I've found it adds something to the show to sit in SL when the show is on, as there are quite a few knowledgable people in the SL audience who can add something to the show as chat.
What I'm curious about is this: what does SL offer beyond a traditional IRC-style chat? Wouldn't a chatroom on the show's website offer an easier way to communicate? (As it lowers the barrier to entry and is more efficient with regards to multitasking).
On Second life, I spend a lot of time scripting, building things. From things from in-world air defense systems to play against other builders as a game to building things that are deemed practically impossible or really difficult due to the technical limitations in world.
So, what you are saying is that people actually turn SL into a game?
I guess that the boundaries between role playing games and virtual worlds aren't that clear as you make them out to be, although the former tend to be more limiting when it comes to user-built games. It would be interesting to find out how many people (like you) are actively creating within SL and how many are simply using SL as an enriched chat client.
After all the hype of Second Life, and the realization that only a bunch of furries and other weirdos (NSFW) are into it, why prolong the suffering of SL with initiatives like these?
The problem with all 'virtual worlds' is simply that they are boring. There is nothing more for the average user to do than walk around and be a good little virtual consumer of virtual products. This in contrast with the massively popular MMORPGs that, while they are criticized for the grind-fest, at least give their users a good time in the process (how else could one explain the millions of paying WoW/Eve/whatnot users, compared to the thousands not paying a dime in SL?).
So (and this is not a troll), who cares about SL or any similar 'virtual world'? What am I missing about virtual worlds that seems so attractive to hype, corporations and in this case even open source developers, but clearly not to ordinary users?
Totally with you on this. It's anti-social for people to expect you to do their bidding for free.
I guess it all boils down to the itch-factor. If the criticism is something you agree to and it's about a problem you yourself run into, there is a chance you might get around to fixing it (ie. all the way at the bottom of the wish-list). If not, feel free to send the patch.
Like TFA states, this is not an issue with Free Software, it's simply a lack of resources/man-power. Large FLOSS projects (Firefox, OOo, GNOME/KDE) tend to have companies behind them and (thus) better usability due to people actually being paid to improve the UI. But for every big project there are hundreds of projects that have been developed in someones spare time. In those cases, a send-the-patch mentality is totally acceptable, IMHO.
Hell, those poor users might actually learn to appreciate the work that has gone into a project. Thankfully the rude ones are a very small minority, but they sure know how to sour someones mood.
You think you're the only weird-looking one on the planet? Newsflash: the sport centers in your area are full with people like us.
My advice would be to go 2/3 times a week with a friend. It might cost a few pennies more in the long run, but you get to do a full workout within a short timeframe, with advice from people who actually know how to optimize your exercise routine.
You don't have to go to the flashy expensive ("Globo-gym") sport center. More important is going together with someone motivated and taking exercise seriously (don't deviate from your schedule, plan around it).
You won't become a hunk overnight, you will feel more healthy and slowly rid your body of that excess weight.
Don't forget that during the last government a Christian (CDA, van der Hoeven) secretary tried to force the ID-discussion upon the education system in the Netherlands. Thankfully there was outcry all over. Evolution isn't going anywhere fast on this side of the Atlantic, and the ID-discussion in the States is met with unbelief here.
We do have a whole different problem in Europe though, that of Muslim students not wanting/having to learn about evolution in religious schools.
I'm all for a strict division between religion and education as that would solve both problems, but as long as you have entrenched religions beliefs within the education system it will be quite a hard task to ^W them.
Now, if you think you are going to come right out of school with no professional experience and a bunch of great ideas and expect that your efforts in the evening are going to be protected... you better detach yourself from the yoke and either find funding, VC, or talk to Mr. VISA. Otherwise, SOMEONE is bankrolling your efforts... and they expect a payback of at least principal or they expect to reap the rewards.
Yes, someone is bankrolling my efforts; however that isn't the company I would work for. It's me.
A company pays you to work for X hours a week. What you do in your own spare time is totally up to you, and none of your company's business. The company isn't bankrolling your company, it is simply paying you for an honest day of labour. What you do with those funds is up to you (buy a new car, invest or start a company).
