A great deal of your post is group-dependent. I read a (fairly small) number of groups where SNR is very high, trolls are few and even occasionally entertaining and spam is *extremely* low. However, they are not high-profile groups, and one of them is moderated.
Fourteen incidents in thirty years, precisely one of which resulted in actual damage to either humans or the landscape (two guys got irradiated, both survived). That's a pretty good safety record: it's better than the oil industry, for a start.
France has gotten pretty good at it over the years. They have the most advanced non-military nuclear technology in the world, by some yards. IIRC they've also never had a nuclear accident, a nuclear scare, or any trouble (beyond some stupid politics in the 60s over bombs in the pacific, and then some stupid politics in the 80s over disposal) with their industry screwing up.
~cHris, who would be genuinely interested in counter arguments if cites can be provided.
System wide or not, the Bush administration has provided ample evidence that they are far more prone to executive abuses than any previous administration in recent memory.
There is an alternative analysis. Governments in the past have tended to hide their screw-ups and executive abuses pretty thoroughly and pretty effectively. Some have been caught (eg. Nixon) but one can theorise that we haven't heard everything that's gone on, fairly safely. I would suggest that the difference with the Bush regime is not that they have commited more abuses but that they have been signally careless and ineffective at covering them up. They've tended to get caught more often. Why that might be is an exercise for the reader.
On the other hand, their hit-rate at getting away with abuses, executive or otherwise, blunders, lies and arrant stupidity is amazingly high. It is possible that what we're seeing is actually a quite intelligent strategic shift: rather than trying too hard not to get caught, get really good at making it so that getting caught doesn't matter. It's a sounder strategy in the long term.
As far as I'm aware, that last was de facto repealed by US-PATRIOT, since the un-supported 'reason', "We think they might be, or might be associated with, terrorists" is now considered sufficient for arresting someone.
he past forty or so years of data have shown us that an encounter with one gun is significantly more likely to result in a casualty than an encounter in which both parties are armed. Also keep in mind that most incidents that are terminated without shots fired go unreported.
Hi. I'm not attacking you, I'm not anti-guns. Having got that out of the way, could you provide cite(s) for this statement? I've been through this argument with a number of americans in the last twenty years and no-one I've ever talked to has claimed this, let alone substantiated it. If it is a substantial claim, then my viewpoint on this issue is about to undergo a significant change.
I'm not sure what the OP intended, but what I read from his post was that the 'perfect' (or, in my opinion, the 'ok' flag) would have the effect that edits would have to be checked by a bureaucrat prior to becoming visible, not that articles would become uneditable.
To someone not in europe or north america, this may be the only encyclopedia they ever see. If that is the case, quibbling over a disputed birthdate seems silly.
I'd say that it's just as likely to be the only encyclopaedia an American sees as it is to be the only encyclopaedia someone in Japan sees; more, in fact, but that gets into a rant about the relative values of their elementary education systems that this is not the place for.
With your last sentence, however, you've revealed that you have absolutely no idea what an encyclpaedia actually is, or indeed of the concept of scholarship. An encyclopaedia is (and the Wikipedia aims to be) a reliable source of information. If you fail to quibble about the birth dates, or more rigorously, fail to mention the fact that there is a quibble possible about the birth dates and why, you are not providing reliable information. That is the point of the article.
Scholarship requires rigour. The internet merely provides recursion.
I do not believe this would be practicable with a population the size of the United States. Finland's population is around 2% the size of America's, the Netherlands is about 7%, Denmark is about 2% again, and Switzerland is about 3.5%. These are pretty representative of developed nations who maintain a National Service policy. If you scale up to the level of the US, you'd see a standing army at any one time of something along the lines of sixty to sixty-five million (that's a finger-in-the-air guess at the demographics of America, not a checked number), of which nearly all would be NS teenagers. This is not a healthy state of affairs, I would argue, and would certainly be a cripplingly expensive one.
Given that the creator of the Daleks (Terry Nation) has been dead for quite some time, it's not so much him as his estate that has a say in the Dalek brand.
although the way the President was given a free hand to declare war it's not too far off.
The President was not given a free hand to declare war. It takes Congress to declare war, and Congress did too much work to stop Presidents from having that power to ever give it back.
The work-around they came up with for Vietnam, however, is still in place: which is that the President can order troops out and invade places and so on without actually ever having a war. Gets you out of various other annoying legal things too, like the whole Prisoners of War issue ("Hey, guys, we never declared war on Afghanistan, therefore they can't be POWs...").
