It could very well be that Jimmy Wales is being swiftboated.
Likewise, the governor of New York is being called to resign because he allegedly saw a hooker. This has nothing whatsoever to do with his ability to govern the state, but sharp political rhetoric is being flung about nevertheless. The Bill Clinton affair also springs to mind.
All this means is that Jimmy Wales has some political opponents who are willing to fight dirty. He might be no saint, but Wikipedia seems to be doing pretty darn well for the most part.
Wikipedia's not a "business" by any stretch of the imagination.
NPR and PBS have also shown that this "begging for money" business model can indeed work successfully. If anything, Wikipedia should turn to them for inspiration and fundraising advice.
Let's not forget the "re-mix" albums Let It Be....Naked, and Love, both of which were released to much acclaim (with many, including McCartney himself preferring the new version over the original).
For starters, the "Wall of Sound" technique used on the original Let It Be was essentially optimized for playback on AM radio and cheap jukeboxes.
I imagine that Google Earth, for instance, has all sorts of licensing issues attached to it, given that Google doesn't own much of the imagery being used.
They're no saints, but they seem to put forth a good effort, which is a heck of a lot more than you can say about most corporations.
Although you certainly wouldn't want to do an interview where you're prohibited from asking potentially incriminating questions, an ethical journalist will also keep the interview on-topic, and not spin off onto unrelated tangents for which the interviewee is completely unprepared.
It'd be like calling up George Bush for an interview about his education policy, and then grilling him about Iraq.*
Although many would like to believe it to be, science is not necessarily about finding absolute truths. It's about forming hypotheses, testing to see whether they're true, and possibly re-forming those hypotheses based upon the results of the tests.
It may very well be that we never find any sort of grand unified theory to explain the universe. However, we *have* determined a range of circumstances under which they Newtonian Mechanics works extremely well (and in many cases, we can also give a very precise answer of exactly *how* well).
In an effort to figure out just exactly is going on in the Universe, physicists and astronomers look for phenomena that cannot necessarily be explained via Newtonian Mechanics, or any of our other current base of knowledge, and use those anomalies to refine our theories, or develop new ones.
Science by its very definition admits that it is not perfect, and is under continuous refinement.
Astrology, like most "religion" is offered as absolute truth. Take it or leave it.
Tell an astrologist that their predictions are no more likely to come true than by random chance. See if they re-evaluate their beliefs. Tell a particle physicist that the Higgs Boson has been conclusively proven not to exist, and after carefully reviewing the data, he'll go back to the drawing board to try and find a new model that fits what we've observed.*
*He'll also probably swear a bit, and get sloshed at the pub later that night.
Music today has boundaries that stretch unfathomably far beyond what gets played on the radio.
For starters, there's the absolutely massive "indie" community that fosters a fantastic amount of great music.
If you prefer ambient/electronic music with few or no words, quite a lot of artists have cropped up in this genre thanks to the magic of file-sharing and the internet, given the genre's relatively specific audience, and the difficulty for such bands to effectively promote themselves.
There are a whole slew of artists in this genre worth checking out: 65daysofstatic, Mogwai, Sigur Rós, Four Tet, Explosions in the Sky, The Books, Battles, Boards of Canada, Aphex Twin, and a thousand others that I've either forgotten or never heard of.
No matter how obscure you might think your musical tastes are, chances are good that there are many, many others like you. Don't be confined by video game soundtracks!
That all said, I've never been all *that* impressed by a video game soundtrack, with the very notable exception of the Final Fantasy series.
There are people alive right now that when they were born, germs were unknown never mind planes, space travel, dark matter, and something as small as an atom. Mind you, there are few like that still alive, but there are. At no time in history has information advanced so much in so short a time. The Internet has helped play a part in that also. Indeed.
However, it's somewhat sobering to realize that this generation is barely left. For instance, there is one American veteran of World War I alive today.
What has our generation done? We're slouching, and making an absolute mess of things in the process.
