hes not telling you to be quiet, hes talking about SSH. its like Telnet.exe but in my opinion telnet is a WAY BETTER IDEA cause it comes with windows XP, but ssh doesn't and you have to download ssh.
otherwise theres nothing else really good about ssh, its just like telnet.
Does anyone make a digital back/lens adapter that you could use to take digital photos instead?
I'm a bit too young to have seen many instruments with Polaroid holders, but my understanding is that there are digital backs for many of them. Sure, they're probably hundreds of thousands of dollars/euros, but a whole lot less expensive than buying a new instrument...
Kohut: Notebooks aren't going to go away, because again, one of the things that is helping us as an industry is that Intel is trying very hard to limit what netbooks can do.
Hmmm... intentionally crippling their low-end stuff, eh? That explains why we've got no 64-bit or VT on the mobile Atom processors, I guess, among other things...
This sounds like a loophole big enough for VIA to drive through with the Nano.
I hope they succeed. And I hope AMD wakes up and makes netbook processors. You wouldn't even know it from their terrible marketing and sales, but the Turion 64 X2 is quite a nice dual-core mobile processor from AMD. And dirt cheap too.
Bottom line, more competition is good and right now, desperately needed for netbook CPUs. We need a serious Nano vs. Atom vs. AMD slugfest. Bring it.
I can't even stand to carry around my 15" laptop on a daily basis. It's not so much the weight as the annoying "bulk" of it. It's awkward thick and wide. The power brick is big and needed far too often. The laptop is too big to fit on most lecture hall desks, and it's not at all unobtrusive... whenever I have it I'm instantly "that jerk with the giant laptop."
Passersby were amazed by the unusually large
amount of blood. Passersby were amazed by the
unusually large amount of blood.
Passersby were amazed by the unusually large
amount of blood. Passersby were amazed by the
unusually large amount of blood....
Furthermore, even without a header, most compression algorithms work by splitting compressed files up into repetitive chunks of some kind and building tables that index these. That pattern itself is detectable.
umm... no, unless you mean non-entropy encoders.
Fair enough. I was thinking more along the lines of things like headerless DEFLATE output, which has some noticeable structure (which is, as you point out, redundant and therefore slightly inefficient).
I agree that a straight entropy-encoder like Huffman will not show such a redundancy.
..or (c) compressed with a decent headerless compression algorithm
"Headerless compression"??? Why would anyone want such a thing...?
Normally you want your compressed files to have a very well-defined header structure, in order to make it easy to identify them and recover data in case of corruption. The only reason you'd want to *not* have a header is for data hiding, and at that point we're back to encryption (where we started), and compression or lack thereof is irrelevant.
Furthermore, even without a header, most compression algorithms work by splitting compressed files up into repetitive chunks of some kind and building tables that index these. That pattern itself is detectable.
Even if it has no side effects and if men are able to accept the stigma of being temporarily infertile, I expect that women won't trust this treatment.
Just think about it: who bears most of the risk in case of pregnancy? Women. It might be unjust, but in most societies, men can walk away and abandon women they've gotten pregnant easily without serious social stigma or financial repercussions. Women either have to get an abortion (stigmatized, traumatic, and in many places illegal/expensive/dangerous) or raise a child alone (stigmatized/expensive/time-consuming).
With the pill or condoms, women are either controlling the birth control themselves, or can verify its use on-the-spot. With male contraceptive injections/pills,
I foresee a big problem with women not trusting that men are really taking this. Heck, in the pilot study 1/3 of the men just stopped taking it for no apparent reason!!
He didn't say that. He said that, for TrueCrypt case, the "random" data on the disk in free sectors is not random at all - it's got bits of deleted files in it, and so on. So, it's rather low entropy. On the other hand, sectors used for TrueCrypt will actually contain truly random, high-entropy data. And statistical analysis will be able to tell the difference easily.
True. But TFA claims that the software works by looking for patterns in the encrypted data. Whereas you are arguing (in my mind correctly), that the way to find the encrypted data is to look for data without any patterns.
