I used to be completely perplexed by the sniping phenomenon, but after a bunch of auctions, late night discussions with friends, and a microeconomics class, I've come to realize why sniping works so well. The point is that there's a big difference between a one-time auction participant and a user who repeatedly participates in many auctions.
For many regular users of ebay, the purpose of ebay auctions is not to maximize economic profit on one single auction. The purpose is to maximize total economic profit across many dozens of auctions conducted over a long period of time. When you are a repeat participant, it can make sense to adopt a strategy which often leaves money on the table, as long as the same strategy has a small probability of winning a lot of money.
The effectiveness of sniping cannot be explained in purely economic terms; one needs a smattering of game theory. In pure economic terms, your strategy of always bidding your maximum leads to minimal risk: either you win the auction and pay less than your maximum, thus profiting the difference, or you lose the auction and do nothing. Obviously, under your strategy, you would always prefer to win the auction, since this is the only scenario that leads to profit. The problem with this strategy is that you are less likely to win the auction if you place your bid first, because
Information is asymmetric: by revealing your bid first, you give other participants more information, and more information always helps their strategy (yes I realize eBay hides your true maximum, but nevertheless your bid leaks information -- if nothing else it leaks the information that you are participating);
Other participants are irrational: The presence of your bid actually causes other people to bid higher than they otherwise would, for various unfathomable reasons which have no grounding in logic.
Because the impact of these problems (especially 2) is somewhat unpredictable and random, the bidding process resembles a type of prisoners dilemma, in which per-instance profit-maximizing play is often not long-term optimal. What makes eBay profitable for repeat buyers is the prospect of winning a small number of auctions at prices far far below the true worth of the items. The sniping strategy is the only way in practice to win an auction at a price dramatically below the true worth of the item, because if you bid your maximum at the outset then the other participants will respond (irrationally) in a manner that raises the winning price. In fact, ironically, the information asymmetry problem exacerbates the irrational bid-raising problem under the eBay auction model, since under this auction model one's true maximum represents a crucial piece of hidden information, and the only way to find out this information is to place bids yourself until you exceed someone else's maximum.
For a repeat participant, it is rational and profitable to take the risk of losing (say) 10 auctions each at a price within $10 under the true worth of the item, in order to have a 1 in 10 chance of winning one of those auctions at a price $100 less than true value. Unless eBay changes their auction rules, sniping is and will remain the best way to maximize expected earnings across a large number of auctions.
If all of this doesn't convince you, then maybe the information asymmetry argument alluded to above will convince you. Since placing a bid reveals information to the other participants, you are always better off placing your bid as late as possible in order to minimize the information available to competing bidders. Doing so certainly never hurts you (if we ignore for the moment eBay's tiebreaker rules, whose effects are negligible, since the costs imposed by bidding second are less than the transaction costs of the sale), and it can sometimes help you if the other participants are irrational, which they are.
I have no relationship with Univenture except as a satisfied customer. Like the parent poster, I strongly recommend Univenture products for CD/DVD storage.
The main advantage of Univenture disc sleeves is that they don't scratch the disc. This holds true whether you leave the discs in the sleeves for a long time or constantly take the discs in and out of the sleeves. I have been actively using them for YEARS with no visible disc scratching. In addition, their disc wallets have paper labels on the spines, which means (unlike other CD wallets) you can label the spines and thereby easily tell from looking at the spines which wallet a particular disc is in -- and yes, the spines are wide enough to hold disc titles for every disc inside, although you may have to write small.
The Univenture disc wallets have plastic outer shells which are considerably more durable than standard jewel cases. In terms of space consumption, they are comparable to spindles, because of the thinness of the sleeves. The only real drawback is the cost -- on a per-disc basis they literally cost more than blank media. Still, compared to the value of the data that I keep on my discs, the cost of providing good storage for the discs is well worth it.
How many printers do you know that ship today or will be out within a year allow you to send a raw PDF file to it and have it print as is without any kind of client spooling and image degradation? XPS lets you do that.
You're about 20 years too late on this one. An Apple LaserWriter from 1985 can print postscript files just by doing cat file.ps >/dev/lp0 in linux, or copy file.ps lpt1 in DOS, or whatever technique your operating system uses to send raw postscript to the printer port. The whole idea of a postscript printer is that it prints raw postscript on the wire.
If you absolutely insist on pdf files as opposed to postscript files, any postscript level 3 printer can handle raw pdf files on the wire with no host processing whatsoever. For example, the HP LaserJet 2420 ships today and allows printing of raw pdf files.
