Only on/. would you find people who get into the habit of thinking that internet access requires a network card.:-)
Well, I hadn't forgotten about dialup entirely. I was lumping it in with computers disconnected from the Internet for a reason: I figure if you're browsing Wikipedia a lot, especially with its images and other media files, that you'll probably prefer a DVD if you don't have high-speed.
I confess it's been quite a while since I used dialup, however, so you're probably correct that my prejudice is asserting itself.
I wouldn't think there are many people for which the price of a wikipedia DVD would be noticably less than the price of the phone calls to look things up in a given year.
Maybe. I wouldn't be surprised if there were (remote) places where dialup was expensive, because it required long-distance calls if nothing else.
I think the best argument for producing a DVD is that it would give people a nice way to contribute to the wikipedia foundation.
Agreed, like buying a copy of Linux from the FSF, it's mostly a gesture. Of course one can already donate directly, but getting something back is good encouragement. I was happy to receive a copy of Lessig's Free Culture when I became an associate member of the FSF, even though it would have been far cheaper just to buy the book from Amazon (or, cheapest of all, to simply read it online).
Wikipedia is available over HTTP in a much more up-to-date, interactive and dynamic format than DVDs.
Well, yes, if you want to read it you're probably not going to download the entire bloody encyclopedia to your local machine via bittorrent.
But some people would have valid reasons for wanting this. A lot of places resyndicate Wikipedia content, e.g. www.thefreedictionary.com. or answers.com; I'm exactly sure why these sites do it, but I can think or many valid reasons.
Maybe data miners or researchers want to run scripts on Wikipedia and make all kinds of conclusions (such things are entirely legal and above board, since the content is free).
The whole purpose of the DVD sets is... I don't know. I really don't.
Well, not all of us are connected to the Internet 24/7. Some of us have laptops without wireless Internet, and even computers without network cards at all.
Lastly, there are many places in the world where you can't get a reliable net connection at all (e.g. various places in Africa, Asia).
Posted on the mailing list wikipedia-l 32 minutes ago:
From: Brion Vibber Reply-To: wikipedia-l@wikimedia.org To: Wikipedia-l, Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List, Wikimedia developers Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2005 04:47:56 -0800 Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Wiki Problems?
Brion Vibber wrote: > There was some sort of power failure at the colocation facility. We're > in the process of rebooting and recovering machines.
The power failure was due to circuit breakers being tripped within the colocation facility; some of our servers have redundant power supplies but *both* circuits failed, causing all our machines and the network switch to unceremoniously shut down.
Whether a problem in MySQL, with our server configurations, or with the hardware (or some combination thereof), most of our database servers managed to glitch the data on disk when they went down. (Yes, we use InnoDB tables. This ain't good enough, apparently.)
The good news: one server maintained a good copy, which we've been copying to the others to get things back on track. We're now serving all wikis read-only.
The bad news: that copy was a bit over a day behind synchronization (it was stopped to run maintenance jobs), so in addition to slogging around 170gb of data to each DB server we have to apply the last day's update logs before we can restore read/write service.
I don't know when exactly we'll have everything editable again, but it should be within 12 hours.
Read a newspaper. Today. Now. Then do it again tomorrow.
The fact that so very many people, presumably intelligent and educated people, could not realize this article is satirical bodes ill for the ability of geeks to digest and influence popular culture and opinion.
I was disturbed to read about that, and it did make me rather more paranoid about the leadership of Wikipedia and possibility that their bias was infecting the place.
For now I will remain paranoid, but continue to edit. I haven't yet been convinced that the rightist flavour on Wikipedia is a consequence of its leadership and not simply its membership.
Though it looks like Wales behaved improperly here, it also might be that Secretlondon just had a bit of thin skin for dealing with firebreathing American rightists (not too hard to believe).
People should face up to it - there needs to be more than one wiki page out there for controversial people like Joseph Stalin, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and whatnot.
