It says (even in the summary) we're talking about zone transfers, not regular lookups. So sue all you want, just don't be surprised when every case is thrown out. I think the OP's point was that we're setting a very low bar on "unauthorized access," and so one could imagine many other situations where otherwise normal traffic could be considered problematic.
Would you be able to sue, though? I think it would be a criminal matter.
In the case that he suggests, however, advertising would be a problem.
Does Speakeasy offer DSL in your area? That's what I did until I could go with RCN. Speakeasy DSL costs more, but they have highly technically skilled customer support people, an expectation that their customers run servers, and a rock-solid network. I highly recommend them.
I can see saying, "look, this Pope made some comments that really don't make inviting him reasonable." What I don't get is berating the Pope for canceling after you do make a public point of not wanting him OR insisting that the Pope just isn't being constructive about a dialog... they're acting as if this University is somehow the diplomatic liaison for the scientific community, which it's simply not.
OK, I think the previous comments were off-the-hook, and indicated just how conservative this new pope is when compared with the previous. That said, I'm not sure what the physicist in question was trying to accomplish.
Did he want the Pope to visit? Why complain when he cancels? He pretty much admits that any move the Pope made would have been viewed as some sort of ploy or insult. And he complains about the Pope not wanting a dialog? And what dialog? Why does the Pope need a dialog with this University?!
RTFA. The article states that this (the Microsoft development) will be a means to link an employees PC to sensors. Every single such diver (we're talking pros who do work like welding on oil platforms) is constantly connected to a number of machines ("PC" in the parlance of the newspaper in question), and you're reading an article from a rag that's trying to summarize a patent application.
As to the ability to remotely monitor vital signs (sans PC), that's prior art. You simply cannot, ever, determine if there is or is not prior art without reading the patent application itself in complete detail. There may or may not be unique elements to this application, regardless of how well traveled the genre of software might be.
So, a patent was filed for a system that could be used to assess the physiological state of employees in order to measure performance. Right. So, who would be the target audience? Financial firms? I don't think so. On the other hand, deep sea divers would benefit from such measures. These are people who get paid an astronomical amount of money to do incredibly dangerous work. If their jobs could be made slightly safer, it would be a huge win, and well worth a large expense.
What about professional athletes? Is player number 73 about to collapse from the strain? Is he too hung over to play? Pay someone six or seven figures for their physical performance and you care about that sort of thing.
Everyone instead leaps to, "my manager is going to be putting my heartrate on my review!"
Only a very small amount This is true. It's also true that many solutions that claim to be "hardware raid" are actually software raid with minimal hardware support. If you're cranking vast amounts of data through the system that's either locally generated or that's coming in over multiple 100MB or single GigE, then you might get a performance win out of hardware XOR calculation, but with a large L2 cache, you won't notice the difference until you start pushing much more data.
It's also true that using the CPU for such calculations can be a small to moderate win on systems that have both CPU and IO intensive jobs running, but that's only because it's easier to schedule CPU vs. CPU rather than CPU vs. IO.
I went to newegg and just built the system from scratch. I got 5 SATAII 250GB disks (the sweet-spot at the time for price per MB) in a tower with a run-of-the-mill motherboard, CPU and RAM. I didn't go headless entirely from the gate, but once I installed Linux, I never connected the monitor again. Simple software raid is enough for my purposes, and I didn't bother mirroring the root disk (which I can always just replace and re-install).
Er, no, a candidate's ENTIRE share of votes at a precinct disappearing, doesn't happen. That is inexcusable. I think Jamie was talking about the claim that the diebold machines were altering the vote. THAT claim is based on the delta between machine and non-machine precincts and the delta between polls and final voting.
The fact that some votes (35, was it) were thrown out is certainly a big concern for exactly the reasons you suggest, but as for the attempt to correlate voting in not-so-arbitrarily chosen districts without considering the margin of error or external forcers... I dislike Diebold and the move to electronic voting in general, but I think this is just a little too loose to get out my pitchfork and torch just yet.
You can also improve the results by looking at which word-parts follow which other word-parts and weighting based on that. So, in the example, above, fooba.com would actually come first, as "foo" is followed by "ba" in at least one example.
