Not only is this a transparently empty gesture by the CPC, but I believe it has absolutely no downside for the CPC. It's English. The only people that are going to looking at it are foreigners and they're going to leave after two weeks. The indigenous population isn't going to bother, simply because they're much more focused on the simplified-chinese version. Also, don't discount how the population has been cowed into self censorship. No doubt thanks to Jingjing, Chacha, and the thousands of true believers. (There's ALWAYS true believers.)
Honestly, I don't think the Chinese people want freedom and democracy. I think they're too busy making money and improving their lives. Don't rock the boat, we've got a good think going. Let it be. It's human nature. As Juvenal observed:
Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions - everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses
Not to mention the legality... The Hatch act still exists, to the best of my knowledge. And although people generally interpret it somewhat more liberally than intended, this seems like exactly the form of corruption targetted thereby... The executive branch, using federal funds to make the war look better, to improve the chances of McCain getting in come November. B-b-but when the president does it, that means it's not illegal! Also since the president ordered the military in a time of war as commander in chief his power is absolute under the constitution, and as the unitary executive he has sovereign immunity from prosecution since it is meaningless for the executive branch to to investigate and prosecute itself, and the other two branches don't have authority because he's commander in chief!
I do research in collaborative filtering, which is essentially what this is.
In the first stage, 30 human participants were asked to rate from 1-7 the beauty of several dozen pictures.
For a masters project (which this was), that's a decent sample size. For research and practice, I do not think that will suffice. Why don't they tell us how this scored some celebrities from around the world like say Iman Abdulmajid, Zsa Zsa Gabor & Angelina Jolie? I have a feeling that their system is over-trained and would perform poorly in real life. Facial beauty requires imagination and this system was hand trained on a hundred points. I don't think that's enough but I wish they would have published more results to either prove or disprove my criticisms.
The number of participants in user studies are usually pretty low. A 30 person sample size is actually pretty good. It would have been better if the number of participants exceeded the number of items being rated though. That would have made this project better. A simple case would simply have been to enlist a bunch of undergrads from some classes. Double bonus points if he got their participation in the project mandatory. That's a common technique in psych departments to get subjects.
I can tell you why they didn't use celebrities. It's completely irrelevant. First off the training data consisted of 91 caucasian (i.e. european descent, i.e. "white") women. Any results with Iman would be completely spurious since she's african (i.e. "black"). Non-whites simply don't exist in the world of machine rater. Her rating would be dependent on what weights would be assigned to skin and hair color. I would suspect that since her skin color lies outside the range of what society defines as "white," this extreme variance would either strong rate her as attractive or unattractive. Not in the middle. But as I said, it doesn't matter since she's not of the population the training set samples. Second, the faces used in the study are all neutral expression, full frontal, under controlled lighting with no makeup and jewelry. Try finding any celebrity photo like that. Third, what is the point of using celebrities? What does that give you that a random sample doesn't? The only reason why I would think that you would mention celebrities is that you believe that somehow they represent a population of highly attractive people. That's a false premise. There are plenty of unattractive celebrities, and there's celebrities that are allegedly attractive but really aren't. Case in point: Angelina Jolie. I find her absolutely hideous. She is the ugliest woman that the media tries desperately to convince me that is attractive. Sorry. No. On the likert used in this study, she's a 2. 3 at best. Now even if I am a freak, and you're implicit assertion that celebrities have above average attractiveness even under controlled conditions, what's the point of using that for testing? The system would need to learn nothing to test well on that data set. Hell, this would be all you'd need to perform well: int ratePhoto(Photo *p) { return 7; } Not very interesting is it?
You're also assuming that there is some sort of objective analysis here, and there clearly isn't. All you can do is measure how the system performed to the human judges. In this case, the system. The system had a Pearson's correlation of.82 with the human judges. This corresponds to a MSE of.39, which is very good. In fact it's significantly better than the previous study this work appears to be based on, which only achieved a correlation of.6 on a similar dataset. So there goes you're argument that this isn't noteworthy.
This leads us to the discussion of why they only used a 91 image dataset. First off you're limited to what data sets are available. These datasets have apparently been used repeatedly throughout the community so apparently they're a standard set for eva
Thanks for the info.
