The public was of the opinion that Drew organized a conspiracy to commit petty fraud that indirectly resulted in a death (i.e. manslaughter). Organizing a conspiracy to commit a felony is a crime.
I agree she didn't violate federal law. Missouri should have handled this.
I'm not so sure that the 19 year old's actions could not be seen as manslaughter, i.e. taking a mentally disturbed person causing great emotional trauma and encouraging suicide as a solution. If that were the case then Drew is part of a conspiracy. But the Missouri DA screwed this up by giving the 19 year old immunity.
I think you are generally right except for "The web site and product manuals are either almost useless or written for people who already understand the products."
Oracle publishes about a 1/2 dozen "concept" manuals designed to teach concepts about various technologies. The technical people do write good materials. Also Oracle used to have excellent tutorial manuals and the database still ships with great learning databases standard.
And that isn't counting oracle press which has about a dozen very good books.
The marketing people suck at marketing. The education people do a nice job.
We've had this discussion here a 100 times regarding email and SMTP. For their to be a change somebody big: Federal Government, Microsoft, Verizon.... has to push through the change. So far they don't have a reason to do it.
1) The reason HTTP was successful rather than Gopher (which had features like search built in) was because HTTP was graphical. At 2400 baud and 9800 baud what do you think was the primary use for graphical?
2) The early move to mass adoption of BBSes was AOLs chat rooms (people doing keyboard phone sex). AOL people formed a large percentage of the mainstream users of the internet around 1995. That is when it went commercial.
3) If you look at X-Windows the 4 original apps were: xchat, xterm, xclock and xv (x viewer). What you think the viewer was for?
Programming is a lot more accessible than it used to be. You don't have to worry about memory allocation anymore. That is, most people don't. But the people who write our compilers and VMs still do. They're not going anywhere, they're just making the job easier for higher-level programers.
Just to make it worse that isn't quite as "still". That sort of stuff comes into and out of fashion. The 1950s COBOL programmers and 1970s LISP programers don't worry about that stuff either. Dealing with hardware at a low level is important when hardware efficiency is important. Ask game programmers on consoles if they worry about that sort of stuff. Cell phones seem like a prime place where efficiency is likely important just the hardware is changing too fast. Once the hardware improvements on cell phones start to slow....
What has gotten better are languages that are more in the middle that allow you to worry about some of it some of the time but mostly ignore it.
f software apps were purely compositional and organized as a hierarchical tree, the low level components would need to be written only once. Once the bottom levels (mostly leaves) of the tree become populated, then all of the higher level apps will be compositions of existing objects. Plug and play. The trick is in the purely compositional part: everything must be compositional from the bottom up.
That's called object oriented programming it has been the dominant paradigm for a generation. Turns out that in reality:
1) Highly generic objects are very abstract and hard to use, too mathy
2) Moderately generic objects are incredibly expensive to write and maintain though very very useful. Of course you need an order of magnitude or more more of them than highly generic.
3) Slightly generic objects are cheap but essentially single purpose.
The ones that only have to be written once are the most abstract ones.
I'm not too worried. The idea behind COBOL was that once you got rid of that mathy way of writing code anyone could do it. The fact is that taking a process and breaking it into a series of steps and dealing with all the cases takes practice. The problem is not syntax or language structure the problem is thinking through a problem that way.
Until computers have common sense all languages are going have to look like
Try the more advanced languages. Once you have strong typing you can have variables that are of types like:
function of a string, int and a char to a string and then when you apply a char to it the system knows you now have a function of type string and int to string.
That "why i hate" is a terrible editorial. What he is saying is that he doesn't want to think carefully about what he's doing. His objection isn't to languages really it is to clarity of thought. Tinkering and right brain is great for art, it isn't the right mode for engineering.
The blog policy is awful and misunderstood. The point that everyone is an expert on themselves or that a person's blog is a reliable source on their opinions needs to be emphasized.
If you would like to change this I'd be interested.
So this is a good example to work since I can give you the details.
What happened with Bristol Palin was that Sarah Palin was encouraging vandalism so there was a click of admins who were assigned to control the Sarah Palin articles. The Bristol Palin article was seen in September and October as a way to bypass the protections on Sarah Palin. Around March Bristol was making news all by herself and there was a serious policy disagreement. Then Levi Johnson was kept with no probation and the probation on Sarah Palin was lifted.
Were people being overly controlling? Yes Was there a belief by people running the Sarah Palin article that there should be no coverage of Bristol? Yes Was this a tricky issue that wikipedia often faces politicians? Yes
What is so bad about fans writing long articles on things that interest them? That stuff was useful content if you were looking for it. I don't know if I could name a single Ashley Simpson song, but the fact that there was a good article on every single one of them before the deletion wave of 2006-7 I consider a plus of wikipedia.
I was around for the full change. I'll agree article quality is better than in 2006 for important articles.
But...
1) The anime related stuff should be covered. There is lots of information that is poorly documented and the best quality information on poorly documented things is still very valuable. In 2006 the attitude was to write the best article you could, in 2009 the attitude is to apply a flat model.
2) On images the policy is purely destructive. Quality has gone way down.
Not only that they would discourage it. You aren't encouraged on wikipedia to edit articles in which you figure prominently. Knuth would be encouraged to comment on the talk page of the TeX article and what he says would be taken very very seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
The public was of the opinion that Drew organized a conspiracy to commit petty fraud that indirectly resulted in a death (i.e. manslaughter). Organizing a conspiracy to commit a felony is a crime.
I agree she didn't violate federal law. Missouri should have handled this.
I'm not so sure that the 19 year old's actions could not be seen as manslaughter, i.e. taking a mentally disturbed person causing great emotional trauma and encouraging suicide as a solution. If that were the case then Drew is part of a conspiracy. But the Missouri DA screwed this up by giving the 19 year old immunity.
