Somebody just invented a means by which internet connected computers may transfer data to one another? How very retro of them...
I'm really hoping that there was something actually interesting in this research, some sort of hardware-abstraction mechanism to allow data from one robot to be applicable to robots that aren't physically identical, say; because otherwise this would seem to be "Mechanism by which machines may obtain firmware updates from the internet, just like they've been doing for years and years now, without fanfare".
SSL only protects you from the man in the middle(and, at that, only if none of the certificate authorities your browser trusts can be leaned on...)
If you are talking to https://www.facebook.com/ ; but facebook is talking to the feds, SSL isn't going to save you from much more than getting your password sniffed at the coffee shop. In a hypothetical repressive scenario, 'cooperation' on the part of large enterprises, whether coerced, purchased, or voluntary, is to be expected.
Worse, your SSL security depends on those certificate authorities you choose to trust(or very carefully vetting the details of a site's certificate every time you visit, to look for suspicious changes). Again, in a hypothetical repressive scenario, it is only reasonable to assume that one or more commonly-trusted certificate authorities would be "invited" to kindly generate cryptographically valid certificates for domains of interest to be used for man in the middle attacks.
I suspect that that would be one of the more solvable problems, if (and only if) site operators cared.
Even without getting into not-terribly-well-supported-on-normal-PCs oddities like WAP, gzipped plaintext/basic HTML hasn't gotten any slower over time, just less common(and the performance of the endpoints has improved enormously, so you don't have to worry about little things like "will my markup language be crippled enough to render within the memory allotment provided by a 1990's Nokia?"). Even a few of the web2.0/xmlhttprequest/etc. tricks that avoid reloading the entire page just to change a single element might actually have improved things; were they not lost in a sea of embedded videos, huge images, and ads and tracking cookies from 25 different overloaded 3rd party advertising outfits' servers.
The result would look like being punched in the face by 1992; but setting up a super-basic HTML form frontend for something like twitter would likely be substantially easier than hacks like the phone-based twitter relay that they were/are running for the Egypt affair.
The market has moved away from webpages that can actually be loaded over a V.32 modem or equivalent in something resembling useful time; but all the old stuff should still work, and is a more or less proper subset of what contemporary web-designers know. Things like large images, streaming video, and VOIP have some hard constraints; but switching back to basic text(and not embedding lots of 3rd-party crap) would be a matter of modest effort...
You could likely plop Freenet on top of a mesh network without too much tweaking... IP assignment would be a bit of an issue; but if you went with V6 you could probably just choose at random and assume that collisions are highly unlikely.
Trouble is, of course, that Freenet is a pain in the ass to use, largely because its design has had to take those issues into account. They aren't totally intractable, the system does work, and somebody skilled in the art could probably whip up a cute little 802.11i mesh router/Freenet cache node device that would be set-and-forget and(in mass market quantities) under $200 a pop... It would still be dog slow and hard to navigate, but at least it would be easy to set up. The odds of that actually happening, though, seem fairly remote. A preconfigured m0n0wall or PFsense variant might be more economically plausible, if no more likely to see mass uptake.
The world isn't completely impossible without a set of trusted hosts and backbones and sites; but it sure does make a lot of things much easier....
This problem really comes down to economics and convenience, rather than any fundamental technological limitation.
All sorts of ways of going around The Man and Big Telco exist(802.11i and pre-standard variants, AX.25 links, RONJA setups, more or less jury-rigged fiber runs between buildings, 802.11A/B/G/N directional antenna links, etc.) Trouble is, without some critical mass of users, you either have nobody to talk to and/or make yourself fairly visible to the hypothetical repressive authorities.
As with internet anonymity schemes like Tor and Freenet, so long as just using the comcast line is cheaper and easier, getting Joe User onboard is going to be a challenge. Should the situation change suddenly(as in Egypt) Joe will have a hard time getting onboard at the last moment. Most of the 'internet-alternative' stuff is much easier to buy and set up when you have internet access...
Perhaps a more serious problem, longer term, is that shutting down the internet is a very crude solution, one that smart authoritarians are going to want to avoid: Why cut off a major business tool and supply of soothing porn and entertainment? Why push activists off a medium that feels anonymous(but is comparatively easy to tap and monitor programmatically) and onto a wide variety of ad-hoc solutions, many of which will have to be chased down by your street-level jackboots and creepy HUMINT types one by one? The capabilities of malicious actors to keep the internet functioning almost perfectly, while compromising or blocking undesired material are only going to increase as time goes on.
While her Google-fu may be good, I'd say that Mr. Weppler's ex could use some work in the wit and viciousness departments.
Without exception, the captions were humorless and(at least without some knowledge of Weppler's background and/or personal life/activities) not at all cutting. A few generic insults, some just nonsensical.
She also seems to have chosen a photo(looks almost like a studio shot rather than a candid) that, while it probably doesn't show him as a genius master of fashion(I'm no judge of this stuff, I can't tell), appears to be reasonably flattering. Neutral background, no embarrassing props/situations/penises sharpied onto his face. Hair and clothes, whether or not well chosen, are in good order, and the lighting is suppressing any facial acne/irregularities.
Plus, of course, you have to be Really Good to pull off insults without sounding pathetic and petty when you are exiting a relationship(even harder when you are the dumped party). Presumably, every one of your oh-so-trenchant insults is either fictitious, or pertains to a quality possessed by somebody you were happy to date until just recently. That takes comedic talent to dodge, and she appears to lack it.