Consider the off-site location here. A burst water pipe or fire... OK, across campus. Maybe to another part of the city or even across the bridge into Oakland or somewhere else in the Bay area... not a four hour drive across the state. That was done because of the earthquake risk. Which is rather foolish, since:
a) An earthquake doesn't utterly destroy everything. your real concern is that the roof will cave in on your computers. Storing the backups across-town would get you reasonable protection from such events.
b) The tapes could simply have been mailed. There are even special boxes sold for doing just that.
Yes, a pity what happened to the Commodore marketing department...
When they finally had a technically superior machine (the Amiga) they completely dropped the ball on marketing. As I understood it, the real problem was that their upper management didn't have any vision whatsoever, so presented with the best personal computer to date (arguably better in nearly every way that Moore's Law couldn't solve than today's systems), they just didn't see the advantage. Toward the end, they ported a Unix to it and actually made some headway on using it as a real computer. That would have gone somewhere had they had a little more time. They needed a new line that wasn't associated with games as much, and a year for the marketing to take.
Had they done it right, we'd all be running Linux on our Amigas today.
Side story: I was once told to write serial communications software to make a VAXStation running VMS talk to an Amiga running AmigaDOS. I began with the assumption that, under a real OS like VMS (which was not developer-friendly, but at least had all the high-level services one might expect), I would be able to finish quickly, but with the crude AmigaDOS, I would need more time. So I did the VMS side first. That took nearly all of the week that I had allocated, so I was scared when I hit AmigaDOS... and discovered that AmigaDOS was indeed shockingly primative... except for the fact that it was running on hardware that made everything I'd ever need available as firmware routines. Heck, you could do triple-indirect semaphores in firmware on that beast! It was a joy. I finished on time, and then forgot a file on the media that I send the code out on, so the demo tanked;-) Sigh.
If what you want is positional weighting on commonly used sub-strings, just add that to your algorithm. No need for special cases. This is exactly how my random name generator works.
I went to school at the University of San Francisco. I worked in the Registrar's office. Every Friday we would make back up tapes of all the school records and drive them up to the a storage facility near Tahoe so that they would survive in case of an earthquake.
This was only 6 to 10 years ago, so obviously there are still some people who think that "modern building codes" don't cut it for earthquakes and are willing (or legally required, like we were) to take some pretty expensive countermeasures. I can use the same argument to prove... well, anything. Anything that people spend money to hedge is a valid concern?! Yikes! I need my tinfoil hat (only $19.95)!
The reason you take backups off-site (anywhere in the world) is that you can't take the chance that water might burst out of a pipe and drown you systems or fire might burn them into lumps of ore or any number of other scenarios (which include earthquakes) might possibly cause damage that could take our your tape archive along with the systems that created them. That's just simple caution, and has no relationship to how likely any ONE of those scenarios is. Rather, it's the cost vs the total risk across all failure modes. Heck, it's probably more likely that a student will go berserk and destroy all of the systems and any tapes he finds, because he flunked out.
Probably the best way to do this search so that it actually consumes the most interesting space first, is to build random domain names, weighted based on existing names. For example, you could build names by taking the most common 2 and 3 letter sub-strings:
foo.com bar.com foobar.com
foo: frequency 2 bar: frequency 2 oob: frequency 1 oba: frequency 1 fo: frequency 2 oo: frequency 2 ba: frequency 2 ar: frequency 2 ob: frequency 1
Now, just pick random length, say 5, and generate random strings with the weights to the random selection being the frequency. Better yet, just generate EVERY possible permutation, ordered by frequency like so:
foofo.com foooo.com fooba.com fooar.com barfo.com baroo.com barba.com barar.com fofoo.com oofoo.com bafoo.com arfoo.com fobar.com... and so on
This should generate all of the most likely-to-be-registered domains of the given length. You could do this based on, say, a few google searches, some Wikipedia articles, and some subset of DMoz. That should get you a nice collection of domain names to seed with.
Given the similarities, expecting a similar outcome from the two would not be unreasonable, would it? I'm not sure what that would mean. Would you be suggesting that Wikia Search would become the defacto Web-based search authority? Perhaps, though I think there are different factors here (search has always been fundamentally a distillation of the wisdom of crowds anyway).
I don't think you can lash out at someone for linking the two when Wales is the one fueling such comparisons. Comparisons are one thing, and fine. However, you should READ the OP. It wasn't a comparison. It was just an: if I can't have what I want in a Wikipedia article, how does Wikipedia justify this thing that has nothing to do with being an encyclopedia? (paraphrase, mine) That's not a comparison, but a mistaken conflagration of Wikipedia and Wikia at the level of editorial and project-management policy.
