I don't suppose you're doing something about this, like for instance dropping by WP:AFD and commenting on discussions of articles you don't think should be deleted?
No, I don't do that, why should I? If they want to delete something from Wikipedia, that's fine with me, I'll just google it elsewhere.
What the Wikipedia administrators should realize is that an online encyclopedia doesn't have to fit into a given shelf space. With disk space costing pennies per gigabyte, having any "notability criteria" at all is just stupid. It wastes time and adds nothing to the value of the organization.
The vast bulk of sex offenders in this country are rapists - more than 95%, if you look at the numbers
And how much of that is date rape? How will handing over passwords affect people who don't understand a simple "NO" as an answer?
If that number you cite is true - I didn't check it but let's assume it is - then the right measure to stop sex crimes has nothing to do with the internet. What you say is that less than 5% of sex crimes are committed online, so why all the fuss? Let's have some different laws instead:
1) Sex offenders may not offer alcohol to other people, or
2) Sex offenders may not own or drive cars, or
3) Sex offenders may not live alone, or...
Why single out one way some (less than 5% according to you) sex offenders use to trap their victims while leaving so many ways the other 95% use?
Since the bad boys in the banks didn't have Big Brother looking over their shoulder, they were free to do very risky things -- bordering on outright fraud -- with other people's money.
No, the current crisis wasn't created by deregulation, it was created by regulation that prohibited banks from denying credit to people based on the neighborhood where they live. That's what the "sub-prime" market is all about, people who borrow money to buy houses without the means to pay their loans.
that assumes that Windows 7 doesn't suck anywhere near as much Vista when it comes out
You know, Windows 7 doesn't need to suck in order to fail. It will fail, unless it offers significant advantages over XP. What could those advantages be? I don't know.
Microsoft's biggest problem today is its own success. They have managed to make XP a pretty good system for the market segment it targeted. Which means it needs not be replaced, software doesn't wear out, an OS is replaced only when the hardware underneath fails.
No matter how good Windows 7 turns out to be, unless it offers some revolutionary advantage, it will be relegated to the same situation Vista faces: no one will upgrade to it, they will only get it when buying new hardware.
My first thought would be that coming up with bearings for a flywheel that can handle the mass of the wheel yet be as close to frictionless as possible would be difficult and expensive to develop and then later to maintain.
In case you haven't heard of it, Vietnam didn't become a communist state as a result of some democratic process. Military force was involved, with the help of foreignpowers
I could see not wanting someone to publish that election polling places have closed when they're still open, or the proverbial shouting fire in a crowded theater
People who are so credulous they will not check if the polling places are actually closed shouldn't vote. They will believe any promises the politicians make. As for shouting "fire!" in a crowded theater, if I can't smell smoke or see flames, I would calmly stand up and walk (not run) to the nearest exit.
I think the only limits to freedom of speech come when the words are spoken and heard as commands or as an authority. People who are in a position of leadership where their words are obeyed for some reason are responsible for the acts of their followers.
Also, when someone speaks as an authority on a subject where false information could cause damage, they should be responsible for the consequences. For instance, a doctor cannot say that he doesn't believe HIV can be transmitted through unprotected sex, the evidence to the contrary is overwhelming and the consequences of someone believing that could be deadly.
Everybody else should be free to say whatever they want
There is so much potential for reaping energy savings on land, without having to resort to dangerous space flights and risky, massive construction projects in orbit...
when we can reap significant energy savings merely by painting the rooftops white of most government buildings, when we drive cars that have half or one third the fuel efficiency they could have, when we live in uninsulated buildings--it's ridiculous to proclaim that an SSP would solve our energy problems.
If it's so simple and cheap to reduce consumption, then tell me why nobody is doing it? Do you really believe people are so stupid and lazy that they wouldn't paint rooftops white if it would result in significant savings?
When you say our cars are "less efficient" you really mean they consume more fuel than smaller cars would. And that's the really big point everybody forgets when talking about energy efficiency: people want to live in comfort. An SUV is more comfortable than a small car. Air conditioning is more comfortable than natural air circulation. Our whole industrial civilization is about comfort, letting people have better lives with less effort.
Sort of a dictatorship, I don't see how anybody could get significant savings in energy consumption today. People will always choose to live in the best condition their income allows, if they have the money to buy an SUV, very few people will opt for a small car instead.
When is the last time you took to the streets protesting against Al-Queda?
I'm not a Muslim
Ever protested against robbing the liquor store?
I don't know of any liquor store robbers who claim to do that in the name of any religion.
