Isn't this like insisting on winning the jumbo jet for collecting five billion Pepsi Points or whatever? Some advertising claims are outrageous enough that you can pretty much assume they're exaggerations.
Also interesting: A higher percentage of men are online (68%) than of women (66%). The numbers have just gotten close enough that the general population ratio kicks in: "women slightly outnumber men in the Internet population because they make up a greater share of the overall U.S. population."
Shall I start with the bit about how Microsoft has no reason to develop Mac programs anymore becuse they can just use the Intel-based versions? He seems to have forgotten that fact that the platform is more than just a processer archtecture, there's the OS API as well. It takes a lot of glue code to get an x86 Windows app to run on x86 Linux (and even then it's rarely perfect), and the same would be true on x86 Mac.
Then he goes off on the whole "Opera identifies itself as IE so we don't know how many people use it" bull that's been debunked over and over and over again. Opera IDs itself as IE in the same way that IE identifies itself as Netscape -- and for the same reason. If you're paying any attention at all, you can tell the difference.
Some examples: Netscape 4: "Mozilla/4.7 [en] (WinNT; U)" IE 6: "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1;.NET CLR 1.1.4322)" Opera 7: "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1) Opera 7.50 [en]"
You'll note that IE spoofs Netscape, that Opera spoofs IE (including the Netscape spoof), and that all three are easily distinguishable if you're looking in the right place.
Does this guy have a clue what he's talking about?
Well, fruit has a whole bunch of nutrients to go with the fructose. It's one thing to eat a fruit-sized portion of fructose with the fruit -- it's another to extract another 30% from alternate sources and eat it with refined carbohydrates.
Think of it this way: your body needs a certain amount of sodium to function, but if you eat too much, it'll cause you problems.
it's converted into fructose because customers want fructose.
Really? I can't think of anyone who has gone out of their way to get a fructose-sweetened product over one sweetened with another kind of sugar. Of course, when *every* mainstream product uses high-fructose corn syrup, there isn't much in the way of choice. Fortunately there are specialty stores and smaller brands that do use other kinds of sugars, but you have to make a special effort (and sometimes spend more) to get those.
I always assumed that it was supply-driven rather than demand-driven -- that it was just cheaper to sweeten things with fructose from corn syrup than, say, sucrose from sugar beets or sugar cane. Though I suppose it could be easier to work with, which would mean the trend was driven by demand from manufacturers. Come to think of it, that makes sense -- from the corn syrup factory's perspective, the customers are going to be mainly food manufacturers (plus the bottles that make it into grocery stores for the end-user).
Spanish is almost completely regular in its spelling. French... not so much. There are so many letters that you just don't pronounce.
With Spanish, there are a couple of situations where you could choose between, say, an "s" and a "z," but there's nothing like the hodge-podge you get with English. Generally speaking, if you can pronounce the word, you can spell it, and vice versa.
Its only real drawback over English is that you need an extra 8 or so characters: the upside-down exclamation point and question mark to indicate the beginning of a phrase (surprisingly useful when reading written Spanish), the five vowels with accent marks to indicate the stressed syllable, and (rarely used) a u with an umlaut to indicate how to pronounce "gui" as in guitarra and pingüino (guitar and penguin, pronounced similarly to the English words).
That's one advantage English has for keyboard design: we don't use diacritical marks very often (generally only on recent loan words), and when we do, they're always optional. Really, who still spells role with a carat over the o, or naive with two dots over the i?
Since when is Wikipedia an "experiment in gathering information?" It may be an experiment in the colloquial, "let's see if this will work" sense, but I don't think they've ever claimed it was an actual scientific experiment.
Really, saying the founder of Wikipedia shouldn't make contributions because it's an experiment to see what other people will do is like saying that CmdrTaco shouldn't make comments on Slashdot, because it's an experiment in gatering comments from random geeks who have too much time on their hands.
Well for the more traditional encyclopedia I'd expect this isn't so much of a problem, unless you happen to be Encyclopedia Moonbatica then you'd probably have difficulty maintaining NPOV
But if NPOV doesn't exist, as the GP claimed, how could a traditional encyclopedia maintain it?
I think Wikipedia is flawed. It is based on NPOV but there is no such thing. This is discussed in depth by post modernistis (who I don't agree with on everything, but they have valid points).