Finally we hear from someone who knows WTF he/she is talking about.
Just to expand a bit: encryption algorithms (except for one-time-pad) don't produce truly random output. But all good, modern ones seek to produce output that's as indistinguishable as possible from truly random output, as a necessary but not sufficient component of their security. There are a variety of techniques to produce pseudorandom data based on a variety of sophisticated mathematics.
It seems like the height of hubris to claim that one software program can reliably detect all these different kinds of extreme slight deviation from perfect randomness.
A more plausible approach (as others have pointed out), is to look for files that do appear to be totally random. Such files are likely to be either (a) the output of a random number generator, or (b) encrypted. All files that have some useful content in their present form have some structure or non-randomness.
Properly encrypted files don't contain significant "patterns that don't exist in random files."
If the cryptography is actually secure, then its result will be indistinguishable from random noise. See the wikipedia article on crypto random number generators, for starters. Any departure from this represents a security vulnerability. That's not to say that every modern cryptosystem is totally secure, but it seems highly unlikely that they all contain similar types of non-randomness.
I would guess that a better way to detect encrypted files is to look for total randomness. Or at least something that's nearly so. There's hardly any other reason to have a file of any size with random contents. Any file that's useful in its current form almost by definition contains some significant structure.
Just like we learned in the 1980s, arming Islamist against the Soviet invaders of Afghanistan turned out so well in the long term, as did promoting the Islamist Hamas against the nationalist PLO. That worked out great for Israel, huh?
They jettisoned Sugar, and they keep courting Microsoft. So sad. I wish the article would have explored the "open source" hardware concept. No idea what the heck that means from the article or for OLPC:
If OLPC is considering truly open source hardware... why are they only considering ARM as an alternative architecture? How about MIPS?
There are a bunch of patents on the ARM architecture and ARM has been quite aggressive at shutting down open-source reimplementations in the embryonic stage.
MIPS has several open-source implementations (a good guide to them here) which can actually run on real hardware in FPGAs. I've tried 'em. There are a couple patents on the instruction set which are expiring soon, but it's such an incredibly minimalist, elegant architecture that there isn't a lot to lock down. It's easy to understand, easy to implement, and actually performs quite well.
Also, Linux has run great on MIPS for years, both on desktop workstations from SGI (now discontinued) and in practically-every-wireless-router-on-the-planet.
So... if OLPC wants *really* open source hardware, why not think about getting a really polished, performant open-source MIPS processor working?
Or they could go even further and consider the explicitly open OpenRISC, which already runs Linux!
Anybody remember Windows NT for the Alpha, MIPS, or PPC? No. Me neither.
No one bought them because there was no support. Closed-source vendors never want to port their software to new architectures, even very similar ones.
Open-source projects developed at least TWO pretty decent reimplementations of Adobe Flash (SWFDEC and Gnash), a moving target, before Adobe got around to a beta for the 64-bit version of its closed source Flash. Lame!
What does such a move mean for backward compatibility? Aren't their applications already written with the existing OLPC in mind? I am afraid, it will not be as easy as "just recompile" to port some of them and those, who have already paid for theirs may have to pay again to be able to use them on the new hardware...
Have you ever used, um, open source software before?
It's a piece of cake to port. I regularly run Linux on my x86_64 computer at home, x86 at work, and MIPS on my router.
Porting well-written open source apps is mostly just a matter of recompiling these days. It is really "just that easy" in most cases. That's why Linux has had flawless kernel-drivers-and-apps support for x86_64 for >5 years, while Windows still doesn't.
This is basically a weakness of proprietary software in general...
We've had x86_64 for what, 6 years now? Windows XP got ported pretty fast, but driver support is still awful since most hardware vendors haven't bothered to port their drivers. And true 64-bit app support is even worse.