The mainstream press loves fanatics. They make for great stories.
I think you are generally right except for "The web site and product manuals are either almost useless or written for people who already understand the products."
Oracle publishes about a 1/2 dozen "concept" manuals designed to teach concepts about various technologies. The technical people do write good materials. Also Oracle used to have excellent tutorial manuals and the database still ships with great learning databases standard.
And that isn't counting oracle press which has about a dozen very good books.
The marketing people suck at marketing. The education people do a nice job.
http://christianscience.com/questions-christian-science-faq.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Science
Good point regarding IPV4. Hopefully this starts pushing up the cost of existing domans while IPV6 is cheap and ....
We've had this discussion here a 100 times regarding email and SMTP. For their to be a change somebody big: Federal Government, Microsoft, Verizon.... has to push through the change. So far they don't have a reason to do it.
Heck yeah its true.
1) The reason HTTP was successful rather than Gopher (which had features like search built in) was because HTTP was graphical. At 2400 baud and 9800 baud what do you think was the primary use for graphical?
2) The early move to mass adoption of BBSes was AOLs chat rooms (people doing keyboard phone sex). AOL people formed a large percentage of the mainstream users of the internet around 1995. That is when it went commercial.
3) If you look at X-Windows the 4 original apps were:
xchat, xterm, xclock and xv (x viewer). What you think the viewer was for?
I have in fact the most popular compiler in the world .NET does both (C# & VB vs F#). GHC used to compile to GCC.
How is it different when making a compiler?
Not really.
f y = case y of ...
1 -> A1
2 -> A 2
3 -> A3
main do y - get.. (x...)
t = f y
not really any different.
Just to make it worse that isn't quite as "still". That sort of stuff comes into and out of fashion. The 1950s COBOL programmers and 1970s LISP programers don't worry about that stuff either. Dealing with hardware at a low level is important when hardware efficiency is important. Ask game programmers on consoles if they worry about that sort of stuff. Cell phones seem like a prime place where efficiency is likely important just the hardware is changing too fast. Once the hardware improvements on cell phones start to slow....
What has gotten better are languages that are more in the middle that allow you to worry about some of it some of the time but mostly ignore it.
That's called object oriented programming it has been the dominant paradigm for a generation. Turns out that in reality:
1) Highly generic objects are very abstract and hard to use, too mathy
2) Moderately generic objects are incredibly expensive to write and maintain though very very useful. Of course you need an order of magnitude or more more of them than highly generic.
3) Slightly generic objects are cheap but essentially single purpose.
The ones that only have to be written once are the most abstract ones.
I'm not too worried. The idea behind COBOL was that once you got rid of that mathy way of writing code anyone could do it. The fact is that taking a process and breaking it into a series of steps and dealing with all the cases takes practice. The problem is not syntax or language structure the problem is thinking through a problem that way.
Until computers have common sense all languages are going have to look like
Do X ...
Read Y
Y Case 1
Y Case 2...
Y Case 3....
Try the more advanced languages. Once you have strong typing you can have variables that are of types like:
function of a string, int and a char to a string and then when you apply a char to it the system knows you now have a function of type string and int to string.
That "why i hate" is a terrible editorial. What he is saying is that he doesn't want to think carefully about what he's doing. His objection isn't to languages really it is to clarity of thought. Tinkering and right brain is great for art, it isn't the right mode for engineering.
The Wall Street Journal? What's the context here?
The blog policy is awful and misunderstood. The point that everyone is an expert on themselves or that a person's blog is a reliable source on their opinions needs to be emphasized.
If you would like to change this I'd be interested.
Funny enough I'm the person who got the Bristol Palin article back up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bristol_Palin
So this is a good example to work since I can give you the details.
What happened with Bristol Palin was that Sarah Palin was encouraging vandalism so there was a click of admins who were assigned to control the Sarah Palin articles. The Bristol Palin article was seen in September and October as a way to bypass the protections on Sarah Palin. Around March Bristol was making news all by herself and there was a serious policy disagreement. Then Levi Johnson was kept with no probation and the probation on Sarah Palin was lifted.
Were people being overly controlling? Yes
Was there a belief by people running the Sarah Palin article that there should be no coverage of Bristol? Yes
Was this a tricky issue that wikipedia often faces politicians? Yes
What is so bad about fans writing long articles on things that interest them? That stuff was useful content if you were looking for it. I don't know if I could name a single Ashley Simpson song, but the fact that there was a good article on every single one of them before the deletion wave of 2006-7 I consider a plus of wikipedia.
I was around for the full change. I'll agree article quality is better than in 2006 for important articles.
But...
1) The anime related stuff should be covered. There is lots of information that is poorly documented and the best quality information on poorly documented things is still very valuable. In 2006 the attitude was to write the best article you could, in 2009 the attitude is to apply a flat model.
2) On images the policy is purely destructive. Quality has gone way down.
Not only that they would discourage it. You aren't encouraged on wikipedia to edit articles in which you figure prominently. Knuth would be encouraged to comment on the talk page of the TeX article and what he says would be taken very very seriously.
Yes exactly that is one of my points of frustration.
An admin can't just delete an article if you object. That's misconduct. You can force that sort of thing to "articles for deletion".
That is unless you were violating the rules on biographies of living persons which are very strict. But again you can force the issue up the chain.
Cost prohibitive. Alice lives in another country.
Then have her deposed in her country and only fly her in if Yoyodyne disagree with her written deposition and then on their dime.
And how does he prove that they aren't falsified?
He doesn't have to. Yoyodyne has the burden to prove them wrong .