The security clearance question was dodged. That's too bad. I would love to work for such an organization, and might even have signed up with the Air Force if I thought I could make it into that group when I was younger. However, I know that for silly reasons that have to do more with red tape than any actual wrong-doing on my part, a security clearance is out of the question. If he'd given people some hope that the typical rules regarding security clearances would be relaxed in favor of a more "are you a potential threat" based analysis, he might have won some hearts and minds.
Gimme a break. Let's face it: Wikipedia is a forum board that's gone "legit", and out of control, with a proprietary fancy interface that doesn't happen to look like VBulletin. 1) Not proprietary 2) I suppose anything that can be edited by more than one person could be compared to a "forum board" 3) What's your point?
I think it's always been a question of organization. If Wikipedia is able to organize, source and create a context within which more information can be placed than in any other source, it has tremendous value. If it falls down on those criteria, then it's just the Internet's stream of consciousness (which isn't valueless, but not nearly as valuable).
You, of course, get to decide how it's measuring up.
Not if it is locked, as stated at the end of the article. Of course, Wales has done this more than once, whenever an article was the subject of clear vandalism. The question is: was it the subject of clear vandalism at the time?
It's nice to be able to "contribute" without actually knowing anything except how to spew things like "Don't do that, it violates [WP:whatever], [WP:neverheardofit], and [WP:madeupbyafewprogrammers]". Actually, the really sad bit is that you don't have to know anything to contribute. Merely grabbing a reference text and citing it as a source on a few articles is vastly more useful than pushing for article deletion, and takes no more knowledge. -~~~~
one of the three men in the world Editing typo. I'd written "three richest" and then realized that was needlessly specific, so I went to delete "three"... got the wrong word, and didn't notice. Some days I hate being dyslexic:-/
PS: Even more annoying that when you post a mistake, Slashdot won't let you edit OR post an immediate correction. Slashdot used to be the most useful forum / talkback system in the world, but the times have changed and other than CSS features, it hasn't....
All this criticism of Jimmy Wales seems a bit silly. It's beyond silly. IMHO, Jimbo should be one of the three men in the world, at this point. If wealth is our measure of reward for your value to the community, then surely the man who made it possible to preserve our shared knowledge should be rewarded duly. I feel the same way about anyone who improved the state of our world. If his worst crime is to try (not succeed, mind you, but try) to get reimbursed for an obscenely expensive meal, then he's doing better than most politicians who have done far, far, FAR less for improving our lot.
Actually, the best solution is to do a make vs. buy analysis. Typically, I'd agree, but in this case, I can't.
This wasn't a situation where a) all of the options were known or b) there was a choice to be made on making vs. buying. The product already existed, and the company simply wanted to determine if they should continue to maintain what they had or hire someone qualified for something else, and switch.
My response had more to do with not switching people and products at the same time than it did with the choice to build in-house or buy from an external source.
Deletionists are like trolls: since destroying content is much easier than creating, they can win over a similar number of inclusionists no matter how hard the latters try. Some basement-dweller ruined Wikipedia for me. I spent (a little too much) time fleshing out a fictional article only to see it deleted because it didn't meet that kid's purity ideal. You're taking it too personally, and attacking someone who you really don't know anything about.
I too stopped editing WP for similar reasons, but I'm sure that the people who opposed the inclusion of the material I contributed were reasonable, well-meaning people who just didn't think through what it was that they wanted, and what the consequences of making the community more insular and deletionist would mean.
I'm convinced that half of the problem is MediaWiki's. I'm of the opinion that anything with even a primary, non-autobiographical source should be included in the database, but when it comes to creating articles, there should be a finer grained choice. Everything that's currently a section in a Wikipedia article really should be an independent entity, and it should be those entities that are created with abandon, but articles *are* the site, and they should be crafted with the site in mind by pulling together relevant entities.
This would also resolve the problem of duplication of information (e.g. between Slavery and Slavery in Ancient Greece) where duplicated data drifts apart over time, with different references and sometimes conflicting facts.
