Just in case you think I'm being facetious, Jimbo Wales has recently cheerfully admitted that he get 10 e-mails a week from students who complain that they got an F because they cited Wikipedia and the citation turned out to be wrong. And Jimbo says "For God sake, you're in college; don't cite the encyclopedia"
A fascinating quote, because it shows just how much Wales missed the point. Their complaint isn't that they were marked down because they cited Wikipedia - but because the facts provided by the Wikipedia were not correct.
My wife just graduated with her bachelors in Accounting - and frequently cited encyclopedias (for non accounting facts) in her papers, and not once were her papers marked down for so citing. Ditto for my sister, just graduated with a associates in Culinary Arts. A brief conversation with my brother in law (a full professor at UC Irvine) and one of his fellow professors yields that they would not mark down a student for 'appropriately citing' an encyclopedia. A friend who is an associate professor at a community college states the same thing.
Now, the plural of anecdote is not data - but I'm starting to suspect that they slashdot meme of "you are in college, never cite an encyclopedia" is not in sync with reality.
Also remember that Wikipedia is a work in progress. So because there may "only" be 10s of 1,000s of articles and the rest are not yet finished means we should abandon it altogther? By that logic nothing would ever be worth starting.
No, it means like virtually every facet of the Wikipedia - there is a vast mismatch between reality and hype. A mistmatch so large that if anyone but Wikipedia or Google tried to get away with it, the slashdot hivemind and the geek community would treat it rightful scorn. Instead, as you did, problems are simply handwaved away.
What the public and John Siegenthaler don't understand is that it's not the current state of an article that is important to Wikipedia's editors--only the future state, and what it has the potential to become...
And what Wikipedia's editors don't understand in their ivory tower is that the public public and John Siegenthaler aren't using some mythical future version of an article - they are using the one currently available. They don't care about some misty future, they care that despite the Wikipedia's credo (failures fixed fast, articles completed soon) - the reality is that errors and incomplete articles can linger for months.
A fact is only as good as it's source, so if you are worried, you can check the reference. This applies to Britannica just as much as Wikipedia.
That would be useful advice - if even as much as 5% of the articles on the Wikipedia had references. Of the Wikipedia's 1 million odd entries - only a minority are properly fact checked, referenced, well written, and encyclopedic. That majority of the articles are stubs and works in progress (last change 6 June 2004).
the cars couldn't be sold for the amount of money it took to build them
Still some people were persistent and patient enough to get their hands on EV1s. But after the leases had expired, they had no choice but to return the cars to GM. What did GM do with them? They crushed them! Every single one! Crushed them and dumped them in a junk yard! Seems like the prudent business decision would be to *ahem* sell your product rather than trashing it, no?
No, it would not have been a prudent business decision to sell them. Had GM sold them, they would have been on the hook for an unknown amount of time for liability. (If some injurious or fatal flaw lay undiscovered in the car say.)
Carter does not pull his punches about Gore's activism, "The man is an embarrassment to US science and its many fine practitioners, a lot of whom know (but feel unable to state publicly) that his propaganda crusade is mostly based on junk science"
Strangely enough this is from a website that is sporting anti-bush t-shirts, buttons, and bumper stickers
Strangely enough being anti-Bush doesn't automatically equate to being pro-Gore, or even pro-Democrat. There's more shades in the world than black-and-white.
If Google Maps doesn't have a map - then why exactly does the 'map' button on the link you provide - display a map?
Answer? I suspect the OP confuses 'map' with 'high-res imagery'. The whole area is only available in lo-res on Maps and Earth - and Google's lo-res imagery is fairly old. The site is quite new (construction started only about a year ago). The lo-res imagery in my area is over three years old, and the what high res does exist is over two years old.
At any rate, your link is about two miles SSE of the actual site.
According to TFA, the data center does not show up on Google Earth.
No surprise - virtually nothing in that area shows up on Google Earth - it's a blur of low res images across the entire region of the state. Not to mention the datacenter may not be visible because the imagery is too old. The datacenter was only built in the last year or so - and much of Googles lowres imagery is much older. The site can be plainly seen in the vicinity of 45.630N 121.203W.
That's pretty much exactly what I was going to say. I remember playing Dragon's Lair in the arcade once. It sucked, even when not compared to the other games available.
What makes them think people are going to pay for a game of comparable quality (in gameplay terms at least) to some of the worse after-thought games that get stuck on kids' DVDs as extras?
What makes them think so? The fact that for over a year - Dragon's Lair machines were printing presses, and they were printing money. You, and the other folks on this thread, who didn't play it represent a distinct minority.
If a mere 10 inch meteor can create a 4 ton explosion then I don't think it would ever be a good idea to try to put a colony on the moon. If this kind of thing happens often, and the say it does, there would have to be a whole lot of protection for any structure we put on the moon. Or develope shields...
The moon is big, really, really big. Colonies are small, really, really small.
It's almost as bad as watching that downloading is stealing trailers before every movie, ON A MOVIE I BOUGHT. Here's a clue. People who download movies don't buy them, and will never see that ad
Fascinating.