Definitely learn a few chinese sayings before you go, something more than "ni hao". Wo yi nian xue zhongwen le. Ke shi, wo shi cuo xuesheng le.
Wo xihuan he pijiu.:) (err... Asian smiley: ^___^ )
Thanks for the advice! I'd like to avoid the touristy parts if I can, but at the same time there are certain things such as Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City that you just have to see since they are unique in the world.
I should definitely try to schedule some time to go to Xian. I can always take a train I guess. A friend of mine in Beijing suggested the the Hou Hai and Xiang Shan neighborhoods in Beijing places to see. Any other advice?
The conventional wisdom is that in the lead up to, and during, the olympics that Great Firewall is going to be deactivated for those with IP addresses originating in parts of Beijing where foreigners are expected to be. The idea is that foreigners will come to China, not see anything a miss and then go back to their home countries and spread the false impression.
It's a page right out Chairman Mao's playbook. When Nixon went China, the handlers routinely gave people on the street transistor radios to listen to. That way Nixon and Kissenger would say, "Wow. What a nice scene. China truly is wonderful place." Then as soon as these people were out of sight of dignitaries, goons (I'm sorry, "the advance team") would collect the radios for redistribution to other Potemkin Villages.
As David Byrne said, "Same as it ever was."
I'm going to be in Beijing next month in a hotel down by the Bird's Nest. I'm going to have to check out the Great Firewall.
1. Inflated grades in the abstract neither suck nor not suck. Being the only kid on the block with lower grades does suck. In one since it doesn't matter that much, because engineering students are getting jobs in engineering firms where crappy grades are common.
2. Good textbooks are not simply tables of equations. Good textbooks have both the equation and enough prose to understand where the equation comes from, its assumptions, and what it means. The complaint that frequently students have to constantly convert between what the book says and what the prof says is all too common. I blame the prof. The book can't be changed. The whiteboard notation can.
3. As a phd student in cs let me tell you something. Undergrad engineering classes suck. Many are essentially nothing but weed out classes with questions that are full of busy work. It is clear that in many cases undergrad courses are simply not a priority for many professors. They're a nuisance that must be passed on to the the undergraduate students. Honestly. You know the prof. You know he's a good guy. You know he can teach if he wants to, but when you see him in front of a room full of undergrads, he's a different guy. WTF?
Does all this mean that engineering sucks? Well I wouldn't say that it sucks sucks, but it could suck a whole lot less.
Seriously... I don't think this article is either NEWS FOR NERDS or STUFF THAT MATTERS. Clearly the author should not try to become an engineer and should switch to some other discipline where he gets inflated grades and the incorrect notion that he is bright. Taco et. al frankly don't give a shit what you think, and if you had half a clue, or even bothered to read the faq, then you'd know that.
A 'bit' like 1984? Actually this more reminds of Max Headroom.
Who in the hell would go for this? The vast majority of people.
Americans seem to have managed to convince their politicians and corporations that they have no interest in freedom at all Because a majority Americans apparently don't.
Oh and this is perfectly okay since it's a corporation and not a government because companies are beholden to a small number of hyper wealthy share holders as opposed to the populous. And companies never do anything wrong! Why would they? I mean look at the housing market. Rolling along! Look at the energy markets where it was finally let loose of the yoke of government regulation! Enron! Worldcom! Bear Stearns! These are pillars of industry. Truly, we should simply have more faith in the wisdom of our betters.
Why is there the push for this? There isn't wide scale fraud, and there's no reason to believe that Bad Guys(tm) couldn't simply create a fake entry in a database, or that the biometric stuff would actually be used. California requires a thumbprint to get a driver's license (!), and yet you're never asked for it at a traffic stop. Why?
I have a suspicion. It's not for authentication at all. Others have already pointed out the inherent flaw in using nonrevokable certificates for authentication. (i.e. once someone has faked or corrupted your biometric data, you're fucked.) So what is a biometric data good for? The same thing that's good for when the government stores DNA sequences of everyone processed. It's a globally unique identifier. You can put multiple databases together easily. Name collisions are a thing of the past.
If you really think that government won't combine their databases, you're a fool.