Have you protested against the great firewall of China?
Yes, I have. I have always been very strongly opposed to the Marxist Socialism ideology that built the great firewall.
Do you believe that any Christian who fails to publicly protest the KKK (and their use of the cross) is, in-fact, a white supremest or at least a supporter of white power?
Yes, I do. If I lived in a state where the KKK is active, I would never, under any circumstances, go to a church that uses the cross as a symbol, unless that church took a very active stance against the KKK.
The only reason why I don't publicly resign my status as a Christian is because I was baptized under a Scandinavian Lutheran church. Look at the situation of the countries where the Lutheran church is prevalent and tell me if you wouldn't be proud of being a participant in that religion.
However, the rot set in earlier than most people think. A lot of it gets blamed on the rise of religious sects and the destruction of the library at Alexandria, but I see those as symptoms more than causes. A few centuries earlier there were lots of important libraries. If that had still been the case when the Alexandrian library was finally destroyed -- whenever that was -- its destruction wouldn't have mattered nearly as much.
I think that's very true, but the end cause of all that intellectual degradation was one of the philosophical roots of Christianity. In the Bible it is stated that this material world of ours does not matter, that one should only be concerned with the afterlife. The final consequence of this mindset is, why should we build aqueducts or libraries, shouldn't we build cathedrals instead?
Europe in general was in a period of declining agricultural output, and not surprisingly, was concerned primarily with feeding themselves first.
A natural consequence of declining technology
It withstood repeated invasions by Muslim conquerors on two fronts
Nature abhors a vacuum. If you are seen as ignorant savages, other people will try to invade.
Not to mention a few bouts with the Plague which killed about 1/3 of Europe
A disease carried by fleas, a consequence of the abolition of the Roman habit of bathing. To take a bath one needs to undress, nakedness might lead to sex, and virginity equals holiness according to the Roman Catholic church.
And in spite of the above, the Catholic Church started the University system
They were first called so in no derogative sense, "middle" here means between antiquity and the newest ages. The term "Middle Ages" got such a negative connotation exactly because of that extreme lack of progress that only an Anonymous Coward could possibly deny.
Europe went into the dark ages barely able to smelt iron, and come out of it as a world beating civilisation[SIC] able to project its power across the globe
Strictly speaking, no one in the world was able to cast iron before the 15th century. But that doesn't mean they couldn't make useful objects of steel and iron. You don't need to completely melt the metal, there are other ways to work it.
There was more 'progress' during that 1000 years than during the entirety of the Roman Empire.
BULLSHIT. The Middle Ages in Europe was a period of complete savagery. They couldn't even take a bath, the great aqueducts built by the Romans lay in ruins, to the point that a disease carried by fleas wiped out a half of the European population.
It's that the mechanism is amazing by the standards of at least 1000 years after it was apparently manufactured
The Greeks and Romans had some clever inventions. The sad part is that all the efforts they did at math and engineering came to a stop, and most of it got lost during the Middle Ages. If you travel through southern Europe, you'll see several engineering works, like the Pont du Gard, Coliseum, Arles amphitheatre, etc, which had no equal a thousand years after they were built.
It's a bit frightening that any intellectual progress was stopped for a thousand years, and I wonder could it happen again?
by creating $1M/year, $2M/year, $4M/year, etc. brackets and introducing a wealth tax on billionaires we could reduce the tax rate among lower income brackets
That has been tried before, in several countries. In the UK there once existed a 98% income tax bracket. It never works.
What you seem to forget is that the difference between the very rich and us is that the rich have more options than we do. If you earn enough money, you have so many different ways to spread that among different organizations that it becomes immune to control by the state. How would you propose to collect those taxes, by declaring war on tax evaders?
We might be looking at a large touchpad to replace the mouse rather than touchscreens.
Look at it this way: how many people buy mice for their notebooks, because they don't like the touchpad? And how many people buy touchpads for their desktops because they don't like the mouse?
With a mouse, the pointer is a small 16x16px or so bitmap. With a touch screen, the pointer is your hand, and that's probably ten times as wide and 20 times as tall. Even a stylus obscures more of the screen than a mouse pointer.
With a mouse, you can activate something one of four ways: hover, left-click, wheel-click, or right-click.
I've had a PDA for a few years and could never use effectively the stylus because of that. There's no way to right-click and open an options sub-menu.
And there's more: with a mouse there's a difference between pointing and clicking. When I'm showing something to someone, or just trying to concentrate in a particular aspect, I move the cursor around the area I'm trying to emphasize without clicking. Sometimes I point at the screen with my finger. With a touchscreen, even by waving your hand at the screen you run the risk of accidentally touching it and starting something.