Google made up a very clever scheme for hyping up their product way in advance. When the invite thing first came out, people were doing everything short of auctioning their invites off on EBay, and they might have been doing that, too. I don't remember anyone every saying, "Oh, man, a HOTMAIL account! Yeah! Yeah!" but somehow Google made it seem like a gmail account was a very special and elusive thing to have. It's just smart marketing.
That marketing made a lot of sense back when gmail first came out, but I see no earthly reason for it now other than to rate limit new accounts. There is in fact a good reason why they still persist with the invitation-only scheme, but the reason you gave is not it.
And dude... I'm sure there's a lot of people who will be more than happy to hook you up with a gmail invite. They aren't hard to come by these days.
Exercise: try to procure one without making use of any european languages. After you have succeeded at that task, then you can come back to me and say with a straight face that gmail is accessible worldwide.
Bonus points if your solution to the exercise is easier and simpler than just signing up at http://mail.yahoo.com.tw/.
You can find gmail invites everywhere. Google for it! There seems to be no limits on the invites either. Google refills your invites as quick as you give them out. Also, you can sign up yourself with your mobile phone..
I talked about mobile phones in my original post. It is obvious that you have not read that post.
It's honestly _that_ hard to find someone with a gmail account already?
Way to not read my post. In case you still have difficulty with reading comprehension, let me emphasize the relevant part:
Just because you personally have easy access to gmail invites does not mean the rest of the world does too. By "world" I do not mean the first world.
Your suggestion to try http://www.google.com/search?q=gmail+invites works wonderfully for someone fluent in English, but do I need to remind you that most of the world is not fluent in English? Or are you really so eurocentric that you cannot comprehend how the rest of the world works?
Yahoo mail, needless to say, supports an order of magnitude more languages than gmail.
Its email arrived with a gig of free space where others offered 6 or 10MB, and is now up to 2.7G; hotmail and yahoo both responded with a similar gig of space for their users -- after Google started claiming huge market share. People vote with their feet.
You're comparing an invitation-only beta gmail service to totally open service provided by competitors like hotmail and yahoo. This is fundamentally not a fair comparison.
Just because you personally have easy access to gmail invites does not mean the rest of the world does too. By "world" I do not mean the first world. There is a very large segment of the world for whom yahoo/hotmail is the only option. Gmail is very deliberately catering to a very limited size userbase and for some reason everyone expects open services like hotmail and yahoo to match gmail in capacity.
The closest thing that gmail has to open enrollment is the option to enroll using a mobile phone, and I wonder if you have noticed that the list of countries which are allowed to enroll via this method is restricted to less than a dozen?
On the day that gmail becomes open enrollment, I will give them due credit for offering a gig of free space. Until then, however, please stop and think about why gmail limits enrollment of new accounts, and what your impressions would be if hotmail or yahoo did the same.
The United States is, at best, a representative democracy, which is a far cry from the original athenian ideals of democracy.
There are so many problems with your suggestion to fix bad laws through voting that I don't even know where to begin. Perhaps George Orwell said it best... if there is any hope, it lies with the proles. But let me try to list the problems anyway.
In the first place, any individual voter's influence on the federal government is exceedingly limited, because a voter can only vote for senators/republicans/electoral votes in their own state, and frankly, the problematic laws in question are not being sponsored or supported by congressmen from my state, but rather congressmen from other states, for which I have no vote. Likewise, I have no direct vote in presidential elections, because my right as a voter is limited to electing an elector to represent my own state, and frankly, the electors from my own state are not the problem -- it's the electors from other states that are screwing us over.
Election procedures are of course defined in the US Constitution, and amending the Constitution is a Herculean task bordering on impossible, so like it or not we are stuck with the two party electoral vote system instead of the proportional voting system which is what most of the world thinks of when they think "democracy".
Related to the previous item is the fact that unconstitutional legislation is practically routine these days, thus seriously raising the question of whether the federal government would allow itself to be thrown out by the voters even if the voters voted it to be so. It is already plain to see that the executive branch of government in the US (the branch responsible for enforcing laws) has utter contempt for all laws and constitutional obligations. Who will be left to enforce a transition of governance, if the executive branch does not enforce it?
I need not mention the numerous problems with Diebold voting machines (which as of this writing are still on slashdot's front page). These machines are legally mandated to be used in polling booths in many states. It is common knowledge by now that the Diebold CEO has publicly pledged to do everything in his power to deliver Republican votes to Bush. How do we know that our votes are even being counted? How can we know?