On the other hand, the Linux kernel got ported to x86_64 shortly before the physical processors were actually available. I was running a full-blown Debian distro on it a couple months later. All the apps were open-source and the kernel makes great efforts to design device drivers for portability, and so for distro maintainers it was largely a matter of just recompiling the packages.
What lags behind in 64-bit support under Linux? Surprise, surprise, it's closed-source stuff like Flash and video drivers.
Closed-source software develops a massive amount of inertia against architecture changes. With open-source, as soon as one developer decides to recompile for the new architecture, maybe tweaks the code a bit, you're off and running.
Probably... Windows in my cell phone eats my battery alive, and sometimes the interface gets unreasonably slow, so it's probably munching on cycles too:)
Bottom line: if you can defy a stereotype, you can gain from it.
This is an excellent point. I have this weird feminine tendency to be overly selfless, which clearly needs to be crushed into oblivion.:)
Yep, there's another stereotype you need to defy. Ruthlessly exploit predictable behavior to your advantage. Hmmm... I guess there's a nerd/robot stereotype in there, actually:-P
Another example I just thought of: Wiliam Jackson, a slave of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, was apparently seen as so debased and dehumanized by his master that he allowed him to overhear strategic details of the military effort. Jackson took full advantage and gave these secrets to the Union.
Wow, what a load of BS that editorial is. Not a coherent argument to be found...
For the record: no, the Authors Guild does not expect royalties from anybody doing non-commercial performances of âoeGoodnight Moon.â If parents want to send their children off to bed with the voice of Kindle 2, however, itâ(TM)s another matter.
So, how is the Kindle's TTS anything other than a non-commercial performance? It is produced on-the-fly by a user's own device, for their own consumption, without money changing hands anywhere.
Audio rights are not generally packaged with e-book rights. They are more valuable than e-book rights. Income from audio books helps not inconsiderably to keep authors, and publishers, afloat.... You may be thinking that no automated read-aloud function can compete with the dulcet resonance of Jim Dale reading âoeHarry Potterâ or of authors, ahem, reading themselves. But the voices of Kindle 2 are quite listenable.
Awww, boo hoo. Technology advances have made lots of formerly lucrative industries lose money. Typewriters, buggy whips, newspapers, pay phones. How is this any different? If I can get my mom to read me a bedtime story, why can't I build an electronic mom that will do the same?
So there: I've got no sympathy, Mr. Blount. And I doubt the law does either. I believe that copyright law properly construed only governs the rights to distribute or copy content. The Kindle's TTS function does not distribute or copy content, it merely converts it to a different form.
While we're at it, I suppose that the Guild should also be upset about the Kindle's ability to change font size, unlike traditional paper-and-ink books. Why, it's destroying the lucrative "large print book rights"!!!!
These guys obviously have disdain for females, but their surprise is that you don't fit that image of the female they disdain. The attention isn't as negative as you may think. And don't discount sexuality.. maybe the surprise and jaw dropping should be considered positive, if annoying.
I've never understood why people who defy stereotypes then turn around and complain about those stereotypes.
In my experience, having other people make assumptions or stereotype me has always worked to my ADVANTAGE. Europeans always think I can't speak any other languages cause I'm American... they're always favorably impressed that I speak French fluently and Spanish decently. Most people assume physicists have poor social and public speaking skills. I can do both decently, and it helps me get noticed.
Bottom line: if you can defy a stereotype, you can gain from it.
I like to think of myself as one of those careful, involved editors who spends my free time "tending" and improving articles on my major areas of interest and expertise.
What I've never understood about Sanger's argument is... what is it in Wikipedia's current model that/prevents/ experts from using their expertise?
What makes an expert?
I'd guess that an expert knows many reliable sources of information that they can use as references in their edits, to correct inaccuracies and add new material. Wikipedia encourages that!
I also expect that experts have superior writing skills and can summarize information in their area of expertise effectively. Wikipedia encourages that too!