I take it these should serve as examples of biased articles? Can you describe why you feel that, for example, the Ronald Reagan article is deeply biased?
I should say that I'm no fan of Reagan, and have little sympathy for rightist views of this kind.
I just experimented with the Driving Direction feature. I fed in my work address in Waterloo, Ontario and my father's home address in Dundas, Ontario (a small town not too far away).
For reference Mapquest gives a reasonable route (in fact, exactly the one I take) and reports the expected time as 63 min. and estimated distance as 38.35 miles.
Holy crap is Google Maps on crack. (I know, it's beta, but it's funny still.) Its expected driving time of 5 hrs. 42 min. with estimated distance of 394 miles.
For those familiar with Ontario geography, its planned route takes me from Dundas (near Hamilton) up the 403 to Toronto, up the 400 North through Barrie all the way to Bracebridge.
Then, somehow, it tells you to take the exit to the 401, as though you were still in Toronto. This confuses me, as it never told me to go back south along the 400 or take any turns. From this point the directions are reasonable, if you had wanted to go to Waterloo from Toronto.
I'm perplexed at how the software could lose track of location like that. Others have reported reasonable driving information for the States, so it's likely that their Canadian driving information is just spotty.
I was with you in the righteous indignation until I discovered they did actually include Canada, even if they didn't label the provinces. Zoom in and you'll see a bunch of Canadian cities.
Oddly, though, Kitchener-Waterloo does not appear on the map, even though they have Guelph, Cambridge, and even St. Jacobs and St. Agatha.
Instead the significant urban area between St. Jacobs and Cambridge is simply marked "Woodside National Historic Park". Which exists, it's true, but it's kind of like replacing 'New York City' on a map with 'Central Park'.
Maybe some Google coders are embittered University of Waterloo graduates who want the place swept off the map?
I don't know how many times I've heard people of a market-libertarian bent denigrate the public transit system because it "costs too much" while upholding the wondrous laissez-faire wunderkind that is the highway system.
A state subsidy is a state subsidy; though it's funny that accusations of socialism are tossed about only for public transit (or public healthcare).
This is particularly interesting, as photography was one of the most important examples cited by Lawrence Lessig in his book Free Culture for lack of regulation conferring advantages to society.
A relevant quote from Free Culture (original text available available here):
What was required for this technology to flourish? Obviously, Eastman's genius was an important part. But also important was the legal environment within which Eastman's invention grew. For early in the history of photography, there was a series of judicial decisions that could well have changed the course of photography substantially. Courts were asked whether the photographer, amateur or professional, required permission before he could capture and print whatever image he wanted. Their answer was no.6
The arguments in favor of requiring permission will sound surprisingly familiar. The photographer was "taking" something from the person or building whose photograph he shot--pirating something of value. Some even thought he was taking the target's soul. Just as Disney was not free to take the pencils that his animators used to draw Mickey, so, too, should these photographers not be free to take images that they thought valuable.
On the other side was an argument that should be familiar, as well. Sure, there may be something of value being used. But citizens should have the right to capture at least those images that stand in public view. (Louis Brandeis, who would become a Supreme Court Justice, thought the rule should be different for images from private spaces.7) It may be that this means that the photographer gets something for nothing. Just as Disney could take inspiration from Steamboat Bill, Jr. or the Brothers Grimm, the photographer should be free to capture an image without compensating the source.
Fortunately for Mr. Eastman, and for photography in general, these early decisions went in favor of the pirates. In general, no permission would be required before an image could be captured and shared with others. Instead, permission was presumed. Freedom was the default. (The law would eventually craft an exception for famous people: commercial photographers who snap pictures of famous people for commercial purposes have more restrictions than the rest of us. But in the ordinary case, the image can be captured without clearing the rights to do the capturing.8)
We can only speculate about how photography would have developed had the law gone the other way. If the presumption had been against the photographer, then the photographer would have had to demonstrate permission. Perhaps Eastman Kodak would have had to demonstrate permission, too, before it developed the film upon which images were captured. After all, if permission were not granted, then Eastman Kodak would be benefiting from the "theft" committed by the photographer. Just as Napster benefited from the copyright infringements committed by Napster users, Kodak would be benefiting from the "image-right" infringement of its photographers. We could imagine the law then requiring that some form of permission be demonstrated before a company developed pictures. We could imagine a system developing to demonstrate that permission.