Ouch! That's sad to hear. I used to think Mage: the Ascension had the best spellcasing concept ever, it's a pity if they dumbed it down:( Yeah, I felt the same. They removed the whole world. No Technocracy. No Marauders. The Traditions are more like Vampire society now... more bent around political agendas than their magical worldviews. Truly dynamic magic is gone, but there's still a semblance of it, it's just not the default. By default, now, you use rotes (essentially a spell list) all the time, and only use dynamic magic in a pinch, and at a cost.
I can see why they had to do this. The magic system would have required actual roleplaying, and kids especially would have looked at the book and said, "OK, so what can I cast?" Still, I'll never really consider M:Awakening to be a replacement for M:Ascension. They're two very different worlds and systems with some common lineage.
I'd really like to see a better spell system, which allows much more flexibility, within certain rules.
I mean, the current magic system in most table-top RPGs is basically a set of pre-set actions: "lightning ball, 30' radius", "light candle without taking match from pocket". Might as well have a DM's story telling system that has options like "tell your players they've entered a "big room'" "tell your player to stop bitchslapping the orc".
Have you looked at the Hero System? It is basically what you want. The main rule book contains a list of abilities and their associated costs. From these ingredients you create your own recipes whose costs you can calculate to keep things balanced. The genre books then offer a series of templates.
While there are some things about the system that bother me, and which I prefer in the d20 system, its a really interesting system none-the-less. In fact, it is probably the best system that no one has played a game in, which is a shame
There are a number of alternatives. There's GURPS which has both a static magic system like D&D and a power system like Hero System which can be used to construct whatever.
From there, you can go to the old (3rd edition) Mage: The Ascension which had the most dynamic spell system that I've ever seen. Sadly, the new Mage: The Awakening is only a pale shadow of the old system, and is much more static like D&D.
Overall, I'd recommend GURPS to anyone who just wanted to get their feet wet with a slightly more dynamic magic system than D&D offers. It's a generic and flexible system that will let your players design just about anything they can think of.
Wikia is a project of Wikia, Inc. So you're WAY off in your throwing stones at Wikipedia over Wikia's search... the two have nothing to do with each other, other than the fact that Wikia search will almost certainly index Wikipedia and Wikipedia will almost certainly have an entry for Wikia search.
Oh stop this nonsense! This has been brought up here many times. Yes, yes, we all know the legal / fiscal entities are claimed as being separate. I suspect this warrants detailed tax auditing. But aside from this semantic dodge, in reality there is enough connections to make this the same organization. They are closely related in that Jimmy Wales is involved in both, but try actually reading what I was responding to. There's no way in which we can connect editorial policies on Wikipedia with Wikia search to then conclude that Wikipedia has some sort of editorial double-standard. I can't even begin to figure out how that thought process would get started unless the OP thought that Wikia is just another name for Wikipedia, and this was, in fact, Wikipedia Search.... Hence my disabusing him of such confusion.
Ok, let me see if I understand this. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that can't have proofs or in depth reference materials, because more detail is out of scope for really no reason. But, they can somehow try and turn wiki into another google or a facebook. Wow, so much wrong.... so little space.
Let me wee if I can begin.... nope... trying again...
Wikia is a project of Wikia, Inc. So you're WAY off in your throwing stones at Wikipedia over Wikia's search... the two have nothing to do with each other, other than the fact that Wikia search will almost certainly index Wikipedia and Wikipedia will almost certainly have an entry for Wikia search.
Now, on to your proofs beef. Proofs are tough. Sometimes overviews of them can be important, but they're fundamental examples of primary sources, which are not nearly as useful to an encyclopedia as secondary sources that give the context within which the proof is notable.
When GURPS did their 4th edition, one of the things that they took great pains at was to maintain a strong degree of backward compatibility (given a free PDF of conversion notes) so that the stacks of GURPS 3e books out there would not become useless. Hero System did much the same with 5th edition. When 3rd edition of D&D came out, none of the books really fit into the new game except for purposes of back-story, but 3.5 did work fairly well with 3.0 with some work.
Is Wizards of the Coast planning on maintaining enough backwards compatibility so that all of the dozens of 3.0 and 3.5 books out there can be used with 4e, or will we be faced with the daunting expenditure of re-buying our entire libraries?