Now I could understand that your company wouldn't be glad if you set up a direct competitor, but anything that doesn't compete with the company interests should be fine. NCA's and the like are simply arbitrary arrangements to get more than those X hours a week from an employee. If you want me not doing anything besides my job, you'll have to pay me for 168 hours a week, and not a minute less.
As someone who's running a small business, I wouldn't mind an employee setting up a side-business. Such a person is likely to be much more proactive in his work, probably gets more work done and brings in new knowledge from his side-business. Instead of badgering him with a legal battle (which means he'll be gone right away) I'd rather follow such an employee closely. It might even mean new business opportunities for the whole company by partnering with him. If he were very successful, I would look around for a replacement but as long as he does his regular job well I wouldn't want to kick him out.
One can argue over whether even the socialist label of that society was true, and to what extent they followed their own supposed principles once they gained power or whether the many reprehensible actions taken were a perversion or abuse of the symbolism and support they had built with no connection to the original ideology.
Well, Lenin was off to a good start, a lot of actions he took came right out of the Manifesto. It's just that he wasn't able to take it far enough or provide a mechanism against the anti-socialistic bureaucracy of Stalin before he died. Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed illustrates this nicely. I personally think that most current states in the EU have a much more socialistic nature than the USSR under Stalin.
Ultimately Stalin's actions lead to the perversion of socialism into a state built upon corporatism/fascism. The Soviet Union and communism as a whole was the largest intellectual experiment of the 20th century, and it has shown that mankind simply isn't ready for the ideals in the Manifesto. On a small scale it might be workable, but the world-wide revolution as portrayed by Marx is simply too vulnerable to individual greed for power.
I second using the n810 for ssh, you can easily use your current phone and connect via BT and GPRS/3G.
The keyboard on the n810 is much better than the regular smartphone keypad. I have a N95 and although I've installed putty on it ssh'ing from the tablet is much more doable.
Most people just don't RTFA, but you skipped a percentage of the words in the summary too ! "In a testbed environment where SOAP was managing around 900 calls a second, Etch generated more than 50,000 messages in a one-way mode, and 15,000 transactions with a full round-trip"
Flaming the GP isn't correct in this case, the summary is ambiguous. There is a difference between managing calls and generating messages, as a single call can generate multiple messages.
A correct summary would have been to compare the amount of calls a second both SOAP and Etch can handle, or the amount of messages/transactions required for a fixed number of calls. But I think the PR-drone that wrote up the article did so knowingly to put SOAP in a bad light.
Or are you simply being sarcastic? If so: WOOOOOSH!
I know RTFQ is forbidden over here, but the OP doesn't want to make a living out of this. 95% of the comments below easily ignore that and tell the OP not to even consider starting something like this up... where is the geek-curiosity of just wanting to figure out how hosting works? Sure, he might get fed up with it in a year, but at least he learned something in the process.
Anyway, I'd start by installing your favorite distro on your server, installing ISPConfig and going from there. cPanel and the like are doable for commercial hosters, but ISPConfig seems good enough for the project you are describing. Play around with it, learn how it works under the bonnet and throw up a small forum for communications.
If you are looking into making a larger business out of this, go for quality and not quantity. Like the rest of these comments state, you don't want to answer to hundreds of people when your servers go down while you are on a holiday. Go for a few more-complex projects, and offer your own hosting as an extra. Personally I'm doing the same (with hosted redundant dedicated servers, I was done playing hosting-provider years ago) but only for a few customers with large projects running on them. And remember that the interesting part is in building those projects, not supporting them.
A large wind turbine ( and when I say large I mean the blades are several meters long ) can produce maybe 1MW at peak wind speed, 300kw on average. In comparison a single nuclear power plant can produce between 500MWe - 3000MWe with a capacity factor close to 90%
Actually the 1MW-mark has been greatly surpassed, as wind turbines are getting bigger and becoming more efficient.
You're correct that it still would require 100 mammoth-sized wind turbines in comparison to a nuclear plant, but fission plants still require fuel (uranium is running out), take quite some time to build, generate waste and aren't cheap either.