The point is, representative democracy is not a panacea. It requires cooperation from our leaders in order to run well, and right now we're not getting cooperation from our leaders, we're getting opposition.
What you're saying is "gypsy, Jew, black, convicted felon, they're all the same".
Has it ever occurred to you that the legislature can in principle make you a felon just by passing a law against breathing air?
This is not a joke. It's happening already. My guess is that well over half of all Americans have committed a sufficient dollar amount of music piracy to qualify as felony. The fact that you personally think that you are capable of avoiding felonies is irrelevant. If the government wants to make you a felon, then believe me, you will be made a felon.
There are cases on the books where even the text of the laws themselves are not available for you to read. Google for "secret laws" if you don't believe me.
AOL Time Warner lost 54 billion dollars as a direct result of the merger. Call it non-cash if you want, but the shareholders (especially big institutional investors, such as Janus fund) lost real money.
Also, the grandparent post is technically inaccurate -- AOL bought Time Warner, not the other way around.
A "wealth of codecs" is only really important when you are pirating your music from fellow people
I've been using slashdot long enough to have a four digit UID, and I must admit that I have never during all this time seen anybody say anything more false. In fact, not only is your statement false, it is the exact opposite of the truth in an egregiously offensive and inciteful way.
Since you seem to lack even the minimal imagination necessary to envision why non-pirates would ever want to use an alternative codec, let me put it to you bluntly and in great detail. Right now, as of this writing, the aotuv vorbis encoder is widely believed to have by far the best sound quality of any codec at low bitrates. There are detractors who disagree, but the funny thing is, those decractors never bother to perform any actual listening tests, and if you bother to perform actual listening tests, you'll find that ogg vorbis not only wins the quality battle, it wins it by a metric mile.
We're talking stuff on the scale of "Ogg vorbis at 96 kbit beats the world's best mp3 encoder at 128 kbit and no other codec at 96 kbit even comes close to beating mp3." That kind of thing.
Now, before you get all up in arms about how portable players have unlimited disk space and file size is no longer a constraint, let me remind you that the iPod nano has a maximum of 4 gigabytes of disk space as of this writing, and no other flash player on the market has larger capacity. Thus anybody in the market for a totally skip-proof digital audio player is stuck with a maximum of 4GB drive capacity, and in this context, file size is important.
Therefore, people who rip their own CDs and play them on flash players have tremendous incentive to choose the highest quality audio format when ripping their CDs, so as to maximize the use of their portable player's limited disk space.
That is why a wide range of supported codecs is important. Coincidentally, Rockbox supports ogg vorbis on the iPod nano, which is exactly the usage scenario I describe.
But wait, there's more!
Vorbis may be the quality leader today, but this has not always been the case. In the past there have been periods where vorbis was not the quality leader, and in the future I fully expect other audio formats to surpass it in time. Hence, in order to guarantee the maximal utility of an audio player in the future, it is mandatory that the user must be able to add support for new codecs as time goes on, in order to take advantage of the high rate of improvements in the audio codec landscape.
Needless to say, the only way to guarantee the ability to add new codecs in the future is to run free software on your audio player. Coincidentally, that's exactly what Rockbox is: it's free software.
For all these reasons and more, a wide range of supported codecs is necessary to have in an audio player, ESPECIALLY if you rip all your music from your own CD collection and thereby possess total control over the choice of what codec to use.
Vorbis isn't any better than the other lossy encoders
You know, if you absolutely insist on remaining ignorant about codec quality, then I can't stop you, but most people I know would prefer to conduct listening tests with recent encoders before making such a blanket statement, and the funny thing is that if you actually bother to do the tests, you'll find that vorbis is actually in many situations noticeably better than other lossy codecs, and almost never worse.
Recent public tests don't cover low bitrates yet, which is a pity, because at bitrates of 48-64 kbps, vorbis aoTuV is all but invincible -- nothing else even comes close. But there's no need to take my word for it; go test it out yourself.
And yes, low bitrates do matter. Even in the context of iPods, flash players are still as of 2006 extremely space constrained, and a lot of people find it useful to maximize quality per bit.
It is true that Apple doesn't need Ogg Vorbis, but there are two points that need to be mentioned here:
Just because vorbis is a non-issue to Apple, doesn't mean it is a non-issue to me. I have no problem with the perfectly valid and obvious fact that Apple cares not about the vorbis niche market, but I get annoyed when people suggest that *I* should support Apple's position.