This is dubiously on-topic; but that particular irony is actually a matter of considerable debate in feminist theory and feminist epistemology/philosophy of science circles. You've got the classical feminist critical position, which would generally hold that the statement we are commenting on is misogynistic and(depending on who you read) either false, or a product of intense socialization for gender-normative behavior, or a combination of the two.
Then you've got the feminist "Standpoint Epistemologists", who tend to sound like they would be in fairly close agreement with that statement; but argue that those "feminine" qualities actually result in a superior epistemological standpoint, and that the misogyny is not in the characterizatio of those qualities as "feminine"; but in the characterization of those feminine qualities as inferior.(With the Standpoint Epistemologists, you quickly run into complexity; because, while the first round of theorists were mostly white academics, it doesn't take long before somebody points out that female minorities, poor women, women in colonial or post-colonial societies, etc. also have distinct standpoints from either white males or comparatively high status white women. You also have the classical Marxist Standpoint theorists and the explicitly feminist marxist standpoint theorists, and so on. Bit of a reading list...)
In reaction to that somewhat chaotic assortment, you get the full-blown postmodernists, who argue against both the notion that any particular epistemology is superior to another and against the notion that there are universal "feminine" characteristics, or universal characteristics in general. Odds are that writers in that genre would personally see the statement as suggesting a misogynist viewpoint; but philosophically their contention would be with its assertion of a universal, rather than its misogyny.
With postmodernism rather out of fashion, and the visibly self-evident material triumphs of science on the table, you then loop back round to a sort of sociologically grounded version of the classical position, which argues(often in the form of specific case studies in various questions or disciplines) that historical exclusion of women from the sciences has produced worse science, and even managed to retard progress in certain areas; but that science is, if imperfect, basically the best shot everybody has at knowledge of the world, and(while not Universal in the classic Enlightenment optimist sort of way) is more or less accessible to everyone, subject to social factors and cognitive ability...
(The above is, of course, heavily abridged and reductive, arguably to the point of being wrong in places. So it goes.)
I have nothing against either classical mechanics or selective, pragmatic, reductionism(indeed, this is an extremely valuable problem solving skill, and teaching people how to determine what facts they can ignore/fudge and what facts will bite them in the ass is an under-emphasized and highly worthy endeavor...) Also, Newton was both a genius and a badass, so I wouldn't mess with him.
My point was just that essentially everything, even in a well designed and rigorous K-12 curriculum, is highly reductive or false. If it is well designed, it will be highly reductive or false in a way that is both a useful approximation of the truth, and a reasonable groundwork for further progress in the student's field of interest. This form of non-truth is quite valuable, and arguably inevitable, whether one ends up doing something where the approximation is good enough, or whether someone is interested in catching up to the forefront of a field and doing work there.
Since everything is in roughly the same boat, anybody who emphasizes one spot for special criticism (even if they use the reductive/incorrect criticism) really has something else in mind(not always malignant, of course. Sometimes a curriculum sucks in a given area, and is reductive or false in a way that is either unnecessary or not useful...)
I think that the basic problem(encountered at the introductory end of most subjects) is that you need some grounding in a subject before you can actually "question" in a useful way, which usually entails some amount of "because that's how it is" based acquisition of groundwork before meaningful inquiry can begin.
Teachers don't generally encourage questions during the introduction of the multiplication tables; because teaching axiomatic number theory to 3rd graders might be a bit tricky. Teachers hand you a list of salient books to be read in English because the list of potential books is a lifetime long, and you need something to hone your critical skills on before you are able to usefully judge salience. Biology suffers from the same chicken-and-egg issue: Science, as a disciple and method of inquiry into the world, is not dogmatic; but unless you want a classroom full of kids who don't even have a conceptual vocabulary asking "why?" "why?" "why?" every thirty seconds, you pretty much have to do a bit of introductory dogmatism to get them up to speed.
In the hands of standardized-test mania, this introductory dogmatism can turn into "Hey kids, we are going to spend the entire year memorizing simplistic and often wrong caricatures of actual science so that our test scores are good!"; but there is some advantage to trying to hurry through some of the ~4000 years of work that got us to where we are today in order to get to the good bits...
While it is true that evolution at the k-12 level(and often at a decent slice of undergrad) is overly simplistic, I'm not sure that avoiding over-simplification in lower level science classes is even possible. The hairy details of the field are such that even PhD'ed full-time researchers in biology related fields tend to have specializations in subsets of the field. A full knowledge of the field, and its controversies, would require nearly superhuman effort, full time. Not Happening in 9th grade Bio.
This isn't evolution specific, of course. K-12 physics is usually Newtonian, which isn't just overly simplistic; but known to be false. However, when it comes down to teaching kids how to apply mathematical models to physical situations, albeit with imperfect accuracy, or wait until they finish tensor calculus to even broach the subject, Newtonian physics usually wins. Somehow, we don't have godbots battering down the doors and demanding that "Newtonism" be presented as a controversial theory... K-12 chemistry, while less overtly false than k-12 physics, is usually heavily simplified and pretty much applies (approximately) to idealized ionic compounds, some of the better behaved transition metals, and ideal gasses. Again, as bad or worse than k-12 bio; but uncontroversial.
Math, while more likely to be correct within its limited scope, also tends to be essentially dogmatic in its approach. You might get a few axioms and proofs in geometry; but you pretty much get to take all the properties of numbers on faith until you make it to number theory sometime in college.