In the end, it is not a matter of having to choose. We don't have that luxury. We'll have to use all options (nuclear, wind, hydro, energy-conservation, solar) if we want to replace a large fraction of the fossil fuels we use today.
I have a tax lawyer that I've used for my business for 12 years who STILL doesn't 'trust' email for ANY communication.
You should never trust email, so in that sense good for him. Then again, faxes and phonecalls can be tapped and are logged. So if someone is really serious about privacy, simply stay off the grid.
My tax lawyer does have an email address, but he only uses it for arranging meetings. Rightfully so IMHO, as handling this kind of stuff face-to-face is much more fruitful (and they'll charge you the same anyway).
I'm happy to respond, and I appreciate that you're going out on a limb and seem honest and genuinely interested. I can assure you that vegans, at least in theory, only disapprove of animals suffering unnecessarily. They might also take a slightly broader view of what animal suffering means than others do.
So I guess that, as with many views of the world, veganism isn't a black-and-white issue, but has increasingly stricter forms depending on the individual.
The reason I commented is that I always viewed veganism as a 'pure' form of ethics with regard to animals. I have several vegetarian friends and one vegan, and the interpretation of the latter's views might have skewed my own.
If it were only down to the question if an animal suffered or not, then a hypothetical vegan farmer would have no problem in raising cattle as good as he/she can and drink milk / eat cheese. A cow doesn't suffer when it is milked properly, and doing it yourself you would be in the position to judge so (although asking the cow might be a better option).
Although I have been a vegetarian for a couple of months I have since fallen back to the sins of eating meat. When I choose meat, I do however pick biological meat over 'regular', hopefully giving an incentive to treat animals more humanely, because that is something I do care about. Then again, it might be more an issue of easing ones own conscience.
Having said that, veganism does lead to a Catch-22 of some sorts: If everyone were vegan, there would be much less use for animals and their numbers would dwindle. True, they wouldn't suffer, but what is worse: having a short life with a degree of suffering or no life at all? Another interesting debate for the pub, me thinks.
if you're making an animal suffer unnecessarily, vegans are against it.
So, if an animal dies of old age, vegans wouldn't mind eating it? If a cow gives milk without suffering, vegans will drink the milk?
I'm not a vegan so please set me straight if I'm wrong, but I thought that vegans disprove of anything coming from animals (meat, milk, eggs), regardless if the animal suffered or not. Artificial meat stems ultimately from animals, thus my view is that vegans would disprove of it.
One could certainly be a competent physician, for example, and not believe in Darwinism (or neo-Darwinism). It seems to me that one could even be a quite competent practitioner of any of the biological sciences (other than the various sorts of paleontology) without necessarily agreeing with Darwinism. Yet, we are constantly told that a failure to teach Darwinism at the high school level will destroy science education as we know it and result in a US population that is hopelessly ignorant of all science, etc. etc. I just don't buy it
Okay, I'll bite: What should we teach children about biology?
Genetics and evolution are simply a part of biology. If you are going to teach how animals and plants work, you can't leave out where animals and plants came from. It would be like discussing geometry without explaining what the Cartesian system is.
What a scientist does or doesn't believe has very little to do with facts from the real world. Humans are full of inconsistencies (otherwise you wouldn't have wars between religions that believe it is wrong to commit murder). Scientists are humans, just like the rest of us. They too might know one thing, but believe the opposite.
Now I don't believe not teaching evolution will destroy education, but why shouldn't it be taught? If education has to be bent in accordance with every religion, you'll also have to get rid of the dinosaurs and most of history. You'll also have to rewrite education in accordance with the Quran (which Muslims believe is the direct word of God, and thus must be true), for instance.
If something is a well-supported scientific theory, there is no reason it shouldn't be taught. Of course it might be replaced by another theory in a hundred years, but that's just how science works.
You can take this and make a point about how lightly people these days treat information. They don't even consider verifiability and good practice like that. What you can't do is somehow take this and make it a crusade against wikipedia like the summary hints at.
This issue isn't black-and-white; the journalist is to blame, the editors are to blame, and wikipedia too is to blame.