Obscurity isn't security, but there is something to be said about making information, even public records, a bit harder to put together than to give a big data dump about everyone to everyone. Society has built on a certain level an anonymity existing, even when legally it doesn't exist. But it's all too obvious that people's expectations and behaviors don't always align with the letter of the law. And seriously, given the government's current cavalier attitude towards privacy and the law, do you really think that a simple law is going to stop them?
Trying to apply science principles to religion, is like trying to apply science to relationships. IT JUST DOESN'T WORK. I'm glad to see that sociology and psychology aren't science.
You want to religion to be unassailable and have it live in some sort of iffy squishy world where the rules of nature conveniently don't exist when their outcomes are inconvenient. But that's a foolish and intellectually dishonest position. Everything is questionable. Everything must be defended on the basis of evidence, and there's simply no evidence that the supernatural exists in any form. You want to change the rules, because you don't want confront the cold hard truth, that you have taken comfort in a lie.
Yes there is a lot of suffering in this world, but most of it is self inflicted. And by 'self' I mean we as humanity. We need to learn to get along between ourselves first. The gods can either take away evil from the world and will not, or, being willing to do so cannot; or they neither can nor will, or lastly, they are able and willing. If they have the will to remove evil and cannot, then they are not omnipotent. If they can but will not, then they are not benevolent. If they are neither able nor willing, they are neither omnipotent nor benevolent. Lastly, if they are both able and willing to annihilate evil, why does it exist? - Epicurus,
No help from above. And with these words, you damn the very basis of religion: the appeal of the supernatural to control what one can not.
It's not a clone. They decompiled the swf and changed some of the graphics. It's obvious from a hex dump. If you bothered to read TFA you would have known that.
I hate class action suits. They do next to no good for the consumer save for putting a couple (literally) bucks in the pocket, benefit lawyers almost exclusively and in the end make products cost more. You don't understand the point of class action lawsuits.
It's not compensation, it's punishment. Punishment for bad behavior is good. It makes companies think twice about conducting bad behavior in the future. It's essentially a civil fine. Lawyers making money? Well look, for members of the class, it is essentially free money. You fill out online form, and then you wait for a check. That's it.
but this is going to do little good in the long run. If it makes them not knowingly engage in an extremely confusing (at best) and deceptive (at worse) campaign, then it would have achieved it's goal.
"B-b-b-but it's a lawsuit! and Lawyers are Evil(tm)!!!11!eleventy-one!11!" you say. If you don't bring civil suits, how do you expect private citizens assert their rights and correct the behavior of those who have wronged them? Unless of course, you think that people shouldn't be able to defend themselves. Do you believe that?
Oh, and more to the point, the USA *is* still among the best in freedom of speech. You know, they're the country where displaying Confederate flags is legal, KKK rallies are legal... whereas in, say, Germany, displaying any sort of Nazi symbolism is a good way to get hauled off to jail. This isn't a value judgment, just an observation that one land is clearly more free than the other, for better or for worse. Or as the saying goes, "Freedom of Speech means nothing, if only the people you agree with are free to speak." Or as I like to put it, "It's everyone's inalienable right, to make sure that everyone knows just how stupid you are."
Joe user != dumb. If someone is knowledgeable enough to have MP3's on their system to play, they are knowledgeable enough to google "play mp3 in ubuntu", hit I'm feeling lucky, and find their answer right there. The fact that you think that googling for an answer is an acceptable solution, show that you have no grasp of just how horrible this situation is. People don't have to google for windows nor for macs. Every time you force people to google for their answers, you've failed. You've have a beyond more than Epically failed.
You obviously don't even realize that this is a problem, let alone the shear scale of this problem.
As for the wireless, what would do if some piece of hardware didn't work in windows? Get one that does. I recommend Joe does the same, there certainly are plenty of wireless cards that just work in linux. Nice try, but literally every piece of consumer hardware, if not all mass produced hardware, supports windows, so that problem simply doesn't happen. While in the linux world, it's all too common. Win for windows. Fail for linux.
The fact that you're blaming the user for linux's failing is all too common of a sentiment that is one of the major impediments to linux adoption. Who's holding linux back in adoption? Ironically it's The Community. It's the attitude of, "Ur dumb. Just patch ur colonel dumbass!!eleventy-one!1!!" and "U suxorz! Buy more stuff dipshit!"