In that case, what makes this problem unique to Wikipedia? Isn't the same true of any traditional encyclopedia?
And if you READ the "policy", it says: "However, it is not policy." Don't flame me, I like Wikipedia, too. But this underscores yet again the inherent problem with the site.
How does the fact that someone misquoted a document (in this case by claiming that it is policy, when the document clearly states otherwise) underscore an inherent problem with said document?
I thought it was extremely silly that this showed up on Wired. Now it's doubly silly that it's shown up on Slashdot.
I mean, seriously, the last time there was a controversy over someone's Wikipedia bio, the suggestion was that he should've fixed the errors himself, right?
As for violating policy -- that "policy" itself says "This page is considered a guideline on Wikipedia. It illustrates standards of conduct, which many editors agree with in principle. However, it is not policy." In RFC terms, that's a SHOULD NOT, rather than a MUST NOT. (And that's not a new, self-justifying edit, either.) Yeah, it's a little tacky, but as long as he's making corrections and not inserting falsehoods, it's a matter for a gossip column, not tech news.
String theory doesn't promote a religion. Intelligent Design does. They may say the designer doesn't necessarily have to be God, but under their own theory -- which not only states that terrestrial life was designed, but that life, particularly complex life, cannot have arisen in any other way -- that designer had to be designed, and so did the designer's designer, until you get to a creator who was not designed. In other words, it's a long-process form of Creationism.
The problem is that Intelligent design fails a number of tests for scientific theory and for general education.
For one thing it hasn't been tested thoroughly by the scientific community. I doubt natural selection made it into the equivalent of a high school curriculum in the first few years after Darwin proposed it. You don't teach the really out-there new ideas in physics or chem class, either, you teach the ones that have the most backing. You might touch on "new research suggests X" but that's about it. Of course, that's not a reason to disallow it, just a reason that it's not ready to go into the standard curriculum yet.
More importantly, Intelligent Design fails the science test. The key tenet of Intelligent Design is that certain things are too complex to be explained by natural processes. The scientific approach is to say, "We don't understand how this works yet, but we do know this part, and we're working on filling in the gaps." ID says "These gaps can't be filled, so it must be God." Instead of seeking to explain the unknown, it just stops with "God did it."
And now for the legal questions. They technically claim it's "a designer," which could be an alien or something, but that means the alien had to have been designed, and that designer had to be designed, and so on, and you end up having to assume a prime mover -- and you're back to God. Add in the fact that much of IDs philosophy and support grew out of creationist movements, and it becomes clear that it's explicitly religious. That means by teaching it, schools would be promoting a religion, and you run into the separation of church and state. (Remember, freedom of religion requires freedom from religion. If you're a Christian, and the state requires you to participate in a Muslim prayer every morning, you don't have freedom of religion.)
So ID isn't mature enough to be in a high school science curriculum. It rejects the basic goal of science. And it fails the establishment test. That's two reasons not to bother teaching it in any high school, and one not to teach it in a public school.
In the first episode of Lois and Clark, Clark was trying on his Superman costume for the first time. His mom (who had designed and sewed it in this version) walked in to see how he looked in the costume:
Martha: Well, one thing's for sure. Nobody's going to be looking at your face. Clark: Mom! Martha: [laughing] Well they don't call them tights for nothing!
Unfortunately for them, the highway has only been around since 1930...
As someone else pointed out, the early sightings aren't very well documented -- the first substantiated reports of the early sightings were made years after the fact and date from well after the highway was built. Even Ellison, it turns out, never actually wrote about the event in his memoirs (1937) -- he told his family about it, and they later told the story to historian Cecilia Thompson or to her source.
The earliest report that researcher could verify was a 1957 magazine article. That doesn't mean the earlier sightings didn't happen, just that they couldn't be verified.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't this like insisting on winning the jumbo jet for collecting five billion Pepsi Points or whatever? Some advertising claims are outrageous enough that you can pretty much assume they're exaggerations.
Why would Opera's code be GPLed? They developed it themselves, and they've never released their source code.
Sorry about that... I think I committed a Slashdot first by reading the article but not the summary!
Also interesting: A higher percentage of men are online (68%) than of women (66%). The numbers have just gotten close enough that the general population ratio kicks in: "women slightly outnumber men in the Internet population because they make up a greater share of the overall U.S. population."
