"Studies suggest that Wikipedia's reliability has improved in recent years, and it is increasingly used as a tertiary source." [1] [wikipedia.org].
Well, that's certainly a reliable source for accuracy about Wikipedia's accuracy. Studies suggest that my Slashdot comments over the years indicate that I should be elected President of the United States in 2012 http://www.xemacs.org/~steve
And here's a fun parting thought: if a source is so often wrong about the things that I do know about, I'll be paranoid about trusting it about the things that I don't know about.
If you want to measure the accuracy of Wikipedia, then let's have evidence based on a survey of pages, comparing that to other sources (whether it's the media, or other encyclopedias).
Every single Wikipedia page that I have in depth knowledge on (including the XEmacs page) is wrong and/or incomplete.
Why do you include profiles of baseball players if you cannot be bothered to get their playing history and stats correct? Why should I assume that given that sloppiness, that anything else there is of higher quality?
The wiki might be good for party facts, but not if really need to know something.
How many better sources are there?
The sources that Wikipedia cites?
*Every* article on Wikipedia that deals with something that I have in-depth knowledge on is wrong in some way or another. I sense a pattern.
The earliest computers worked by doing computations multiple times and using a majority vote on which of the results returned was correct. So long as one does the same thing with stuff returned from Internet searches, that usually leads to a pretty good result. If one also makes the assumption that Wikipedia is wrong on a controversial subject, it usually leads to an even better result.
You are a braver man than I am, I will not show my wife the older games and expect her to understand why they are important. Gaming history is perhaps the least important aspect of history.
I'd say that Roguelikes' ongoing popularity must be at least in part _because_ of the primitive graphics.
I would have to agree. I've played both Rogue/Hack/Nethack for curses and Nethack for Qt and I prefer the curses version.
the dashing asterisk can be whatever you imagine it to be, and that makes it better. It's just like the way books are satisfying in a way that movies can never quite be.
You're right, but for the wrong reason. Books are a far, far better medium for laying out a rich story.
I enjoy playing World of Warcraft, but nothing I've encountered there has excited me more than killing the wizard of Yendor and beginning the dangerous ascent back up to victory.
No, thank them. Obama, being a fool, is about to learn why those loopholes exist.
Obama is a fool, but these aren't loopholes.
Business income taxes are probably the most evil taxes of them all. Exactly how many times do you need to tax something?
Businesses pay sales tax. This is passed on to the customers, but it results in fewer sales and higher prices.
Businesses pay property taxes on the land where they operate.
Businesses pay certain employee withholding taxes (SSI, FICA, etc.).
Incorporated businesses pay dividends which are taxable.
Further taxes appear as business and operating "licenses".
Businesses pay income tax on what is left over.
The average unit of currency that finally reaches an employee's or shareholder's hands has already been taxed several times.
As to the "loophole" that Obama is closing, only a handful of countries (fewer than 5 the last time I checked) taxed income from outside the country and two of them were Sudan and Libya. What splendid company we are in!
Actually it doesn't. Age matters. The difference between a cult and a religion is that a cult is something that you join and a religion is something that your parents make you join.
I don't know what's actually more popular, but I have seen two ways for Chinese input into phones. There are probably more, I'm by no means an expert.
(I'm more familiar with Japanese input, than Chinese, but the principles are the same).
Stroke recognition is a well-established technology as there is a very precise order in how characters must be written. At least in Japan, those weren't very popular - handwriting is a fast fading art. The easiest method is to type in the word phonetically (romaji in Japanese, pinyin in Chinese) and then do a dictionary lookup to select the word you're trying to write. I found it easier to type in Japanese on a cellphone than in English.
The finance company I consult at has its entire sales platform built on VB6/IIS5 and (shock horror) VBScript so it only works on IE6. This was sold to them as an approach by MS back in the day - the platform will cost over $20m - $30m to replace...
Vendor lock-in does have its own costs. Was this factored into Microsoft's TCO surveys? (The company I work for has similar pending upgrade costs, though probably much, much higher than that - they're not done spending all the money they have to spend on IE7 compatibility for internal apps).
the average commercial programmer only generates something like 10 SLOCS per day
That's pretty close. After you have factored in documentation, testing, etc. it's a fairly reasonable number and it's only on new development. My own SLOC/day in the last year is way negative, but that's because I'm currently working on maintaining an existing system (and the negative count means I'm saving money by getting rid of ancient crap that wasn't being used and no longer needs to be maintained).
Taser has a right to defend their trademark. On the other hand, it will be interesting to see if they can defend a word that has become synonymous with stun gun.
Merriam-Webster gives as a definition:
Function:
trademark
--used for a gun that fires electrified darts to stun and immobilize a person
Sorry, but if you're writing an article claiming that casual gaming is ousting hardcore titles, you don't pick the world's most notorious timesink as supporting evidence.
I've played World of Warcraft every day for over the past two and a half years and there is NO WAY I am addicted. Nope. No chance at all.
(Oops, gotta run, guild raid on Ulduar coming up in 10 minutes)
I'm OK with outlawing any unsolicited email from a business, period.