That's not helpful. In fact, it's hurtful. Also, the whole "Your toys are 31337 enough" turns people off. It's too high a barrier of entry. People don't buy stuff, they simply delete the partition and say, "Well that's a weekend wasted," and then go off thinking "Linux doesn't work."
WLAN support sucks. Many times the hardware is supported by using ndiswrapper, which in my experience has led to kernel panics, and if you want WPA support, that's entire clusterfuck in in its own right. It's hard to configure, and you never know exactly what is going on. If you make the user go to the command line to do anything, you've failed. This is 2008. Not 1968. The world has moved on. In too many ways Linux hasn't.
"But you have to LEARN!11!eleventy-one!!11!" you say. No. Screw that. Life is too short. I don't want to waste my life unfucking your problems. I want to do work. I don't give two shits about sysadmining. Sysadmining is not and end. Sysadmining is not fun. Every time you make me a sysadmin I'm not whatever it is I am. You've stolen a little bit of my life, and that makes me bitter.
From the blurb:
I know it's not true that Linux is worth less than Windows. It's far more valuable to the end user in terms of getting things done. No. No it's not. OpenOffice sucks. It's usability is worse than MS Office, and it's compatibility filters regularly screw up simple files. "Of but that's because M$ is using closed formats!" I hear you say. To which I respond, "Who cares?" If it's not 100% correct, it's 100% wrong. Sucks I know, but that's just how it is.
There's a big gap in lifestyle apps. I'm talking things like photo, movie, and music managers. They either don't exist, or are much harder to use, or lack the features that really matter people. (FYI: No one gives a shit about Ogg-Vorbis support, because there's nothing out there in that format. They DO care about WindowsMedia 10 though. Stop making excuses and fix that problem.)
So in summary, if you don't have the apps I need, you're worthless to me, and Linux doesn't have the apps many people need. Also, if you require me to do any sysadmining whatsoever you've epicly failed. The total cost of ownership has just 1000%. Sucks, I know, but that's just how the world works.
You want linux to really be valuable to people, then get your fat ass of the damn blog patting yourself on the back and get to work!
using the term "dictators" in a vague, hand-wavy ill-defined manner Nice try. It's not. China is a single party totalitarian regime. Hu Jintao, is a dictator in a long line of dictators that stretch back to Chairman Mao.
implying that "cultural differences" are generally "trivial" Nice try. He said, spitting habits were trivial. He didn't say that all cultural differences are trivial. I would Saudi and western treatment of women are not trivial matters.
I'd suggest folks with a similar politically-correct set of assumptions start with a slow reading of Wikipedia article on human rights and make a list of all shit they they haven't read, studied, or heard about, all the while keeping in mind that China is a permanent member of the Security Council. A country's status on the UNSC is completely irrelevant. The permanent members of the the UNSC are the victors of World War II. And China's seat? Until the US normalized relations with China, it was held by the nation of Taiwan.
Learning about China is all well and good, but none of that gives an excuse for select group of elites with no legitimacy to impose total arbitrary will over others. That's the hallmark of a totalitarian regime, and that's always wrong.
And before you say anything America's human rights standards, yes, the United States is torturing people in Cuba and in secret locations around the world. And yes, it's a war crime, punishable by death even by America's own standards.
No. hydrocarbons are just hydrogen and carbon molecules. They're very common. FYI: Organic compounds are just hydrocarbons with oxygen attached. That's it. Organic compounds aren't that special either.
DTDs are specificiation, and while machine readable is nice, it's not really needed for anything except validation. A napkin is good enough for listing defaults to an app, since they're going to have to be coded anyway. Yeah, you could use as a type of static config file, but there's no reason why you have to. I'm not convinced that DTDs really get you anything in practice.
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Not only is this a transparently empty gesture by the CPC, but I believe it has absolutely no downside for the CPC. It's English. The only people that are going to looking at it are foreigners and they're going to leave after two weeks. The indigenous population isn't going to bother, simply because they're much more focused on the simplified-chinese version. Also, don't discount how the population has been cowed into self censorship. No doubt thanks to Jingjing, Chacha, and the thousands of true believers. (There's ALWAYS true believers.)