Finally, I expect that experts are used to defending their conclusions and evidence in a rational but skeptical setting, so they should be well-prepared to convince their fellow editors when disputes over content and emphasis arise (as is inevitable!). Wikipedia encourages that kind of debate too.
So... what exactly ARE the aspects of Wikipedia that hinder expert contributors? It's an honest question by me. Can anyone point out any specific issues or cases they're aware of?
Indeed, the implementation of flagged revisions is currently being debated for the English Wikipedia, and was the subject of a recent./ article.
A lot of the debate centers on exactly what the "signing" process will entail in terms of responsibilities and consequences for the articles subject to it.
I don't think a one-size-fits-all approach to trust networks is a good idea. Requirements for effective trust in key sharing, peer review, and wiki content may differ and I think it's appropriate for each to develop a fine-tuned approach, while borrowing good ideas from one another.
arXiv, the pioneering online preprint archive, already does something like this, though not as sophisticated. They have an endorsement system, wherein more established users endorse newer ones. It's fairly rudimentary and ad-hoc, but seems to keep out crackpots and spam fairly well in practice.
Typically, the pattern that I see is a bunch of names picked more-or-less-randomly from a pool of related things. For example, a bunch of servers named after LOTR characters (frodo, bilbo, etc.) or facilities named after ancient Romans (CESR and CLEO), mail programs named after trees (elm, pine, cone). Yadda yadda yadda...
As I see it, this pattern reflects the fact that the people have unique personalities while the machines pretty much don't. The humans adopt or join a naming scheme in order to express themselves a bit, while the individual names aren't that important. After all, the computers don't care about the names.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, we'll keep it down.
oh wow, *whooosh*
hes not telling you to be quiet, hes talking about SSH. its like Telnet.exe but in my opinion telnet is a WAY BETTER IDEA cause it comes with windows XP, but ssh doesn't and you have to download ssh.
otherwise theres nothing else really good about ssh, its just like telnet.
Does anyone make a digital back/lens adapter that you could use to take digital photos instead?
I'm a bit too young to have seen many instruments with Polaroid holders, but my understanding is that there are digital backs for many of them. Sure, they're probably hundreds of thousands of dollars/euros, but a whole lot less expensive than buying a new instrument...
Kohut: Notebooks aren't going to go away, because again, one of the things that is helping us as an industry is that Intel is trying very hard to limit what netbooks can do.
Hmmm... intentionally crippling their low-end stuff, eh? That explains why we've got no 64-bit or VT on the mobile Atom processors, I guess, among other things...
This sounds like a loophole big enough for VIA to drive through with the Nano.
I hope they succeed. And I hope AMD wakes up and makes netbook processors. You wouldn't even know it from their terrible marketing and sales, but the Turion 64 X2 is quite a nice dual-core mobile processor from AMD. And dirt cheap too.
Bottom line, more competition is good and right now, desperately needed for netbook CPUs. We need a serious Nano vs. Atom vs. AMD slugfest. Bring it.
Wow. That's either impressive or insane :-)
I can't even stand to carry around my 15" laptop on a daily basis. It's not so much the weight as the annoying "bulk" of it. It's awkward thick and wide. The power brick is big and needed far too often. The laptop is too big to fit on most lecture hall desks, and it's not at all unobtrusive... whenever I have it I'm instantly "that jerk with the giant laptop."
So 17"... way too big :-p
Passersby were amazed by the unusually large ...
amount of blood. Passersby were amazed by the
unusually large amount of blood.
Passersby were amazed by the unusually large
amount of blood. Passersby were amazed by the
unusually large amount of blood.
Furthermore, even without a header, most compression algorithms work by splitting compressed files up into repetitive chunks of some kind and building tables that index these. That pattern itself is detectable.
umm... no, unless you mean non-entropy encoders.
Fair enough. I was thinking more along the lines of things like headerless DEFLATE output, which has some noticeable structure (which is, as you point out, redundant and therefore slightly inefficient).
I agree that a straight entropy-encoder like Huffman will not show such a redundancy.