You're part of the "9-11 Truth" committee... Someone threw an airplane into three buildings and tried to throw one into a fourth. I don't think a little paranoia was out of place. That's not to say that I think there was ever any evidence for anything other than the fact that the person who was ultimately responsible for the plan wouldn't have been in a position to do so if the U.S. had kept its grubby hands (or more specifically, those of the CIA) out of the Middle East, but that was water that was long since under the bridge by 2001.
Still, I don't begrudge those who feel it's worth following up on how it came to pass, and not entirely trusting the combination of federal investigations and the media.
you think HIV doesn't cause AIDS... That's a twist I haven't heard before. The typical conspiracy theory that I've always heard around AIDS was that it was an attempt to cull African population that got out of hand (or didn't, depending on how far you thought the culling was meant to go).
you think MMR vaccine causes autism... I thought the jury was still out on that one?
and your presidential candidate of choice is Ron Paul. Hmmm... given that 1:10 people are leaning toward Paul in the NH primary, I don't think it's fair to tag his supporters are wingnuts. They're a sizable demographic and one that should be treated like any other citizens. Regardless of how I might feel about him (another story), he does have some interesting things to say, and like all dark horse candidates he brings issues forth which the others would rather not have to discuss. This is a good thing.
PS: Had you really wanted to respond to the OP, you could simply have pointed out that the term "climate change" was originally introduced by those who sought to cool the political debate (pun intended), and not by those who wished to hedge their bets. However, as the climate is large and complex, it was quickly realized that the term was more suitable (some parts of the earth's surface are, indeed, cooling).
PPS: I'm still waiting for someone to find a reasonable explanation for why water vapor is such a popular topic when it comes to climate change feedback cycles, but agriculture-introduced, ground-cover water vapor is entirely ignored in all of the models that I've seen. If you want a factor that has introduced permanent greenhouse gas increases, wouldn't you look at the largest single change to the earth's lower atmospheric composition in the past 1000 years? That, by the way, would be irrigation which has created a permanent change in the ground-cover water vapor over a sizable fraction of the earth's surface, especially at mid-to-central northern latitudes.
You can buy DRM-free versions of many songs on iTunes, but it's on a case-by-case basis. They have no universal agreements with any vendor yet (that I know of) to off all of their music DRM-free (though they may have such agreements with some smaller labels, and I just don't know).
Slashdot is lame like U**x in 1980 and ate the characters you typed. Actually, Slash (the engine behind Slashdot) does exactly the right thing, converting any out-of-latin-1 characters into HTML-encoded characters such as )F;
However, it also eliminates these from display because of the confusion that people use them to inject (e.g. mis-spelling a domain name with Cyrillic characters so that when someone cuts-and-pastes it, their session can be hijacked). It's a specific security feature used on MANY sites which are intended for English-language discussion.
Actually one of big advantages of Microsoft was internalization. MS jumped on the internationalization bandwagon VERY late in the game, but they were the first to incorporate Unicode into the filesystem which made up for a lot of their delays... better late than never, I guess. Prior to Unicode the approach was typically to have multiple versions of the text associated with an application, in multiple character sets which would be loaded on-demand. These features worked in Unixes that I was using as early as 1987.,
I could use national characters without any problem in 1994 on NT. "Use" is an interesting term. Most uses of Unicode outside of a Word Processor in vintage NT would result in system crashes and/or corruption.
Good luck with Linux or most of Unices then. Well... Linux didn't really exist as a commercial OS at that time, so I guess you're right by default. What's more, the Unicode standard had JUST been published in 1991. It took years for most software to adapt to using Unicode, and even longer for the interoperability features to be worked out. Even today, new releases of, for example, Gnome continue to adapt to the ways other cultures use the desktop and OS with their native characters (e.g. with vertical or RtL script).
You seem to have this rosy view of the world that involves Microsoft products solving the hard problem of internationalization from day one, and everyone else staring dumbly... this is far from the case.
Slashdot Mirror
Would you be able to sue, though? I think it would be a criminal matter.
In the case that he suggests, however, advertising would be a problem.
Does Speakeasy offer DSL in your area? That's what I did until I could go with RCN. Speakeasy DSL costs more, but they have highly technically skilled customer support people, an expectation that their customers run servers, and a rock-solid network. I highly recommend them.