Honestly, I don't think the Chinese people want freedom and democracy. I think they're too busy making money and improving their lives. Don't rock the boat, we've got a good think going. Let it be. It's human nature. As Juvenal observed:
Ahh John Yoo, where's a bullet when you need one.
Moulitsas is a pompous idiot that in between bouts of manufactured outrage is busy slapping himself on the back, so this isn't surprising at all.
In the first stage, 30 human participants were asked to rate from 1-7 the beauty of several dozen pictures.
For a masters project (which this was), that's a decent sample size. For research and practice, I do not think that will suffice. Why don't they tell us how this scored some celebrities from around the world like say Iman Abdulmajid, Zsa Zsa Gabor & Angelina Jolie? I have a feeling that their system is over-trained and would perform poorly in real life. Facial beauty requires imagination and this system was hand trained on a hundred points. I don't think that's enough but I wish they would have published more results to either prove or disprove my criticisms.
The number of participants in user studies are usually pretty low. A 30 person sample size is actually pretty good. It would have been better if the number of participants exceeded the number of items being rated though. That would have made this project better. A simple case would simply have been to enlist a bunch of undergrads from some classes. Double bonus points if he got their participation in the project mandatory. That's a common technique in psych departments to get subjects.
.82 with the human judges. This corresponds to a MSE of .39, which is very good. In fact it's significantly better than the previous study this work appears to be based on, which only achieved a correlation of .6 on a similar dataset. So there goes you're argument that this isn't noteworthy.
I can tell you why they didn't use celebrities. It's completely irrelevant. First off the training data consisted of 91 caucasian (i.e. european descent, i.e. "white") women. Any results with Iman would be completely spurious since she's african (i.e. "black"). Non-whites simply don't exist in the world of machine rater. Her rating would be dependent on what weights would be assigned to skin and hair color. I would suspect that since her skin color lies outside the range of what society defines as "white," this extreme variance would either strong rate her as attractive or unattractive. Not in the middle. But as I said, it doesn't matter since she's not of the population the training set samples. Second, the faces used in the study are all neutral expression, full frontal, under controlled lighting with no makeup and jewelry. Try finding any celebrity photo like that. Third, what is the point of using celebrities? What does that give you that a random sample doesn't? The only reason why I would think that you would mention celebrities is that you believe that somehow they represent a population of highly attractive people. That's a false premise. There are plenty of unattractive celebrities, and there's celebrities that are allegedly attractive but really aren't. Case in point: Angelina Jolie. I find her absolutely hideous. She is the ugliest woman that the media tries desperately to convince me that is attractive. Sorry. No. On the likert used in this study, she's a 2. 3 at best. Now even if I am a freak, and you're implicit assertion that celebrities have above average attractiveness even under controlled conditions, what's the point of using that for testing? The system would need to learn nothing to test well on that data set. Hell, this would be all you'd need to perform well:
int ratePhoto(Photo *p) { return 7; }
Not very interesting is it?
You're also assuming that there is some sort of objective analysis here, and there clearly isn't. All you can do is measure how the system performed to the human judges. In this case, the system. The system had a Pearson's correlation of
This leads us to the discussion of why they only used a 91 image dataset. First off you're limited to what data sets are available. These datasets have apparently been used repeatedly throughout the community so apparently they're a standard set for eva
50 cents!? Thank the glorious communist revolutionaries for pegging the renminbi to the US dollar. :)
Wo xihuan he pijiu.
Thanks for the advice! I'd like to avoid the touristy parts if I can, but at the same time there are certain things such as Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City that you just have to see since they are unique in the world.
I should definitely try to schedule some time to go to Xian. I can always take a train I guess. A friend of mine in Beijing suggested the the Hou Hai and Xiang Shan neighborhoods in Beijing places to see. Any other advice?
The conventional wisdom is that in the lead up to, and during, the olympics that Great Firewall is going to be deactivated for those with IP addresses originating in parts of Beijing where foreigners are expected to be. The idea is that foreigners will come to China, not see anything a miss and then go back to their home countries and spread the false impression.