Many people right now are already playing Ogg Vorbis files on Apple iPods using the Rockbox firmware. This is the real reason why Apple doesn't need Ogg Vorbis: the geeks can make iPods play vorbis files anyway, whether Apple likes it or not.
Apple deserves credit for making good hardware and parlaying it into good market share. Despite all your naysaying, iPods are going to be the most popular vorbis player in the world, thanks to their market share. That's because even the free software community pays attention to market share when deciding where to focus their coding efforts.
It's not that informative, but definitely correct in the sense that a function (real etc.) is continuous iff the graph is path-connected
There is a minor difference between what you said and what the article text said, although no one except math PhDs would be likely to care. (For the record: your statement is correct, but the article text is not.)
A path connected graph is not the same thing as a connected graph. There exist examples of graphs which are connected but not path connected. The article text claims that a continuous function is one whose graph is connected. This statement is wrong. The correct statement is what you said, that a function is continuous if and only if the graph is path connected.
The topologists' sine curve is an example of a discontinuous function which has a connected graph.
Competition is a good thing. Unfortunately all the iPod did was kill it entirely. For me, the iPod = the destruction of my ability to enjoy digital music. If Apple would ever support OGG and FLAC it would ease my pain at least but this will never happen.
Apple does not support OGG and FLAC, but iPods do. Just install Rockbox on it and you'll have support for ogg, flac, musepack, aac (but not DRM'd aac), gapless playback, and all the bonuses of free software to boot.
For better or for worse, the portable player universe revolves around the iPod now. This holds even for the free software community. I fully expect that the iPod will become the dominant platform for ogg vorbis portables.
To the gp who claims that ogg vorbis is pointless because nobody outside of a few geeks care: you're missing the point. I personally gain a lot from vorbis support, because with only 4GB of storage for flash players, sound quality at low bitrates suddenly becomes important, and ogg vorbis aoTuV beats any other format in terms of sound quality at low bitrates (yes, even AAC). If I have the option of using vorbis and benefitting from it, then I'll use it. I don't really care what everyone else uses. It's not like I trade music with other people (which is illegal anyway), so why should I care what file formats everyone else uses, or vice versa.
Again, even the crudest estimates debunk the standard tireworn doomsday cries of negative energy return on investment for nuclear power, as long as you 1) do the arithmetic correctly, 2) use accurate facts. To quote:
extraction from seawater is thought to cost as much as $200/kg.... Even at $200/kg of uranium, the heat produced by the uranium is around 35 times as much as its cost in fuel oil, assuming the entire cost goes for fuel oil (which is silly).
Where do you propose we get uranium from? I don't believe it's that abundant in the earth's crust. What happens when we hit 'peak uranium' in a few years?
Even the crudest, most conservative estimates indicate that there is enough available uranium to last several billion years at current worldwide energy usage rates.
There's another major advantage of one-time-use credit card numbers, one that often goes unappreciated by the customer using the number -- namely, if a one-time-use credit card number is compromised, you know exactly which retailer was responsible for the breach, because each retailer will have a different credit card number of yours on file.
Not only does this information jump start a police investigation, but it also tells you which database was broken into and thus which set of customers to warn about possible impending credit card fraud.
Don't forget that when Bush Sr. appointed Souter, he wasn't the President's first choice. He originally nominated Robert Bork, but the largely Democratic senate wouldn't approve his appointment.
This statement is factually incorrect. Bork was nominated by Reagan, not Bush.
Bork was a circuit judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1982 to 1988, and was nominated by President Ronald Reagan to the Supreme Court in 1987. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bork
We can easily build provable security schemes for confidentiality and integrity, where we prove computational security against all possible attacks.
No, you can't. Doing this requires proving that P is not equal to NP, which nobody has done. You can prove security against all known attacks, but not against all possible attacks.
What you probably meant to say is that we can easily build provably secure systems under reasonable number-theoretic assumptions such as hardness of integer factorization or hardness of discrete log. In other words, if we assume that integer factorization is hard, then we can build some systems which are guaranteed to be secure, in the sense that any successful attack on those systems would lead to fast integer factorization.
This does not mean that the underlying system is guaranteed to be secure, because the underlying assumption might be false. For example, we do not currently have any proof that integer factorization is actually a hard problem, unless you know something that no other researcher knows. All we have so far is several decades of experience indicating that integer factorization is likely to be hard.
Your statement is valid, but Wikipedia itself seems to disagree with you, given that they host articles not only on rings and fields (which are what I was talking about) but also on far more obscure and esoteric topics in mathematics such as schemes and cohomology.
