Technology that will augment a random person's skill to the level of a trained medic? I see what you mean, I just got sidetracked because 25 years still seems a tad too optimistic for that. And sure, speaking in general, such a thing would create a hell of an upheaval, even if I doubt that managing it "democratically" like the authors suggest would be useful in combat - human mind can't handle such complex situations to make all those decisions in time, especially if one's life depends on making the right ones quickly.
What you described as an "alternative" is already in place today - every soldier gets a basic medical training and is instructed to call for a medic if he isn't up to the task. The system described (as far as I can understand from the summary, didn't read the thing) would instead replace this instruction with bugging every member of the group with the question about whether to call somebody and whom to call. In the heat of the battle! And supposing that the member of the group with the most medical expertise isn't the one that gets called for some reason, can you imagine the said group delegating every incision (again, in the heat of the battle)?
Flying a plane remotely by giving somebody instructions on what lever to pull and what button to press is *much* easier than deciding where to cut when blood is spilling everywhere and the living subject is writhing in agony, before we even start to consider bullets and explosions.
That, plus "democratically" peforming specialist tasks doesn't seem like a terribly good idea. Who'd want to have their wounds tended by a political scientist? I wouldn't...
Ask, and be answered. They didn't, not by a long shot.
It's not so much a question of training - the couple of laboratory lessons in which a class of students actually does dissecting won't make an anatomist or a physiologist out of anyone. But for me and a few other hands-on people that I know, those couple of hours were one of the most insightful parts of the whole undergrad study of biology. I cannot begin to explain how much more "real" that felt (in every sense of the word), as opposed to listening to abstract summaries of the processes we experienced. We have the same debate in my country, where some people argue that to become a geneticist, you don't have to know how to make a physiological preparation out of a toad's heart and see it respond to a solution of some nerve transmitter antagonist. The disagreement I feel fits into the broader perception of inadequacy of current trends in biology that lean towards reducing all biological processes to molecular level. Sure, machines that churn out DNA sequences are neat, and you don't have to go about killing cute bunnies to do research, but there's only so much you can learn from that. We are talking about the most complex phenomenon that we know - life. To think that a simulation and conjecture from molecules can replace one whole organizational level of it is immature, to say the least. If the dissecting lesson makes a physiologist of only one of that class, that's one badly needed expert more in a field that is rapidly becoming malnourished. And one less in a field that is already oversaturated (plus, those that become geneticists anyway get at least a glimpse of the broader picture).
Watching the video, I can conclude that the summary above is wrong. What this system actually does, is to take repeated pictures of repeated pulses of light, each delayed by a very tiny fraction of a second. So no, it doesn't take a trillion frames per second any more than a regular high-speed camera.
You don't. If you can't find enough info about something to write an article, you simply don't write one.
But you have enough info if you're personally connected with the subject. Who can say that you're not being honest (NPOV) in your writing if you aren't overtly exaggerating your claims?
If on the other side you do find enough info, then there is no reason to go around deleting it.
There is, if you cannot trust this info.
Of course you should not allow crap, but crap is something very different then just something you don't consider important.
What I'm saying is, that it is not possible to tell the difference, if you don't already know what's true. And if you do know, then you don't need an encyclopedia to tell you that.
And yet in my use of Wikipedia I have tripped over far more articles I was interested in that got deleted or cut down back to uselessness then over plain old vandalism.
You wouldn't even notice the kind of vandalism that you suggest opening the door to. You treat this issue much too narrowly, from the perspective of a topic you are familiar with. When people look something up in a general encyclopedia, it's often about a subject they know nothing about. How could they trust information that is based on self-published sources? I'm not just talking about obscure topics, I'm talking (for example) about fringe theories that would start being added to articles en masse.
There is a ton of stuff that exists on the Internet about which you could write well sourced articles, but you aren't allowed to because those things haven't yet entered mainstream press.
No, there isn't. Well sourced means that you can trust the sources. And there is a lot more that is considered reliable than "mainstream" (whatever you imagine under this word). It's just that subjects you care about and would like to promote aren't important enough to get mentioned at all by anybody other than a very narrow group of people. It's immature to demand that Wikipedia change its rules because you feel that this is unjust.
Thats perfectly good for an article, because it is something where there is a reasonable expectation that somebody might actually look that up one day
Er... no, there isn't. And for every such article that might eventually, in a couple of years, be useful to a single person, there would be hundreds of articles with unverifiable false information (including that band's article). How do you write a NPOV article, if the only people who have correct information about a topic are those personally connected with the subject? Furthermore, I don't know what part of internet you use, but consider yourself extremely lucky if you didn't experience a resourceful troll yet. They would have a field day in a Wikipedia without notability rules (it's bad enough as it is). The effort to write that one useful article is nothing compared to effort that would be needed to sift through the crap.