The spiritual truths in all Earth's religions are basically the same: 1. There is a [higher being/a collective of higher beings/a higher force] which must be [revered/worshipped/honored].
Except, for example, Buddhism. [1]
2. You should be nice to people who profess to hold the same spiritual belief as you.
Except, for example, Buddhism.
3. People who do not fall in the previous category are [doomed/below your standing/misguided] and should be [ignored/converted/killed].
Except, for example, Buddhism.
In fact, your initial statement is completely false as examined by your ensuing points. There are a number of religions that do not follow point 3, for example; enough so that it was considered an aberration when the Peoples of the Book introduced the idea.
Examine the Ba'hai some time. Or any one of several elements of Contemporary Paganism. Or the Dinka in southern Africa.... what you seem to have meant is, "The Christians, the Moslems and some Jews, along with elements of Sikhism and Hinduism, on average believe that they're the only people worth inviting round to tea and are willing to support idiots like Bush or fanatics like Khomainei in order to have the chance to throw rocks at everyone else".
And even there, the variance between denominations (for example between Shi'ite and Ismaelian within Islam, or Eastern Orthodox vs. Southern Baptist within Christianity) is so radical that they're barely recognizable as the same religion.
~cHris
[1] I appreciate that you probably put in 'collective of higher beings' as a gesture towards Nirvanist and related philosophies, but you lost that point on 'must be [revered/honoured/worshipped]'; all of those things apply to the various Bodhisattva, but none apply to Nirvana, and none apply to the Bodhisattva (at a philosophical level) more than they apply to everyone and everything else.
I'm aware of the cost of a 35mm print for cinematic release, however, the indepenent and guerrilla film-makers are not the ones complaining about people beating the artificial scarcities created by staggered release through internet piracy. It's the blockbuster makers who have an issue with that, and for them, the solution I presented is more than feasible: again I say, LOTR.
Why? Well, take the movie Galaxy Quest. The UK theatrical release date was the same as the US DVD release date. Given the prevalence of international sales via, say, eBay and Amazon, I can imagine people being tempted to buy a DVD and sell it if they don't like it, or buy a secondhand one.
There is an answer to this, which certain high-profile and high-revenue projects have recently used and made popular (Cf. Peter Jackson's LOTR project): release the damn theatrical cuts on the same day world-wide. The old communications barrier is non-existant, the only reasons not to do this are psychological, and as LOTR etc. proved you can make a great deal of money and generate a great deal of good-will very quickly by doing this.
Oh yeah, and it also completely eradicates the 'international piracy risk' argument.
This is also something that the better Open Source MacOS X applications are doing very well: Exim, for example, GNUPG, Apache, and so on. Experienced users and coders have prepared disk images (.dmg's) which auto-mount and allow you to run the standard MacOS X installer shield, and when you've done that it *all just works*. You can then go off and hack the/usr/local/etc/ configuration files to your hearts content, but the application works.
Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.
These measures do not prevent anyone from doing that. They merely allow the government to take note when he does. I don't mean to say I like it, but your implication that people aren't allowed to watch you move around is not, in my reading, supported by the document.
Now if only I could set it up in a "Neko" mode where it can play "chase the mouse" with the mouse pointer...that would be cool.
There was one of these a while back, 6 or 7 years ago, on windows platforms. It wasn't a help function, it was just an amusement program: the pointer turned into a mouse, the cat chased it around the desktop, and if it was inside a 'window' the cat couldn't get in and would stalk around the borders of the window waiting for the mouse to come out. It was amusing. For about 10 minutes.
Right now, the government(s) don't want you to believe it's just a coincidence. They want you to believe that it's the Axis of Evil. No-one's actually blamed this fire on terrorists yet, but I'm cynical enough to say 'wait three weeks'.
Making Microsoft remove media player (and who knows maybe others will happen later).
Making them provide *complete* specs such that other software companies can make totally compatible products.
How about an NTFS implementation for Linux with complete read/write compatibility. How about open office reading/writing all of Office's document formats perfectly.
It should be pointed that the complete disclosure clause under dicussion by the EU Commission is of client-server application formats and APIs. That is, it only applies to stopping Microsoft leveraging control of the desktop into control of the server market. So neither of your examples would actually be covered by this penalty, but some other very useful things (SMB stuff, all the IE-only hacks which bad html authors constantly abuse, asp; this is not an exhaustive list) will be covered.
