I look at this whole patent wars thing and have the distinct feeling that lawyers and executives are playing their own exclusive, worldwide, and expensive version of Starcraft.
It's people with your opinion of "delete immediately" that has ruined a lot of what made WIkipedia good IMO.
There's two camps, mainly; deletionists and inclusionists. Deletionists are for deleting unsourced, poorly cited, etc. articles. Inclusionists are more for just leaving anything there and having it improve over time.
I really, really can't fathom why articles are deleted from Wikipedia at all, ever (aside from malicious articles, such as "List of reasons why Rush Limbaugh is an asshole"). Disk storage and bandwidth are getting ever cheaper, and for the most part deleted articles are "stored" anyway - just the public at large can't view them.
Wikipedia was built on an inclusionist philosophy. Anyone wrote anything and it built up over time. I penned a few articles myself (not under my name, of course) and loved to watch them grow and expand, but that takes time. If the people in charge today were around when Wikipedia started, then it wouldn't be nearly as popular as it is today because the morons would have deleted anything that didn't get cited properly right away.
Frankly it raises the barrier to entry and repeat edits. Why bother making an article when you're just going to have 5 people cite reasons it should be deleted, have a quick vote of 4 or 5 guys, and the thing disappears? It's frustrating.
I've always said to my friends that cell phones as a business and technology aren't really worth being used seriously until you can get worldwide unlimited everything (sans data) for $50/month. It's ridiculous that you have to pay $0.10 a minute or something to telephone granny in Scotland. We should be way past this point now, but greed and little reason for expansion has greatly slowed this down.
Maybe one day satphones will be cheap enough (service wise) that they're a viable option. It'd be awesome to see the cell companies get hit from behind like that.
The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed from one generation to the next, says that when you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. However, our government entities seem to think other factors must be taken into consideration and other strategies often have to be tried with dead horses, including the following:
1. Buy a stronger whip.
2. Change riders.
3. Threaten the horse with termination.
4. Appoint a committee to study the horse.
5. Arrange to visit other sites to see how they ride dead horses.
6. Lower the standards so that dead horses can be included.
7. Appoint an intervention team to reanimate the dead horse.
8. Create a training session to increase the rider’s load share.
9. Reclassify the dead horse as “living impaired”.
10. Change the form so that it reads “This horse is not dead.”
11. Hire outside contractors to ride the dead horse.
12. Harness several dead horses together for increased speed.
13. Donate the dead horse to a recognized charity, thereby deducting its full original cost.
14. Provide additional funding to increase the horse’s performance.
15. Do a time-management study to see if lighter riders would improve productivity.
16. Purchase an after-market product to make dead horses run faster.
17. Declare that a dead horse has lower overhead and therefore performs better.
18. Form a quality focus group to find profitable uses for dead horses.
19. Rewrite the expected performance requirements for horses.
20. Promote the dead horse to a supervisory position.
A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
I don't know about you, but the fact that something like this can even happen is an egregious loophole in the law.
Is that thing actually getting sold finally? I've seen the release date pushed back over and over again and I'm reluctant to spend money on what might just be an elaborate scam.
Hey, we all have our hot buttons. I even know a rather famous tribe somewhere on this globe that has members that consider it a provocation when people burn a piece of cloth.
Horseshit.
Has a Catholic priest issued a death order for someone burning the American flag?
Has anyone been brutally gunned down in public for making a movie critical of America?
Yeah, it might piss people off, but they sure as shit don't get murdered.
Their leader is dynamic, in a sense. Not just dynamic in the sense of "Dynamic IP", but dynamic in the sense of "Dynamic personality." Think Dennis Leary's character in Demolition Man. He knows how to speak the language of the people he leads, even though he's not the "leader" per se.
To get "Anonymous" to take action, all you need is the following:
1) Willing and able bodies that can follow simple instructions. (They have this in large supply.)
2) Someone who has the technical skill to coordinate an event. (They do things besides DDoS attacks.)
3) Someone who can convince a large group of Anonymous to do things. This may or may not be the same person in 2).
4) A place through which to coordinate. These are places like 4chan & other similar imageboards (there are dozens of clones of 4chan), IRC, ED, etc.
Keep in mind that Anons don't just do stuff "for the lulz". They are, as a group, the very best and very worst of us. Yeah, they might troll the living daylights out of someone who acts like a pretentious ass on YouTube (or just seems like an easy target), but god help you if you hurt a cat and they find out about it. They've also tracked down child molestors and righted other wrongs. They have probably done more "bad" than "good" (as the average person would consider "bad" and "good").