I can see saying, "look, this Pope made some comments that really don't make inviting him reasonable." What I don't get is berating the Pope for canceling after you do make a public point of not wanting him OR insisting that the Pope just isn't being constructive about a dialog... they're acting as if this University is somehow the diplomatic liaison for the scientific community, which it's simply not.
OK, I think the previous comments were off-the-hook, and indicated just how conservative this new pope is when compared with the previous. That said, I'm not sure what the physicist in question was trying to accomplish.
Did he want the Pope to visit? Why complain when he cancels? He pretty much admits that any move the Pope made would have been viewed as some sort of ploy or insult. And he complains about the Pope not wanting a dialog? And what dialog? Why does the Pope need a dialog with this University?!
Why does no one stop to think about these things?
So, a patent was filed for a system that could be used to assess the physiological state of employees in order to measure performance. Right. So, who would be the target audience? Financial firms? I don't think so. On the other hand, deep sea divers would benefit from such measures. These are people who get paid an astronomical amount of money to do incredibly dangerous work. If their jobs could be made slightly safer, it would be a huge win, and well worth a large expense.
What about professional athletes? Is player number 73 about to collapse from the strain? Is he too hung over to play? Pay someone six or seven figures for their physical performance and you care about that sort of thing.
Everyone instead leaps to, "my manager is going to be putting my heartrate on my review!"
Sigh.
Only a very small amount This is true. It's also true that many solutions that claim to be "hardware raid" are actually software raid with minimal hardware support. If you're cranking vast amounts of data through the system that's either locally generated or that's coming in over multiple 100MB or single GigE, then you might get a performance win out of hardware XOR calculation, but with a large L2 cache, you won't notice the difference until you start pushing much more data.
It's also true that using the CPU for such calculations can be a small to moderate win on systems that have both CPU and IO intensive jobs running, but that's only because it's easier to schedule CPU vs. CPU rather than CPU vs. IO.
I went to newegg and just built the system from scratch. I got 5 SATAII 250GB disks (the sweet-spot at the time for price per MB) in a tower with a run-of-the-mill motherboard, CPU and RAM. I didn't go headless entirely from the gate, but once I installed Linux, I never connected the monitor again. Simple software raid is enough for my purposes, and I didn't bother mirroring the root disk (which I can always just replace and re-install).
Er, no, a candidate's ENTIRE share of votes at a precinct disappearing, doesn't happen. That is inexcusable. I think Jamie was talking about the claim that the diebold machines were altering the vote. THAT claim is based on the delta between machine and non-machine precincts and the delta between polls and final voting.
The fact that some votes (35, was it) were thrown out is certainly a big concern for exactly the reasons you suggest, but as for the attempt to correlate voting in not-so-arbitrarily chosen districts without considering the margin of error or external forcers... I dislike Diebold and the move to electronic voting in general, but I think this is just a little too loose to get out my pitchfork and torch just yet.
You can also improve the results by looking at which word-parts follow which other word-parts and weighting based on that. So, in the example, above, fooba.com would actually come first, as "foo" is followed by "ba" in at least one example.
a) An earthquake doesn't utterly destroy everything. your real concern is that the roof will cave in on your computers. Storing the backups across-town would get you reasonable protection from such events.
b) The tapes could simply have been mailed. There are even special boxes sold for doing just that.
When they finally had a technically superior machine (the Amiga) they completely dropped the ball on marketing. As I understood it, the real problem was that their upper management didn't have any vision whatsoever, so presented with the best personal computer to date (arguably better in nearly every way that Moore's Law couldn't solve than today's systems), they just didn't see the advantage. Toward the end, they ported a Unix to it and actually made some headway on using it as a real computer. That would have gone somewhere had they had a little more time. They needed a new line that wasn't associated with games as much, and a year for the marketing to take.
Had they done it right, we'd all be running Linux on our Amigas today.
Side story: I was once told to write serial communications software to make a VAXStation running VMS talk to an Amiga running AmigaDOS. I began with the assumption that, under a real OS like VMS (which was not developer-friendly, but at least had all the high-level services one might expect), I would be able to finish quickly, but with the crude AmigaDOS, I would need more time. So I did the VMS side first. That took nearly all of the week that I had allocated, so I was scared when I hit AmigaDOS... and discovered that AmigaDOS was indeed shockingly primative... except for the fact that it was running on hardware that made everything I'd ever need available as firmware routines. Heck, you could do triple-indirect semaphores in firmware on that beast! It was a joy. I finished on time, and then forgot a file on the media that I send the code out on, so the demo tanked
If what you want is positional weighting on commonly used sub-strings, just add that to your algorithm. No need for special cases. This is exactly how my random name generator works.
