So, on the one hand you have scientists reporting on melting icecaps, changes in weather patterns, and gross ecological damage. On the other hand, you have the Fair and Balanced(TM) network reporting random crap to refute the scientists. Sure, that balances out!
Why is it useless? Yes, some have more, some have less, but so what? Even if I'm overstating the statistic by a whole order of magnitude, then the average TV has half a pound of lead. Multiply that by the millions of TV sets that are about to be discarding, and you have a fucking huge amount of pollution.
I supposed I could have said that in the first place — only then you would have accused me of being too vague!
Exactly how does acquiring resources or selling land for storage set the third world back? They get cash in exchange for land that isn't useful. Using that cash they can build irrigation systems or buy food. It's a win-win situation.
You're ill informed. "Storage" of obsolete crap means dumping it into a landfill, where the heavy metals leach into the groundwater. A single TV set contains five pounds of lead!
And that's the best scenario. Most often they burn the electronics in order to recover the copper in the wires. The byproduct is toxic smoke and sludge.
You're the one the brought vending machines into the discussion. You claimed that random folks with camera phones don't compete with photojournalists for the same reason vending machines don't compete with gourmet restaurants. My point was that this analogy is too selective and therefore flawed: it makes more sense to compare how vending machines, and other mass-market food vendors, compete with all food vendors.
By the same token, random bystanders with camera phones do indeed have an impact on the photojournalism and telejournalism marketplace. Bloggers and other websites use their output, and sometimes they even sell their work to mainstream media. You're correct in pointing out that amateurs can never replace professionals for most serious work, but they do play a role.
This has actually been going on for a long time. Nobody ever would have heard of Rodney King if there hadn't been a bystander with a camcorder. Or consider the assassination of JFK: there were hundreds of professionals in the vicinity, but a amateur with an 8mm toy happened to be the only one to catch the actual shooting. As more and more folks walk around with cameras in their pockets, that kind of happenstance will become more and more common.
You basic point does indeed stand: there's a lot more to being a photojournalist than being on the scene and having a camera. But that element of blind luck is not insignificant.
Are vending machines going to put gourmet chefs out of business? They're everywhere, and get you fed for a lot less!
That's an interesting example. You're certainly correct in thinking that a 4-star restaurant doesn't fear competition from vending machines. On the other hand, technology has put a whole segment of food vendors out of business. If you were low or moderate income, you used to rely on delis, diners, street vendors, grocers, butchers, produce stands, and a lot of other such small businesses, mostly locally owned and often family operated. Such businesses are still around, but they've lost most of their market to businesses that sell food that is packaged and/or mass-produced: supermarkets, fast food outlets, and, yes, vending machines.
Gourmet restaurants are still around (they're probably bigger than ever) because there's a market for a high-end meals at a premium price. By the token, amateur journalists, with their camera phones, blogs, and YouTube accounts, will never completely replace newspapers, magazines, and broadcast news, and Wikipedia will never put Britannica out of business. There will always be a huge market segment that will pay extra for a quality product. But the fact remains, the low-end vendors do have a huge effect on the marketplace. Not as huge as hype artists like the author of the TFA claim, but huge nonetheless.
I have yet to run across a burned CD I cannot read due to this sort of degradation. Maybe at the decade mark, some of my discs will fail me and I'll change my mind but right now I'm not too concerned.
When a product has an expiration date, that's just a promise that it probably won't fail before then, not a guarantee that will fail. If your carton of milk expires on Thursday, it won't necessarily be sour on Friday. By the same token, your archive disks are probably OK well past the 10 year mark, but you have no way of knowing exactly when they will stop being readable. If you have any data on them you can't afford to lose, you should make copies before the expiration date.
Apropos of last week's flamefest about safe driving: this logic also applies to the risk you take every time you exceed the speed limit or tailgate. Maybe you've done it a thousand times without mishap — but the risk is still there. When you make a bet, the odds are not the only measure of whether the bet is a safe one. You should also consider whether you can afford to lose.
If the program is supposed to be localizable, then its design is fundamentally flawed. The message string needs to be relocated to an external resource, and printf needs to be replaced with something that handles Unicode strings. Given the scale of the changes necessary, the whole program will have to be scrapped and rewritten from scratch. Since we're scrapping the C source code, we might as well move to a more modern language with better i18n support, such as Java.