I think I have a fanboi, following me around and modding my posts down
If the best you can do is to repeat that tired old joke about Uranus (which isn't even pronounced "your anus", the correct pronunciation according to all the dictionaries I've seen is YOO-ran-us) you should expect more negative karma.
I'm an engineer, I do a lot of computational work. As a student I was able to get a $100 student copy of matlab. I tried out free software too mind you, but nothing out there compares(octave doesn't compare, nor does scilab).
I think you are stuck with the wrong language. For me, Python using the SciPy library has been a true Matlab killer. Why limit yourself to a language that's optimized for math when you have an alternative that's just as efficient for scientific, mathematic, and every other sort of program you could imagine?
And if you don't want to throw away your Matlab expertise, Matplotlib has a compatibility layer that present a programming interface in Python that's similar to many Matlab functions.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I don't do that, why should I? If they want to delete something from Wikipedia, that's fine with me, I'll just google it elsewhere.
What the Wikipedia administrators should realize is that an online encyclopedia doesn't have to fit into a given shelf space. With disk space costing pennies per gigabyte, having any "notability criteria" at all is just stupid. It wastes time and adds nothing to the value of the organization.
And how much of that is date rape? How will handing over passwords affect people who don't understand a simple "NO" as an answer?
If that number you cite is true - I didn't check it but let's assume it is - then the right measure to stop sex crimes has nothing to do with the internet. What you say is that less than 5% of sex crimes are committed online, so why all the fuss? Let's have some different laws instead:
1) Sex offenders may not offer alcohol to other people, or
2) Sex offenders may not own or drive cars, or
3) Sex offenders may not live alone, or...
Why single out one way some (less than 5% according to you) sex offenders use to trap their victims while leaving so many ways the other 95% use?
No, the current crisis wasn't created by deregulation, it was created by regulation that prohibited banks from denying credit to people based on the neighborhood where they live. That's what the "sub-prime" market is all about, people who borrow money to buy houses without the means to pay their loans.
You know, Windows 7 doesn't need to suck in order to fail. It will fail, unless it offers significant advantages over XP. What could those advantages be? I don't know.
Microsoft's biggest problem today is its own success. They have managed to make XP a pretty good system for the market segment it targeted. Which means it needs not be replaced, software doesn't wear out, an OS is replaced only when the hardware underneath fails.
No matter how good Windows 7 turns out to be, unless it offers some revolutionary advantage, it will be relegated to the same situation Vista faces: no one will upgrade to it, they will only get it when buying new hardware.
No, that's old stuff, no problem at all
In case you haven't heard of it, Vietnam didn't become a communist state as a result of some democratic process. Military force was involved, with the help of foreign powers
People who are so credulous they will not check if the polling places are actually closed shouldn't vote. They will believe any promises the politicians make. As for shouting "fire!" in a crowded theater, if I can't smell smoke or see flames, I would calmly stand up and walk (not run) to the nearest exit.
I think the only limits to freedom of speech come when the words are spoken and heard as commands or as an authority. People who are in a position of leadership where their words are obeyed for some reason are responsible for the acts of their followers.
Also, when someone speaks as an authority on a subject where false information could cause damage, they should be responsible for the consequences. For instance, a doctor cannot say that he doesn't believe HIV can be transmitted through unprotected sex, the evidence to the contrary is overwhelming and the consequences of someone believing that could be deadly.
Everybody else should be free to say whatever they want
Haven't you heard? The largest American brewer IS European now.
If it's so simple and cheap to reduce consumption, then tell me why nobody is doing it? Do you really believe people are so stupid and lazy that they wouldn't paint rooftops white if it would result in significant savings?
When you say our cars are "less efficient" you really mean they consume more fuel than smaller cars would. And that's the really big point everybody forgets when talking about energy efficiency: people want to live in comfort. An SUV is more comfortable than a small car. Air conditioning is more comfortable than natural air circulation. Our whole industrial civilization is about comfort, letting people have better lives with less effort.
Sort of a dictatorship, I don't see how anybody could get significant savings in energy consumption today. People will always choose to live in the best condition their income allows, if they have the money to buy an SUV, very few people will opt for a small car instead.
I'm not a Muslim
I don't know of any liquor store robbers who claim to do that in the name of any religion.
Yes, I have. I have always been very strongly opposed to the Marxist Socialism ideology that built the great firewall.