One of the arguments used those who support piracy is that it encourages people to buy movies they've downloaded. Yet, here - you proclaim the opposite. (And in fact, this matches my personal experience.)
Who's saying it's an "Excel Killer"? My take is that it's yet another beta that Google tossed out. As others have pointed out, if Google were actually planning such a thing,
My take is that Google doesn't do much planning at all. They just take whatever looks shiniest on their plate and offer it to the public. Sometimes they even bother to fix the bugs, interface problems, and user issues - when they get around to remembering to do so.
I don't use charting on Excel, and I gather a lot of others don't either. A fairly sizable number of people use excel in place of a database for things like contact management or inventories. It's not a feature that'd be critical to have available in a beta test.
Google's track record to date indicates that if a feature isn't in the 'beta launch' - it will be a long time, if ever, before the feature is actually incorporated. Most likely because (it seems to me), that Google's applications are written to the preferences of the head developer. Very little work on useability, interfaces, and human factors seem to be done beforehand - if ever.
I count three posts of mine in this thread, now four with this one. The one you chose to quote was precisely the one I meant. If you wanted to prove me wrong, you could have done better than focus on the unimportant part of it.
I'll provide a clue for you since you can't seem to get one:
I don't care about any issue but bodies being formed outside of the plane of the elliptic. None of your other messages have adressed that. The fact that a body could possibly break loose and orbit somewhere else is a side issue - and one I care exactly zero about. That's why I didn't adress it!
Then expand, since you didn't get it: "Then that body could find itself out of the elliptic plane. I'd still tend to call it a planet".
That's precisely what I *did* adress in my initial message - and provided a discussion of the science involved, which you've avoided adressing at all. The extraordinarily unlikely case of a body being formed in one place, and ultimately orbiting in another is an extreme edge case - and almost by definition classification systems deal poorly with edge cases.
People have gotten into hot water or even gotten fired for years for blogging...check out http://www.dooce.com/ and read her story,
Slashdotted... But what I could pull from google's cache is that she is an ignorant bitch who is amazing full of herself. She was fired because she believed she could post whatever she wanted, wherever she wanted - and not pay the consequences.
Telecom: I'm sure if I thought for a while, I could come up with a reason to label this as a need
And that's just the problem - you've haven't applied an ounce of thought at all. You've done exactly what you said - labled each item a need regardless of it's actual status.
So we've got 5 needs, 2 need/wants and 1 want.
No, what we have is handwaving ignorant word games.
Yes, shelter is a need. Large mortgage payments however are a want - one can choose to live in smaller place, or a cheaper place, or a less desirable place. Ditto car loans - buy a decent car rather than bling and you can drive it for a decade or more. Ditto food, costs can easily be controlled by careful shopping and preparation. Ditto telecommunications. Careful choice of where to live and which car to drive effects the amount of gas consumed. Health care is not 'Necessity for survival' - it's a percieved right based on the groundless belief that everyone has a right to happy life.
Now, these needs are not unique to America, but in many other places, they are less expensive, which explains the differences in costs of living.
No, what is nearly unique to America is the inability to discern between a 'want' (a gas guzzling status symbol) and a need (transportation).
No, not at all. The other post had nothing at all to say about bodies out of the elliptic plane.
But yes, it's heresy here on Slashdot to suggest that actual reading should be done.
Had your other post had something to say on the issue to which I responded - you'd have a point. But it didn't. Your quote 'Granted, I don't really know what I'm talking about' applies to more than the formation of planets.
Or perhaps they feel the value of having a place, public or not, where they can vent themselves is worth the price of a couple missed jobs due to employers who demand that people they consider for jobs be identically stiff at work and away from work.
it's much more likely that they don't think about the issue at all. Like excessive drug or alchohol use - it's what they do, and the concept of longer term repercussions is absent from their reality.
Here on an IT/geek website, I'm sure most readers are thinking, "Geeze, 80-100 hours a week, could that possibly be worth it?" That's because most of us have jobs that run a little (or a lot) over the "standard 40." Two jobs does not necessarily mean early retirement, as the actual text of the article clearly shows. "Forty percent" having two jobs does not tell the whole story.
Indeed. My father-in-law (God rest his soul) had at times as many as six 'jobs' - but they were all ones that could be done mostly in parallel. His actual workweek could run from as little as 10 hours a week to just over 60.
Slashdot Mirror
A fascinating quote, because it shows just how much Wales missed the point. Their complaint isn't that they were marked down because they cited Wikipedia - but because the facts provided by the Wikipedia were not correct.
My wife just graduated with her bachelors in Accounting - and frequently cited encyclopedias (for non accounting facts) in her papers, and not once were her papers marked down for so citing. Ditto for my sister, just graduated with a associates in Culinary Arts. A brief conversation with my brother in law (a full professor at UC Irvine) and one of his fellow professors yields that they would not mark down a student for 'appropriately citing' an encyclopedia. A friend who is an associate professor at a community college states the same thing.