How come the latter? Well, over the last few years the average Internet-user has had quite a few articles comparing the reliability of Wikipedia against Encylopedia Brittanica. It was always a study comparing a fixed set of articles, but this has lead to the public perception that Wikipedia is comparable to EB.
This wouldn't have been a problem, if the Wiki-cabal wasn't trying to reinforce the meme that the two are comparable. The public is increasingly relying on Wikipedia to be correct, but due to its nature you have to take each and every article with a large grain of salt. Nowhere on your average Wikipedia-page is this stated.
I'm not talking about a 'disputed' block, but a 'wikipedia-is-not-an-encyclopedia' block on each and every page. Until that time, you can't put all the blame on the (mis)users of Wikipedia.
Yep, that's exactly right. It's easy to sell Firefox because that's a name that sounds exciting. People want to know what Firefox is just based on the name. Shallow, sure -- but welcome to Earth.
How about we call it 'FireGimp'? The logo can be some cripple who's on fire.
I'm sure people would find that exciting. Remember, there is no such thing as bad publicity!
It happened thanks to namely UN-appointed Holland troopers let Serbian terrorists go to city they were supposed to protect.
As you can read on the wikipedia page you linked, the dutch were hopelessly outnumbered (400 lightly armed soldiers vs 1k-2k serbs with tanks and morters). The dutch troopers weren't given the mandate, the manpower, the reinforcements or the air-support required to fight back.
I wouldn't know what I would have done in their place, and I hope I never will know. Either way, it shames me that the dutch and the UN were this toothless faced with genocide right under their noses.
Netscape published an excellent guide to the language over a decade ago (now maintained by Mozilla.org). I'm going to take a wild guess and say... you've never read it, have you?
Just a quick "thanks!" from someone who has for far too long equated JavaScript with voodoo-programming and thus wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot pole. Finally a proper guide for developers who want to wrap their head around this misunderstood language.
Pity it took me 10 years to find it, but I'll admit I wasn't searching for something that would let me make sense of JS.
People drop out of CS programs because of programming courses too. The first thing that gets people is recursion. The next big thing is pointers. Some people just aren't prepared for those concepts, and it's too much for them.
And thank heavens they do move on. I sound like the elitist prick I am, but having a masters in CS and AI I know too many people who graduate and still fumble on these basic principles. Lots of hacks out in the field too, who don't know their basics and churn out crappy code.
Move on to psy or law or something. I can't understand that some people just muddle on and work in a field they barely grasp and on work they don't enjoy, only making it more difficult for the rest of us.
Marketing agencies spend a lot on infomercials and they never, ever ring true. They're always obvious inside of 60 seconds of viewing. I can't see how a fake blog would be any different.
100% infomercials are naturally easy to spot, but what about product placement in regular programs? That bottle of Coke(r) that your favorite star just drank? Or even movies like The Island, with over-the-top-obvious Microsoft-placements, but only if you're a geek? A random person might just think that that Xbox-thingy looks pretty cool.
Infomercials are made by the lowest of the marketeers, but the big boys make sure you can't avoid them and hopefully won't even notice their products are being marketed. In this case, you might be browsing for comments about a product, and a random blog or two states that said product sucks. Would you still buy it? I know I'd reconsider.
This is pure astroturfing, and in my opinion completely unethical. But I'm afraid anyone working in marketing has any remaining scrap of ethics surgically removed.
Slashdot Mirror
What I'm curious about is this: what does SL offer beyond a traditional IRC-style chat? Wouldn't a chatroom on the show's website offer an easier way to communicate? (As it lowers the barrier to entry and is more efficient with regards to multitasking).
So, what you are saying is that people actually turn SL into a game?
I guess that the boundaries between role playing games and virtual worlds aren't that clear as you make them out to be, although the former tend to be more limiting when it comes to user-built games. It would be interesting to find out how many people (like you) are actively creating within SL and how many are simply using SL as an enriched chat client.
After all the hype of Second Life, and the realization that only a bunch of furries and other weirdos (NSFW) are into it, why prolong the suffering of SL with initiatives like these?