Unfortunately, since businesses own the government, here and abroad, that's unlikely to ever happen.
How can you write something so idiotically stupid and then write...
Best we can do is make it unprofitable to send spam
something insightful?
Murder is outlawed everywhere on earth. Does that mean that the murder issue is resolved?
When the economics of email is such that the recipient bears the cost, unsolicited email is always going to be a problem.
Laws do help sometimes. My Philippine phone receives unsolicited SMS text message ads all the time. My US phone does not. It's still economics. More Filipinos have cell phones than have regular access to email and SMS is *cheap*.
An E-postage paid from sender to recipient would stop SPAM dead without any need of useless and unenforceable laws. Fix the real problem. Fix SMTP.
It is possible to design a machine that is secure even from someone who has physical access, but doing so is expensive and involves compromises in usability that normal users would never accept.
+1
Put a substance inside that was explosive with oxygen, then vacuum seal the container or something like that as another poster mentioned. It would never fly. You'd never be able to sell those anywhere with anything remotely resembling product (or employee) safety laws. Even at the end of normal, useful life, disposal would be a nightmare.
The only safe alternative I can think of would be to always boot from an unwritable, unchangeable fixed media and keep everything in volatile RAM, but no one is going to be happy with that.
Slashdot Mirror
"Studies suggest that Wikipedia's reliability has improved in recent years, and it is increasingly used as a tertiary source." [1] [wikipedia.org].
Well, that's certainly a reliable source for accuracy about Wikipedia's accuracy. Studies suggest that my Slashdot comments over the years indicate that I should be elected President of the United States in 2012 http://www.xemacs.org/~steve
Actually, modern journalism is about profit.
If that is the case, why are so many newspapers in trouble right now?
Just asking ...
And here's a fun parting thought: if a source is so often wrong about the things that I do know about, I'll be paranoid about trusting it about the things that I don't know about.
Amen!
Something more reliable, like the newspaper?
Newspapers are failing, big time. Boston Globe will go under soon. Maybe NYT and Wikipedia will do so at the same time. Trifecta!
If you want to measure the accuracy of Wikipedia, then let's have evidence based on a survey of pages, comparing that to other sources (whether it's the media, or other encyclopedias).
Every single Wikipedia page that I have in depth knowledge on (including the XEmacs page) is wrong and/or incomplete.
Why do you include profiles of baseball players if you cannot be bothered to get their playing history and stats correct? Why should I assume that given that sloppiness, that anything else there is of higher quality?
Wikipedia's now demonstrably equal to or more reliable than journalists!
That's an embarrassingly low entry level. Kind of like saying that it's as good as a kdawson posted article because kdawson is a /. editor.
Hey, maybe kdawson is an alias for Jimmy Wales?
The wiki might be good for party facts, but not if really need to know something.
How many better sources are there?
The sources that Wikipedia cites?
*Every* article on Wikipedia that deals with something that I have in-depth knowledge on is wrong in some way or another. I sense a pattern.
The earliest computers worked by doing computations multiple times and using a majority vote on which of the results returned was correct. So long as one does the same thing with stuff returned from Internet searches, that usually leads to a pretty good result. If one also makes the assumption that Wikipedia is wrong on a controversial subject, it usually leads to an even better result.
In Hack/Nethack, the successor to Rogue.
I maintain the similarities are there
They are.
You are a braver man than I am, I will not show my wife the older games and expect her to understand why they are important. Gaming history is perhaps the least important aspect of history.
I'd say that Roguelikes' ongoing popularity must be at least in part _because_ of the primitive graphics.
I would have to agree. I've played both Rogue/Hack/Nethack for curses and Nethack for Qt and I prefer the curses version.
the dashing asterisk can be whatever you imagine it to be, and that makes it better. It's just like the way books are satisfying in a way that movies can never quite be.
You're right, but for the wrong reason. Books are a far, far better medium for laying out a rich story.
I enjoy playing World of Warcraft, but nothing I've encountered there has excited me more than killing the wizard of Yendor and beginning the dangerous ascent back up to victory.
Offtopic? Idiot moderator.
I never got a playable Moria compiled on any of my systems. Basically, it was a VMS only game. The Unix ports never worked all that well.
Or maybe just the game play sucked. I never seemed to get past the rooms of spreading lice.
No, thank them. Obama, being a fool, is about to learn why those loopholes exist.
Obama is a fool, but these aren't loopholes.
Business income taxes are probably the most evil taxes of them all. Exactly how many times do you need to tax something?
Businesses pay sales tax. This is passed on to the customers, but it results in fewer sales and higher prices.
Businesses pay property taxes on the land where they operate.
Businesses pay certain employee withholding taxes (SSI, FICA, etc.).
Incorporated businesses pay dividends which are taxable.
Further taxes appear as business and operating "licenses".
Businesses pay income tax on what is left over.
The average unit of currency that finally reaches an employee's or shareholder's hands has already been taxed several times.
As to the "loophole" that Obama is closing, only a handful of countries (fewer than 5 the last time I checked) taxed income from outside the country and two of them were Sudan and Libya. What splendid company we are in!