It is definitely true that low-level science education is, from a factual/current state of the discipline perspective, reductive, false, or both(and this is why they should really spend more time instilling inquiry, experimentation, hypothesis, testing, conclusions, etc. rather than rote "facts" that are mostly known to be wrong); but that isn't why K-12 evolutionary biology is controversial. Virtually no part of a K-12 curriculum is immune to the charges of excessive simplicity; but only in the cases where the curriculum is also ideologically inconvenient does that become a major issue(mostly evolution, occasionally American history or the English class reading list)...
It would be interesting to see, though, for this relatively pricey device, if the users skew a bit taller than average because of the height-earnings correlation that has been observed...
While your brief overview of the the wackier quotes of gender-studies-influenced-postmodern-drivel is certainly amusing, I'm far from convinced that it is relevant to wikipedia's work. Even in some of its former bastions in the more incestuous and empiricism-free regions of academia that stuff isn't nearly as fashionable as it used to be, and its penetration among the population at large was trivial even at its height(as with most academic publications, works on postmodern epistemology don't exactly hit the bestseller lists...).
Since wikipedia has essentially zero coercive power, it isn't going to be "forcing" anybody to do anything. My point was that, if you are trying to increase your contributor base(which you really should be, if you are the wikipedia leadership) demographic analysis of who you are and aren't getting can be a valuable tool for working to identify what strategies are most promising. As I've noted elsewhere, I am uninterested in increasing the relative number of female contributors for its own sake; but characterizing non-contributor demographics, and attempting to determine what might convert each one, is an eminently rational strategy for working to bump contributor numbers. Not all non-contributor demographics will turn out to be worth what it would take to convert them, of course (I'm guessing that the epistemological concessions required to get team Conservapaedia back on board would be outlandish to say the least...); but it is a very sensible planning exercise from which to pursue such further work as seems valuable.
If your project depends entirely on the effort of participants, trying to determine why some people don't want to participate, and then figuring out what non-participants can be converted without causing other damage, is pretty much the most important job the leadership has.
I don't think that focusing on the male/female ratio is all that productive in itself, a change that doubles the number of useful contributors but leaves the ratio untouched would be more useful than one that attracts a few more females to bump their numbers up to 25%, for instance; but it can be diagnostically useful.
If your numbers are 85/15, this suggests that there is something about your project that is leaving a number of potential contributors on the table. What is that? Are there changes we can make that would bring them in to the project? Would there be costs associated with doing so?
Since not all contributors are equally useful, not all changes that increase absolute numbers are good; but constantly trying to identify under-tapped potential contributors and figure out if they can be brought in in a useful way is a vital exercise. For a fairly mature project like wikipedia(everybody knows about them, they have more pagerank than god, ignorance is unlikely to be the reason behind most non-contributors), focusing on anomalies in your contributor statistics is a good way of identifying potential issues that might be standing in the way of your growth.
For J Random OSS project, it is easy(and often correct) to just say "obscurity is the problem" and go from there; but wikipedia is about as far from obscure as any entity without a 500million TV advertising budget can be. If they want new blood, their analysis will have to be more subtle...
I don't see that trying to bump the percentage, in itself, would be wildly useful to the project(trying to bump the absolute numbers, certainly; but the ratio, less obviously)...
However, efforts to modify the current situation might well have broader benefits. Criticism of wikipedia(aside from that of sniffy old media types, which is rarely all that interesting) largely focuses on the perception, sometimes the reality, that swaths of it tend to fall under the most obsessive rules-lawyering assholes with sufficiently long attention spans. On the plus side, these types are something of a bulwark against pure chaos and obvious troll-edits. On the minus side, as anybody who has ever played a tabletop RPG with an obsessive, rules-lawyering asshole can attest, such people are hell to work with and can crush the enthusiasm and patience of virtually anybody by sheer force of persistent pedantry.
If they want more female contributors, they'll have to do something about that. If successful, they will probably end up with more contributors across the board.
100kg isn't outside the realm of possibility by any means. For someone 6 feet tall, not an unusual height, 220 pounds only qualifies you as "overweight"(or nontrivially muscled) not even "obese". I'm assuming that the cruise/tour/hotel companies that are likely to be buying these things count the sort of "middle aged middle management who has a lot more disposable income, and a lot less time for exercise, than he did when he was 25" as standard customers.
If they could be peeled off with sufficient creativity, some of the SCO lawsuits might still have value as a high-risk/high-reward vehicle. I'd hate to see the zombie shamble on; but if you could keep the ongoing legal costs down, you could probably find investors willing to take a chance in exchange for the slight odds of a major payoff...
I suspect that the comment you note is largely correct. Back when this was still on view at your friendly local hospital, people had a certain... urgency about vaccinations.
I suspect that there is one other slightly subtler sub-factor: the difficulty of intuitively comparing small risks. The vaccines that draw the most fire today are the ones for comparatively non-scary sounding diseases. Everybody knows that things like polio and smallpox were Seriously. Bad. News. Things like Measles and Mumps, though, just don't sound that scary. However, Measles, for example, does have a.3% mortality rate, and the risk of encephalitis or corneal damage isn't fun either. However, people are very bad, intuitively, at comparing very small and very large values. The rate of complications and fatalities from the MMR vaccine is lower than that of the diseases it helps prevent(even weighted with the less than 100% probability of getting the disease); but not quite zero. However, since both values are very small, they both fall into the "small; but gnawingly nonzero" risk category, which makes them feel close to equivalent. With something like Polio vs. Polio vaccine, the high risk/low risk intuition is straightforward and emotions match math. With low risk/lower risk, the math holds up; but intuition and emotion don't necessarily fall into line...