But though we could imagine this system of permission, it would be very hard to see how photography could have flourished as it did if the requirement for permission had been built into the rules that govern it. Photography would have existed. It would have grown in importance over time. Professionals would have continued to use the technology as they did--since professionals could have more easily borne the burdens of the permission system. But the spread of photography to ordinary people would not have occurred. Nothing like that growth would have been realized. And certainly, nothing like that growth in a democratic technology of expression would have been realized.
I think that this is reflected in Rohan (Anglo-Saxon) and Gondor (post-Norman), and their roles in the books.
That's a little dubious. Tolkien goes out of his way a number of times to portray the Numenoreans as somehow nobler and better than the other peoples of Middle-earth, including the Rohirrim to whom they were historically related.
Now, that's not to say that Gondor hadn't fallen from its original lofty ideal, but I get the impression he still favoured Gondor over Rohan. He admired the heroism and enthusiasm of the Rohirrim, but still regarded them as rather primitive.
Most around here are gonna be confused when they watch the movie and there's only one monster.
Proving the theory that Slashdotters know far more about Beowulf clusters than Beowulf.
There are actually three monsters in Beowulf: Grendel, Grendel's mother, and the dragon. (Of course, Beowulf takes them on serially rather than in parallel, and he waits a good forty years or so between Grendel's ma and the dragon.)
(Hell, even Xena got this detail right, though in the Xena episode it was (predictably) Xena who did all the arse-kicking, while Beowulf mostly looked pretty.)
In fact, there are even more monsters if you count the monsters mentioned in random digressions, such as when Beowulf is meeting the Danes and mentions how he basically swam across the Baltic in full armour carrying a sword while fighting sea monsters.
As an aside, for Tolkien fans I would recommend the essay The Monsters and the Critics by J. R. R. himself, which argues that the monsters represent the central theme of the Beowulf poem.
That recent purchase of outdated World War 2 submarines from England still makes me laugh.
The Upholder class subs were actually built in the 80's. They were retired a few years later only because Thatcher had decided to build a bunch of nuclear subs as well.
What's your point, That he retained ability into fairly old age or what?
I was referring to the following bit from the Wikipedia article. I haven't read The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, but I have read My Brain is Open, and his drug use was mentioned there.
After 1971 he also took amphetamines, despite the concern of his friends, who bet him $500 that he could not stop taking amphetamines for a month. He won the bet, but complained that mathematics had been set back for a month. He complained, "Before, when I looked at a piece of blank paper my mind was filled with ideas. Now all I see is a blank piece of paper." The bet won, he promptly resumed his habit.
The 1 in 455 figure is for you an an individual. The absolute proability of such an event happening is very low, but if it did happen, it would affect *everyone*.
Yeah, I'm talking about the absolute probability.
The chance that I would be affected given that a significant asteroid impact into Earth occurred is almost 1. MYy point, however, was that the absolute probability is very low: given what we know of the Earth's past history, 1 in 455 is way too high an estimate for a cataclysmic natural disaster of sort described.
It's also fairly clear that, with more people alive now than at any previous point in history, the probability that any given human will experience such a major event is higher than it's ever been. That doesn't mean it's more likely to happen, just that there are more people who would be affected if it did.
What? I don't understand this point at all. Do you mean 'any given human alive now', or 'any human, out all humans who have ever lived'? I'm assuming you mean the former, because the latter makes no sense.
You just argued that any such event would affect everyone. So it doesn't matter if there's 5*10^9 or 5000 people. The probably that it would affect any particular human, given that it happened at all, is the same: almost 1.