This was only 6 to 10 years ago, so obviously there are still some people who think that "modern building codes" don't cut it for earthquakes and are willing (or legally required, like we were) to take some pretty expensive countermeasures. I can use the same argument to prove
The reason you take backups off-site (anywhere in the world) is that you can't take the chance that water might burst out of a pipe and drown you systems or fire might burn them into lumps of ore or any number of other scenarios (which include earthquakes) might possibly cause damage that could take our your tape archive along with the systems that created them. That's just simple caution, and has no relationship to how likely any ONE of those scenarios is. Rather, it's the cost vs the total risk across all failure modes. Heck, it's probably more likely that a student will go berserk and destroy all of the systems and any tapes he finds, because he flunked out.
Probably the best way to do this search so that it actually consumes the most interesting space first, is to build random domain names, weighted based on existing names. For example, you could build names by taking the most common 2 and 3 letter sub-strings:
... and so on
foo.com
bar.com
foobar.com
foo: frequency 2
bar: frequency 2
oob: frequency 1
oba: frequency 1
fo: frequency 2
oo: frequency 2
ba: frequency 2
ar: frequency 2
ob: frequency 1
Now, just pick random length, say 5, and generate random strings with the weights to the random selection being the frequency. Better yet, just generate EVERY possible permutation, ordered by frequency like so:
foofo.com
foooo.com
fooba.com
fooar.com
barfo.com
baroo.com
barba.com
barar.com
fofoo.com
oofoo.com
bafoo.com
arfoo.com
fobar.com
This should generate all of the most likely-to-be-registered domains of the given length. You could do this based on, say, a few google searches, some Wikipedia articles, and some subset of DMoz. That should get you a nice collection of domain names to seed with.
I can see why they had to do this. The magic system would have required actual roleplaying, and kids especially would have looked at the book and said, "OK, so what can I cast?" Still, I'll never really consider M:Awakening to be a replacement for M:Ascension. They're two very different worlds and systems with some common lineage.
I mean, the current magic system in most table-top RPGs is basically a set of pre-set actions: "lightning ball, 30' radius", "light candle without taking match from pocket". Might as well have a DM's story telling system that has options like "tell your players they've entered a "big room'" "tell your player to stop bitchslapping the orc".
Have you looked at the Hero System? It is basically what you want. The main rule book contains a list of abilities and their associated costs. From these ingredients you create your own recipes whose costs you can calculate to keep things balanced. The genre books then offer a series of templates.
While there are some things about the system that bother me, and which I prefer in the d20 system, its a really interesting system none-the-less. In fact, it is probably the best system that no one has played a game in, which is a shame
There are a number of alternatives. There's GURPS which has both a static magic system like D&D and a power system like Hero System which can be used to construct whatever.For truly dynamic magic, check out Ars Magica.
From there, you can go to the old (3rd edition) Mage: The Ascension which had the most dynamic spell system that I've ever seen. Sadly, the new Mage: The Awakening is only a pale shadow of the old system, and is much more static like D&D.
Overall, I'd recommend GURPS to anyone who just wanted to get their feet wet with a slightly more dynamic magic system than D&D offers. It's a generic and flexible system that will let your players design just about anything they can think of.
Oh stop this nonsense! This has been brought up here many times. Yes, yes, we all know the legal / fiscal entities are claimed as being separate. I suspect this warrants detailed tax auditing. But aside from this semantic dodge, in reality there is enough connections to make this the same organization. They are closely related in that Jimmy Wales is involved in both, but try actually reading what I was responding to. There's no way in which we can connect editorial policies on Wikipedia with Wikia search to then conclude that Wikipedia has some sort of editorial double-standard. I can't even begin to figure out how that thought process would get started unless the OP thought that Wikia is just another name for Wikipedia, and this was, in fact, Wikipedia Search.
Let me wee if I can begin.... nope... trying again...
OK, so the WikiMedia Foundation, of which Wikipedia is one (and the best known) project, includes Wikibooks, Wiktionary, and many more.
Wikia isn't any of those.