Vaccines aren't an especially lucrative field. Many of them are old enough to be off patent, some others require re-formulation every year(flu, sometimes more than once..), and the whole point of their use is to reduce the morbidity and mortality of the population. A single dose can ruin one or more potential customers for life!
A few of the newer ones are still kind of pricey(a shot of Guardasil will set you back a bit); but your basic childhood-diseases battery is unexciting. Never mind the R&D for ones that largely affect only dirt-poor people in the tropics, like malaria and yellow fever. Working on those is not exactly a cash cow, compared to cutting edge problems like hair loss, obesity, or limp-dick syndrome...
Drugs do have higher potential liability; but there is so much more cash to be had there...
States, at least in the US context, certainly are subject to different financial constraints than is the federal government. There are some other differences as well. At least for stuff that can be stamped "national security" the feds have greater leverage over private sector actors: It is perfectly legal for Yoyodyne LLC. to say "Dear Florida, give us the land to build a spaceport, some cushy tax breaks, and exemption from certain local zoning restrictions, or we will take our precious, precious jobs to New Mexico". That is, in fact, entirely standard practice for corporations siting facilities. On the other hand, were Slaughtertek industries to say "Well, if you don't like the price of our proposed air-defense missile package, perhaps China will be more cooperative...", they would likely find themselves in legal hot water.
This tends to create a countervailing pressure on state governments: As you say, even if they are willing to take the macroecomic consequences, they cannot print money and are generally limited in their ability to run debts. On the other hand, state governments are often much easier to play against one another in competition for the most generous public/private "partnerships". In non-defense industries, some of the same stuff happens nation to nation; but there are still barriers like language, tariffs, currencies, etc. that states either are powerless to erect(interstate commerce is federal, so state x can't impose a tariff on goods from state y) or that don't exist(all states use USD and have high concentrations of available native English speakers, say). Unfortunately, there is some evidence from empirical economic study that this countervailing pressure often ends up with state governments being made into what amounts to a corporate booty call. Governors just cannot resist the electoral value of cutting the ribbon at some new plant with some shiny new jobs for their constituents; but often end up paying out alarming sums in taxpayer money per job, and long-term retention(once the goodies run out) can be surprisingly low. Apparently, southern states have it particularly bad; but others are not immune(Municipalities that shell out to build stadiums for private sports teams are in a similar boat and that seems to be a universal vice...)
This isn't just a US phenomenon: Euro-zone nations, because of comparatively low borders, often face some of the same problems and national governments generally are not exempt, though they have somewhat stronger tools to work with.
I agree that the two are not identical. I just wanted to emphasize that "stateness" and "privateness" can come from either the ownership side or the customer base side(and, in practice, generally comes from a mixture of both) and that one has to be careful, because of that, to examine an an entity's "state" or "private" status along the lines of those broader considerations.
There are also, neatly matching the Owner/Customer distinction, two distinct but often not that different ways in which a "state" and a "private" entity can grow together organizationally. On the one hand, you have "state capture", where the state entity uses some mixture of ownership, legal power, or good old fashioned violence to control the organization and activity of the private entity. State owned industries, regulated monopolies, nationalizing companies that piss you off, that sort of thing. On the other you have "regulatory capture"/"Revolving door", where a private entity will engage in a process of intense lobbying, typically culminating in heavy recruitment of ex-state officeholders for positions or financial stakes in the private entity and heavy penetration of ex-private position or financial interest holders into state positions.
Each of these processes is its own peculiar phenomenon, and none are identical; but they all tend to blur the lines between "state" and "private" and you can end up with situations where the de-facto situation is very different from what the ownership situation would suggest. This seems especially to be the case in industries that either have high barriers to entry(telcomms, say) and/or "national security" considerations(mil/aero, strategic minerals, etc.)
I wasn't really thinking in terms of a "state"/"federal" distinction; but a "state"/"private" one. If the customer is spending tax dollars, they are probably "state". If not, "private"...
I am familiar with the utility of financial instruments, limited liability corporations, and the like; and I don't deny them; but I find it disconcerting to see that high speed access to those things is being ranked with access to electricity in importance. Obviously the delta between modernity and some pre-capitalist subsistence feudalism is massive. I'm just much more skeptical of the delta between a '50's style comparatively slow trading with brokers and telephones and such and today's highly automated process(I don't deny that there is a very, very large number purporting to be that delta; I just suspect that a substantial portion of that large number is illusory, balanced by an increase in tightly interlinked risk, or consists of rents extracted from the economy of people who actually make stuff).
Electricity, by contrast, basically underpins such niceties as "cities of contemporary density that actually work" and "all modern high-speed communications systems". It would only take a few days without access to refrigeration, street lights, and traffic signals for things to start getting a bit Road Warrior in many locations...
Slashdot Mirror
Somebody just invented a means by which internet connected computers may transfer data to one another? How very retro of them...
I'm really hoping that there was something actually interesting in this research, some sort of hardware-abstraction mechanism to allow data from one robot to be applicable to robots that aren't physically identical, say; because otherwise this would seem to be "Mechanism by which machines may obtain firmware updates from the internet, just like they've been doing for years and years now, without fanfare".