It's not ethical. No part of Wikipedia's mission is providing expensive dinners to donors and administrators. And yet, shmoozing donors is the #1 job of most non-profits because without doing so, they disappear. Do you really think that your $50 donation back when you bothered to do so kept Wikipedia afloat? No, it's the big donors who like to size up the organization and gauge how effective their donation will be that keep these organizations afloat.
If you think it's not ethical for him to spend your money on getting more money for the Foundation, then you should never donate to United Way or the Jimmy Fund or the Ronald McDonald House or any other non-profit. They will wantonly spend your money on making more money in an attempt to run their business.
This is probably not a great idea. Instead, consider broadening your hiring criteria, and hiring people who don't have experience with that particular platform, but know the application domain well. For example, if you're a PHP shop and you need someone to maintain PHPNuke, but can't find anyone, consider bringing in someone who knows Slash or some other Web logging software and has a grasp of the technology.
Make one of the new guy's first tasks the evaluation of competing products and the overhead involved in moving to them, not with an eye to switching, but just to get a lay of the land and further expose him to a breadth of approaches. Periodically, send him off to appropriate conferences too.
All together, you'll end up with a well-rounded employee who can speak to the costs and benefits of your platform.
$1,300 on four people is high end, but not over the top. Most major cities have at least a half dozen restaurants where you can drop that kind of cash without doing anything weird. And what's probably more interesting: they're the sorts of places that founders of non-profits tend to take prospective sources of large donations. I had a friend who worked for a medium-large non-profit, and he would not have batted an eye at this, had he been closing in on a $1m or larger donation. It's chump change compared to the potential benefit, and if it makes the person more comfortable donating, you just do it.
So we've Godwinned a thread that talks about Jimmy Wales "evil plot" to take 3 people out to an expensive dinner and edit his date's user page.
Really? That's what we're going to accuse him of? And with hitler references, no less?
Sad.
What's really sad is that when we talk about the head of SCO or Microsoft, we require much more evil before we start throwing rocks than we do for Google or Wikipedia, both of which have contributed more to Open Source than the vast majority of their peers and frankly made the world just a little bit more useful in their wake.
NDIS wrapper might itself be GPL but a kernel that uses it is not because the kernel is monolithic. Linus is actually giving everyone what they want. I have to disagree slightly. If it COMES WITH drivers that are non-GPLed, then I agree with Linus. If it does not, then as a stand-alone driver you cannot tell what it will be used to load, and it could just as easily load GPLed drivers as non-GPLed drivers (the fact that there aren't any GPLed drivers that use the Windows API yet is actually moot from a licensing standpoint).
HOWEVER, it clearly should (to be a good citizen) implement the same strictures that the kernel does. That is, if it is used to load a non-GPLed driver, then it should implement the same access controls that it would have been subject to. I could see Linus saying that he won't open up access to this driver because it fails to pass on such strictures. I'd have to look deeper to see if that's the case or not.
If these rays cool the planet, and Global Warming warms the planet, we should stay a nice luke-warm and be fine, right? You're mis-reading the quote. The event cooled the planet, not the rays. Likely that was a result of secondary effects. For example, killing 60% of living things would result in lots of barren land which would produce large amounts of dust. That may have been what produced the cooling effect.
If a human foot print is found next to a fossilized dinosaur bone, would that not prove that Evolution is wrong? No. This is, in fact, where people tend to get confused.
What that would do is bring into question the origin of man, and cause us to review the evidence that we had previous to suggest that a) man was a recent addition to the planet and b) dinosaurs died out long before man evolved.
The theory of evolution would remain untouched. The origin of man would be near impossible to reconcile.
What anti-evolutionists are constantly confounded by is that they missed the boat. Evolution had dozens of possible disproofs and they all panned out in favor of evolution decades ago. The last major straw was Darwin's (among others) prediction that there would be a biochemical mechanism that produced evolutionary change. The failure to discover the specifics of this mechanism was a major thorn in the side of proponents of evolution... and then in the '60s DNA was discovered and not only was it clearly the missing mechanism that Darwin had predicted, but in the '80s and '90s we managed to discover that DNA re-confirmed evolution at every turn, demonstrating a far more accurate map of speciation than we had ever had access to before.