They are the very essence of crowdsourcing, cell-based behavior, and the human condition all rolled up into one horrifying maelstrom of dick jokes and lolcats.
Not even Bruce Willis and a rag-tag group of oil workers can save us now.
As tired as some of us may be of hearing the parent post, it is in no way irrelevant to the current discussion. It still rings as true today as when it was first put to paper.
G'day! We're the Aussies, mate. Your biological and technological distinctivities will be added to our own. Ain't worth it ta resist, unless that's the sorta thing you're inta. Then I know a bangin' honey in Perth that'll do ya real good for th' right price!
You have to wonder how many of them came to the realization that acting like a complete douche/whore makes them marketable to large segments of the opposite sex as well as making them interesting enough to ensure the next season of the show gets produced. They're raking in millions of dollars a year acting like gussied-up morons on national television.
Finally, the American dream has been realized and someone has found a way to make money acting like a complete ass in public.
Slashdot Mirror
I look at this whole patent wars thing and have the distinct feeling that lawyers and executives are playing their own exclusive, worldwide, and expensive version of Starcraft.
"OMG PATENT TROLL RUSH!"
"SC_EASTTEXASCOURT IS A CRAPPY MAP!"
"SUMMARY JUDGEMENT BITCH, GG NO RE"
The coffee isn't burnt, it's well done.
Just don't ask for a Venti Frappachino Rare. Blood and coffee do not mix well.
It's people with your opinion of "delete immediately" that has ruined a lot of what made WIkipedia good IMO.
There's two camps, mainly; deletionists and inclusionists. Deletionists are for deleting unsourced, poorly cited, etc. articles. Inclusionists are more for just leaving anything there and having it improve over time.
I really, really can't fathom why articles are deleted from Wikipedia at all, ever (aside from malicious articles, such as "List of reasons why Rush Limbaugh is an asshole"). Disk storage and bandwidth are getting ever cheaper, and for the most part deleted articles are "stored" anyway - just the public at large can't view them.
Wikipedia was built on an inclusionist philosophy. Anyone wrote anything and it built up over time. I penned a few articles myself (not under my name, of course) and loved to watch them grow and expand, but that takes time. If the people in charge today were around when Wikipedia started, then it wouldn't be nearly as popular as it is today because the morons would have deleted anything that didn't get cited properly right away.
Frankly it raises the barrier to entry and repeat edits. Why bother making an article when you're just going to have 5 people cite reasons it should be deleted, have a quick vote of 4 or 5 guys, and the thing disappears? It's frustrating.
I've always said to my friends that cell phones as a business and technology aren't really worth being used seriously until you can get worldwide unlimited everything (sans data) for $50/month. It's ridiculous that you have to pay $0.10 a minute or something to telephone granny in Scotland. We should be way past this point now, but greed and little reason for expansion has greatly slowed this down.
Maybe one day satphones will be cheap enough (service wise) that they're a viable option. It'd be awesome to see the cell companies get hit from behind like that.
It's okay, we just need to flip it upside down to hear the B-Side. Just don't play it backwards for the love of god.
Do what I do and mod them underrated, then. Someone else will mod it Funny if it's funny.
The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed from one generation to the next, says that when you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. However, our government entities seem to think other factors must be taken into consideration and other strategies often have to be tried with dead horses, including the following:
1. Buy a stronger whip.
2. Change riders.
3. Threaten the horse with termination.
4. Appoint a committee to study the horse.
5. Arrange to visit other sites to see how they ride dead horses.
6. Lower the standards so that dead horses can be included.
7. Appoint an intervention team to reanimate the dead horse.
8. Create a training session to increase the rider’s load share.
9. Reclassify the dead horse as “living impaired”.
10. Change the form so that it reads “This horse is not dead.”
11. Hire outside contractors to ride the dead horse.
12. Harness several dead horses together for increased speed.
13. Donate the dead horse to a recognized charity, thereby deducting its full original cost.
14. Provide additional funding to increase the horse’s performance.
15. Do a time-management study to see if lighter riders would improve productivity.
16. Purchase an after-market product to make dead horses run faster.
17. Declare that a dead horse has lower overhead and therefore performs better.
18. Form a quality focus group to find profitable uses for dead horses.
19. Rewrite the expected performance requirements for horses.
20. Promote the dead horse to a supervisory position.
A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
I don't know about you, but the fact that something like this can even happen is an egregious loophole in the law.