Let us be thankful we have commerce. Buy more. Buy more now. Buy. And be happy.
SSL only protects you from the man in the middle(and, at that, only if none of the certificate authorities your browser trusts can be leaned on...)
If you are talking to https://www.facebook.com/ ; but facebook is talking to the feds, SSL isn't going to save you from much more than getting your password sniffed at the coffee shop. In a hypothetical repressive scenario, 'cooperation' on the part of large enterprises, whether coerced, purchased, or voluntary, is to be expected.
Worse, your SSL security depends on those certificate authorities you choose to trust(or very carefully vetting the details of a site's certificate every time you visit, to look for suspicious changes). Again, in a hypothetical repressive scenario, it is only reasonable to assume that one or more commonly-trusted certificate authorities would be "invited" to kindly generate cryptographically valid certificates for domains of interest to be used for man in the middle attacks.
I suspect that that would be one of the more solvable problems, if (and only if) site operators cared.
Even without getting into not-terribly-well-supported-on-normal-PCs oddities like WAP, gzipped plaintext/basic HTML hasn't gotten any slower over time, just less common(and the performance of the endpoints has improved enormously, so you don't have to worry about little things like "will my markup language be crippled enough to render within the memory allotment provided by a 1990's Nokia?"). Even a few of the web2.0/xmlhttprequest/etc. tricks that avoid reloading the entire page just to change a single element might actually have improved things; were they not lost in a sea of embedded videos, huge images, and ads and tracking cookies from 25 different overloaded 3rd party advertising outfits' servers.
The result would look like being punched in the face by 1992; but setting up a super-basic HTML form frontend for something like twitter would likely be substantially easier than hacks like the phone-based twitter relay that they were/are running for the Egypt affair.
The market has moved away from webpages that can actually be loaded over a V.32 modem or equivalent in something resembling useful time; but all the old stuff should still work, and is a more or less proper subset of what contemporary web-designers know. Things like large images, streaming video, and VOIP have some hard constraints; but switching back to basic text(and not embedding lots of 3rd-party crap) would be a matter of modest effort...
You could likely plop Freenet on top of a mesh network without too much tweaking... IP assignment would be a bit of an issue; but if you went with V6 you could probably just choose at random and assume that collisions are highly unlikely.
Trouble is, of course, that Freenet is a pain in the ass to use, largely because its design has had to take those issues into account. They aren't totally intractable, the system does work, and somebody skilled in the art could probably whip up a cute little 802.11i mesh router/Freenet cache node device that would be set-and-forget and(in mass market quantities) under $200 a pop... It would still be dog slow and hard to navigate, but at least it would be easy to set up. The odds of that actually happening, though, seem fairly remote. A preconfigured m0n0wall or PFsense variant might be more economically plausible, if no more likely to see mass uptake.
The world isn't completely impossible without a set of trusted hosts and backbones and sites; but it sure does make a lot of things much easier....
This problem really comes down to economics and convenience, rather than any fundamental technological limitation.
All sorts of ways of going around The Man and Big Telco exist(802.11i and pre-standard variants, AX.25 links, RONJA setups, more or less jury-rigged fiber runs between buildings, 802.11A/B/G/N directional antenna links, etc.) Trouble is, without some critical mass of users, you either have nobody to talk to and/or make yourself fairly visible to the hypothetical repressive authorities.
As with internet anonymity schemes like Tor and Freenet, so long as just using the comcast line is cheaper and easier, getting Joe User onboard is going to be a challenge. Should the situation change suddenly(as in Egypt) Joe will have a hard time getting onboard at the last moment. Most of the 'internet-alternative' stuff is much easier to buy and set up when you have internet access...
Perhaps a more serious problem, longer term, is that shutting down the internet is a very crude solution, one that smart authoritarians are going to want to avoid: Why cut off a major business tool and supply of soothing porn and entertainment? Why push activists off a medium that feels anonymous(but is comparatively easy to tap and monitor programmatically) and onto a wide variety of ad-hoc solutions, many of which will have to be chased down by your street-level jackboots and creepy HUMINT types one by one? The capabilities of malicious actors to keep the internet functioning almost perfectly, while compromising or blocking undesired material are only going to increase as time goes on.
While her Google-fu may be good, I'd say that Mr. Weppler's ex could use some work in the wit and viciousness departments.
Without exception, the captions were humorless and(at least without some knowledge of Weppler's background and/or personal life/activities) not at all cutting. A few generic insults, some just nonsensical.
She also seems to have chosen a photo(looks almost like a studio shot rather than a candid) that, while it probably doesn't show him as a genius master of fashion(I'm no judge of this stuff, I can't tell), appears to be reasonably flattering. Neutral background, no embarrassing props/situations/penises sharpied onto his face. Hair and clothes, whether or not well chosen, are in good order, and the lighting is suppressing any facial acne/irregularities.
Plus, of course, you have to be Really Good to pull off insults without sounding pathetic and petty when you are exiting a relationship(even harder when you are the dumped party). Presumably, every one of your oh-so-trenchant insults is either fictitious, or pertains to a quality possessed by somebody you were happy to date until just recently. That takes comedic talent to dodge, and she appears to lack it.