..or (c) compressed with a decent headerless compression algorithm
"Headerless compression"??? Why would anyone want such a thing...?
Normally you want your compressed files to have a very well-defined header structure, in order to make it easy to identify them and recover data in case of corruption. The only reason you'd want to *not* have a header is for data hiding, and at that point we're back to encryption (where we started), and compression or lack thereof is irrelevant.
Furthermore, even without a header, most compression algorithms work by splitting compressed files up into repetitive chunks of some kind and building tables that index these. That pattern itself is detectable.
... I doubt that women will accept it.
Even if it has no side effects and if men are able to accept the stigma of being temporarily infertile, I expect that women won't trust this treatment.
Just think about it: who bears most of the risk in case of pregnancy? Women. It might be unjust, but in most societies, men can walk away and abandon women they've gotten pregnant easily without serious social stigma or financial repercussions. Women either have to get an abortion (stigmatized, traumatic, and in many places illegal/expensive/dangerous) or raise a child alone (stigmatized/expensive/time-consuming).
With the pill or condoms, women are either controlling the birth control themselves, or can verify its use on-the-spot. With male contraceptive injections/pills,
I foresee a big problem with women not trusting that men are really taking this. Heck, in the pilot study 1/3 of the men just stopped taking it for no apparent reason!!
He didn't say that. He said that, for TrueCrypt case, the "random" data on the disk in free sectors is not random at all - it's got bits of deleted files in it, and so on. So, it's rather low entropy. On the other hand, sectors used for TrueCrypt will actually contain truly random, high-entropy data. And statistical analysis will be able to tell the difference easily.
True. But TFA claims that the software works by looking for patterns in the encrypted data. Whereas you are arguing (in my mind correctly), that the way to find the encrypted data is to look for data without any patterns.
I wish I had mod-points for you.
Finally we hear from someone who knows WTF he/she is talking about.
Just to expand a bit: encryption algorithms (except for one-time-pad) don't produce truly random output. But all good, modern ones seek to produce output that's as indistinguishable as possible from truly random output, as a necessary but not sufficient component of their security. There are a variety of techniques to produce pseudorandom data based on a variety of sophisticated mathematics.
It seems like the height of hubris to claim that one software program can reliably detect all these different kinds of extreme slight deviation from perfect randomness.
A more plausible approach (as others have pointed out), is to look for files that do appear to be totally random. Such files are likely to be either (a) the output of a random number generator, or (b) encrypted. All files that have some useful content in their present form have some structure or non-randomness.
Properly encrypted files don't contain significant "patterns that don't exist in random files."
If the cryptography is actually secure, then its result will be indistinguishable from random noise. See the wikipedia article on crypto random number generators, for starters. Any departure from this represents a security vulnerability. That's not to say that every modern cryptosystem is totally secure, but it seems highly unlikely that they all contain similar types of non-randomness.
I would guess that a better way to detect encrypted files is to look for total randomness. Or at least something that's nearly so. There's hardly any other reason to have a file of any size with random contents. Any file that's useful in its current form almost by definition contains some significant structure.
... to use the Internet for propaganda purposes?
Well, there's no way THAT could every backfire :-)
Just like we learned in the 1980s, arming Islamist against the Soviet invaders of Afghanistan turned out so well in the long term, as did promoting the Islamist Hamas against the nationalist PLO. That worked out great for Israel, huh?
I gotta say it... I was pretty shocked to see "Thagomizer" excluded from the article!
It's a term for the tail spikes of a Stegosaurus, which comes from this Far Side cartoon.
They jettisoned Sugar, and they keep courting Microsoft. So sad. I wish the article would have explored the "open source" hardware concept. No idea what the heck that means from the article or for OLPC:
If OLPC is considering truly open source hardware... why are they only considering ARM as an alternative architecture? How about MIPS?
There are a bunch of patents on the ARM architecture and ARM has been quite aggressive at shutting down open-source reimplementations in the embryonic stage.