Ellipsoids aren't round? Oh, crap, I guess I'd better go back and re-read my old high school geometry text!
Remember the time when the most acclaimed minds in the world thought that the world was flat?
So you're saying that we should continue looking for alternatives to the current understanding that the world is round?
Shall I start with the bit about how Microsoft has no reason to develop Mac programs anymore becuse they can just use the Intel-based versions? He seems to have forgotten that fact that the platform is more than just a processer archtecture, there's the OS API as well. It takes a lot of glue code to get an x86 Windows app to run on x86 Linux (and even then it's rarely perfect), and the same would be true on x86 Mac.
.NET CLR 1.1.4322)"
Then he goes off on the whole "Opera identifies itself as IE so we don't know how many people use it" bull that's been debunked over and over and over again. Opera IDs itself as IE in the same way that IE identifies itself as Netscape -- and for the same reason. If you're paying any attention at all, you can tell the difference.
Some examples:
Netscape 4: "Mozilla/4.7 [en] (WinNT; U)"
IE 6: "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1;
Opera 7: "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1) Opera 7.50 [en]"
You'll note that IE spoofs Netscape, that Opera spoofs IE (including the Netscape spoof), and that all three are easily distinguishable if you're looking in the right place.
Does this guy have a clue what he's talking about?
I've gotta say, this looked like a weird chain of projects: Nupedia (experts) -> Wikipedia (masses) -> Digital Universe (experts).
That said, it's possible that, especially with Wikipedia's high profile right now, the circumstances are different enough that it could work.
Well, fruit has a whole bunch of nutrients to go with the fructose. It's one thing to eat a fruit-sized portion of fructose with the fruit -- it's another to extract another 30% from alternate sources and eat it with refined carbohydrates.
Think of it this way: your body needs a certain amount of sodium to function, but if you eat too much, it'll cause you problems.
it's converted into fructose because customers want fructose.
Really? I can't think of anyone who has gone out of their way to get a fructose-sweetened product over one sweetened with another kind of sugar. Of course, when *every* mainstream product uses high-fructose corn syrup, there isn't much in the way of choice. Fortunately there are specialty stores and smaller brands that do use other kinds of sugars, but you have to make a special effort (and sometimes spend more) to get those.
I always assumed that it was supply-driven rather than demand-driven -- that it was just cheaper to sweeten things with fructose from corn syrup than, say, sucrose from sugar beets or sugar cane. Though I suppose it could be easier to work with, which would mean the trend was driven by demand from manufacturers. Come to think of it, that makes sense -- from the corn syrup factory's perspective, the customers are going to be mainly food manufacturers (plus the bottles that make it into grocery stores for the end-user).
Such options, of course, are already available, as a certain poster attests.
Spanish is almost completely regular in its spelling. French... not so much. There are so many letters that you just don't pronounce.
With Spanish, there are a couple of situations where you could choose between, say, an "s" and a "z," but there's nothing like the hodge-podge you get with English. Generally speaking, if you can pronounce the word, you can spell it, and vice versa.
Its only real drawback over English is that you need an extra 8 or so characters: the upside-down exclamation point and question mark to indicate the beginning of a phrase (surprisingly useful when reading written Spanish), the five vowels with accent marks to indicate the stressed syllable, and (rarely used) a u with an umlaut to indicate how to pronounce "gui" as in guitarra and pingüino (guitar and penguin, pronounced similarly to the English words).
That's one advantage English has for keyboard design: we don't use diacritical marks very often (generally only on recent loan words), and when we do, they're always optional. Really, who still spells role with a carat over the o, or naive with two dots over the i?
When the dupe shows up later today, will that be triply silly or quadruply silly?
I dunno, but when someone reads it in Tripoli...
Since when is Wikipedia an "experiment in gathering information?" It may be an experiment in the colloquial, "let's see if this will work" sense, but I don't think they've ever claimed it was an actual scientific experiment.
Really, saying the founder of Wikipedia shouldn't make contributions because it's an experiment to see what other people will do is like saying that CmdrTaco shouldn't make comments on Slashdot, because it's an experiment in gatering comments from random geeks who have too much time on their hands.
You might want to take a look at what Wikipedia is and what it is not before comparing apples to oranges.
Well for the more traditional encyclopedia I'd expect this isn't so much of a problem, unless you happen to be Encyclopedia Moonbatica then you'd probably have difficulty maintaining NPOV
But if NPOV doesn't exist, as the GP claimed, how could a traditional encyclopedia maintain it?