But Google street view is hardly a "live view" where neighbors snoop upon each other. It's just a one-time snapshot of a spot. What's more, THIS IS NOT NEW! There are tons of real estate databases out there that have images of most of the houses in urban U.S. areas. Google's novelty here is in making the images available through a map-browsing interface.
In Akamai's case, there is so little mechanism that they're essentially patenting standard sysadmin tools. Round-robin DNS is an old concept, it usually distributes fairly, or on workload. The only difference in Akamai's case is that it's geographical, and that's just an easy lookup. I think it's worse than that.
I'm pretty sure that the patents on returning DNS answers based on geography are held by Cisco. Akamai is only claiming the higher level content-management-by-location concept.
I'll admit that, without hindsight, some of this idea is clearly novel. However, the core problem with software patents has never been the novelty or lack of (sometimes there is a lack of novelty, but not always). The core problem is two-fold: 1) software patents are fundamentally math patents, and math is not "invented" and 2) the duration that's reasonable in non-software is crippling to the rapid-turnaround software world where develop-package-and-release cycles are 6 months and many products are obsolete within a year or two.
If software patents were only issued for 2 years with the availability of 2 extensions for a hefty fee (i.e. only those patents that were commercially successful would be renewed) and only whole, working systems, and not their algorithms were patentable, then I'd be fine with them.
So, you are saying that NATURE and GOD are antithetical?
I would posture that NATURE and GOD are inseparable. Neither is entirely reasonable. "Nature" is an ill-defined term in common usage. If "God" exists and has a physical presence or effect, then it is a part of the natural world, but by that definition, a toaster is also "natural," which again conflicts with common usage.
It's safest to stay away from the terms "natural" and "supernatural" in any conversation in which the definition of those terms might be crucial.
It is safer to say that the Christian God is not typically described as being a part of the physical phenomena of our Universe, though He clearly has influence over such phenomenon when He wishes to.
Which is a completely different problem. Different from what? You can't assert that religion and science are mutually exclusive concepts. You can find a common case where they are, but that doesn't really establish the point to which I was responding.
Certain kinds of subscriptions are incompatible with reason since some people consider revealed truth as primary authority. Even the issue of authority is ignorable if you're willing to accept that the work is not literal. For example, you might believe absolutely that the God of the Old Testament created Adam and Eve. As long as you're willing to re-examine the definitions of "created" and "Adam and Eve" in light of scientific discovery, then there's no conflict to be had. This is *exactly* what theistic evolutionists do.
You seem to think that if some people treat revelation in a certain "reasonable" way then that's it. It isn't. It might be useful to think of them to use different words when discussing the differences. Nope. You're trying to make too broad an assertion about religion and science and their miscability. I'll stand my ground on this. As long as SOME people are reasonable you can't say "religion" when you mean "intolerant religious zealots."
Your solution to the conflict just sweeps the issue into a different corner: reasonable workarounds don't work on people for whom Reason isn't primary. MY solution? Excuse me? Nothing I've discussed involved MY views.
And please note that the issue I brought up doesn't deal with the narrow question of physical creation but the moral issue of the origin of evil. They're just different examples of the same problem: when a literal interpretation of what is clearly a work of religion, philosophy and oral tradition is applied, yes you will have an incompatibility with reason. That does not mean that subscription to such works is inherently incompatible with reason.
Science doesn't address evil, It most certainly does. The science of neurobiology has several interesting things to say about thee topic, in fact.
You apparenly want to define away what a conflict is No, I'm simply pointing out that the conflict isn't a given, and that's not an ignorable point, here.
That's a cop out and you know it. Nope.
There are a not insubstantial number of people who DO believe that the bible is the literal word of god. The statement was that religion and science are not compatible, and Christianity was being used as an example. Since there are MANY Christians who disagree and reconcile both, the point is quite simply false.
OF COURSE, there are plenty of people who disagree with any given position. That doesn't mean that their beliefs are all antithetical to whatever they disagree with, but rather that they have chosen an oppositional stance.