MIPS has several open-source implementations (a good guide to them here) which can actually run on real hardware in FPGAs. I've tried 'em. There are a couple patents on the instruction set which are expiring soon, but it's such an incredibly minimalist, elegant architecture that there isn't a lot to lock down. It's easy to understand, easy to implement, and actually performs quite well.
Also, Linux has run great on MIPS for years, both on desktop workstations from SGI (now discontinued) and in practically-every-wireless-router-on-the-planet.
So... if OLPC wants *really* open source hardware, why not think about getting a really polished, performant open-source MIPS processor working?
Or they could go even further and consider the explicitly open OpenRISC, which already runs Linux!
Yeah, this seems like the worst of all worlds.
Anybody remember Windows NT for the Alpha, MIPS, or PPC? No. Me neither.
No one bought them because there was no support. Closed-source vendors never want to port their software to new architectures, even very similar ones.
Open-source projects developed at least TWO pretty decent reimplementations of Adobe Flash (SWFDEC and Gnash), a moving target, before Adobe got around to a beta for the 64-bit version of its closed source Flash. Lame!
What does such a move mean for backward compatibility? Aren't their applications already written with the existing OLPC in mind? I am afraid, it will not be as easy as "just recompile" to port some of them and those, who have already paid for theirs may have to pay again to be able to use them on the new hardware...
Have you ever used, um, open source software before?
It's a piece of cake to port. I regularly run Linux on my x86_64 computer at home, x86 at work, and MIPS on my router.
Porting well-written open source apps is mostly just a matter of recompiling these days. It is really "just that easy" in most cases. That's why Linux has had flawless kernel-drivers-and-apps support for x86_64 for >5 years, while Windows still doesn't.
This is basically a weakness of proprietary software in general...
We've had x86_64 for what, 6 years now? Windows XP got ported pretty fast, but driver support is still awful since most hardware vendors haven't bothered to port their drivers. And true 64-bit app support is even worse.
On the other hand, the Linux kernel got ported to x86_64 shortly before the physical processors were actually available. I was running a full-blown Debian distro on it a couple months later. All the apps were open-source and the kernel makes great efforts to design device drivers for portability, and so for distro maintainers it was largely a matter of just recompiling the packages.
What lags behind in 64-bit support under Linux? Surprise, surprise, it's closed-source stuff like Flash and video drivers.
Closed-source software develops a massive amount of inertia against architecture changes. With open-source, as soon as one developer decides to recompile for the new architecture, maybe tweaks the code a bit, you're off and running.
Probably... Windows in my cell phone eats my battery alive, and sometimes the interface gets unreasonably slow, so it's probably munching on cycles too :)
Bottom line: if you can defy a stereotype, you can gain from it.
This is an excellent point. I have this weird feminine tendency to be overly selfless, which clearly needs to be crushed into oblivion. :)
Yep, there's another stereotype you need to defy. Ruthlessly exploit predictable behavior to your advantage. Hmmm... I guess there's a nerd/robot stereotype in there, actually :-P
Another example I just thought of: Wiliam Jackson, a slave of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, was apparently seen as so debased and dehumanized by his master that he allowed him to overhear strategic details of the military effort. Jackson took full advantage and gave these secrets to the Union.
Wow, what a load of BS that editorial is. Not a coherent argument to be found...
For the record: no, the Authors Guild does not expect royalties from anybody doing non-commercial performances of âoeGoodnight Moon.â If parents want to send their children off to bed with the voice of Kindle 2, however, itâ(TM)s another matter.
So, how is the Kindle's TTS anything other than a non-commercial performance? It is produced on-the-fly by a user's own device, for their own consumption, without money changing hands anywhere.
Audio rights are not generally packaged with e-book rights. They are more valuable than e-book rights. Income from audio books helps not inconsiderably to keep authors, and publishers, afloat. ... You may be thinking that no automated read-aloud function can compete with the dulcet resonance of Jim Dale reading âoeHarry Potterâ or of authors, ahem, reading themselves. But the voices of Kindle 2 are quite listenable.