This is dubiously on-topic; but that particular irony is actually a matter of considerable debate in feminist theory and feminist epistemology/philosophy of science circles. You've got the classical feminist critical position, which would generally hold that the statement we are commenting on is misogynistic and(depending on who you read) either false, or a product of intense socialization for gender-normative behavior, or a combination of the two.
Then you've got the feminist "Standpoint Epistemologists", who tend to sound like they would be in fairly close agreement with that statement; but argue that those "feminine" qualities actually result in a superior epistemological standpoint, and that the misogyny is not in the characterizatio of those qualities as "feminine"; but in the characterization of those feminine qualities as inferior.(With the Standpoint Epistemologists, you quickly run into complexity; because, while the first round of theorists were mostly white academics, it doesn't take long before somebody points out that female minorities, poor women, women in colonial or post-colonial societies, etc. also have distinct standpoints from either white males or comparatively high status white women. You also have the classical Marxist Standpoint theorists and the explicitly feminist marxist standpoint theorists, and so on. Bit of a reading list...)
In reaction to that somewhat chaotic assortment, you get the full-blown postmodernists, who argue against both the notion that any particular epistemology is superior to another and against the notion that there are universal "feminine" characteristics, or universal characteristics in general. Odds are that writers in that genre would personally see the statement as suggesting a misogynist viewpoint; but philosophically their contention would be with its assertion of a universal, rather than its misogyny.
With postmodernism rather out of fashion, and the visibly self-evident material triumphs of science on the table, you then loop back round to a sort of sociologically grounded version of the classical position, which argues(often in the form of specific case studies in various questions or disciplines) that historical exclusion of women from the sciences has produced worse science, and even managed to retard progress in certain areas; but that science is, if imperfect, basically the best shot everybody has at knowledge of the world, and(while not Universal in the classic Enlightenment optimist sort of way) is more or less accessible to everyone, subject to social factors and cognitive ability...
(The above is, of course, heavily abridged and reductive, arguably to the point of being wrong in places. So it goes.)
I have nothing against either classical mechanics or selective, pragmatic, reductionism(indeed, this is an extremely valuable problem solving skill, and teaching people how to determine what facts they can ignore/fudge and what facts will bite them in the ass is an under-emphasized and highly worthy endeavor...) Also, Newton was both a genius and a badass, so I wouldn't mess with him.
My point was just that essentially everything, even in a well designed and rigorous K-12 curriculum, is highly reductive or false. If it is well designed, it will be highly reductive or false in a way that is both a useful approximation of the truth, and a reasonable groundwork for further progress in the student's field of interest. This form of non-truth is quite valuable, and arguably inevitable, whether one ends up doing something where the approximation is good enough, or whether someone is interested in catching up to the forefront of a field and doing work there.
Since everything is in roughly the same boat, anybody who emphasizes one spot for special criticism (even if they use the reductive/incorrect criticism) really has something else in mind(not always malignant, of course. Sometimes a curriculum sucks in a given area, and is reductive or false in a way that is either unnecessary or not useful...)
I think that the basic problem(encountered at the introductory end of most subjects) is that you need some grounding in a subject before you can actually "question" in a useful way, which usually entails some amount of "because that's how it is" based acquisition of groundwork before meaningful inquiry can begin.
Teachers don't generally encourage questions during the introduction of the multiplication tables; because teaching axiomatic number theory to 3rd graders might be a bit tricky. Teachers hand you a list of salient books to be read in English because the list of potential books is a lifetime long, and you need something to hone your critical skills on before you are able to usefully judge salience. Biology suffers from the same chicken-and-egg issue: Science, as a disciple and method of inquiry into the world, is not dogmatic; but unless you want a classroom full of kids who don't even have a conceptual vocabulary asking "why?" "why?" "why?" every thirty seconds, you pretty much have to do a bit of introductory dogmatism to get them up to speed.
In the hands of standardized-test mania, this introductory dogmatism can turn into "Hey kids, we are going to spend the entire year memorizing simplistic and often wrong caricatures of actual science so that our test scores are good!"; but there is some advantage to trying to hurry through some of the ~4000 years of work that got us to where we are today in order to get to the good bits...
While it is true that evolution at the k-12 level(and often at a decent slice of undergrad) is overly simplistic, I'm not sure that avoiding over-simplification in lower level science classes is even possible. The hairy details of the field are such that even PhD'ed full-time researchers in biology related fields tend to have specializations in subsets of the field. A full knowledge of the field, and its controversies, would require nearly superhuman effort, full time. Not Happening in 9th grade Bio.
This isn't evolution specific, of course. K-12 physics is usually Newtonian, which isn't just overly simplistic; but known to be false. However, when it comes down to teaching kids how to apply mathematical models to physical situations, albeit with imperfect accuracy, or wait until they finish tensor calculus to even broach the subject, Newtonian physics usually wins. Somehow, we don't have godbots battering down the doors and demanding that "Newtonism" be presented as a controversial theory... K-12 chemistry, while less overtly false than k-12 physics, is usually heavily simplified and pretty much applies (approximately) to idealized ionic compounds, some of the better behaved transition metals, and ideal gasses. Again, as bad or worse than k-12 bio; but uncontroversial.
Math, while more likely to be correct within its limited scope, also tends to be essentially dogmatic in its approach. You might get a few axioms and proofs in geometry; but you pretty much get to take all the properties of numbers on faith until you make it to number theory sometime in college.