The statistical risk of humans getting wiped out in the next 100 years due to a super volcano or asteroid or comet impact is 1 in 455.
I find that kind of hard to believe.
I'll admit I haven't yet read the article, so I'm assuming this figure 1/455 is an accurate summary of the article. If not, take this is as a criticism of the summary.
I think we can assume that this risk has been present for, say, the last million years at least, as it depends on external factors like asteroids and not human actions. This means that the chances of _not_ having a mass extinction within the last 10,000 years are (1-1/455)^100 =~ 0.8025 = 80.25%, and of not having one within the last 100,000 years are (1-454/455)^1000 = 0.11 = 11%.
Go back slightly further, and the probably of a mass extinction is almost a certainty.
Obviously mass extinctions happen, and one of them is probably going to finish us off one day or another. But this figure seems exaggerated.
What kind of probability estimate would you assign to the chance that some crazy government or malfunctioning computer system launches an ICBM within the next 100 years? I think a lot of the stuff you hear about this is alarmist propaganda, but I would still estimate the risk of us killing ourselves to be much higher than a natural disaster. The Earth has been here for millenia. We haven't.
'Mr. Schleicher said that students in countries that emphasized theorems and rote learning tended not to do as well as those that emphasized the more practical aspects of mathematics.'"
There's some serious false dichotomy here.
'Rote learning' in the sense it was once taught is not applicable to the modern era; though Feynman could compute logarithms in his head due to a very full mental lookup table, we cannot, and understandably so.
But 'theorems'? Theorems are simply pieces of mathematical knowledge. If you think they are useless frills, you have been badly taught.
Without knowing the basic rules which allow you to do computation, and the conditions under which the rules apply, 'practical mathematics' is nothing but a random set of staged problems.
You may know how to solve any of these problems, or the same problem with the numbers changed, but as soon as you encounter a new one, you're toast. This is not the way to reform mathematical education.
Speculation on reasons for the difference in click rates range from Firefox's integrated pop-up blocking to seeing the average Firefox user as more tech-savvy the average Internet Explorer user.
I see a lot of posters here talking about the first, but I think the phenonenon is entirely explicable from the second.
Firefox users are not drawn from a random segment of the population. I suspect they're largely still the early-adopter crowd of geeks and would-be geeks.
It would not surprise me to learn that the ad-clicking habits of this crowd differ substantially from Internet browsers at large. This difference has probably existed for years, even while most of them used IE, but was then invisible to the data-mining folks.
However, I think it will be largely the ad blocking which will get space in the minds of Internet advertisers. I hope that we can avoid a situation wherein sites deny access to Firefox users on the presumption that they would be blocking ads. (I guess one can always reset User-Agent to look like IE, but I don't think this is very easy in Firefox at present.)
Slashdot Mirror
Only on /. would you find people who get into the habit of thinking that internet access requires a network card.:-)
Well, I hadn't forgotten about dialup entirely. I was lumping it in with computers disconnected from the Internet for a reason: I figure if you're browsing Wikipedia a lot, especially with its images and other media files, that you'll probably prefer a DVD if you don't have high-speed.
I confess it's been quite a while since I used dialup, however, so you're probably correct that my prejudice is asserting itself.
I wouldn't think there are many people for which the price of a wikipedia DVD would be noticably less than the price of the phone calls to look things up in a given year.
Maybe. I wouldn't be surprised if there were (remote) places where dialup was expensive, because it required long-distance calls if nothing else.
I think the best argument for producing a DVD is that it would give people a nice way to contribute to the wikipedia foundation.
Agreed, like buying a copy of Linux from the FSF, it's mostly a gesture. Of course one can already donate directly, but getting something back is good encouragement. I was happy to receive a copy of Lessig's Free Culture when I became an associate member of the FSF, even though it would have been far cheaper just to buy the book from Amazon (or, cheapest of all, to simply read it online).
Wikipedia is available over HTTP in a much more up-to-date, interactive and dynamic format than DVDs.