The problem with all 'virtual worlds' is simply that they are boring. There is nothing more for the average user to do than walk around and be a good little virtual consumer of virtual products. This in contrast with the massively popular MMORPGs that, while they are criticized for the grind-fest, at least give their users a good time in the process (how else could one explain the millions of paying WoW/Eve/whatnot users, compared to the thousands not paying a dime in SL?).
So (and this is not a troll), who cares about SL or any similar 'virtual world'? What am I missing about virtual worlds that seems so attractive to hype, corporations and in this case even open source developers, but clearly not to ordinary users?
An even better solution would be to simply use RSS.
Problem solved (until hackers use the DNS attack to feed you an RSS feed with modified links. Nothing is fool-proof).
PKI for email will take off once regular email becomes useless. So in that sense, we should be rooting for the spammers.
Totally with you on this. It's anti-social for people to expect you to do their bidding for free.
I guess it all boils down to the itch-factor. If the criticism is something you agree to and it's about a problem you yourself run into, there is a chance you might get around to fixing it (ie. all the way at the bottom of the wish-list). If not, feel free to send the patch.
Like TFA states, this is not an issue with Free Software, it's simply a lack of resources/man-power. Large FLOSS projects (Firefox, OOo, GNOME/KDE) tend to have companies behind them and (thus) better usability due to people actually being paid to improve the UI. But for every big project there are hundreds of projects that have been developed in someones spare time. In those cases, a send-the-patch mentality is totally acceptable, IMHO.
Hell, those poor users might actually learn to appreciate the work that has gone into a project. Thankfully the rude ones are a very small minority, but they sure know how to sour someones mood.
You think you're the only weird-looking one on the planet? Newsflash: the sport centers in your area are full with people like us.
My advice would be to go 2/3 times a week with a friend. It might cost a few pennies more in the long run, but you get to do a full workout within a short timeframe, with advice from people who actually know how to optimize your exercise routine.
You don't have to go to the flashy expensive ("Globo-gym") sport center. More important is going together with someone motivated and taking exercise seriously (don't deviate from your schedule, plan around it).
You won't become a hunk overnight, you will feel more healthy and slowly rid your body of that excess weight.
Don't forget that during the last government a Christian (CDA, van der Hoeven) secretary tried to force the ID-discussion upon the education system in the Netherlands. Thankfully there was outcry all over. Evolution isn't going anywhere fast on this side of the Atlantic, and the ID-discussion in the States is met with unbelief here.
We do have a whole different problem in Europe though, that of Muslim students not wanting/having to learn about evolution in religious schools.
I'm all for a strict division between religion and education as that would solve both problems, but as long as you have entrenched religions beliefs within the education system it will be quite a hard task to ^W them.
Yes, someone is bankrolling my efforts; however that isn't the company I would work for. It's me.
A company pays you to work for X hours a week. What you do in your own spare time is totally up to you, and none of your company's business. The company isn't bankrolling your company, it is simply paying you for an honest day of labour. What you do with those funds is up to you (buy a new car, invest or start a company).
Now I could understand that your company wouldn't be glad if you set up a direct competitor, but anything that doesn't compete with the company interests should be fine. NCA's and the like are simply arbitrary arrangements to get more than those X hours a week from an employee. If you want me not doing anything besides my job, you'll have to pay me for 168 hours a week, and not a minute less.
As someone who's running a small business, I wouldn't mind an employee setting up a side-business. Such a person is likely to be much more proactive in his work, probably gets more work done and brings in new knowledge from his side-business. Instead of badgering him with a legal battle (which means he'll be gone right away) I'd rather follow such an employee closely. It might even mean new business opportunities for the whole company by partnering with him. If he were very successful, I would look around for a replacement but as long as he does his regular job well I wouldn't want to kick him out.
Well, Lenin was off to a good start, a lot of actions he took came right out of the Manifesto. It's just that he wasn't able to take it far enough or provide a mechanism against the anti-socialistic bureaucracy of Stalin before he died. Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed illustrates this nicely. I personally think that most current states in the EU have a much more socialistic nature than the USSR under Stalin.
Ultimately Stalin's actions lead to the perversion of socialism into a state built upon corporatism/fascism. The Soviet Union and communism as a whole was the largest intellectual experiment of the 20th century, and it has shown that mankind simply isn't ready for the ideals in the Manifesto. On a small scale it might be workable, but the world-wide revolution as portrayed by Marx is simply too vulnerable to individual greed for power.