Since Wikipedia itself undertakes to host these articles, it is legitimate to criticize them on that basis.
can you name authoritative sources that can provide what Wikipedia does that do not have errors and are free?
No, of course not. Everything has errors. I actually agree with you that there are no true experts in any field. Any human is at best an imperfect approximation of an expert and prone to making errors.
The place where I disagree with you is in our response to imperfection. You seem to say, no one is an expert so therefore we shouldn't even try to give preference to those with more knowledge. Let every man fend for himself with his own thinking skills. I on the other hand believe that relying on an imperfect approximation to an expert is still better than relying on a random user. For lack of a better word, I will continue to refer to such approximations as "experts" in what follows.
You've already given several high profile examples where the experts were wrong. But you seem to discount the innumerable mundane instances where the experts are right. I believe the benefits of the countless instances where experts are right outweigh the problems caused when they are wrong. The barrier to challenging an expert should be higher than it is now. If it is simply mob rule, then there will always be more uneducated users who believe 1+1 always equals 2 than there are experts to correct them. Critical thinking is not going to solve this problem, because the number of experts is so small that random statistical noise guarantees they will be outnumbered by the wrongheader thinkers.
Getting back to your question, you did ask for alternatives to Wikipedia. I've helped to develop a site called PlanetMath which is a mathematics oriented wiki with a different contributions model that requires discussion as a precondition for making changes and gives the author more control over article edits. I would not go so far as to claim that it is accurate or authoritative, or that it has better quality material than wikipedia (in fact I doubt that these statements are true). However I do believe that the review process makes it more sustainable in the long term. Time will tell, and meanwhile the benefits of having alternatives far outweighs the temporary costs of duplication of effort.
I'm sure there are similar such websites for other fields of study, but I am not intimately familiar with them since my area of expertise is mathematics.
Slashdot Mirror
For many regular users of ebay, the purpose of ebay auctions is not to maximize economic profit on one single auction. The purpose is to maximize total economic profit across many dozens of auctions conducted over a long period of time. When you are a repeat participant, it can make sense to adopt a strategy which often leaves money on the table, as long as the same strategy has a small probability of winning a lot of money.
The effectiveness of sniping cannot be explained in purely economic terms; one needs a smattering of game theory. In pure economic terms, your strategy of always bidding your maximum leads to minimal risk: either you win the auction and pay less than your maximum, thus profiting the difference, or you lose the auction and do nothing. Obviously, under your strategy, you would always prefer to win the auction, since this is the only scenario that leads to profit. The problem with this strategy is that you are less likely to win the auction if you place your bid first, because
- Information is asymmetric: by revealing your bid first, you give other participants more information, and more information always helps their strategy (yes I realize eBay hides your true maximum, but nevertheless your bid leaks information -- if nothing else it leaks the information that you are participating);
- Other participants are irrational: The presence of your bid actually causes other people to bid higher than they otherwise would, for various unfathomable reasons which have no grounding in logic.
Because the impact of these problems (especially 2) is somewhat unpredictable and random, the bidding process resembles a type of prisoners dilemma, in which per-instance profit-maximizing play is often not long-term optimal. What makes eBay profitable for repeat buyers is the prospect of winning a small number of auctions at prices far far below the true worth of the items. The sniping strategy is the only way in practice to win an auction at a price dramatically below the true worth of the item, because if you bid your maximum at the outset then the other participants will respond (irrationally) in a manner that raises the winning price. In fact, ironically, the information asymmetry problem exacerbates the irrational bid-raising problem under the eBay auction model, since under this auction model one's true maximum represents a crucial piece of hidden information, and the only way to find out this information is to place bids yourself until you exceed someone else's maximum.For a repeat participant, it is rational and profitable to take the risk of losing (say) 10 auctions each at a price within $10 under the true worth of the item, in order to have a 1 in 10 chance of winning one of those auctions at a price $100 less than true value. Unless eBay changes their auction rules, sniping is and will remain the best way to maximize expected earnings across a large number of auctions.
If all of this doesn't convince you, then maybe the information asymmetry argument alluded to above will convince you. Since placing a bid reveals information to the other participants, you are always better off placing your bid as late as possible in order to minimize the information available to competing bidders. Doing so certainly never hurts you (if we ignore for the moment eBay's tiebreaker rules, whose effects are negligible, since the costs imposed by bidding second are less than the transaction costs of the sale), and it can sometimes help you if the other participants are irrational, which they are.