People still buy technology with the wrong, wrong mindset that it is a capital asset, that it will last a long time like a house, or at least a good car. It's not. It won't last that long anymore; not just the gadget, the ENTIRE FORMAT. My tapes lasted 20 years, DVD came and went in about 10, Blu-Ray is widely expected to be obsoleted by (often downloaded) AVI files in less than 10.
The difference these days is that optical medium have been, for the large part, backward compatible.
I can play CDs in my DVD player. Pioneer make (made?) a few giant DVD players that could accept LD, and HD-DVD and Blu-Ray players both play DVDs.
Given that DVDs offer what is already "pretty darn good" quality (in some cases approaching that of the original source material), it's not as likely that we'll see people flocking out to replace their DVD collections with Blu-Ray. The quality difference between Blu-Ray and "old fashioned" DVD isn't even remotely as wide as the gap was between VHS and DVD.
Blu-Ray/HD-DVD are evolutionary improvements to an existing medium. DVD could easily be considered a revolutionary new medium. Taking that into account, 20-30 years doesn't seem all that foolish of a guess for the lifespan of optical media as a format. 15 years for DVD, another 10-15 for Blu-Ray, and perhaps a few more for something that hasn't been invented yet.
If a shopkeeper leaves his doors wide open after leaving for the night, it would still indeed be illegal to steal from that store (and you'd probably be found guilty if caught).
However, it'd be damned easy to do so, and it would be pretty damn negligent on the shopkeeper's part. Likewise, no insurance company on the planet would dream of covering his losses over those circumstances.
Now imagine how stupid it'd look for the shopkeeper to begin suing every person who walked by the shop and noted that the doors were open..... and continued to leave his doors open throughout this process.
The piston railway would have been a nightmare to construct and operate on a large scale. The difficulties encountered with rounding sharp corners, or switching trains between lines would have been immense, nevermind the difficulties you'd encounter with leakages or blockages in the tunnels.
As far as cool rail technologies that never made it go, the Gyro Monorail has got to be by far the greatest.
It sucks a lot less that Windows Media Player does on the Mac (which isn't even officially supported any more!)
And on the Mac, QuickTime isn't all that bad. As a base set of libraries, it provides an extremely valuable function to the operating system, by allowing any application to easily access the full suite of audio/video functions provided by Quicktime. iMovie and FinalCut do virtually no video processing of their own, and are effectively just fancy front-ends to the quicktime libraries.
Performance isn't phenomenally great (I believe VLC uses a few percent less CPU for some formats, although it's nothing all that remarkable), but it certainly isn't bad.
On the PC, Quicktime is a good bit worse than VLC, but is still very much usable (unlike the ill-fated Windows Media Player for mac).
The last Soyuz failure occurred in 1983 when the rocket exploded on the pad with the crew inside.
It might be a good point to note here that the crew all survived.
In 1975, Soyuz 18a aborted its launch before reaching orbit due to a major booster malfunction. The Launch-Escape-System automatically triggered when the rocket left what was considered a "safe" trajectory, and the crew also survived.
Soyuz capsules have also survived landings in virtually every sort of terrain known to man. Although subsequent revisions have made the spacecraft's landing precision considerably better, the ability to land *anywhere* is a very nice fallback to have if an abort is necessary.
I'm no fan of Ron Paul, but from what I know about him, he's not the type to let himself become another Ross Perot or Ralph Nader.
He's most likely going to drop out before the election so that he doesn't hurt his own party in what is very likely going to be a somewhat close election.
This has more to do with the fact that the OS X Flash Player is a steaming pile of crap, and will load even a reasonably powerful system to 100% for no reason whatsoever.
*VLC* of all things plays FLVs considerably more efficiently than Adobe's official Flash Player.
Although I don't want to push the irrelevant political debate any further, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is a very real condition that many Iraq veterans are returning with. The fact that a military consultant such as youself doesn't even seem to be aware of this is troubling to say the least, and is somewhat indicative of the utter disregard with which we are currently treating our soldiers.
Killing a person in self-defense most likely won't cause any sort of major long-term psychological stress. Similarly, if faced with an enemy soldier in combat, you do what you have to in order to stay alive.