Except that they don't filter crap out
Yes, they do. And it's completely reasonable to say, that if nobody bothered to get an article about something through the editorial process of a single media source that's more than locally important (given their sheer number), then this topic is useless for general public.
By the way, given the abovementioned number of sources that are considered reliable, it's completely ridiculous to claim that every single one of them is afraid of the gaming industry. I sincerely hope you were joking after all.
Classic straw man argument. No, an article about your molar removal should not be in Wikipedia, because it never ever was part of public knowledge.
It's you who put up effort as a measure. I merely continued with this logic, so no, it's not a straw man any more than you are.
But okay, then, if not my molar, a song by a garage band that got played once or twice on a local radio and performed at a village fair before the band broke up. How about that? Or a primary school rocket-modelling team? The internet is not the only repository of public knowledge.
The problem with the internet generation is that they are very good at collecting information, but completely incapable of assessment. I strongly believe that current rules about what constitutes a reliable reference provide the best (or as nearly to the best as humanely possible) filter that keeps the useless crap out, while simultaneously allowing useful content and ensuring its accuracy.
Why does relevance matter when the facts are correct?
Because they are useless and because anonymous contributors cannot be trusted to supply correct facts.
Because somebody made the effort to actually write an article about it. Why should anything else matter for Wikipedia?
Because it's an encyclopedia, not an indiscriminate collection of random facts. Would you agree that if I made an effort to write an article about how I had my molars removed, this should be published in Wikipedia?
That's not a conspiracy theory, thats plain old fact.
Nonsense, just get a few gamers together and have them look over the article. If none of them has ever heard about it, then there is a reasonable chance that it is made up, on the other side if everybody agrees that its real thing,
The existence is not in question here, relevance is. And by introducing more anonymous cowards, you haven't done anything to solve the problem of substantiating your opinion.
just a little obscure, no problem, just stick one of those banners over it that says that it could use more references.
But there aren't any to begin with. Why would a topic like that deserve metion in an encyclopedia?
the mainstream gaming press prefers to ignore that topic as good as it can to not lose its good relationship with the game companies.
Introducing conspiracy theories doesn't really improve your argument.
That's exactly the kind of pointlessness I'm talking about. You said that they are influential and you have nothing to back this statement, except additional opinions. Why would your opinions be important?
... support the Wikipedia rules about notability. Some line has to be drawn, and without good sources, there's no way of telling that a user "Alex1648" (for example) is a genuine old gaming enthusiast as opposed to a 15-year old troll who made a story about it last Monday and set up a website. And if nobody but MUD players argues that this-or-this title was "massively influential", an uninvolved person would reasonably argue that maybe, just maybe, they're overstating its influence. Be it because of emotional attachment, or anything else, why would that be relevant?
If we let MUDs slip through the guidelines, what's next? Cigarette lighters? Dish-washing brands nobody has heard of? Car salesmen? Why would they be deprivileged then? Surely they must've had massive influence, just look at how many people wash their dishes, light their cigarettes or buy cars (more than there are MMORPG players, surely).
They're immobile until someone steals them. So I suggest you tone down your sarcasm if you know so little about these things, because it just sounds stupid.
They are immobile until someone steals one. You should tone down your sarcasm, because it just sounds stupid if you know so little of what you're talking about.
The study sounds interesting, but I read the original article and its execution [sic] is a bit... naive. They only measured power density. What about active phones radiating heat? Noise? Something else entirely? The number of trials was also extremely low (as already pointed out by others) and therefore vulnerable to chance events.
I'm not claiming that electromagnetic radiation doesn't have any effect on bees, I'm just trying to provide a bit of perspective to the hysteria the popular media will inevitably start producing again on the basis of this single article.
Exactly. Users pay their ISPs for data transfer. Isn't it actually illegal to charge twice for the same product or service? If they aren't happy about the costs of transfering large amount of data across their networks, they can raise the prices (and watch the customers go elsewhere).
DDT is not a magic wand like you want to portray it. Like any other insecticide, target organisms quickly become resistant, which is when it starts causing more harm than good. Using it irresponsibly alleviates this, but even with moderate use it slowly becomes of no use at all.
Oops, clicked "post" too early. I wanted to say that it's funny to note that they think spraying this on warm days over a couple of inhabited areas in the West will do the same trick as covering half the ocean with the stuff.