Also, he mentions Judao-Christian, in other words both Jewish and Christian faiths. "Judeo-Christian" is a phrase that must be carefully deployed. It rarely means what you think it means. Given that the Jewish interpretation of the parts of the Torah that are in common with the Old Testament are quite different from the Christian interpretations, this conversation cannot easily be about both without treating them seperately. However, we don't need both, since we have a ready counter-example to the original point without involving Judaism. If you REALLY need another from the Jewish side of the fence, I direct you to a gentleman named Albert "God Does Not Play Dice With the Universe" Einstein.
And for that matter, we should be also including ALL Abrahamic religions, including Islam. All contain significant populations that take their holy books as facts. Again irrelevant since the existence of deniers of the history of our world as illuminated by science do not demonstrate a fundamental incompatibility between science and religion. There are Hindus who insist that evolution is false. There are a majority of Hindus who do not take that stance and are closer to theistic evolution. Every religion (every culture for that matter) will have their "the scientists are wrong" camp. That doesn't mean that religion and science are not compatible.
Even if we take your 2nd point as fact, there are still plenty of people who believe what I stated above, and these people believe themselves to be 'true' Christians/Jews/Musllims/whatever and the rest of us hethen scum. This evidences that there are fanatics in the world. I assumed this was a given, but it does not bear on the conversation.
As for #3, that's a meaningless statement. Humans have proven that they are exceptionally skilled at rationalizing anything they want. It is a fallacious argument to attempt to rebut a statement by suggesting that it is possible that someone is wrong without providing any context to the current debate. Try again.
If 'many scientists' find no conflict between science and religion, then all the power to them, but the fact remains that science is based on the premise that what we observe in the world can be explained by NATURAL causes, which means God has absolutely no business in scientific discovery. You've whipped out an anti-ID argument here which is misplaced in this conversation. I don't think you read what I wrote.
Actually, there's a grave conflict between Science and the religions which depend upon revealed truths. Not so.
Take the Judeo-Christian Creation story. In it, Man is the source of woe in the world due to disobedience. Science shows that woe (sickness, old age, death, pain) is just part of the whole package from the git-go. 1) You're singling out one religion, and as it turns out the one which is least compatible with science when interpreted literally, but 2) just to remind you, a literal interpretation of the Bible was, for about 1,000 years, a heresy of the Christian faith and 3) many scientists who are also Christians find no conflict between their work and their beliefs.
If buy into the Christian teachings as allegory, then the role of science is to help you to explain, understand and ultimately to appreciate the Creator's accomplishment.
the fact that the person they were working with at the DOJ is now a Google employee seems to indicate that there might have been some hush-hush deal made "These aren't the search records you're looking for... oh, and by the way, Google is hiring (wink, wink) and we need someone like you; you should submit a resume." So, what you're saying is that Google might have protected your privacy by bribing the government? I'm just trying to determine what it is that you are suggesting.... The bottom line for me is that the EFF seems to be going in an odd direction, here. Rather than finding a way to nail Yahoo and Microsoft for turning over private data at the drop of a hat, they're investigating how Google got out of doing so. This seems counter to their mission to me, but perhaps I just don't have all the details.... certainly as a previous contributor, I'll make sure I get the appropriate details before I give them money again.
Slashdot Mirror
The security clearance question was dodged. That's too bad. I would love to work for such an organization, and might even have signed up with the Air Force if I thought I could make it into that group when I was younger. However, I know that for silly reasons that have to do more with red tape than any actual wrong-doing on my part, a security clearance is out of the question. If he'd given people some hope that the typical rules regarding security clearances would be relaxed in favor of a more "are you a potential threat" based analysis, he might have won some hearts and minds.
2) I suppose anything that can be edited by more than one person could be compared to a "forum board"
3) What's your point?
I think it's always been a question of organization. If Wikipedia is able to organize, source and create a context within which more information can be placed than in any other source, it has tremendous value. If it falls down on those criteria, then it's just the Internet's stream of consciousness (which isn't valueless, but not nearly as valuable).