I've long had a theory that the RIAA/MPAA aren't really against piracy, but they are really against a peer-to-peer economy that is coming up.
Courtney Love agrees with you. The fear of the gate-keepers is that someone will knock down the back wall: that physical reproduction costs will become (have become) so cheap that artists can communicate directly with audiance, without a cost-of-entry prohibition dictated by physical manufacturing and distribution costs. This will remove the need for Capex-rich gate-keepers, and will therefore diminish or entirely remove the market segment they inhabit, and their business models along with it.
They're not scared about copying. That's free advertising. They're scared about artist->audiance direct distribution. That's a death knell.
Now what I want to know is, why don't we see Halloween type leaks from inside the RIAA/MPAA? Does no-one in there care enough? Do they not use email?
Not all tasks need to be done from the terminal. But there are enough that do that someone who has only used Windows will have trouble. Linux GUIs are simply not even close to those in Windows for administering the entire system. Even with Mandrake I can't avoid the command line completely even if I wanted to. And even when I can, its not nearly as intuitive as Windows.
This has been one of my stock rants for a long time. The real thing that the GUI people need to write and debug and test and all those wonderful things is a strong set of clear, well-designed administration applications which interface between the user and the text files. You can hack the config file, and read the manual page, and so on. You should not have to. That's the best-of-both-worlds situation that the Open Source community is driving for, right?
I only know of one free-unix vendor who has done anything which successfully approaches this, and they aren't perfect in it (but they're very very good
at it). That's Apple: all the usual text config files, and cli control utilities, exist under MacOS X, but anything which shipped with the system and needs configuring can be configured through the control panel GUI [1]. A good example is network configuration: I know how to use ifconfig and often do, but I can perform the same configuration tasks through the GUI, and if I didn't know what I was doing, then the error-checking and option-based nature of that would make it a lot easier to get right.
There are some holes in Jaguar, some of which are fixed in Panther (for example, you can now write Windows-compatible data DVD-ROMs from the GUI, rather than having to do it manually from the command-line using standard GNU software). But they've done a damn good job of making a free-unix system administrable by novices.
That's where GNOME and KDE and everyone else need to be heading: be at least as good as, and preferably better than, Apple at making Free Unix accessible to novices.
~cHris
[1] One tip though: if you plan to mess with something via CLI and it's GUI-configurable, close the 'System Preferences' application first. If you don't it will become very confused.
Let me also state that all those feature's are fine, IF you want to run windows. Personally, i prefer linux (for a variety of reasons), and therefore can't run MS office all the time. That being the case, I would rather just use one office suite, not 2.
To me, this is a persuasive argument for buying a Mac. [1] It persuaded me, and I've had a really good year with that decision.
~cHris
[1] If, for linux, you are prepared to read 'Some form of Open-source Unix'
Slashdot Mirror
A great deal of your post is group-dependent. I read a (fairly small) number of groups where SNR is very high, trolls are few and even occasionally entertaining and spam is *extremely* low. However, they are not high-profile groups, and one of them is moderated.
~cHris
Fourteen incidents in thirty years, precisely one of which resulted in actual damage to either humans or the landscape (two guys got irradiated, both survived). That's a pretty good safety record: it's better than the oil industry, for a start.
~cHris
France has gotten pretty good at it over the years. They have the most advanced non-military nuclear technology in the world, by some yards. IIRC they've also never had a nuclear accident, a nuclear scare, or any trouble (beyond some stupid politics in the 60s over bombs in the pacific, and then some stupid politics in the 80s over disposal) with their industry screwing up.
~cHris, who would be genuinely interested in counter arguments if cites can be provided.
There is an alternative analysis. Governments in the past have tended to hide their screw-ups and executive abuses pretty thoroughly and pretty effectively. Some have been caught (eg. Nixon) but one can theorise that we haven't heard everything that's gone on, fairly safely. I would suggest that the difference with the Bush regime is not that they have commited more abuses but that they have been signally careless and ineffective at covering them up. They've tended to get caught more often. Why that might be is an exercise for the reader.
On the other hand, their hit-rate at getting away with abuses, executive or otherwise, blunders, lies and arrant stupidity is amazingly high. It is possible that what we're seeing is actually a quite intelligent strategic shift: rather than trying too hard not to get caught, get really good at making it so that getting caught doesn't matter. It's a sounder strategy in the long term.