It's a page right out Chairman Mao's playbook. When Nixon went China, the handlers routinely gave people on the street transistor radios to listen to. That way Nixon and Kissenger would say, "Wow. What a nice scene. China truly is wonderful place." Then as soon as these people were out of sight of dignitaries, goons (I'm sorry, "the advance team") would collect the radios for redistribution to other Potemkin Villages.
As David Byrne said, "Same as it ever was."
I'm going to be in Beijing next month in a hotel down by the Bird's Nest. I'm going to have to check out the Great Firewall.
2. Good textbooks are not simply tables of equations. Good textbooks have both the equation and enough prose to understand where the equation comes from, its assumptions, and what it means. The complaint that frequently students have to constantly convert between what the book says and what the prof says is all too common. I blame the prof. The book can't be changed. The whiteboard notation can.
3. As a phd student in cs let me tell you something. Undergrad engineering classes suck. Many are essentially nothing but weed out classes with questions that are full of busy work. It is clear that in many cases undergrad courses are simply not a priority for many professors. They're a nuisance that must be passed on to the the undergraduate students. Honestly. You know the prof. You know he's a good guy. You know he can teach if he wants to, but when you see him in front of a room full of undergrads, he's a different guy. WTF?
Does all this mean that engineering sucks? Well I wouldn't say that it sucks sucks, but it could suck a whole lot less. Seriously
Fatwah? Pfft.
I declare a THUMB WAR!
Oh and this is perfectly okay since it's a corporation and not a government because companies are beholden to a small number of hyper wealthy share holders as opposed to the populous. And companies never do anything wrong! Why would they? I mean look at the housing market. Rolling along! Look at the energy markets where it was finally let loose of the yoke of government regulation! Enron! Worldcom! Bear Stearns! These are pillars of industry. Truly, we should simply have more faith in the wisdom of our betters.
Why is there the push for this? There isn't wide scale fraud, and there's no reason to believe that Bad Guys(tm) couldn't simply create a fake entry in a database, or that the biometric stuff would actually be used. California requires a thumbprint to get a driver's license (!), and yet you're never asked for it at a traffic stop. Why?
I have a suspicion. It's not for authentication at all. Others have already pointed out the inherent flaw in using nonrevokable certificates for authentication. (i.e. once someone has faked or corrupted your biometric data, you're fucked.) So what is a biometric data good for? The same thing that's good for when the government stores DNA sequences of everyone processed. It's a globally unique identifier. You can put multiple databases together easily. Name collisions are a thing of the past.
If you really think that government won't combine their databases, you're a fool.
Obscurity isn't security, but there is something to be said about making information, even public records, a bit harder to put together than to give a big data dump about everyone to everyone. Society has built on a certain level an anonymity existing, even when legally it doesn't exist. But it's all too obvious that people's expectations and behaviors don't always align with the letter of the law. And seriously, given the government's current cavalier attitude towards privacy and the law, do you really think that a simple law is going to stop them?
You want to religion to be unassailable and have it live in some sort of iffy squishy world where the rules of nature conveniently don't exist when their outcomes are inconvenient. But that's a foolish and intellectually dishonest position. Everything is questionable. Everything must be defended on the basis of evidence, and there's simply no evidence that the supernatural exists in any form. You want to change the rules, because you don't want confront the cold hard truth, that you have taken comfort in a lie. Yes there is a lot of suffering in this world, but most of it is self inflicted. And by 'self' I mean we as humanity. We need to learn to get along between ourselves first. The gods can either take away evil from the world and will not, or, being willing to do so cannot; or they neither can nor will, or lastly, they are able and willing. If they have the will to remove evil and cannot, then they are not omnipotent. If they can but will not, then they are not benevolent. If they are neither able nor willing, they are neither omnipotent nor benevolent. Lastly, if they are both able and willing to annihilate evil, why does it exist?
- Epicurus, No help from above. And with these words, you damn the very basis of religion: the appeal of the supernatural to control what one can not.
It's not a clone. They decompiled the swf and changed some of the graphics. It's obvious from a hex dump. If you bothered to read TFA you would have known that.
Oooo... all ones.