Well, yes, if you want to read it you're probably not going to download the entire bloody encyclopedia to your local machine via bittorrent.
But some people would have valid reasons for wanting this. A lot of places resyndicate Wikipedia content, e.g. www.thefreedictionary.com. or answers.com; I'm exactly sure why these sites do it, but I can think or many valid reasons.
Maybe data miners or researchers want to run scripts on Wikipedia and make all kinds of conclusions (such things are entirely legal and above board, since the content is free).
The whole purpose of the DVD sets is... I don't know. I really don't.
Well, not all of us are connected to the Internet 24/7. Some of us have laptops without wireless Internet, and even computers without network cards at all.
Lastly, there are many places in the world where you can't get a reliable net connection at all (e.g. various places in Africa, Asia).
Man, your dryer died? Do you realize how much like a spoiled child you sound?
You realize there are millions of people on this planet who live on less than a dollar a day, right?
What the hell is the point of putting "Deutsch" and "Swahili" on your page, if you don't even support them as links?
Posted on the mailing list wikipedia-l 32 minutes ago:
From: Brion Vibber
Reply-To: wikipedia-l@wikimedia.org
To: Wikipedia-l, Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List, Wikimedia developers
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2005 04:47:56 -0800
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Wiki Problems?
Brion Vibber wrote:
> There was some sort of power failure at the colocation facility. We're
> in the process of rebooting and recovering machines.
The power failure was due to circuit breakers being tripped within the colocation facility; some of our servers have redundant power supplies but *both* circuits failed, causing all our machines and the network switch to unceremoniously shut down.
Whether a problem in MySQL, with our server configurations, or with the hardware (or some combination thereof), most of our database servers managed to glitch the data on disk when they went down. (Yes, we use InnoDB tables. This ain't good enough, apparently.)
The good news: one server maintained a good copy, which we've been copying to the others to get things back on track. We're now serving all wikis read-only.
The bad news: that copy was a bit over a day behind synchronization (it was stopped to run maintenance jobs), so in addition to slogging around 170gb of data to each DB server we have to apply the last day's update logs before we can restore read/write service.
I don't know when exactly we'll have everything editable again, but it should be within 12 hours.
The GFDL does need improvement though, there's a reason Creative Commons is getting so widely used and GFDL gets used by no one.
Wikipedia is no one?
But you're quite right that it needs to change. The potential for dead weight inherent in the invariant sections clause and the fact that the GFDL is GPL-incompatible in both directions is seriously sucky.
Wikipedia specifically avoids invariant sections for this reason, but the licence itself ought to be changed.
Read a newspaper. Today. Now. Then do it again tomorrow.
The fact that so very many people, presumably intelligent and educated people, could not realize this article is satirical bodes ill for the ability of geeks to digest and influence popular culture and opinion.
Jimbo Wales even personally drove off an admin from London who he disagreed with, usually he leaves it to his admins.
I'm assuming you're talking about Secretlondon?
I was disturbed to read about that, and it did make me rather more paranoid about the leadership of Wikipedia and possibility that their bias was infecting the place.
For now I will remain paranoid, but continue to edit. I haven't yet been convinced that the rightist flavour on Wikipedia is a consequence of its leadership and not simply its membership.
Though it looks like Wales behaved improperly here, it also might be that Secretlondon just had a bit of thin skin for dealing with firebreathing American rightists (not too hard to believe).
People should face up to it - there needs to be more than one wiki page out there for controversial people like Joseph Stalin, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and whatnot.
I take it these should serve as examples of biased articles? Can you describe why you feel that, for example, the Ronald Reagan article is deeply biased?
I should say that I'm no fan of Reagan, and have little sympathy for rightist views of this kind.
G$? (G-String for those that aren't use to equating $ with string ;))
Hmm, a terminating $. I think I used to use that back in those dark QuickBasic years.
You're brave to drop VB references (I'm guessing) on Slashdot.