~cHrisAs far as I'm aware, that last was de facto repealed by US-PATRIOT, since the un-supported 'reason', "We think they might be, or might be associated with, terrorists" is now considered sufficient for arresting someone.
~cHris
Hi. I'm not attacking you, I'm not anti-guns. Having got that out of the way, could you provide cite(s) for this statement? I've been through this argument with a number of americans in the last twenty years and no-one I've ever talked to has claimed this, let alone substantiated it. If it is a substantial claim, then my viewpoint on this issue is about to undergo a significant change.
~cHrisA whole bunch of people have focussed on this one, yours just happens to be the post I decided to reply to.
From the article:
HTH, HAND.
~cHrisI'm not sure what the OP intended, but what I read from his post was that the 'perfect' (or, in my opinion, the 'ok' flag) would have the effect that edits would have to be checked by a bureaucrat prior to becoming visible, not that articles would become uneditable.
~cHrisI'd say that it's just as likely to be the only encyclopaedia an American sees as it is to be the only encyclopaedia someone in Japan sees; more, in fact, but that gets into a rant about the relative values of their elementary education systems that this is not the place for.
With your last sentence, however, you've revealed that you have absolutely no idea what an encyclpaedia actually is, or indeed of the concept of scholarship. An encyclopaedia is (and the Wikipedia aims to be) a reliable source of information. If you fail to quibble about the birth dates, or more rigorously, fail to mention the fact that there is a quibble possible about the birth dates and why, you are not providing reliable information. That is the point of the article.
Scholarship requires rigour. The internet merely provides recursion.
~cHrisI do not believe this would be practicable with a population the size of the United States. Finland's population is around 2% the size of America's, the Netherlands is about 7%, Denmark is about 2% again, and Switzerland is about 3.5%. These are pretty representative of developed nations who maintain a National Service policy. If you scale up to the level of the US, you'd see a standing army at any one time of something along the lines of sixty to sixty-five million (that's a finger-in-the-air guess at the demographics of America, not a checked number), of which nearly all would be NS teenagers. This is not a healthy state of affairs, I would argue, and would certainly be a cripplingly expensive one.
~cHris
Given that the creator of the Daleks (Terry Nation) has been dead for quite some time, it's not so much him as his estate that has a say in the Dalek brand.
~cHris
Don't you remember the day a Dalek learned to fly? It made the Nine O'Clock News in the UK.
~cHris
The President was not given a free hand to declare war. It takes Congress to declare war, and Congress did too much work to stop Presidents from having that power to ever give it back.
The work-around they came up with for Vietnam, however, is still in place: which is that the President can order troops out and invade places and so on without actually ever having a war. Gets you out of various other annoying legal things too, like the whole Prisoners of War issue ("Hey, guys, we never declared war on Afghanistan, therefore they can't be POWs...").
~cHrisThe spiritual truths in all Earth's religions are basically the same:
1. There is a [higher being/a collective of higher beings/a higher force] which must be [revered/worshipped/honored].
Except, for example, Buddhism. [1]
2. You should be nice to people who profess to hold the same spiritual belief as you.
Except, for example, Buddhism.
3. People who do not fall in the previous category are [doomed/below your standing/misguided] and should be [ignored/converted/killed].
Except, for example, Buddhism.
In fact, your initial statement is completely false as examined by your ensuing points. There are a number of religions that do not follow point 3, for example; enough so that it was considered an aberration when the Peoples of the Book introduced the idea.
Examine the Ba'hai some time. Or any one of several elements of Contemporary Paganism. Or the Dinka in southern Africa. ... what you seem to have meant is, "The Christians, the Moslems and some Jews, along with elements of Sikhism and Hinduism, on average believe that they're the only people worth inviting round to tea and are willing to support idiots like Bush or fanatics like Khomainei in order to have the chance to throw rocks at everyone else".
And even there, the variance between denominations (for example between Shi'ite and Ismaelian within Islam, or Eastern Orthodox vs. Southern Baptist within Christianity) is so radical that they're barely recognizable as the same religion.
~cHris
[1] I appreciate that you probably put in 'collective of higher beings' as a gesture towards Nirvanist and related philosophies, but you lost that point on 'must be [revered/honoured/worshipped]'; all of those things apply to the various Bodhisattva, but none apply to Nirvana, and none apply to the Bodhisattva (at a philosophical level) more than they apply to everyone and everything else.