Wikia is a project of Wikia, Inc. So you're WAY off in your throwing stones at Wikipedia over Wikia's search... the two have nothing to do with each other, other than the fact that Wikia search will almost certainly index Wikipedia and Wikipedia will almost certainly have an entry for Wikia search.
Now, on to your proofs beef. Proofs are tough. Sometimes overviews of them can be important, but they're fundamental examples of primary sources, which are not nearly as useful to an encyclopedia as secondary sources that give the context within which the proof is notable.
When GURPS did their 4th edition, one of the things that they took great pains at was to maintain a strong degree of backward compatibility (given a free PDF of conversion notes) so that the stacks of GURPS 3e books out there would not become useless. Hero System did much the same with 5th edition. When 3rd edition of D&D came out, none of the books really fit into the new game except for purposes of back-story, but 3.5 did work fairly well with 3.0 with some work.
Is Wizards of the Coast planning on maintaining enough backwards compatibility so that all of the dozens of 3.0 and 3.5 books out there can be used with 4e, or will we be faced with the daunting expenditure of re-buying our entire libraries?
Still, I don't begrudge those who feel it's worth following up on how it came to pass, and not entirely trusting the combination of federal investigations and the media. you think HIV doesn't cause AIDS... That's a twist I haven't heard before. The typical conspiracy theory that I've always heard around AIDS was that it was an attempt to cull African population that got out of hand (or didn't, depending on how far you thought the culling was meant to go). you think MMR vaccine causes autism... I thought the jury was still out on that one? and your presidential candidate of choice is Ron Paul. Hmmm... given that 1:10 people are leaning toward Paul in the NH primary, I don't think it's fair to tag his supporters are wingnuts. They're a sizable demographic and one that should be treated like any other citizens. Regardless of how I might feel about him (another story), he does have some interesting things to say, and like all dark horse candidates he brings issues forth which the others would rather not have to discuss. This is a good thing.
PS: Had you really wanted to respond to the OP, you could simply have pointed out that the term "climate change" was originally introduced by those who sought to cool the political debate (pun intended), and not by those who wished to hedge their bets. However, as the climate is large and complex, it was quickly realized that the term was more suitable (some parts of the earth's surface are, indeed, cooling).
PPS: I'm still waiting for someone to find a reasonable explanation for why water vapor is such a popular topic when it comes to climate change feedback cycles, but agriculture-introduced, ground-cover water vapor is entirely ignored in all of the models that I've seen. If you want a factor that has introduced permanent greenhouse gas increases, wouldn't you look at the largest single change to the earth's lower atmospheric composition in the past 1000 years? That, by the way, would be irrigation which has created a permanent change in the ground-cover water vapor over a sizable fraction of the earth's surface, especially at mid-to-central northern latitudes.
You can buy DRM-free versions of many songs on iTunes, but it's on a case-by-case basis. They have no universal agreements with any vendor yet (that I know of) to off all of their music DRM-free (though they may have such agreements with some smaller labels, and I just don't know).
However, it also eliminates these from display because of the confusion that people use them to inject (e.g. mis-spelling a domain name with Cyrillic characters so that when someone cuts-and-pastes it, their session can be hijacked). It's a specific security feature used on MANY sites which are intended for English-language discussion. Actually one of big advantages of Microsoft was internalization. MS jumped on the internationalization bandwagon VERY late in the game, but they were the first to incorporate Unicode into the filesystem which made up for a lot of their delays... better late than never, I guess. Prior to Unicode the approach was typically to have multiple versions of the text associated with an application, in multiple character sets which would be loaded on-demand. These features worked in Unixes that I was using as early as 1987., I could use national characters without any problem in 1994 on NT. "Use" is an interesting term. Most uses of Unicode outside of a Word Processor in vintage NT would result in system crashes and/or corruption. Good luck with Linux or most of Unices then. Well... Linux didn't really exist as a commercial OS at that time, so I guess you're right by default. What's more, the Unicode standard had JUST been published in 1991. It took years for most software to adapt to using Unicode, and even longer for the interoperability features to be worked out. Even today, new releases of, for example, Gnome continue to adapt to the ways other cultures use the desktop and OS with their native characters (e.g. with vertical or RtL script).
You seem to have this rosy view of the world that involves Microsoft products solving the hard problem of internationalization from day one, and everyone else staring dumbly... this is far from the case.