The main advantage of Univenture disc sleeves is that they don't scratch the disc. This holds true whether you leave the discs in the sleeves for a long time or constantly take the discs in and out of the sleeves. I have been actively using them for YEARS with no visible disc scratching. In addition, their disc wallets have paper labels on the spines, which means (unlike other CD wallets) you can label the spines and thereby easily tell from looking at the spines which wallet a particular disc is in -- and yes, the spines are wide enough to hold disc titles for every disc inside, although you may have to write small.
The Univenture disc wallets have plastic outer shells which are considerably more durable than standard jewel cases. In terms of space consumption, they are comparable to spindles, because of the thinness of the sleeves. The only real drawback is the cost -- on a per-disc basis they literally cost more than blank media. Still, compared to the value of the data that I keep on my discs, the cost of providing good storage for the discs is well worth it.
You're about 20 years too late on this one. An Apple LaserWriter from 1985 can print postscript files just by doing cat file.ps > /dev/lp0 in linux, or copy file.ps lpt1 in DOS, or whatever technique your operating system uses to send raw postscript to the printer port. The whole idea of a postscript printer is that it prints raw postscript on the wire.
If you absolutely insist on pdf files as opposed to postscript files, any postscript level 3 printer can handle raw pdf files on the wire with no host processing whatsoever. For example, the HP LaserJet 2420 ships today and allows printing of raw pdf files.
That marketing made a lot of sense back when gmail first came out, but I see no earthly reason for it now other than to rate limit new accounts. There is in fact a good reason why they still persist with the invitation-only scheme, but the reason you gave is not it.
Exercise: try to procure one without making use of any european languages. After you have succeeded at that task, then you can come back to me and say with a straight face that gmail is accessible worldwide.
Bonus points if your solution to the exercise is easier and simpler than just signing up at http://mail.yahoo.com.tw/.
I talked about mobile phones in my original post. It is obvious that you have not read that post.
Way to not read my post. In case you still have difficulty with reading comprehension, let me emphasize the relevant part:
Your suggestion to try http://www.google.com/search?q=gmail+invites works wonderfully for someone fluent in English, but do I need to remind you that most of the world is not fluent in English? Or are you really so eurocentric that you cannot comprehend how the rest of the world works?
Yahoo mail, needless to say, supports an order of magnitude more languages than gmail.
You're comparing an invitation-only beta gmail service to totally open service provided by competitors like hotmail and yahoo. This is fundamentally not a fair comparison.
Just because you personally have easy access to gmail invites does not mean the rest of the world does too. By "world" I do not mean the first world. There is a very large segment of the world for whom yahoo/hotmail is the only option. Gmail is very deliberately catering to a very limited size userbase and for some reason everyone expects open services like hotmail and yahoo to match gmail in capacity.
The closest thing that gmail has to open enrollment is the option to enroll using a mobile phone, and I wonder if you have noticed that the list of countries which are allowed to enroll via this method is restricted to less than a dozen?
On the day that gmail becomes open enrollment, I will give them due credit for offering a gig of free space. Until then, however, please stop and think about why gmail limits enrollment of new accounts, and what your impressions would be if hotmail or yahoo did the same.
There are so many problems with your suggestion to fix bad laws through voting that I don't even know where to begin. Perhaps George Orwell said it best ... if there is any hope, it lies with the proles. But let me try to list the problems anyway.
In the first place, any individual voter's influence on the federal government is exceedingly limited, because a voter can only vote for senators/republicans/electoral votes in their own state, and frankly, the problematic laws in question are not being sponsored or supported by congressmen from my state, but rather congressmen from other states, for which I have no vote. Likewise, I have no direct vote in presidential elections, because my right as a voter is limited to electing an elector to represent my own state, and frankly, the electors from my own state are not the problem -- it's the electors from other states that are screwing us over.
Election procedures are of course defined in the US Constitution, and amending the Constitution is a Herculean task bordering on impossible, so like it or not we are stuck with the two party electoral vote system instead of the proportional voting system which is what most of the world thinks of when they think "democracy".
Related to the previous item is the fact that unconstitutional legislation is practically routine these days, thus seriously raising the question of whether the federal government would allow itself to be thrown out by the voters even if the voters voted it to be so. It is already plain to see that the executive branch of government in the US (the branch responsible for enforcing laws) has utter contempt for all laws and constitutional obligations. Who will be left to enforce a transition of governance, if the executive branch does not enforce it?