I, for one, welcome our new Zimbabwean overlord.
OS X, nearly all its users seem to be drooling fanbois, but as you say this seems to be changing, and this may just be the set I know.
I've never understood this characterization. I like OS X for two reasons - 1) underneath the hood, it is pure Unix goodness and 2) my wife likes it.
Linux is the system I've worked towards most of my adult life, but if you must assign a fanboy tag to me, I am absolutely a Unix fanboy.
But really, how can you possibly stand running a system that you haven't contributed source code to?
Size matters
Actually it doesn't. Age matters. The difference between a cult and a religion is that a cult is something that you join and a religion is something that your parents make you join.
the followers of the one true Emacs, or the XEmacs heresy.
Heathen! We are all Brothers in the Church of Emacs.
I don't know what's actually more popular, but I have seen two ways for Chinese input into phones. There are probably more, I'm by no means an expert.
(I'm more familiar with Japanese input, than Chinese, but the principles are the same).
Stroke recognition is a well-established technology as there is a very precise order in how characters must be written. At least in Japan, those weren't very popular - handwriting is a fast fading art. The easiest method is to type in the word phonetically (romaji in Japanese, pinyin in Chinese) and then do a dictionary lookup to select the word you're trying to write. I found it easier to type in Japanese on a cellphone than in English.
I mean, how many times have you opened up a page and said to yourself "Sweet, it's a PDF, now I can...".
All the time at work. And replace the "..." with "print it out".
I can't even think of a good example of something you can do with a PDF that you can't do with a properly designed web page or an RTF document.
You have a small mind. Government forms and payroll stubs are two important uses.
(For usage as an "official" document, exact format is *everything*).
Now, has anyone ever used PDF to print counterfeit money? There are some limitations ...
I can't understand what is the need to use pdf.
For web usage, none at all, really. For printing, it's supposed to guarantee WYSI(R)WYG[1] output. No other document format does that.
[1] What You See Is (Really) What You Get
The government passes a law saying I'm responsible for the tax liability of someone else's property?
That's just nonsensical.
So are all the trillions of US$ being thrown at bankers who gambled and lost. What else is new?
The finance company I consult at has its entire sales platform built on VB6/IIS5 and (shock horror) VBScript so it only works on IE6. This was sold to them as an approach by MS back in the day - the platform will cost over $20m - $30m to replace...
Vendor lock-in does have its own costs. Was this factored into Microsoft's TCO surveys?
(The company I work for has similar pending upgrade costs, though probably much, much higher than that - they're not done spending all the money they have to spend on IE7 compatibility for internal apps).
the average commercial programmer only generates something like 10 SLOCS per day
That's pretty close. After you have factored in documentation, testing, etc. it's a fairly reasonable number and it's only on new development. My own SLOC/day in the last year is way negative, but that's because I'm currently working on maintaining an existing system (and the negative count means I'm saving money by getting rid of ancient crap that wasn't being used and no longer needs to be maintained).
Taser has a right to defend their trademark. On the other hand, it will be interesting to see if they can defend a word that has become synonymous with stun gun.
Merriam-Webster gives as a definition:
Function:
trademark
--used for a gun that fires electrified darts to stun and immobilize a person
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/taser
Contrast that definition to another (real) common word that has been trademarked (windows). Neither Microsoft nor trademark appear at all.
Sorry, but if you're writing an article claiming that casual gaming is ousting hardcore titles, you don't pick the world's most notorious timesink as supporting evidence.
I've played World of Warcraft every day for over the past two and a half years and there is NO WAY I am addicted. Nope. No chance at all.
(Oops, gotta run, guild raid on Ulduar coming up in 10 minutes)
I'm OK with outlawing any unsolicited email from a business, period.
Unfortunately, since businesses own the government, here and abroad, that's unlikely to ever happen.
How can you write something so idiotically stupid and then write ...
Best we can do is make it unprofitable to send spam
something insightful?
Murder is outlawed everywhere on earth. Does that mean that the murder issue is resolved?
When the economics of email is such that the recipient bears the cost, unsolicited email is always going to be a problem.
Laws do help sometimes. My Philippine phone receives unsolicited SMS text message ads all the time. My US phone does not. It's still economics. More Filipinos have cell phones than have regular access to email and SMS is *cheap*.
An E-postage paid from sender to recipient would stop SPAM dead without any need of useless and unenforceable laws. Fix the real problem. Fix SMTP.
It is possible to design a machine that is secure even from someone who has physical access, but doing so is expensive and involves compromises in usability that normal users would never accept.
+1
Put a substance inside that was explosive with oxygen, then vacuum seal the container or something like that as another poster mentioned. It would never fly. You'd never be able to sell those anywhere with anything remotely resembling product (or employee) safety laws. Even at the end of normal, useful life, disposal would be a nightmare.
The only safe alternative I can think of would be to always boot from an unwritable, unchangeable fixed media and keep everything in volatile RAM, but no one is going to be happy with that.
Not all that is possible is practical.