What about a global forum where users would volunteer to read through the licenses of various programs and inform the community about the possible hooks?.... although I can't imagine how to attract a big enough group of masochists who would be prepared to do such a thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Technology that will augment a random person's skill to the level of a trained medic? I see what you mean, I just got sidetracked because 25 years still seems a tad too optimistic for that. And sure, speaking in general, such a thing would create a hell of an upheaval, even if I doubt that managing it "democratically" like the authors suggest would be useful in combat - human mind can't handle such complex situations to make all those decisions in time, especially if one's life depends on making the right ones quickly.
Flying a plane remotely by giving somebody instructions on what lever to pull and what button to press is *much* easier than deciding where to cut when blood is spilling everywhere and the living subject is writhing in agony, before we even start to consider bullets and explosions.
That, plus "democratically" peforming specialist tasks doesn't seem like a terribly good idea. Who'd want to have their wounds tended by a political scientist? I wouldn't...
If you're so concerned about stupidity in slashdot, why did you have to make it worse by posting the above?
Ask, and be answered. They didn't, not by a long shot. It's not so much a question of training - the couple of laboratory lessons in which a class of students actually does dissecting won't make an anatomist or a physiologist out of anyone. But for me and a few other hands-on people that I know, those couple of hours were one of the most insightful parts of the whole undergrad study of biology. I cannot begin to explain how much more "real" that felt (in every sense of the word), as opposed to listening to abstract summaries of the processes we experienced. We have the same debate in my country, where some people argue that to become a geneticist, you don't have to know how to make a physiological preparation out of a toad's heart and see it respond to a solution of some nerve transmitter antagonist. The disagreement I feel fits into the broader perception of inadequacy of current trends in biology that lean towards reducing all biological processes to molecular level. Sure, machines that churn out DNA sequences are neat, and you don't have to go about killing cute bunnies to do research, but there's only so much you can learn from that. We are talking about the most complex phenomenon that we know - life. To think that a simulation and conjecture from molecules can replace one whole organizational level of it is immature, to say the least. If the dissecting lesson makes a physiologist of only one of that class, that's one badly needed expert more in a field that is rapidly becoming malnourished. And one less in a field that is already oversaturated (plus, those that become geneticists anyway get at least a glimpse of the broader picture).
Watching the video, I can conclude that the summary above is wrong. What this system actually does, is to take repeated pictures of repeated pulses of light, each delayed by a very tiny fraction of a second. So no, it doesn't take a trillion frames per second any more than a regular high-speed camera.
You don't. If you can't find enough info about something to write an article, you simply don't write one.
But you have enough info if you're personally connected with the subject. Who can say that you're not being honest (NPOV) in your writing if you aren't overtly exaggerating your claims?
If on the other side you do find enough info, then there is no reason to go around deleting it.
There is, if you cannot trust this info.
Of course you should not allow crap, but crap is something very different then just something you don't consider important.
What I'm saying is, that it is not possible to tell the difference, if you don't already know what's true. And if you do know, then you don't need an encyclopedia to tell you that.
And yet in my use of Wikipedia I have tripped over far more articles I was interested in that got deleted or cut down back to uselessness then over plain old vandalism.
You wouldn't even notice the kind of vandalism that you suggest opening the door to. You treat this issue much too narrowly, from the perspective of a topic you are familiar with. When people look something up in a general encyclopedia, it's often about a subject they know nothing about. How could they trust information that is based on self-published sources? I'm not just talking about obscure topics, I'm talking (for example) about fringe theories that would start being added to articles en masse.
There is a ton of stuff that exists on the Internet about which you could write well sourced articles, but you aren't allowed to because those things haven't yet entered mainstream press.
No, there isn't. Well sourced means that you can trust the sources. And there is a lot more that is considered reliable than "mainstream" (whatever you imagine under this word). It's just that subjects you care about and would like to promote aren't important enough to get mentioned at all by anybody other than a very narrow group of people. It's immature to demand that Wikipedia change its rules because you feel that this is unjust.
Thats perfectly good for an article, because it is something where there is a reasonable expectation that somebody might actually look that up one day
Er... no, there isn't. And for every such article that might eventually, in a couple of years, be useful to a single person, there would be hundreds of articles with unverifiable false information (including that band's article). How do you write a NPOV article, if the only people who have correct information about a topic are those personally connected with the subject? Furthermore, I don't know what part of internet you use, but consider yourself extremely lucky if you didn't experience a resourceful troll yet. They would have a field day in a Wikipedia without notability rules (it's bad enough as it is). The effort to write that one useful article is nothing compared to effort that would be needed to sift through the crap.
Except that they don't filter crap out
Yes, they do. And it's completely reasonable to say, that if nobody bothered to get an article about something through the editorial process of a single media source that's more than locally important (given their sheer number), then this topic is useless for general public.