Time for some god-given capitalistic coffee.
You obviously haven't had to explain to a CEO why the company runs on Eunuchs. Kids these days have it far too easy.
Mod parent up. Some Google-fanatics modded him Troll while the comment of Google explicitly not allowing web crawlers in their ToS is anything but.
Google is very, very careful with giving third parties access to their search results. The limitations of Google's Search API show this.
I second using the n810 for ssh, you can easily use your current phone and connect via BT and GPRS/3G.
The keyboard on the n810 is much better than the regular smartphone keypad. I have a N95 and although I've installed putty on it ssh'ing from the tablet is much more doable.
And it runs Linux. What more could you ask for?
Flaming the GP isn't correct in this case, the summary is ambiguous. There is a difference between managing calls and generating messages, as a single call can generate multiple messages.
A correct summary would have been to compare the amount of calls a second both SOAP and Etch can handle, or the amount of messages/transactions required for a fixed number of calls. But I think the PR-drone that wrote up the article did so knowingly to put SOAP in a bad light.
Or are you simply being sarcastic? If so: WOOOOOSH!
I know RTFQ is forbidden over here, but the OP doesn't want to make a living out of this. 95% of the comments below easily ignore that and tell the OP not to even consider starting something like this up... where is the geek-curiosity of just wanting to figure out how hosting works? Sure, he might get fed up with it in a year, but at least he learned something in the process.
Anyway, I'd start by installing your favorite distro on your server, installing ISPConfig and going from there. cPanel and the like are doable for commercial hosters, but ISPConfig seems good enough for the project you are describing. Play around with it, learn how it works under the bonnet and throw up a small forum for communications.
If you are looking into making a larger business out of this, go for quality and not quantity. Like the rest of these comments state, you don't want to answer to hundreds of people when your servers go down while you are on a holiday. Go for a few more-complex projects, and offer your own hosting as an extra. Personally I'm doing the same (with hosted redundant dedicated servers, I was done playing hosting-provider years ago) but only for a few customers with large projects running on them. And remember that the interesting part is in building those projects, not supporting them.
Actually the 1MW-mark has been greatly surpassed, as wind turbines are getting bigger and becoming more efficient.
You're correct that it still would require 100 mammoth-sized wind turbines in comparison to a nuclear plant, but fission plants still require fuel (uranium is running out), take quite some time to build, generate waste and aren't cheap either.
In the end, it is not a matter of having to choose. We don't have that luxury. We'll have to use all options (nuclear, wind, hydro, energy-conservation, solar) if we want to replace a large fraction of the fossil fuels we use today.
You should never trust email, so in that sense good for him. Then again, faxes and phonecalls can be tapped and are logged. So if someone is really serious about privacy, simply stay off the grid.
My tax lawyer does have an email address, but he only uses it for arranging meetings. Rightfully so IMHO, as handling this kind of stuff face-to-face is much more fruitful (and they'll charge you the same anyway).
So I guess that, as with many views of the world, veganism isn't a black-and-white issue, but has increasingly stricter forms depending on the individual.
The reason I commented is that I always viewed veganism as a 'pure' form of ethics with regard to animals. I have several vegetarian friends and one vegan, and the interpretation of the latter's views might have skewed my own.
If it were only down to the question if an animal suffered or not, then a hypothetical vegan farmer would have no problem in raising cattle as good as he/she can and drink milk / eat cheese. A cow doesn't suffer when it is milked properly, and doing it yourself you would be in the position to judge so (although asking the cow might be a better option).
Although I have been a vegetarian for a couple of months I have since fallen back to the sins of eating meat. When I choose meat, I do however pick biological meat over 'regular', hopefully giving an incentive to treat animals more humanely, because that is something I do care about. Then again, it might be more an issue of easing ones own conscience.
Having said that, veganism does lead to a Catch-22 of some sorts: If everyone were vegan, there would be much less use for animals and their numbers would dwindle. True, they wouldn't suffer, but what is worse: having a short life with a degree of suffering or no life at all? Another interesting debate for the pub, me thinks.