I need not mention the numerous problems with Diebold voting machines (which as of this writing are still on slashdot's front page). These machines are legally mandated to be used in polling booths in many states. It is common knowledge by now that the Diebold CEO has publicly pledged to do everything in his power to deliver Republican votes to Bush. How do we know that our votes are even being counted? How can we know?
The point is, representative democracy is not a panacea. It requires cooperation from our leaders in order to run well, and right now we're not getting cooperation from our leaders, we're getting opposition.
Has it ever occurred to you that the legislature can in principle make you a felon just by passing a law against breathing air?
This is not a joke. It's happening already. My guess is that well over half of all Americans have committed a sufficient dollar amount of music piracy to qualify as felony. The fact that you personally think that you are capable of avoiding felonies is irrelevant. If the government wants to make you a felon, then believe me, you will be made a felon.
There are cases on the books where even the text of the laws themselves are not available for you to read. Google for "secret laws" if you don't believe me.
If yes, what effect does it have? Be specific.
If no, why is the ninth amendment in the Constitution?
I think you could use a civics lesson yourself. Here is the text of the ninth amendment:
Also, the grandparent post is technically inaccurate -- AOL bought Time Warner, not the other way around.
I've been using slashdot long enough to have a four digit UID, and I must admit that I have never during all this time seen anybody say anything more false. In fact, not only is your statement false, it is the exact opposite of the truth in an egregiously offensive and inciteful way.
Since you seem to lack even the minimal imagination necessary to envision why non-pirates would ever want to use an alternative codec, let me put it to you bluntly and in great detail. Right now, as of this writing, the aotuv vorbis encoder is widely believed to have by far the best sound quality of any codec at low bitrates. There are detractors who disagree, but the funny thing is, those decractors never bother to perform any actual listening tests, and if you bother to perform actual listening tests, you'll find that ogg vorbis not only wins the quality battle, it wins it by a metric mile.
We're talking stuff on the scale of "Ogg vorbis at 96 kbit beats the world's best mp3 encoder at 128 kbit and no other codec at 96 kbit even comes close to beating mp3." That kind of thing.
Now, before you get all up in arms about how portable players have unlimited disk space and file size is no longer a constraint, let me remind you that the iPod nano has a maximum of 4 gigabytes of disk space as of this writing, and no other flash player on the market has larger capacity. Thus anybody in the market for a totally skip-proof digital audio player is stuck with a maximum of 4GB drive capacity, and in this context, file size is important.
Therefore, people who rip their own CDs and play them on flash players have tremendous incentive to choose the highest quality audio format when ripping their CDs, so as to maximize the use of their portable player's limited disk space.
That is why a wide range of supported codecs is important. Coincidentally, Rockbox supports ogg vorbis on the iPod nano, which is exactly the usage scenario I describe.
But wait, there's more!
Vorbis may be the quality leader today, but this has not always been the case. In the past there have been periods where vorbis was not the quality leader, and in the future I fully expect other audio formats to surpass it in time. Hence, in order to guarantee the maximal utility of an audio player in the future, it is mandatory that the user must be able to add support for new codecs as time goes on, in order to take advantage of the high rate of improvements in the audio codec landscape.
Needless to say, the only way to guarantee the ability to add new codecs in the future is to run free software on your audio player. Coincidentally, that's exactly what Rockbox is: it's free software.
For all these reasons and more, a wide range of supported codecs is necessary to have in an audio player, ESPECIALLY if you rip all your music from your own CD collection and thereby possess total control over the choice of what codec to use.
You know, if you absolutely insist on remaining ignorant about codec quality, then I can't stop you, but most people I know would prefer to conduct listening tests with recent encoders before making such a blanket statement, and the funny thing is that if you actually bother to do the tests, you'll find that vorbis is actually in many situations noticeably better than other lossy codecs, and almost never worse.
Recent public tests don't cover low bitrates yet, which is a pity, because at bitrates of 48-64 kbps, vorbis aoTuV is all but invincible -- nothing else even comes close. But there's no need to take my word for it; go test it out yourself.
And yes, low bitrates do matter. Even in the context of iPods, flash players are still as of 2006 extremely space constrained, and a lot of people find it useful to maximize quality per bit.
- Just because vorbis is a non-issue to Apple, doesn't mean it is a non-issue to me. I have no problem with the perfectly valid and obvious fact that Apple cares not about the vorbis niche market, but I get annoyed when people suggest that *I* should support Apple's position.
- Many people right now are already playing Ogg Vorbis files on Apple iPods using the Rockbox firmware. This is the real reason why Apple doesn't need Ogg Vorbis: the geeks can make iPods play vorbis files anyway, whether Apple likes it or not.