Awww, boo hoo. Technology advances have made lots of formerly lucrative industries lose money. Typewriters, buggy whips, newspapers, pay phones. How is this any different? If I can get my mom to read me a bedtime story, why can't I build an electronic mom that will do the same?
So there: I've got no sympathy, Mr. Blount. And I doubt the law does either. I believe that copyright law properly construed only governs the rights to distribute or copy content. The Kindle's TTS function does not distribute or copy content, it merely converts it to a different form.
While we're at it, I suppose that the Guild should also be upset about the Kindle's ability to change font size, unlike traditional paper-and-ink books. Why, it's destroying the lucrative "large print book rights"!!!!
Good arguments. I wish I had mod points for you.
These guys obviously have disdain for females, but their surprise is that you don't fit that image of the female they disdain. The attention isn't as negative as you may think. And don't discount sexuality.. maybe the surprise and jaw dropping should be considered positive, if annoying.
I've never understood why people who defy stereotypes then turn around and complain about those stereotypes.
In my experience, having other people make assumptions or stereotype me has always worked to my ADVANTAGE. Europeans always think I can't speak any other languages cause I'm American... they're always favorably impressed that I speak French fluently and Spanish decently. Most people assume physicists have poor social and public speaking skills. I can do both decently, and it helps me get noticed.
Bottom line: if you can defy a stereotype, you can gain from it.
Well, good summary, I very much agree!
I like to think of myself as one of those careful, involved editors who spends my free time "tending" and improving articles on my major areas of interest and expertise.
What I've never understood about Sanger's argument is... what is it in Wikipedia's current model that /prevents/ experts from using their expertise?
What makes an expert?
I'd guess that an expert knows many reliable sources of information that they can use as references in their edits, to correct inaccuracies and add new material. Wikipedia encourages that!
I also expect that experts have superior writing skills and can summarize information in their area of expertise effectively. Wikipedia encourages that too!
Finally, I expect that experts are used to defending their conclusions and evidence in a rational but skeptical setting, so they should be well-prepared to convince their fellow editors when disputes over content and emphasis arise (as is inevitable!). Wikipedia encourages that kind of debate too.
So... what exactly ARE the aspects of Wikipedia that hinder expert contributors? It's an honest question by me. Can anyone point out any specific issues or cases they're aware of?
Indeed, the implementation of flagged revisions is currently being debated for the English Wikipedia, and was the subject of a recent ./ article.
A lot of the debate centers on exactly what the "signing" process will entail in terms of responsibilities and consequences for the articles subject to it.
I don't think a one-size-fits-all approach to trust networks is a good idea. Requirements for effective trust in key sharing, peer review, and wiki content may differ and I think it's appropriate for each to develop a fine-tuned approach, while borrowing good ideas from one another.
arXiv, the pioneering online preprint archive, already does something like this, though not as sophisticated. They have an endorsement system, wherein more established users endorse newer ones. It's fairly rudimentary and ad-hoc, but seems to keep out crackpots and spam fairly well in practice.
My physics research group has a bunch of weird Japanese names: Fugu, Basashi, Himo, Shirako, Ebi...
I had no idea what these meant at first, but they're all crazy Japanese delicacies.
Fugu=Poisonous Pufferfish
Basashi=Horse meat
Ebi=LIVE baby shrimp
Shirako=Fish semen
Himo=?????
Typically, the pattern that I see is a bunch of names picked more-or-less-randomly from a pool of related things. For example, a bunch of servers named after LOTR characters (frodo, bilbo, etc.) or facilities named after ancient Romans (CESR and CLEO), mail programs named after trees (elm, pine, cone). Yadda yadda yadda...
As I see it, this pattern reflects the fact that the people have unique personalities while the machines pretty much don't. The humans adopt or join a naming scheme in order to express themselves a bit, while the individual names aren't that important. After all, the computers don't care about the names.