It's not compensation, it's punishment. Punishment for bad behavior is good. It makes companies think twice about conducting bad behavior in the future. It's essentially a civil fine. Lawyers making money? Well look, for members of the class, it is essentially free money. You fill out online form, and then you wait for a check. That's it. but this is going to do little good in the long run. If it makes them not knowingly engage in an extremely confusing (at best) and deceptive (at worse) campaign, then it would have achieved it's goal.
"B-b-b-but it's a lawsuit! and Lawyers are Evil(tm)!!!11!eleventy-one!11!" you say. If you don't bring civil suits, how do you expect private citizens assert their rights and correct the behavior of those who have wronged them? Unless of course, you think that people shouldn't be able to defend themselves. Do you believe that?
You obviously don't even realize that this is a problem, let alone the shear scale of this problem. As for the wireless, what would do if some piece of hardware didn't work in windows? Get one that does. I recommend Joe does the same, there certainly are plenty of wireless cards that just work in linux. Nice try, but literally every piece of consumer hardware, if not all mass produced hardware, supports windows, so that problem simply doesn't happen. While in the linux world, it's all too common. Win for windows. Fail for linux.
The fact that you're blaming the user for linux's failing is all too common of a sentiment that is one of the major impediments to linux adoption. Who's holding linux back in adoption? Ironically it's The Community. It's the attitude of, "Ur dumb. Just patch ur colonel dumbass!!eleventy-one!1!!" and "U suxorz! Buy more stuff dipshit!"
That's not helpful. In fact, it's hurtful. Also, the whole "Your toys are 31337 enough" turns people off. It's too high a barrier of entry. People don't buy stuff, they simply delete the partition and say, "Well that's a weekend wasted," and then go off thinking "Linux doesn't work."
WLAN support sucks. Many times the hardware is supported by using ndiswrapper, which in my experience has led to kernel panics, and if you want WPA support, that's entire clusterfuck in in its own right. It's hard to configure, and you never know exactly what is going on. If you make the user go to the command line to do anything, you've failed. This is 2008. Not 1968. The world has moved on. In too many ways Linux hasn't.
"But you have to LEARN!11!eleventy-one!!11!" you say. No. Screw that. Life is too short. I don't want to waste my life unfucking your problems. I want to do work. I don't give two shits about sysadmining. Sysadmining is not and end. Sysadmining is not fun. Every time you make me a sysadmin I'm not whatever it is I am. You've stolen a little bit of my life, and that makes me bitter.
So in summary: You're not helping linux. Go away.
There's a big gap in lifestyle apps. I'm talking things like photo, movie, and music managers. They either don't exist, or are much harder to use, or lack the features that really matter people. (FYI: No one gives a shit about Ogg-Vorbis support, because there's nothing out there in that format. They DO care about WindowsMedia 10 though. Stop making excuses and fix that problem.)
So in summary, if you don't have the apps I need, you're worthless to me, and Linux doesn't have the apps many people need. Also, if you require me to do any sysadmining whatsoever you've epicly failed. The total cost of ownership has just 1000%. Sucks, I know, but that's just how the world works.
You want linux to really be valuable to people, then get your fat ass of the damn blog patting yourself on the back and get to work!
The IOC truly goes for the gold.
Learning about China is all well and good, but none of that gives an excuse for select group of elites with no legitimacy to impose total arbitrary will over others. That's the hallmark of a totalitarian regime, and that's always wrong.
And before you say anything America's human rights standards, yes, the United States is torturing people in Cuba and in secret locations around the world. And yes, it's a war crime, punishable by death even by America's own standards.
No. hydrocarbons are just hydrogen and carbon molecules. They're very common. FYI: Organic compounds are just hydrocarbons with oxygen attached. That's it. Organic compounds aren't that special either.
Mining the moon for sand?
Lame, and worthless. We have it.
Mining the astroids for iron?
Lame. We have it.
Pumping Titan dry?
Oh yeah! Screw you Mideast.
DTDs are specificiation, and while machine readable is nice, it's not really needed for anything except validation. A napkin is good enough for listing defaults to an app, since they're going to have to be coded anyway. Yeah, you could use as a type of static config file, but there's no reason why you have to. I'm not convinced that DTDs really get you anything in practice.