I'm aware of the cost of a 35mm print for cinematic release, however, the indepenent and guerrilla film-makers are not the ones complaining about people beating the artificial scarcities created by staggered release through internet piracy. It's the blockbuster makers who have an issue with that, and for them, the solution I presented is more than feasible: again I say, LOTR.
~cHrisThere is an answer to this, which certain high-profile and high-revenue projects have recently used and made popular (Cf. Peter Jackson's LOTR project): release the damn theatrical cuts on the same day world-wide. The old communications barrier is non-existant, the only reasons not to do this are psychological, and as LOTR etc. proved you can make a great deal of money and generate a great deal of good-will very quickly by doing this.
Oh yeah, and it also completely eradicates the 'international piracy risk' argument.
~cHrisThis is also something that the better Open Source MacOS X applications are doing very well: Exim, for example, GNUPG, Apache, and so on. Experienced users and coders have prepared disk images (.dmg's) which auto-mount and allow you to run the standard MacOS X installer shield, and when you've done that it *all just works*. You can then go off and hack the /usr/local/etc/ configuration files to your hearts content, but the application works.
~cHris
No such thing that I ever heard of. Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says this:
Article 13.
These measures do not prevent anyone from doing that. They merely allow the government to take note when he does. I don't mean to say I like it, but your implication that people aren't allowed to watch you move around is not, in my reading, supported by the document.
~cHrisThere was one of these a while back, 6 or 7 years ago, on windows platforms. It wasn't a help function, it was just an amusement program: the pointer turned into a mouse, the cat chased it around the desktop, and if it was inside a 'window' the cat couldn't get in and would stalk around the borders of the window waiting for the mouse to come out. It was amusing. For about 10 minutes.
~cHrisRight now, the government(s) don't want you to believe it's just a coincidence. They want you to believe that it's the Axis of Evil. No-one's actually blamed this fire on terrorists yet, but I'm cynical enough to say 'wait three weeks'.
~cHris
It should be pointed that the complete disclosure clause under dicussion by the EU Commission is of client-server application formats and APIs. That is, it only applies to stopping Microsoft leveraging control of the desktop into control of the server market. So neither of your examples would actually be covered by this penalty, but some other very useful things (SMB stuff, all the IE-only hacks which bad html authors constantly abuse, asp; this is not an exhaustive list) will be covered.
~cHrisCourtney Love agrees with you. The fear of the gate-keepers is that someone will knock down the back wall: that physical reproduction costs will become (have become) so cheap that artists can communicate directly with audiance, without a cost-of-entry prohibition dictated by physical manufacturing and distribution costs. This will remove the need for Capex-rich gate-keepers, and will therefore diminish or entirely remove the market segment they inhabit, and their business models along with it.
They're not scared about copying. That's free advertising. They're scared about artist->audiance direct distribution. That's a death knell.
Now what I want to know is, why don't we see Halloween type leaks from inside the RIAA/MPAA? Does no-one in there care enough? Do they not use email?
~cHrisThis has been one of my stock rants for a long time. The real thing that the GUI people need to write and debug and test and all those wonderful things is a strong set of clear, well-designed administration applications which interface between the user and the text files. You can hack the config file, and read the manual page, and so on. You should not have to. That's the best-of-both-worlds situation that the Open Source community is driving for, right?
I only know of one free-unix vendor who has done anything which successfully approaches this, and they aren't perfect in it (but they're very very good at it). That's Apple: all the usual text config files, and cli control utilities, exist under MacOS X, but anything which shipped with the system and needs configuring can be configured through the control panel GUI [1]. A good example is network configuration: I know how to use ifconfig and often do, but I can perform the same configuration tasks through the GUI, and if I didn't know what I was doing, then the error-checking and option-based nature of that would make it a lot easier to get right.
There are some holes in Jaguar, some of which are fixed in Panther (for example, you can now write Windows-compatible data DVD-ROMs from the GUI, rather than having to do it manually from the command-line using standard GNU software). But they've done a damn good job of making a free-unix system administrable by novices.
That's where GNOME and KDE and everyone else need to be heading: be at least as good as, and preferably better than, Apple at making Free Unix accessible to novices.
~cHris[1] One tip though: if you plan to mess with something via CLI and it's GUI-configurable, close the 'System Preferences' application first. If you don't it will become very confused.
To me, this is a persuasive argument for buying a Mac. [1] It persuaded me, and I've had a really good year with that decision.
~cHris[1] If, for linux, you are prepared to read 'Some form of Open-source Unix'
Was.
~cHris