I just experimented with the Driving Direction feature. I fed in my work address in Waterloo, Ontario and my father's home address in Dundas, Ontario (a small town not too far away).
For reference Mapquest gives a reasonable route (in fact, exactly the one I take) and reports the expected time as 63 min. and estimated distance as 38.35 miles.
Holy crap is Google Maps on crack. (I know, it's beta, but it's funny still.) Its expected driving time of 5 hrs. 42 min. with estimated distance of 394 miles.
For those familiar with Ontario geography, its planned route takes me from Dundas (near Hamilton) up the 403 to Toronto, up the 400 North through Barrie all the way to Bracebridge.
Then, somehow, it tells you to take the exit to the 401, as though you were still in Toronto. This confuses me, as it never told me to go back south along the 400 or take any turns. From this point the directions are reasonable, if you had wanted to go to Waterloo from Toronto.
I'm perplexed at how the software could lose track of location like that. Others have reported reasonable driving information for the States, so it's likely that their Canadian driving information is just spotty.
What about the rest of the planet?
I was with you in the righteous indignation until I discovered they did actually include Canada, even if they didn't label the provinces. Zoom in and you'll see a bunch of Canadian cities.
Oddly, though, Kitchener-Waterloo does not appear on the map, even though they have Guelph, Cambridge, and even St. Jacobs and St. Agatha.
Instead the significant urban area between St. Jacobs and Cambridge is simply marked "Woodside National Historic Park". Which exists, it's true, but it's kind of like replacing 'New York City' on a map with 'Central Park'.
Maybe some Google coders are embittered University of Waterloo graduates who want the place swept off the map?
[And what transport system has? But no matter.]
I don't know how many times I've heard people of a market-libertarian bent denigrate the public transit system because it "costs too much" while upholding the wondrous laissez-faire wunderkind that is the highway system.
A state subsidy is a state subsidy; though it's funny that accusations of socialism are tossed about only for public transit (or public healthcare).
Notify Ministry of Peace? (Y/y):
Nice, but it should be the Ministry of Love.
You know you're a geek when you prefer "serially" and "in parallel" to "one at a time" and "simultaneously".
Yeah, but I kind of gave up any non-geek cred when I posted about Beowulf and J. R. R. Tolkien on Slashdot.
Actually, I gave up any non-geek cred a long, long time ago. Probably during my Transformers phase.
A relevant quote from Free Culture (original text available available here):
I think that this is reflected in Rohan (Anglo-Saxon) and Gondor (post-Norman), and their roles in the books.
That's a little dubious. Tolkien goes out of his way a number of times to portray the Numenoreans as somehow nobler and better than the other peoples of Middle-earth, including the Rohirrim to whom they were historically related.
Now, that's not to say that Gondor hadn't fallen from its original lofty ideal, but I get the impression he still favoured Gondor over Rohan. He admired the heroism and enthusiasm of the Rohirrim, but still regarded them as rather primitive.
Most around here are gonna be confused when they watch the movie and there's only one monster.
Proving the theory that Slashdotters know far more about Beowulf clusters than Beowulf.
There are actually three monsters in Beowulf: Grendel, Grendel's mother, and the dragon. (Of course, Beowulf takes them on serially rather than in parallel, and he waits a good forty years or so between Grendel's ma and the dragon.)
(Hell, even Xena got this detail right, though in the Xena episode it was (predictably) Xena who did all the arse-kicking, while Beowulf mostly looked pretty.)
In fact, there are even more monsters if you count the monsters mentioned in random digressions, such as when Beowulf is meeting the Danes and mentions how he basically swam across the Baltic in full armour carrying a sword while fighting sea monsters.
As an aside, for Tolkien fans I would recommend the essay The Monsters and the Critics by J. R. R. himself, which argues that the monsters represent the central theme of the Beowulf poem.
That recent purchase of outdated World War 2 submarines from England still makes me laugh.
The Upholder class subs were actually built in the 80's. They were retired a few years later only because Thatcher had decided to build a bunch of nuclear subs as well.