On the other hand, thanks to the moronic policies and tactics of our current round of politicians, many of our soldiers in Iraq are beginning to question themselves, as the "enemy opposition" is increasingly composed of desperate civilians. Suddenly, things begin to look very different --- after all, the primary victims of the Iraq war have been civilians, not soldiers.
I have no reason to doubt that their technical degrees are quite good. However, based upon the absurdly disproportionate amount of press they receive, their marketing people have got to be absolutely fucking brilliant.
Perhaps one of their engineers managed to clone Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion Field......
Well, for starters, I imagine that this will be funded through the government's grant rather than tuition dollars.
Most students outside of the US pay very little for tuition. Tuition fees generally fund the university's variable costs associated with taking on more students, whilst the university's core operation and fixed costs are paid for by the government. State universities in the US operate on a somewhat similar principle, unless you happen to live in a state that is unwilling or unable to fund its public university system, or want to (gasp!) leave your home state.
The problem I have with this Velocity thing is: who pays and who benefits? Seems to me a chunk of everyone's tuition will go toward it, while only some will be in a position to get in. And those who can get in will be the ones who can deal with the extra work load. From what I've seen, even the most "gifted" university students are worked to the core. The divide between the "average" and "better" students is typically directly proportional to the amount of time/work spent studying. The assumption that the most gifted students are also going to be the least worked/stressed is just plain false. Given the general flexibility of a university curriculum, "gifted" students most frequently increase their courseload so that they can graduate early, or begin to take graduate-level courses as part of their undergraduate studies.
The notion that there are gifted students who barely do any work is an absolute myth at the university level.
Slashdot Mirror
It could very well be that Jimmy Wales is being swiftboated.
Likewise, the governor of New York is being called to resign because he allegedly saw a hooker. This has nothing whatsoever to do with his ability to govern the state, but sharp political rhetoric is being flung about nevertheless. The Bill Clinton affair also springs to mind.
All this means is that Jimmy Wales has some political opponents who are willing to fight dirty. He might be no saint, but Wikipedia seems to be doing pretty darn well for the most part.
Wikipedia's not a "business" by any stretch of the imagination.
NPR and PBS have also shown that this "begging for money" business model can indeed work successfully. If anything, Wikipedia should turn to them for inspiration and fundraising advice.
Let's not forget the "re-mix" albums Let It Be....Naked, and Love, both of which were released to much acclaim (with many, including McCartney himself preferring the new version over the original).
For starters, the "Wall of Sound" technique used on the original Let It Be was essentially optimized for playback on AM radio and cheap jukeboxes.
I imagine that Google Earth, for instance, has all sorts of licensing issues attached to it, given that Google doesn't own much of the imagery being used.
They're no saints, but they seem to put forth a good effort, which is a heck of a lot more than you can say about most corporations.
It's still a tough call.
Although you certainly wouldn't want to do an interview where you're prohibited from asking potentially incriminating questions, an ethical journalist will also keep the interview on-topic, and not spin off onto unrelated tangents for which the interviewee is completely unprepared.
It'd be like calling up George Bush for an interview about his education policy, and then grilling him about Iraq.*
(*This might not actually be a bad idea)
1) 99% of everything is crap.
2) This is doubly so on Usenet.
Although many would like to believe it to be, science is not necessarily about finding absolute truths. It's about forming hypotheses, testing to see whether they're true, and possibly re-forming those hypotheses based upon the results of the tests.
It may very well be that we never find any sort of grand unified theory to explain the universe. However, we *have* determined a range of circumstances under which they Newtonian Mechanics works extremely well (and in many cases, we can also give a very precise answer of exactly *how* well).
In an effort to figure out just exactly is going on in the Universe, physicists and astronomers look for phenomena that cannot necessarily be explained via Newtonian Mechanics, or any of our other current base of knowledge, and use those anomalies to refine our theories, or develop new ones.
Science by its very definition admits that it is not perfect, and is under continuous refinement.
