: if coal has carbon-14, then the carbon-14-free carbon would be coming from *fewer* fossil fuel sources (only oil, gas, etc.). Thus it would cause an *underestimate* of the human impact (you'd end up measuring fossil fuels minus the coal impact). So now the impact from oil/gas is even bigger, making the coal impact also likely bigger. You just made it even more likely that the carbon dioxide we're adding is what's causing the increase in the air. Nice job.