You, of course, get to decide how it's measuring up.
PS: Even more annoying that when you post a mistake, Slashdot won't let you edit OR post an immediate correction. Slashdot used to be the most useful forum / talkback system in the world, but the times have changed and other than CSS features, it hasn't....
This wasn't a situation where a) all of the options were known or b) there was a choice to be made on making vs. buying. The product already existed, and the company simply wanted to determine if they should continue to maintain what they had or hire someone qualified for something else, and switch.
My response had more to do with not switching people and products at the same time than it did with the choice to build in-house or buy from an external source.
I too stopped editing WP for similar reasons, but I'm sure that the people who opposed the inclusion of the material I contributed were reasonable, well-meaning people who just didn't think through what it was that they wanted, and what the consequences of making the community more insular and deletionist would mean.
I'm convinced that half of the problem is MediaWiki's. I'm of the opinion that anything with even a primary, non-autobiographical source should be included in the database, but when it comes to creating articles, there should be a finer grained choice. Everything that's currently a section in a Wikipedia article really should be an independent entity, and it should be those entities that are created with abandon, but articles *are* the site, and they should be crafted with the site in mind by pulling together relevant entities.
This would also resolve the problem of duplication of information (e.g. between Slavery and Slavery in Ancient Greece) where duplicated data drifts apart over time, with different references and sometimes conflicting facts.
It's not ethical. No part of Wikipedia's mission is providing expensive dinners to donors and administrators. And yet, shmoozing donors is the #1 job of most non-profits because without doing so, they disappear. Do you really think that your $50 donation back when you bothered to do so kept Wikipedia afloat? No, it's the big donors who like to size up the organization and gauge how effective their donation will be that keep these organizations afloat.
If you think it's not ethical for him to spend your money on getting more money for the Foundation, then you should never donate to United Way or the Jimmy Fund or the Ronald McDonald House or any other non-profit. They will wantonly spend your money on making more money in an attempt to run their business.
This is probably not a great idea. Instead, consider broadening your hiring criteria, and hiring people who don't have experience with that particular platform, but know the application domain well. For example, if you're a PHP shop and you need someone to maintain PHPNuke, but can't find anyone, consider bringing in someone who knows Slash or some other Web logging software and has a grasp of the technology.
Make one of the new guy's first tasks the evaluation of competing products and the overhead involved in moving to them, not with an eye to switching, but just to get a lay of the land and further expose him to a breadth of approaches. Periodically, send him off to appropriate conferences too.
All together, you'll end up with a well-rounded employee who can speak to the costs and benefits of your platform.
So we've Godwinned a thread that talks about Jimmy Wales "evil plot" to take 3 people out to an expensive dinner and edit his date's user page.
Really? That's what we're going to accuse him of? And with hitler references, no less?
Sad.
What's really sad is that when we talk about the head of SCO or Microsoft, we require much more evil before we start throwing rocks than we do for Google or Wikipedia, both of which have contributed more to Open Source than the vast majority of their peers and frankly made the world just a little bit more useful in their wake.
HOWEVER, it clearly should (to be a good citizen) implement the same strictures that the kernel does. That is, if it is used to load a non-GPLed driver, then it should implement the same access controls that it would have been subject to. I could see Linus saying that he won't open up access to this driver because it fails to pass on such strictures. I'd have to look deeper to see if that's the case or not.
* rolls dice *
"very sad to hear that!"
(With apologies to the writers of Futurama). I don't think they mind.
From the episode: Gary Gygax: Hello Fry. It's a (rolls dice) pleasure to meet you.
Gary Gygax: Here, take my +1 mace. RIP E.G.G.
What that would do is bring into question the origin of man, and cause us to review the evidence that we had previous to suggest that a) man was a recent addition to the planet and b) dinosaurs died out long before man evolved.
The theory of evolution would remain untouched. The origin of man would be near impossible to reconcile.