Astrology, like most "religion" is offered as absolute truth. Take it or leave it.
Tell an astrologist that their predictions are no more likely to come true than by random chance. See if they re-evaluate their beliefs.
Tell a particle physicist that the Higgs Boson has been conclusively proven not to exist, and after carefully reviewing the data, he'll go back to the drawing board to try and find a new model that fits what we've observed.*
*He'll also probably swear a bit, and get sloshed at the pub later that night.
Music today has boundaries that stretch unfathomably far beyond what gets played on the radio.
For starters, there's the absolutely massive "indie" community that fosters a fantastic amount of great music.
If you prefer ambient/electronic music with few or no words, quite a lot of artists have cropped up in this genre thanks to the magic of file-sharing and the internet, given the genre's relatively specific audience, and the difficulty for such bands to effectively promote themselves.
There are a whole slew of artists in this genre worth checking out: 65daysofstatic, Mogwai, Sigur Rós, Four Tet, Explosions in the Sky, The Books, Battles, Boards of Canada, Aphex Twin, and a thousand others that I've either forgotten or never heard of.
No matter how obscure you might think your musical tastes are, chances are good that there are many, many others like you. Don't be confined by video game soundtracks!
That all said, I've never been all *that* impressed by a video game soundtrack, with the very notable exception of the Final Fantasy series.
However, it's somewhat sobering to realize that this generation is barely left. For instance, there is one American veteran of World War I alive today.
What has our generation done? We're slouching, and making an absolute mess of things in the process.
Yes, but it took them quite a while to get it right, and Russian spacecraft throughout the 60s and 70s were plagued with docking failures.
These days, they've gotten it to the point where it works quite well, although this certainly wasn't always the case.
The difference these days is that optical medium have been, for the large part, backward compatible.
I can play CDs in my DVD player. Pioneer make (made?) a few giant DVD players that could accept LD, and HD-DVD and Blu-Ray players both play DVDs.
Given that DVDs offer what is already "pretty darn good" quality (in some cases approaching that of the original source material), it's not as likely that we'll see people flocking out to replace their DVD collections with Blu-Ray. The quality difference between Blu-Ray and "old fashioned" DVD isn't even remotely as wide as the gap was between VHS and DVD.
Blu-Ray/HD-DVD are evolutionary improvements to an existing medium. DVD could easily be considered a revolutionary new medium. Taking that into account, 20-30 years doesn't seem all that foolish of a guess for the lifespan of optical media as a format. 15 years for DVD, another 10-15 for Blu-Ray, and perhaps a few more for something that hasn't been invented yet.
If a shopkeeper leaves his doors wide open after leaving for the night, it would still indeed be illegal to steal from that store (and you'd probably be found guilty if caught).
However, it'd be damned easy to do so, and it would be pretty damn negligent on the shopkeeper's part. Likewise, no insurance company on the planet would dream of covering his losses over those circumstances.
Now imagine how stupid it'd look for the shopkeeper to begin suing every person who walked by the shop and noted that the doors were open..... and continued to leave his doors open throughout this process.
Newsflash! Company markets product! More at 10.....
Not quite.
It's OS X's media-playback framework/library.
If Apple were faithful to their Unix roots, nothing on OS X should ever require a full reboot apart from kernel updates.
The piston railway would have been a nightmare to construct and operate on a large scale. The difficulties encountered with rounding sharp corners, or switching trains between lines would have been immense, nevermind the difficulties you'd encounter with leakages or blockages in the tunnels.
As far as cool rail technologies that never made it go, the Gyro Monorail has got to be by far the greatest.
It sucks a lot less that Windows Media Player does on the Mac (which isn't even officially supported any more!)
And on the Mac, QuickTime isn't all that bad. As a base set of libraries, it provides an extremely valuable function to the operating system, by allowing any application to easily access the full suite of audio/video functions provided by Quicktime. iMovie and FinalCut do virtually no video processing of their own, and are effectively just fancy front-ends to the quicktime libraries.