Call it what you want. The fact is, a lot of road rage incidents are linked to unsubtle signals like flashing your brake lights. It may not be a rational response, but road rage never is.
It's hard to accept that you can't "educate" other drivers, but the simple fact is that you can't. As I said before, nobody accepts that they aren't a perfect driver, and get really bent out of shape when somebody tries to tell them otherwise. And not being able to accept that is itself a kind of road rage.
That's not my point at all. I'm not the benchmark, the posted speed limit is. Yeah, it's arbitrary, but that's the nature of rules. I'm sure there are people out there who can drive 300 mph without getting in an accident, but if you let one person do it, you have to let everybody do it.
Actually, I came away from all three accidents with somebody else taking the blame. One time I was heading down a mountain freeway when I saw the left lane blocked by a car that had spun out. Even though I was speeding, I was able to stop in time. But before I could merge into the right lane, along come somebody who was going even faster than I was...
I had three episodes like that in just a few months. Even though it was somebody else's fault in each case, I had to ask myself why I was getting in trouble so much. It isn't enough to be in the right: you want to be safe. And always pushing the limits is not safe.
There are some pretty stupid comments in this thread, but yours is by far the stupidest. Blinding other drivers, yeah, that's clever. Hope you have a good lawyer.
Yeah, basically, that's the right way to do things. However, your strategy doesn't really apply to me. My encounters with tailgaters almost always occur when I'm driving a middle lane on a freeway with three or more lanes each way, which is how I spend most of my freeway time. I avoid the left lane precisely because I'm tired of what goes on there. People don't tailgate me because I'm holding them up. They tailgate me just because they're in the habit of driving close. My strategy is designed to encourage them to pass without pissing them off.
Twenty years ago, the speed limit along that strech of road was 60 miles per hour. Would it have been unsafe to go faster than that 20 years ago?
As a matter of fact, yes. Speed limits have been creeping up in the last few years because low speed limits are unpopular. Every time they raise the limit, accident rates go up. If you contact whoever does enforcement for that stretch of highway, you'll probably find that it's no exception.
My skill or lack of it was not the issue. Everybody has the limits. My mistake was thinking I knew exactly how good a driver I was; I let my ego override my judgment. Judging from what I see on the freeway — and in this discussion — that's pretty fucking common.
How about, when you're being tailgated, there's maybe a reason? Like you're going too slow?
You're about the twentieth person to make that asinine comment. I avoid the left lane precisely because I got tired of dealing with assholes like you — and I still get tailgated.
I can't believe how many people responded to my post with smartass crap like yours. You're all need to learn to read a post before responding to it. Here's the gist: ROAD RAGE IS DANGEROUS. When you see somebody driving badly, the last thing you want to do is humiliate them. It will not change their behavior, except to make them even angrier and nastier.
Oh, bullshit. I gave up driving in the left lane (except to pass) because I got tired of dealing with assholes like you. I still get tailgated all the time.
Becauses, it is not speeding that causes accidents, it's the person speeding needs to take extra caution.
I used to think that. Three accidents later, I changed my mind.
When you go fast, you have less time to respond to the unexpected, and the results are more severe when the unexpected happens. Anybody who thinks they can speed safely is fooling themselves.
My idea was a flashing neon sign that says, "back off!"
Problem is, everybody thinks they're a perfect driver, and get very weird when anybody tries to tell them otherwise. Hence all the road rage incidents connected to tailgating.
My strategy is to slow down, but subtly, so they don't register that I'm pissed at them. I don't even brake, I just don't push the accelerator as hard as a normally do. Invariably the tailgater gets impatient and passes, without registering any change in my driving.
It is, of course, frustrating to see bad driving and not be able to communicate your concerns to the other driver. But frustration is better than being targeted by a psycho.
If people are reading the articles (which they must be if they are arguing against its deletion), then why bother deleting it?
Good question. If I still suffered from the illusion that the Wikipedia model had any chance of working, the first thing I'd do to "fix" it is just get rid of the idea of notability. Everything is "notable" to somebody, so what gets rated as notable on Wikipedia is whatever happens to be of interest to whoever's participating at the moment.