Now, the plural of anecdote is not data - but I'm starting to suspect that they slashdot meme of "you are in college, never cite an encyclopedia" is not in sync with reality.
No, it means like virtually every facet of the Wikipedia - there is a vast mismatch between reality and hype. A mistmatch so large that if anyone but Wikipedia or Google tried to get away with it, the slashdot hivemind and the geek community would treat it rightful scorn. Instead, as you did, problems are simply handwaved away.
And what Wikipedia's editors don't understand in their ivory tower is that the public public and John Siegenthaler aren't using some mythical future version of an article - they are using the one currently available. They don't care about some misty future, they care that despite the Wikipedia's credo (failures fixed fast, articles completed soon) - the reality is that errors and incomplete articles can linger for months.
That would be useful advice - if even as much as 5% of the articles on the Wikipedia had references. Of the Wikipedia's 1 million odd entries - only a minority are properly fact checked, referenced, well written, and encyclopedic. That majority of the articles are stubs and works in progress (last change 6 June 2004).
A quote I once heard; Most scientific discoveries don't start with 'eureka', they start from 'hmm... thats odd'.
No, it would not have been a prudent business decision to sell them. Had GM sold them, they would have been on the hook for an unknown amount of time for liability. (If some injurious or fatal flaw lay undiscovered in the car say.)
That was only true in some mythic fantasy land - not in the United States, ever.
If Google Maps doesn't have a map - then why exactly does the 'map' button on the link you provide - display a map?
Answer? I suspect the OP confuses 'map' with 'high-res imagery'. The whole area is only available in lo-res on Maps and Earth - and Google's lo-res imagery is fairly old. The site is quite new (construction started only about a year ago). The lo-res imagery in my area is over three years old, and the what high res does exist is over two years old.
At any rate, your link is about two miles SSE of the actual site.
No surprise - virtually nothing in that area shows up on Google Earth - it's a blur of low res images across the entire region of the state. Not to mention the datacenter may not be visible because the imagery is too old. The datacenter was only built in the last year or so - and much of Googles lowres imagery is much older. The site can be plainly seen in the vicinity of 45.630N 121.203W.
What makes them think so? The fact that for over a year - Dragon's Lair machines were printing presses, and they were printing money. You, and the other folks on this thread, who didn't play it represent a distinct minority.
The moon is big, really, really big. Colonies are small, really, really small.
Los Angeles isn't having water problems because it lacks water - but because it has too many people living in what is essentially a desert.
Fascinating.
One of the arguments used those who support piracy is that it encourages people to buy movies they've downloaded. Yet, here - you proclaim the opposite. (And in fact, this matches my personal experience.)
You obviously get your history from TV or the Wikipedia. There's essentially not one single statement in your message that's completely true.
I've got a simpler solution - I just deal with the heat and get on with my day. (Save energy too!)
But then I grew up in the South before nearly universal aircon and before the age where everyone expected to be pampered from cradle to grave.
My take is that Google doesn't do much planning at all. They just take whatever looks shiniest on their plate and offer it to the public. Sometimes they even bother to fix the bugs, interface problems, and user issues - when they get around to remembering to do so.
Google's track record to date indicates that if a feature isn't in the 'beta launch' - it will be a long time, if ever, before the feature is actually incorporated. Most likely because (it seems to me), that Google's applications are written to the preferences of the head developer. Very little work on useability, interfaces, and human factors seem to be done beforehand - if ever.
I don't care about any issue but bodies being formed outside of the plane of the elliptic. None of your other messages have adressed that. The fact that a body could possibly break loose and orbit somewhere else is a side issue - and one I care exactly zero about. That's why I didn't adress it!
That's precisely what I *did* adress in my initial message - and provided a discussion of the science involved, which you've avoided adressing at all. The extraordinarily unlikely case of a body being formed in one place, and ultimately orbiting in another is an extreme edge case - and almost by definition classification systems deal poorly with edge cases.
Slashdotted... But what I could pull from google's cache is that she is an ignorant bitch who is amazing full of herself. She was fired because she believed she could post whatever she wanted, wherever she wanted - and not pay the consequences.
And that's just the problem - you've haven't applied an ounce of thought at all. You've done exactly what you said - labled each item a need regardless of it's actual status.
No, what we have is handwaving ignorant word games.
Yes, shelter is a need. Large mortgage payments however are a want - one can choose to live in smaller place, or a cheaper place, or a less desirable place. Ditto car loans - buy a decent car rather than bling and you can drive it for a decade or more. Ditto food, costs can easily be controlled by careful shopping and preparation. Ditto telecommunications. Careful choice of where to live and which car to drive effects the amount of gas consumed. Health care is not 'Necessity for survival' - it's a percieved right based on the groundless belief that everyone has a right to happy life.
No, what is nearly unique to America is the inability to discern between a 'want' (a gas guzzling status symbol) and a need (transportation).
No, not at all. The other post had nothing at all to say about bodies out of the elliptic plane.
Had your other post had something to say on the issue to which I responded - you'd have a point. But it didn't. Your quote 'Granted, I don't really know what I'm talking about' applies to more than the formation of planets.