Performance isn't phenomenally great (I believe VLC uses a few percent less CPU for some formats, although it's nothing all that remarkable), but it certainly isn't bad.
On the PC, Quicktime is a good bit worse than VLC, but is still very much usable (unlike the ill-fated Windows Media Player for mac).
The last Soyuz failure occurred in 1983 when the rocket exploded on the pad with the crew inside.
It might be a good point to note here that the crew all survived.
In 1975, Soyuz 18a aborted its launch before reaching orbit due to a major booster malfunction. The Launch-Escape-System automatically triggered when the rocket left what was considered a "safe" trajectory, and the crew also survived.
Soyuz capsules have also survived landings in virtually every sort of terrain known to man. Although subsequent revisions have made the spacecraft's landing precision considerably better, the ability to land *anywhere* is a very nice fallback to have if an abort is necessary.
The last Soyuz known fatalities occurred in 1971.
Because of Jabber's decentralized nature, it's not hard to imagine E-Mail providers bundling IM services with their e-mail packages.
Heck, a handful of them already do just that (Google being the biggest and most obvious such provider)
It's not as if IM traffic is particularly bandwidth-intensive. It's one of the most lightweight protocols in use on the internet today.
A series of absurdly racist newsletters were printed under Ron Paul's name.
Ron Paul knew about it for many years, and did absolutely nothing to stop it.
You could hardly call that "guilt by association."
I'm no fan of Ron Paul, but from what I know about him, he's not the type to let himself become another Ross Perot or Ralph Nader.
He's most likely going to drop out before the election so that he doesn't hurt his own party in what is very likely going to be a somewhat close election.
Can't you look past your own ideology to see that this is actually a remarkably good thing, even if it possibly could be better.
This has more to do with the fact that the OS X Flash Player is a steaming pile of crap, and will load even a reasonably powerful system to 100% for no reason whatsoever.
*VLC* of all things plays FLVs considerably more efficiently than Adobe's official Flash Player.
Although I don't want to push the irrelevant political debate any further, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is a very real condition that many Iraq veterans are returning with. The fact that a military consultant such as youself doesn't even seem to be aware of this is troubling to say the least, and is somewhat indicative of the utter disregard with which we are currently treating our soldiers.
Killing a person in self-defense most likely won't cause any sort of major long-term psychological stress. Similarly, if faced with an enemy soldier in combat, you do what you have to in order to stay alive.
On the other hand, thanks to the moronic policies and tactics of our current round of politicians, many of our soldiers in Iraq are beginning to question themselves, as the "enemy opposition" is increasingly composed of desperate civilians. Suddenly, things begin to look very different --- after all, the primary victims of the Iraq war have been civilians, not soldiers.
We've gone and created Vietnam 2.0.
You do bring up a good point.
If I went to MIT, I'd major in marketing.
I have no reason to doubt that their technical degrees are quite good. However, based upon the absurdly disproportionate amount of press they receive, their marketing people have got to be absolutely fucking brilliant.
Perhaps one of their engineers managed to clone Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion Field......
Most students outside of the US pay very little for tuition. Tuition fees generally fund the university's variable costs associated with taking on more students, whilst the university's core operation and fixed costs are paid for by the government. State universities in the US operate on a somewhat similar principle, unless you happen to live in a state that is unwilling or unable to fund its public university system, or want to (gasp!) leave your home state. The problem I have with this Velocity thing is: who pays and who benefits? Seems to me a chunk of everyone's tuition will go toward it, while only some will be in a position to get in. And those who can get in will be the ones who can deal with the extra work load. From what I've seen, even the most "gifted" university students are worked to the core. The divide between the "average" and "better" students is typically directly proportional to the amount of time/work spent studying. The assumption that the most gifted students are also going to be the least worked/stressed is just plain false. Given the general flexibility of a university curriculum, "gifted" students most frequently increase their courseload so that they can graduate early, or begin to take graduate-level courses as part of their undergraduate studies.
The notion that there are gifted students who barely do any work is an absolute myth at the university level.
(Note: None of this applies to Arts majors)