So, if an animal dies of old age, vegans wouldn't mind eating it? If a cow gives milk without suffering, vegans will drink the milk?
I'm not a vegan so please set me straight if I'm wrong, but I thought that vegans disprove of anything coming from animals (meat, milk, eggs), regardless if the animal suffered or not. Artificial meat stems ultimately from animals, thus my view is that vegans would disprove of it.
Okay, I'll bite: What should we teach children about biology?
Genetics and evolution are simply a part of biology. If you are going to teach how animals and plants work, you can't leave out where animals and plants came from. It would be like discussing geometry without explaining what the Cartesian system is.
What a scientist does or doesn't believe has very little to do with facts from the real world. Humans are full of inconsistencies (otherwise you wouldn't have wars between religions that believe it is wrong to commit murder). Scientists are humans, just like the rest of us. They too might know one thing, but believe the opposite.
Now I don't believe not teaching evolution will destroy education, but why shouldn't it be taught? If education has to be bent in accordance with every religion, you'll also have to get rid of the dinosaurs and most of history. You'll also have to rewrite education in accordance with the Quran (which Muslims believe is the direct word of God, and thus must be true), for instance.
If something is a well-supported scientific theory, there is no reason it shouldn't be taught. Of course it might be replaced by another theory in a hundred years, but that's just how science works.
This issue isn't black-and-white; the journalist is to blame, the editors are to blame, and wikipedia too is to blame.
How come the latter? Well, over the last few years the average Internet-user has had quite a few articles comparing the reliability of Wikipedia against Encylopedia Brittanica. It was always a study comparing a fixed set of articles, but this has lead to the public perception that Wikipedia is comparable to EB.
This wouldn't have been a problem, if the Wiki-cabal wasn't trying to reinforce the meme that the two are comparable. The public is increasingly relying on Wikipedia to be correct, but due to its nature you have to take each and every article with a large grain of salt. Nowhere on your average Wikipedia-page is this stated.
I'm not talking about a 'disputed' block, but a 'wikipedia-is-not-an-encyclopedia' block on each and every page. Until that time, you can't put all the blame on the (mis)users of Wikipedia.
How about we call it 'FireGimp'? The logo can be some cripple who's on fire.
I'm sure people would find that exciting. Remember, there is no such thing as bad publicity!
As you can read on the wikipedia page you linked, the dutch were hopelessly outnumbered (400 lightly armed soldiers vs 1k-2k serbs with tanks and morters). The dutch troopers weren't given the mandate, the manpower, the reinforcements or the air-support required to fight back.
I wouldn't know what I would have done in their place, and I hope I never will know. Either way, it shames me that the dutch and the UN were this toothless faced with genocide right under their noses.
Just a quick "thanks!" from someone who has for far too long equated JavaScript with voodoo-programming and thus wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot pole. Finally a proper guide for developers who want to wrap their head around this misunderstood language.
Pity it took me 10 years to find it, but I'll admit I wasn't searching for something that would let me make sense of JS.
And thank heavens they do move on. I sound like the elitist prick I am, but having a masters in CS and AI I know too many people who graduate and still fumble on these basic principles. Lots of hacks out in the field too, who don't know their basics and churn out crappy code.
Move on to psy or law or something. I can't understand that some people just muddle on and work in a field they barely grasp and on work they don't enjoy, only making it more difficult for the rest of us.
100% infomercials are naturally easy to spot, but what about product placement in regular programs? That bottle of Coke(r) that your favorite star just drank? Or even movies like The Island, with over-the-top-obvious Microsoft-placements, but only if you're a geek? A random person might just think that that Xbox-thingy looks pretty cool.
Infomercials are made by the lowest of the marketeers, but the big boys make sure you can't avoid them and hopefully won't even notice their products are being marketed. In this case, you might be browsing for comments about a product, and a random blog or two states that said product sucks. Would you still buy it? I know I'd reconsider.
This is pure astroturfing, and in my opinion completely unethical. But I'm afraid anyone working in marketing has any remaining scrap of ethics surgically removed.