What anti-evolutionists are constantly confounded by is that they missed the boat. Evolution had dozens of possible disproofs and they all panned out in favor of evolution decades ago. The last major straw was Darwin's (among others) prediction that there would be a biochemical mechanism that produced evolutionary change. The failure to discover the specifics of this mechanism was a major thorn in the side of proponents of evolution... and then in the '60s DNA was discovered and not only was it clearly the missing mechanism that Darwin had predicted, but in the '80s and '90s we managed to discover that DNA re-confirmed evolution at every turn, demonstrating a far more accurate map of speciation than we had ever had access to before.
I'm pretty sure that the patents on returning DNS answers based on geography are held by Cisco. Akamai is only claiming the higher level content-management-by-location concept.
I'll admit that, without hindsight, some of this idea is clearly novel. However, the core problem with software patents has never been the novelty or lack of (sometimes there is a lack of novelty, but not always). The core problem is two-fold: 1) software patents are fundamentally math patents, and math is not "invented" and 2) the duration that's reasonable in non-software is crippling to the rapid-turnaround software world where develop-package-and-release cycles are 6 months and many products are obsolete within a year or two.
If software patents were only issued for 2 years with the availability of 2 extensions for a hefty fee (i.e. only those patents that were commercially successful would be renewed) and only whole, working systems, and not their algorithms were patentable, then I'd be fine with them.
Yes, the Gnome HIG is really quite nice. Props to Sun for all their work on it!
I would posture that NATURE and GOD are inseparable. Neither is entirely reasonable. "Nature" is an ill-defined term in common usage. If "God" exists and has a physical presence or effect, then it is a part of the natural world, but by that definition, a toaster is also "natural," which again conflicts with common usage.
It's safest to stay away from the terms "natural" and "supernatural" in any conversation in which the definition of those terms might be crucial.
It is safer to say that the Christian God is not typically described as being a part of the physical phenomena of our Universe, though He clearly has influence over such phenomenon when He wishes to.
OF COURSE, there are plenty of people who disagree with any given position. That doesn't mean that their beliefs are all antithetical to whatever they disagree with, but rather that they have chosen an oppositional stance. Also, he mentions Judao-Christian, in other words both Jewish and Christian faiths. "Judeo-Christian" is a phrase that must be carefully deployed. It rarely means what you think it means. Given that the Jewish interpretation of the parts of the Torah that are in common with the Old Testament are quite different from the Christian interpretations, this conversation cannot easily be about both without treating them seperately. However, we don't need both, since we have a ready counter-example to the original point without involving Judaism. If you REALLY need another from the Jewish side of the fence, I direct you to a gentleman named Albert "God Does Not Play Dice With the Universe" Einstein. And for that matter, we should be also including ALL Abrahamic religions, including Islam. All contain significant populations that take their holy books as facts. Again irrelevant since the existence of deniers of the history of our world as illuminated by science do not demonstrate a fundamental incompatibility between science and religion. There are Hindus who insist that evolution is false. There are a majority of Hindus who do not take that stance and are closer to theistic evolution. Every religion (every culture for that matter) will have their "the scientists are wrong" camp. That doesn't mean that religion and science are not compatible. Even if we take your 2nd point as fact, there are still plenty of people who believe what I stated above, and these people believe themselves to be 'true' Christians/Jews/Musllims/whatever and the rest of us hethen scum. This evidences that there are fanatics in the world. I assumed this was a given, but it does not bear on the conversation. As for #3, that's a meaningless statement. Humans have proven that they are exceptionally skilled at rationalizing anything they want. It is a fallacious argument to attempt to rebut a statement by suggesting that it is possible that someone is wrong without providing any context to the current debate. Try again. If 'many scientists' find no conflict between science and religion, then all the power to them, but the fact remains that science is based on the premise that what we observe in the world can be explained by NATURAL causes, which means God has absolutely no business in scientific discovery. You've whipped out an anti-ID argument here which is misplaced in this conversation. I don't think you read what I wrote.
If buy into the Christian teachings as allegory, then the role of science is to help you to explain, understand and ultimately to appreciate the Creator's accomplishment.
For more detail see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theistic_evolution