By the way, given the abovementioned number of sources that are considered reliable, it's completely ridiculous to claim that every single one of them is afraid of the gaming industry. I sincerely hope you were joking after all.
Classic straw man argument. No, an article about your molar removal should not be in Wikipedia, because it never ever was part of public knowledge.
It's you who put up effort as a measure. I merely continued with this logic, so no, it's not a straw man any more than you are.
But okay, then, if not my molar, a song by a garage band that got played once or twice on a local radio and performed at a village fair before the band broke up. How about that? Or a primary school rocket-modelling team? The internet is not the only repository of public knowledge.
The problem with the internet generation is that they are very good at collecting information, but completely incapable of assessment. I strongly believe that current rules about what constitutes a reliable reference provide the best (or as nearly to the best as humanely possible) filter that keeps the useless crap out, while simultaneously allowing useful content and ensuring its accuracy.
Why does relevance matter when the facts are correct?
Because they are useless and because anonymous contributors cannot be trusted to supply correct facts.
Because somebody made the effort to actually write an article about it. Why should anything else matter for Wikipedia?
Because it's an encyclopedia, not an indiscriminate collection of random facts. Would you agree that if I made an effort to write an article about how I had my molars removed, this should be published in Wikipedia?
That's not a conspiracy theory, thats plain old fact.
Again, according to you, i.e. irrelevant.
Nonsense, just get a few gamers together and have them look over the article. If none of them has ever heard about it, then there is a reasonable chance that it is made up, on the other side if everybody agrees that its real thing,
The existence is not in question here, relevance is. And by introducing more anonymous cowards, you haven't done anything to solve the problem of substantiating your opinion.
just a little obscure, no problem, just stick one of those banners over it that says that it could use more references.
But there aren't any to begin with. Why would a topic like that deserve metion in an encyclopedia?
the mainstream gaming press prefers to ignore that topic as good as it can to not lose its good relationship with the game companies.
Introducing conspiracy theories doesn't really improve your argument.
That's exactly the kind of pointlessness I'm talking about. You said that they are influential and you have nothing to back this statement, except additional opinions. Why would your opinions be important?
... support the Wikipedia rules about notability. Some line has to be drawn, and without good sources, there's no way of telling that a user "Alex1648" (for example) is a genuine old gaming enthusiast as opposed to a 15-year old troll who made a story about it last Monday and set up a website. And if nobody but MUD players argues that this-or-this title was "massively influential", an uninvolved person would reasonably argue that maybe, just maybe, they're overstating its influence. Be it because of emotional attachment, or anything else, why would that be relevant? If we let MUDs slip through the guidelines, what's next? Cigarette lighters? Dish-washing brands nobody has heard of? Car salesmen? Why would they be deprivileged then? Surely they must've had massive influence, just look at how many people wash their dishes, light their cigarettes or buy cars (more than there are MMORPG players, surely).
They're immobile until someone steals them. So I suggest you tone down your sarcasm if you know so little about these things, because it just sounds stupid.
They are immobile until someone steals one. You should tone down your sarcasm, because it just sounds stupid if you know so little of what you're talking about.
The study sounds interesting, but I read the original article and its execution [sic] is a bit... naive. They only measured power density. What about active phones radiating heat? Noise? Something else entirely? The number of trials was also extremely low (as already pointed out by others) and therefore vulnerable to chance events. I'm not claiming that electromagnetic radiation doesn't have any effect on bees, I'm just trying to provide a bit of perspective to the hysteria the popular media will inevitably start producing again on the basis of this single article.
Exactly. Users pay their ISPs for data transfer. Isn't it actually illegal to charge twice for the same product or service? If they aren't happy about the costs of transfering large amount of data across their networks, they can raise the prices (and watch the customers go elsewhere).
The blog link explaining the whole thing of course doesn't work for us Europeans, either.
Are you crazy? Imagine the frustration when you find this horrible typo and you can't fix it!
DDT is not a magic wand like you want to portray it. Like any other insecticide, target organisms quickly become resistant, which is when it starts causing more harm than good. Using it irresponsibly alleviates this, but even with moderate use it slowly becomes of no use at all.
Add to this that her first name would translate roughly as "sweetheart" in my language (Slovene).
At least remove the reference link if you copy-paste text from Wikipedia... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.tel
Oops, clicked "post" too early. I wanted to say that it's funny to note that they think spraying this on warm days over a couple of inhabited areas in the West will do the same trick as covering half the ocean with the stuff.
According to chemtrails conspiracy theorists, the evil governments have been doing this for a decade or two. It's funny to
What about a global forum where users would volunteer to read through the licenses of various programs and inform the community about the possible hooks? .... although I can't imagine how to attract a big enough group of masochists who would be prepared to do such a thing.