See this CBC story.
I was referring to the following bit from the Wikipedia article. I haven't read The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, but I have read My Brain is Open, and his drug use was mentioned there.
...and not a single mention of Paul Erdös?
The 1 in 455 figure is for you an an individual. The absolute proability of such an event happening is very low, but if it did happen, it would affect *everyone*.
Yeah, I'm talking about the absolute probability.
The chance that I would be affected given that a significant asteroid impact into Earth occurred is almost 1. MYy point, however, was that the absolute probability is very low: given what we know of the Earth's past history, 1 in 455 is way too high an estimate for a cataclysmic natural disaster of sort described.
It's also fairly clear that, with more people alive now than at any previous point in history, the probability that any given human will experience such a major event is higher than it's ever been. That doesn't mean it's more likely to happen, just that there are more people who would be affected if it did.
What? I don't understand this point at all. Do you mean 'any given human alive now', or 'any human, out all humans who have ever lived'? I'm assuming you mean the former, because the latter makes no sense.
You just argued that any such event would affect everyone. So it doesn't matter if there's 5*10^9 or 5000 people. The probably that it would affect any particular human, given that it happened at all, is the same: almost 1.
The statistical risk of humans getting wiped out in the next 100 years due to a super volcano or asteroid or comet impact is 1 in 455.
I find that kind of hard to believe.
I'll admit I haven't yet read the article, so I'm assuming this figure 1/455 is an accurate summary of the article. If not, take this is as a criticism of the summary.
I think we can assume that this risk has been present for, say, the last million years at least, as it depends on external factors like asteroids and not human actions. This means that the chances of _not_ having a mass extinction within the last 10,000 years are (1-1/455)^100 =~ 0.8025 = 80.25%, and of not having one within the last 100,000 years are (1-454/455)^1000 = 0.11 = 11%.
Go back slightly further, and the probably of a mass extinction is almost a certainty.
Obviously mass extinctions happen, and one of them is probably going to finish us off one day or another. But this figure seems exaggerated.
What kind of probability estimate would you assign to the chance that some crazy government or malfunctioning computer system launches an ICBM within the next 100 years? I think a lot of the stuff you hear about this is alarmist propaganda, but I would still estimate the risk of us killing ourselves to be much higher than a natural disaster. The Earth has been here for millenia. We haven't.
'Mr. Schleicher said that students in countries that emphasized theorems and rote learning tended not to do as well as those that emphasized the more practical aspects of mathematics.'"
There's some serious false dichotomy here.
'Rote learning' in the sense it was once taught is not applicable to the modern era; though Feynman could compute logarithms in his head due to a very full mental lookup table, we cannot, and understandably so.
But 'theorems'? Theorems are simply pieces of mathematical knowledge. If you think they are useless frills, you have been badly taught.
Without knowing the basic rules which allow you to do computation, and the conditions under which the rules apply, 'practical mathematics' is nothing but a random set of staged problems.
You may know how to solve any of these problems, or the same problem with the numbers changed, but as soon as you encounter a new one, you're toast. This is not the way to reform mathematical education.
Speculation on reasons for the difference in click rates range from Firefox's integrated pop-up blocking to seeing the average Firefox user as more tech-savvy the average Internet Explorer user.
I see a lot of posters here talking about the first, but I think the phenonenon is entirely explicable from the second.
Firefox users are not drawn from a random segment of the population. I suspect they're largely still the early-adopter crowd of geeks and would-be geeks.
It would not surprise me to learn that the ad-clicking habits of this crowd differ substantially from Internet browsers at large. This difference has probably existed for years, even while most of them used IE, but was then invisible to the data-mining folks.
However, I think it will be largely the ad blocking which will get space in the minds of Internet advertisers. I hope that we can avoid a situation wherein sites deny access to Firefox users on the presumption that they would be blocking ads. (I guess one can always reset User-Agent to look like IE, but I don't think this is very easy in Firefox at present.)