Yes, I do. If I lived in a state where the KKK is active, I would never, under any circumstances, go to a church that uses the cross as a symbol, unless that church took a very active stance against the KKK.
The only reason why I don't publicly resign my status as a Christian is because I was baptized under a Scandinavian Lutheran church. Look at the situation of the countries where the Lutheran church is prevalent and tell me if you wouldn't be proud of being a participant in that religion.
I think that's very true, but the end cause of all that intellectual degradation was one of the philosophical roots of Christianity. In the Bible it is stated that this material world of ours does not matter, that one should only be concerned with the afterlife. The final consequence of this mindset is, why should we build aqueducts or libraries, shouldn't we build cathedrals instead?
A natural consequence of declining technology
Nature abhors a vacuum. If you are seen as ignorant savages, other people will try to invade.
A disease carried by fleas, a consequence of the abolition of the Roman habit of bathing. To take a bath one needs to undress, nakedness might lead to sex, and virginity equals holiness according to the Roman Catholic church.
You mean the same church that burned the library of Alexandria and flayed and burned alive the librarian on a Christian church altar? The same church that burned alive a man who dared to question the official scientific "truth"? The same church that forced one of the inventors of the scientific method to deny his own discoveries?
They were first called so in no derogative sense, "middle" here means between antiquity and the newest ages. The term "Middle Ages" got such a negative connotation exactly because of that extreme lack of progress that only an Anonymous Coward could possibly deny.
Strictly speaking, no one in the world was able to cast iron before the 15th century. But that doesn't mean they couldn't make useful objects of steel and iron. You don't need to completely melt the metal, there are other ways to work it.
BULLSHIT. The Middle Ages in Europe was a period of complete savagery. They couldn't even take a bath, the great aqueducts built by the Romans lay in ruins, to the point that a disease carried by fleas wiped out a half of the European population.
No, that gullibility part only came into effect some 500 years later, when someone convinced people that a woman could remain a virgin after giving birth to a child. This belief was formally adopted into Christian doctrine in the year 431 AD, which more or less marks the start of a thousand years when all intellectual progress in Europe stood still.
The Greeks and Romans had some clever inventions. The sad part is that all the efforts they did at math and engineering came to a stop, and most of it got lost during the Middle Ages. If you travel through southern Europe, you'll see several engineering works, like the Pont du Gard, Coliseum, Arles amphitheatre, etc, which had no equal a thousand years after they were built.
It's a bit frightening that any intellectual progress was stopped for a thousand years, and I wonder could it happen again?
That has been tried before, in several countries. In the UK there once existed a 98% income tax bracket. It never works.
What you seem to forget is that the difference between the very rich and us is that the rich have more options than we do. If you earn enough money, you have so many different ways to spread that among different organizations that it becomes immune to control by the state. How would you propose to collect those taxes, by declaring war on tax evaders?
The least they could do is to protest with the same emphasis muslims protested against those cartoons they said offended their religion.
If terrorism performed in the name of your religion doesn't offend you enough to do a public protest, then your religion *does* support terrorism.
In 1943 a farmer in Mexico was plowing his field, when smoke started coming from the soil. Today the nearby village is like this.
Even if the lava in the hole solidified almost instantly, they had to make sure there would be no unforeseen evolution.
I think he's being sarcastic
Look at it this way: how many people buy mice for their notebooks, because they don't like the touchpad? And how many people buy touchpads for their desktops because they don't like the mouse?
I've had a PDA for a few years and could never use effectively the stylus because of that. There's no way to right-click and open an options sub-menu.
And there's more: with a mouse there's a difference between pointing and clicking. When I'm showing something to someone, or just trying to concentrate in a particular aspect, I move the cursor around the area I'm trying to emphasize without clicking. Sometimes I point at the screen with my finger. With a touchscreen, even by waving your hand at the screen you run the risk of accidentally touching it and starting something.
But they call it "irony"
If the best you can do is to repeat that tired old joke about Uranus (which isn't even pronounced "your anus", the correct pronunciation according to all the dictionaries I've seen is YOO-ran-us) you should expect more negative karma.
I think you are stuck with the wrong language. For me, Python using the SciPy library has been a true Matlab killer. Why limit yourself to a language that's optimized for math when you have an alternative that's just as efficient for scientific, mathematic, and every other sort of program you could imagine?
And if you don't want to throw away your Matlab expertise, Matplotlib has a compatibility layer that present a programming interface in Python that's similar to many Matlab functions.
And all that is Free Software.
Have you RTFA? Both of them? The second one says he paid $200 million in a divorce settlement and is quite happy about it.