Save the anti-abortion violence, what do any of those have to do with Christianity?
Is that thing actually getting sold finally? I've seen the release date pushed back over and over again and I'm reluctant to spend money on what might just be an elaborate scam.
This obvious persecution of Julian Assange is atrocious.
Not only are they trying to hit him with dition, but extra dition? That's overboard, man.
Hey, we all have our hot buttons. I even know a rather famous tribe somewhere on this globe that has members that consider it a provocation when people burn a piece of cloth.
Horseshit.
Has a Catholic priest issued a death order for someone burning the American flag?
Has anyone been brutally gunned down in public for making a movie critical of America?
Yeah, it might piss people off, but they sure as shit don't get murdered.
A quote from a good (cynical and realistic) friend:
"When all the politicians agree on something, be afraid. Be very afraid."
I love the dynamic buttons to press and see the next result on the Wikileaks site. A sample:
Their leader is dynamic, in a sense. Not just dynamic in the sense of "Dynamic IP", but dynamic in the sense of "Dynamic personality." Think Dennis Leary's character in Demolition Man. He knows how to speak the language of the people he leads, even though he's not the "leader" per se.
To get "Anonymous" to take action, all you need is the following:
1) Willing and able bodies that can follow simple instructions. (They have this in large supply.)
2) Someone who has the technical skill to coordinate an event. (They do things besides DDoS attacks.)
3) Someone who can convince a large group of Anonymous to do things. This may or may not be the same person in 2).
4) A place through which to coordinate. These are places like 4chan & other similar imageboards (there are dozens of clones of 4chan), IRC, ED, etc.
Keep in mind that Anons don't just do stuff "for the lulz". They are, as a group, the very best and very worst of us. Yeah, they might troll the living daylights out of someone who acts like a pretentious ass on YouTube (or just seems like an easy target), but god help you if you hurt a cat and they find out about it. They've also tracked down child molestors and righted other wrongs. They have probably done more "bad" than "good" (as the average person would consider "bad" and "good").
They are the very essence of crowdsourcing, cell-based behavior, and the human condition all rolled up into one horrifying maelstrom of dick jokes and lolcats.
Not even Bruce Willis and a rag-tag group of oil workers can save us now.
As tired as some of us may be of hearing the parent post, it is in no way irrelevant to the current discussion. It still rings as true today as when it was first put to paper.
Go fight Hitler? Did you miss History, or were you misinformed? The Americans basically sat back saying "meh. Not our business." for two years.
I wish "not our business" was still our policy today.
Police action to correct human rights violations at the request of the UN? Yes.
Goin' around bustin' up countries because they're communist or they have a dictator? No.
If it's not our business, it's not our goddamned business.
G'day! We're the Aussies, mate. Your biological and technological distinctivities will be added to our own. Ain't worth it ta resist, unless that's the sorta thing you're inta. Then I know a bangin' honey in Perth that'll do ya real good for th' right price!
but being contrary just so you can feel yourself superior is the sign of stupidity
NUH-UH!
Throughout most of human history, the man has been the gatekeeper to sexual activity, not the woman.
Having the man be the gatekeeper to sexual activity is about as good an idea as having the woman be the gatekeeper for the credit cards.
What about tears produced by an irritant?
I'm sure one of my ex-girlfriends could drum up some crying for the study.
Besides, they used Australians, and we all know the lot of them are mad as a hatter.
Those controls disappeared decades ago.
FTFA:
Screw the users. Looks like almost everyone has accepted the "you bought it but you don't control it" mentality.
Who do we blame? Steve Jobs. Verizon? Microsoft? The Supreme Court? Everyone for not making more noise?
Wait a sec, are you saying that I could jailbreak my television? I don't know if it's incredibly awesome or incredibly depressing.
"Inter arma enim silent leges"
"In times of war, the law falls silent."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter_arma_enim_silent_leges
I guess the government finally figured out the best way to permanently suspend people's rights is to be in a permanent state of war.
Can they really be construed as stupid, though?
You have to wonder how many of them came to the realization that acting like a complete douche/whore makes them marketable to large segments of the opposite sex as well as making them interesting enough to ensure the next season of the show gets produced. They're raking in millions of dollars a year acting like gussied-up morons on national television.
Finally, the American dream has been realized and someone has found a way to make money acting like a complete ass in public.