Space is not an issue. There's another policy that says, "Wikipedia is not paper" — that is, conserving space is never a priority. So really, why bother?
In other words, you can't compress data that's already been compressed. (At least not very effectively.) It was very stupid of me to forget to mention that!
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So, on the one hand you have scientists reporting on melting icecaps, changes in weather patterns, and gross ecological damage. On the other hand, you have the Fair and Balanced(TM) network reporting random crap to refute the scientists. Sure, that balances out!
Why is it useless? Yes, some have more, some have less, but so what? Even if I'm overstating the statistic by a whole order of magnitude, then the average TV has half a pound of lead. Multiply that by the millions of TV sets that are about to be discarding, and you have a fucking huge amount of pollution.
I supposed I could have said that in the first place — only then you would have accused me of being too vague!
You're ill informed. "Storage" of obsolete crap means dumping it into a landfill, where the heavy metals leach into the groundwater. A single TV set contains five pounds of lead!
And that's the best scenario. Most often they burn the electronics in order to recover the copper in the wires. The byproduct is toxic smoke and sludge.
You're the one the brought vending machines into the discussion. You claimed that random folks with camera phones don't compete with photojournalists for the same reason vending machines don't compete with gourmet restaurants. My point was that this analogy is too selective and therefore flawed: it makes more sense to compare how vending machines, and other mass-market food vendors, compete with all food vendors.
By the same token, random bystanders with camera phones do indeed have an impact on the photojournalism and telejournalism marketplace. Bloggers and other websites use their output, and sometimes they even sell their work to mainstream media. You're correct in pointing out that amateurs can never replace professionals for most serious work, but they do play a role.
This has actually been going on for a long time. Nobody ever would have heard of Rodney King if there hadn't been a bystander with a camcorder. Or consider the assassination of JFK: there were hundreds of professionals in the vicinity, but a amateur with an 8mm toy happened to be the only one to catch the actual shooting. As more and more folks walk around with cameras in their pockets, that kind of happenstance will become more and more common.
You basic point does indeed stand: there's a lot more to being a photojournalist than being on the scene and having a camera. But that element of blind luck is not insignificant.
That's an interesting example. You're certainly correct in thinking that a 4-star restaurant doesn't fear competition from vending machines. On the other hand, technology has put a whole segment of food vendors out of business. If you were low or moderate income, you used to rely on delis, diners, street vendors, grocers, butchers, produce stands, and a lot of other such small businesses, mostly locally owned and often family operated. Such businesses are still around, but they've lost most of their market to businesses that sell food that is packaged and/or mass-produced: supermarkets, fast food outlets, and, yes, vending machines.
Gourmet restaurants are still around (they're probably bigger than ever) because there's a market for a high-end meals at a premium price. By the token, amateur journalists, with their camera phones, blogs, and YouTube accounts, will never completely replace newspapers, magazines, and broadcast news, and Wikipedia will never put Britannica out of business. There will always be a huge market segment that will pay extra for a quality product. But the fact remains, the low-end vendors do have a huge effect on the marketplace. Not as huge as hype artists like the author of the TFA claim, but huge nonetheless.
When a product has an expiration date, that's just a promise that it probably won't fail before then, not a guarantee that will fail. If your carton of milk expires on Thursday, it won't necessarily be sour on Friday. By the same token, your archive disks are probably OK well past the 10 year mark, but you have no way of knowing exactly when they will stop being readable. If you have any data on them you can't afford to lose, you should make copies before the expiration date.
Apropos of last week's flamefest about safe driving: this logic also applies to the risk you take every time you exceed the speed limit or tailgate. Maybe you've done it a thousand times without mishap — but the risk is still there. When you make a bet, the odds are not the only measure of whether the bet is a safe one. You should also consider whether you can afford to lose.
If the program is supposed to be localizable, then its design is fundamentally flawed. The message string needs to be relocated to an external resource, and printf needs to be replaced with something that handles Unicode strings. Given the scale of the changes necessary, the whole program will have to be scrapped and rewritten from scratch. Since we're scrapping the C source code, we might as well move to a more modern language with better i18n support, such as Java.