Apple deserves credit for making good hardware and parlaying it into good market share. Despite all your naysaying, iPods are going to be the most popular vorbis player in the world, thanks to their market share. That's because even the free software community pays attention to market share when deciding where to focus their coding efforts.There is a minor difference between what you said and what the article text said, although no one except math PhDs would be likely to care. (For the record: your statement is correct, but the article text is not.)
A path connected graph is not the same thing as a connected graph. There exist examples of graphs which are connected but not path connected. The article text claims that a continuous function is one whose graph is connected. This statement is wrong. The correct statement is what you said, that a function is continuous if and only if the graph is path connected.
The topologists' sine curve is an example of a discontinuous function which has a connected graph.
Apple does not support OGG and FLAC, but iPods do. Just install Rockbox on it and you'll have support for ogg, flac, musepack, aac (but not DRM'd aac), gapless playback, and all the bonuses of free software to boot.
For better or for worse, the portable player universe revolves around the iPod now. This holds even for the free software community. I fully expect that the iPod will become the dominant platform for ogg vorbis portables.
To the gp who claims that ogg vorbis is pointless because nobody outside of a few geeks care: you're missing the point. I personally gain a lot from vorbis support, because with only 4GB of storage for flash players, sound quality at low bitrates suddenly becomes important, and ogg vorbis aoTuV beats any other format in terms of sound quality at low bitrates (yes, even AAC). If I have the option of using vorbis and benefitting from it, then I'll use it. I don't really care what everyone else uses. It's not like I trade music with other people (which is illegal anyway), so why should I care what file formats everyone else uses, or vice versa.
Maybe you meant it as a joke, but it is actually possible to get light on two sides of every room. See Joel's bionic office.
Even the crudest, most conservative estimates indicate that there is enough available uranium to last several billion years at current worldwide energy usage rates.
Not only does this information jump start a police investigation, but it also tells you which database was broken into and thus which set of customers to warn about possible impending credit card fraud.
This statement is factually incorrect. Bork was nominated by Reagan, not Bush.
No, you can't. Doing this requires proving that P is not equal to NP, which nobody has done. You can prove security against all known attacks, but not against all possible attacks.
What you probably meant to say is that we can easily build provably secure systems under reasonable number-theoretic assumptions such as hardness of integer factorization or hardness of discrete log. In other words, if we assume that integer factorization is hard, then we can build some systems which are guaranteed to be secure, in the sense that any successful attack on those systems would lead to fast integer factorization.
This does not mean that the underlying system is guaranteed to be secure, because the underlying assumption might be false. For example, we do not currently have any proof that integer factorization is actually a hard problem, unless you know something that no other researcher knows. All we have so far is several decades of experience indicating that integer factorization is likely to be hard.
Since Wikipedia itself undertakes to host these articles, it is legitimate to criticize them on that basis.
No, of course not. Everything has errors. I actually agree with you that there are no true experts in any field. Any human is at best an imperfect approximation of an expert and prone to making errors.
The place where I disagree with you is in our response to imperfection. You seem to say, no one is an expert so therefore we shouldn't even try to give preference to those with more knowledge. Let every man fend for himself with his own thinking skills. I on the other hand believe that relying on an imperfect approximation to an expert is still better than relying on a random user. For lack of a better word, I will continue to refer to such approximations as "experts" in what follows.
You've already given several high profile examples where the experts were wrong. But you seem to discount the innumerable mundane instances where the experts are right. I believe the benefits of the countless instances where experts are right outweigh the problems caused when they are wrong. The barrier to challenging an expert should be higher than it is now. If it is simply mob rule, then there will always be more uneducated users who believe 1+1 always equals 2 than there are experts to correct them. Critical thinking is not going to solve this problem, because the number of experts is so small that random statistical noise guarantees they will be outnumbered by the wrongheader thinkers.
Getting back to your question, you did ask for alternatives to Wikipedia. I've helped to develop a site called PlanetMath which is a mathematics oriented wiki with a different contributions model that requires discussion as a precondition for making changes and gives the author more control over article edits. I would not go so far as to claim that it is accurate or authoritative, or that it has better quality material than wikipedia (in fact I doubt that these statements are true). However I do believe that the review process makes it more sustainable in the long term. Time will tell, and meanwhile the benefits of having alternatives far outweighs the temporary costs of duplication of effort.
I'm sure there are similar such websites for other fields of study, but I am not intimately familiar with them since my area of expertise is mathematics.