It is definitely true that low-level science education is, from a factual/current state of the discipline perspective, reductive, false, or both(and this is why they should really spend more time instilling inquiry, experimentation, hypothesis, testing, conclusions, etc. rather than rote "facts" that are mostly known to be wrong); but that isn't why K-12 evolutionary biology is controversial. Virtually no part of a K-12 curriculum is immune to the charges of excessive simplicity; but only in the cases where the curriculum is also ideologically inconvenient does that become a major issue(mostly evolution, occasionally American history or the English class reading list)...
When it comes to emotive, interpersonal, Machiavellian, drama I would rather deal with a (non-socipathic) male, without question.
When it comes to a grinding nerd-fight on the message boards or an endurance fueled edit/revert war, on the other hand...
Fair enough.
It would be interesting to see, though, for this relatively pricey device, if the users skew a bit taller than average because of the height-earnings correlation that has been observed...
While your brief overview of the the wackier quotes of gender-studies-influenced-postmodern-drivel is certainly amusing, I'm far from convinced that it is relevant to wikipedia's work. Even in some of its former bastions in the more incestuous and empiricism-free regions of academia that stuff isn't nearly as fashionable as it used to be, and its penetration among the population at large was trivial even at its height(as with most academic publications, works on postmodern epistemology don't exactly hit the bestseller lists...).
Since wikipedia has essentially zero coercive power, it isn't going to be "forcing" anybody to do anything. My point was that, if you are trying to increase your contributor base(which you really should be, if you are the wikipedia leadership) demographic analysis of who you are and aren't getting can be a valuable tool for working to identify what strategies are most promising. As I've noted elsewhere, I am uninterested in increasing the relative number of female contributors for its own sake; but characterizing non-contributor demographics, and attempting to determine what might convert each one, is an eminently rational strategy for working to bump contributor numbers. Not all non-contributor demographics will turn out to be worth what it would take to convert them, of course (I'm guessing that the epistemological concessions required to get team Conservapaedia back on board would be outlandish to say the least...); but it is a very sensible planning exercise from which to pursue such further work as seems valuable.
If your project depends entirely on the effort of participants, trying to determine why some people don't want to participate, and then figuring out what non-participants can be converted without causing other damage, is pretty much the most important job the leadership has.
I don't think that focusing on the male/female ratio is all that productive in itself, a change that doubles the number of useful contributors but leaves the ratio untouched would be more useful than one that attracts a few more females to bump their numbers up to 25%, for instance; but it can be diagnostically useful.
If your numbers are 85/15, this suggests that there is something about your project that is leaving a number of potential contributors on the table. What is that? Are there changes we can make that would bring them in to the project? Would there be costs associated with doing so?
Since not all contributors are equally useful, not all changes that increase absolute numbers are good; but constantly trying to identify under-tapped potential contributors and figure out if they can be brought in in a useful way is a vital exercise. For a fairly mature project like wikipedia(everybody knows about them, they have more pagerank than god, ignorance is unlikely to be the reason behind most non-contributors), focusing on anomalies in your contributor statistics is a good way of identifying potential issues that might be standing in the way of your growth.
For J Random OSS project, it is easy(and often correct) to just say "obscurity is the problem" and go from there; but wikipedia is about as far from obscure as any entity without a 500million TV advertising budget can be. If they want new blood, their analysis will have to be more subtle...
I don't see that trying to bump the percentage, in itself, would be wildly useful to the project(trying to bump the absolute numbers, certainly; but the ratio, less obviously)...
However, efforts to modify the current situation might well have broader benefits. Criticism of wikipedia(aside from that of sniffy old media types, which is rarely all that interesting) largely focuses on the perception, sometimes the reality, that swaths of it tend to fall under the most obsessive rules-lawyering assholes with sufficiently long attention spans. On the plus side, these types are something of a bulwark against pure chaos and obvious troll-edits. On the minus side, as anybody who has ever played a tabletop RPG with an obsessive, rules-lawyering asshole can attest, such people are hell to work with and can crush the enthusiasm and patience of virtually anybody by sheer force of persistent pedantry.
If they want more female contributors, they'll have to do something about that. If successful, they will probably end up with more contributors across the board.
100kg isn't outside the realm of possibility by any means. For someone 6 feet tall, not an unusual height, 220 pounds only qualifies you as "overweight"(or nontrivially muscled) not even "obese". I'm assuming that the cruise/tour/hotel companies that are likely to be buying these things count the sort of "middle aged middle management who has a lot more disposable income, and a lot less time for exercise, than he did when he was 25" as standard customers.
150kg, though, is a fairly generous ceiling.
The prospect that I would rather avoid would be letting my leg wander into the path of the water being ejected...
I don't know exactly where "painful bruising" ends and "flaying" begins; but I don't really want to find out the hard way...
If they could be peeled off with sufficient creativity, some of the SCO lawsuits might still have value as a high-risk/high-reward vehicle. I'd hate to see the zombie shamble on; but if you could keep the ongoing legal costs down, you could probably find investors willing to take a chance in exchange for the slight odds of a major payoff...
I suspect that the comment you note is largely correct. Back when this was still on view at your friendly local hospital, people had a certain... urgency about vaccinations.