Your version has a grammatical bug: it should output "Hello, World!"
Call it what you want. The fact is, a lot of road rage incidents are linked to unsubtle signals like flashing your brake lights. It may not be a rational response, but road rage never is.
It's hard to accept that you can't "educate" other drivers, but the simple fact is that you can't. As I said before, nobody accepts that they aren't a perfect driver, and get really bent out of shape when somebody tries to tell them otherwise. And not being able to accept that is itself a kind of road rage.
We can trade non-sequiturs all day. Doesn't change anything.
That's not my point at all. I'm not the benchmark, the posted speed limit is. Yeah, it's arbitrary, but that's the nature of rules. I'm sure there are people out there who can drive 300 mph without getting in an accident, but if you let one person do it, you have to let everybody do it.
Great, you're Mario Fucking Andretti. With mere mortals, speeding causes accidents.
Actually, I came away from all three accidents with somebody else taking the blame. One time I was heading down a mountain freeway when I saw the left lane blocked by a car that had spun out. Even though I was speeding, I was able to stop in time. But before I could merge into the right lane, along come somebody who was going even faster than I was...
I had three episodes like that in just a few months. Even though it was somebody else's fault in each case, I had to ask myself why I was getting in trouble so much. It isn't enough to be in the right: you want to be safe. And always pushing the limits is not safe.
There are some pretty stupid comments in this thread, but yours is by far the stupidest. Blinding other drivers, yeah, that's clever. Hope you have a good lawyer.
Yeah, basically, that's the right way to do things. However, your strategy doesn't really apply to me. My encounters with tailgaters almost always occur when I'm driving a middle lane on a freeway with three or more lanes each way, which is how I spend most of my freeway time. I avoid the left lane precisely because I'm tired of what goes on there. People don't tailgate me because I'm holding them up. They tailgate me just because they're in the habit of driving close. My strategy is designed to encourage them to pass without pissing them off.
As a matter of fact, yes. Speed limits have been creeping up in the last few years because low speed limits are unpopular. Every time they raise the limit, accident rates go up. If you contact whoever does enforcement for that stretch of highway, you'll probably find that it's no exception.
My skill or lack of it was not the issue. Everybody has the limits. My mistake was thinking I knew exactly how good a driver I was; I let my ego override my judgment. Judging from what I see on the freeway — and in this discussion — that's pretty fucking common.
I can't believe how many people responded to my post with smartass crap like yours. You're all need to learn to read a post before responding to it. Here's the gist: ROAD RAGE IS DANGEROUS. When you see somebody driving badly, the last thing you want to do is humiliate them. It will not change their behavior, except to make them even angrier and nastier.
Oh, bullshit. I gave up driving in the left lane (except to pass) because I got tired of dealing with assholes like you. I still get tailgated all the time.
I used to think that. Three accidents later, I changed my mind.
When you go fast, you have less time to respond to the unexpected, and the results are more severe when the unexpected happens. Anybody who thinks they can speed safely is fooling themselves.
Did you miss the part about road rage?
My idea was a flashing neon sign that says, "back off!"
Problem is, everybody thinks they're a perfect driver, and get very weird when anybody tries to tell them otherwise. Hence all the road rage incidents connected to tailgating.
My strategy is to slow down, but subtly, so they don't register that I'm pissed at them. I don't even brake, I just don't push the accelerator as hard as a normally do. Invariably the tailgater gets impatient and passes, without registering any change in my driving.
It is, of course, frustrating to see bad driving and not be able to communicate your concerns to the other driver. But frustration is better than being targeted by a psycho.
Good question. If I still suffered from the illusion that the Wikipedia model had any chance of working, the first thing I'd do to "fix" it is just get rid of the idea of notability. Everything is "notable" to somebody, so what gets rated as notable on Wikipedia is whatever happens to be of interest to whoever's participating at the moment.
Space is not an issue. There's another policy that says, "Wikipedia is not paper" — that is, conserving space is never a priority. So really, why bother?
In other words, you can't compress data that's already been compressed. (At least not very effectively.) It was very stupid of me to forget to mention that!