Does even its own founder really believe in it, when it comes to information he personally cares about?
Given that he made a few edits instead of locking it down, I'd guess the answer is "yes."
I think Wikipedia is flawed. It is based on NPOV but there is no such thing. This is discussed in depth by post modernistis (who I don't agree with on everything, but they have valid points).
In that case, what makes this problem unique to Wikipedia? Isn't the same true of any traditional encyclopedia?
And if you READ the "policy", it says: "However, it is not policy." Don't flame me, I like Wikipedia, too. But this underscores yet again the inherent problem with the site.
How does the fact that someone misquoted a document (in this case by claiming that it is policy, when the document clearly states otherwise) underscore an inherent problem with said document?
I thought it was extremely silly that this showed up on Wired. Now it's doubly silly that it's shown up on Slashdot.
I mean, seriously, the last time there was a controversy over someone's Wikipedia bio, the suggestion was that he should've fixed the errors himself, right?
As for violating policy -- that "policy" itself says "This page is considered a guideline on Wikipedia. It illustrates standards of conduct, which many editors agree with in principle. However, it is not policy." In RFC terms, that's a SHOULD NOT, rather than a MUST NOT. (And that's not a new, self-justifying edit, either.) Yeah, it's a little tacky, but as long as he's making corrections and not inserting falsehoods, it's a matter for a gossip column, not tech news.
String theory doesn't promote a religion. Intelligent Design does. They may say the designer doesn't necessarily have to be God, but under their own theory -- which not only states that terrestrial life was designed, but that life, particularly complex life, cannot have arisen in any other way -- that designer had to be designed, and so did the designer's designer, until you get to a creator who was not designed. In other words, it's a long-process form of Creationism.
What makes you think that scientists treat carbon dating as 100% accurate?
The problem is that Intelligent design fails a number of tests for scientific theory and for general education.
For one thing it hasn't been tested thoroughly by the scientific community. I doubt natural selection made it into the equivalent of a high school curriculum in the first few years after Darwin proposed it. You don't teach the really out-there new ideas in physics or chem class, either, you teach the ones that have the most backing. You might touch on "new research suggests X" but that's about it. Of course, that's not a reason to disallow it, just a reason that it's not ready to go into the standard curriculum yet.
More importantly, Intelligent Design fails the science test. The key tenet of Intelligent Design is that certain things are too complex to be explained by natural processes. The scientific approach is to say, "We don't understand how this works yet, but we do know this part, and we're working on filling in the gaps." ID says "These gaps can't be filled, so it must be God." Instead of seeking to explain the unknown, it just stops with "God did it."
And now for the legal questions. They technically claim it's "a designer," which could be an alien or something, but that means the alien had to have been designed, and that designer had to be designed, and so on, and you end up having to assume a prime mover -- and you're back to God. Add in the fact that much of IDs philosophy and support grew out of creationist movements, and it becomes clear that it's explicitly religious. That means by teaching it, schools would be promoting a religion, and you run into the separation of church and state. (Remember, freedom of religion requires freedom from religion. If you're a Christian, and the state requires you to participate in a Muslim prayer every morning, you don't have freedom of religion.)
So ID isn't mature enough to be in a high school science curriculum. It rejects the basic goal of science. And it fails the establishment test. That's two reasons not to bother teaching it in any high school, and one not to teach it in a public school.
If high schools had philosophy classes, though, it would be a perfect subject there.
In the first episode of Lois and Clark , Clark was trying on his Superman costume for the first time. His mom (who had designed and sewed it in this version) walked in to see how he looked in the costume:
Martha: Well, one thing's for sure. Nobody's going to be looking at your face.
Clark: Mom!
Martha: [laughing] Well they don't call them tights for nothing!
Unfortunately for them, the highway has only been around since 1930...
As someone else pointed out, the early sightings aren't very well documented -- the first substantiated reports of the early sightings were made years after the fact and date from well after the highway was built. Even Ellison, it turns out, never actually wrote about the event in his memoirs (1937) -- he told his family about it, and they later told the story to historian Cecilia Thompson or to her source.
The earliest report that researcher could verify was a 1957 magazine article. That doesn't mean the earlier sightings didn't happen, just that they couldn't be verified.