.3% mortality rate, and the risk of encephalitis or corneal damage isn't fun either. However, people are very bad, intuitively, at comparing very small and very large values. The rate of complications and fatalities from the MMR vaccine is lower than that of the diseases it helps prevent(even weighted with the less than 100% probability of getting the disease); but not quite zero. However, since both values are very small, they both fall into the "small; but gnawingly nonzero" risk category, which makes them feel close to equivalent. With something like Polio vs. Polio vaccine, the high risk/low risk intuition is straightforward and emotions match math. With low risk/lower risk, the math holds up; but intuition and emotion don't necessarily fall into line...
I suspect that there is one other slightly subtler sub-factor: the difficulty of intuitively comparing small risks. The vaccines that draw the most fire today are the ones for comparatively non-scary sounding diseases. Everybody knows that things like polio and smallpox were Seriously. Bad. News. Things like Measles and Mumps, though, just don't sound that scary. However, Measles, for example, does have a
Vaccines aren't an especially lucrative field. Many of them are old enough to be off patent, some others require re-formulation every year(flu, sometimes more than once..), and the whole point of their use is to reduce the morbidity and mortality of the population. A single dose can ruin one or more potential customers for life!
A few of the newer ones are still kind of pricey(a shot of Guardasil will set you back a bit); but your basic childhood-diseases battery is unexciting. Never mind the R&D for ones that largely affect only dirt-poor people in the tropics, like malaria and yellow fever. Working on those is not exactly a cash cow, compared to cutting edge problems like hair loss, obesity, or limp-dick syndrome...
Drugs do have higher potential liability; but there is so much more cash to be had there...
States, at least in the US context, certainly are subject to different financial constraints than is the federal government. There are some other differences as well. At least for stuff that can be stamped "national security" the feds have greater leverage over private sector actors: It is perfectly legal for Yoyodyne LLC. to say "Dear Florida, give us the land to build a spaceport, some cushy tax breaks, and exemption from certain local zoning restrictions, or we will take our precious, precious jobs to New Mexico". That is, in fact, entirely standard practice for corporations siting facilities. On the other hand, were Slaughtertek industries to say "Well, if you don't like the price of our proposed air-defense missile package, perhaps China will be more cooperative...", they would likely find themselves in legal hot water.
This tends to create a countervailing pressure on state governments: As you say, even if they are willing to take the macroecomic consequences, they cannot print money and are generally limited in their ability to run debts. On the other hand, state governments are often much easier to play against one another in competition for the most generous public/private "partnerships". In non-defense industries, some of the same stuff happens nation to nation; but there are still barriers like language, tariffs, currencies, etc. that states either are powerless to erect(interstate commerce is federal, so state x can't impose a tariff on goods from state y) or that don't exist(all states use USD and have high concentrations of available native English speakers, say). Unfortunately, there is some evidence from empirical economic study that this countervailing pressure often ends up with state governments being made into what amounts to a corporate booty call. Governors just cannot resist the electoral value of cutting the ribbon at some new plant with some shiny new jobs for their constituents; but often end up paying out alarming sums in taxpayer money per job, and long-term retention(once the goodies run out) can be surprisingly low. Apparently, southern states have it particularly bad; but others are not immune(Municipalities that shell out to build stadiums for private sports teams are in a similar boat and that seems to be a universal vice...)
This isn't just a US phenomenon: Euro-zone nations, because of comparatively low borders, often face some of the same problems and national governments generally are not exempt, though they have somewhat stronger tools to work with.
I agree that the two are not identical. I just wanted to emphasize that "stateness" and "privateness" can come from either the ownership side or the customer base side(and, in practice, generally comes from a mixture of both) and that one has to be careful, because of that, to examine an an entity's "state" or "private" status along the lines of those broader considerations.
There are also, neatly matching the Owner/Customer distinction, two distinct but often not that different ways in which a "state" and a "private" entity can grow together organizationally. On the one hand, you have "state capture", where the state entity uses some mixture of ownership, legal power, or good old fashioned violence to control the organization and activity of the private entity. State owned industries, regulated monopolies, nationalizing companies that piss you off, that sort of thing. On the other you have "regulatory capture"/"Revolving door", where a private entity will engage in a process of intense lobbying, typically culminating in heavy recruitment of ex-state officeholders for positions or financial stakes in the private entity and heavy penetration of ex-private position or financial interest holders into state positions.
Each of these processes is its own peculiar phenomenon, and none are identical; but they all tend to blur the lines between "state" and "private" and you can end up with situations where the de-facto situation is very different from what the ownership situation would suggest. This seems especially to be the case in industries that either have high barriers to entry(telcomms, say) and/or "national security" considerations(mil/aero, strategic minerals, etc.)
I wasn't really thinking in terms of a "state"/"federal" distinction; but a "state"/"private" one. If the customer is spending tax dollars, they are probably "state". If not, "private"...
I am familiar with the utility of financial instruments, limited liability corporations, and the like; and I don't deny them; but I find it disconcerting to see that high speed access to those things is being ranked with access to electricity in importance. Obviously the delta between modernity and some pre-capitalist subsistence feudalism is massive. I'm just much more skeptical of the delta between a '50's style comparatively slow trading with brokers and telephones and such and today's highly automated process(I don't deny that there is a very, very large number purporting to be that delta; I just suspect that a substantial portion of that large number is illusory, balanced by an increase in tightly interlinked risk, or consists of rents extracted from the economy of people who actually make stuff).
Electricity, by contrast, basically underpins such niceties as "cities of contemporary density that actually work" and "all modern high-speed communications systems". It would only take a few days without access to refrigeration, street lights, and traffic signals for things to start getting a bit Road Warrior in many locations...