That was said far better than I could have. (Though I don't think you meant to say that featured articles can have hundreds of cites for each fact.) And, indeed, you make a very good point about Citizendium--if someone manages to pull one over on Larry, considerable damage can be done because authority carries more weight there than actually being able to back up one's statements. (If it didn't, what would be the point of all this real-name, real-experts stuff?) He certainly shouldn't be dancing about all the damage Essjay was able to do.
Essjay has plenty of contributions. If he's been removing "information pointing out the hypocrisy that permeates the project", I'd like to know about it. Please provide an example of such conduct.
I don't think you understand where Larry is coming from. People on Wikipedia didn't give Larry the suck-up action he felt he deserved; you can read about it in his Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism essay over at The Other Site. Despite Larry's previous position that authorities must be kowtowed to, he's now complaining that Wikipedia provided too much deference to a self-proclaimed elite (though I'm unaware of Essjay actually bludgeoning anyone with his credentials, it's quite legitimate to presume that his claims influenced how his edits were received).
Jimbo has GodKing powers over all of Wikipedia, and the people there regard his word as law. People don't trash-talk Jimbo, because they might find themselves unexpectedly WP:OFFICE'd or somesuch. Well, gosh-darn-it, Larry wants some of that sweet dictatorship action. But he can't get it on Wikipedia, because he stomped off and missed the gravy boat. Whoopsie. His k5 essay should have been titled "Why Wikipedia Must Defer To Larry Sanger's Genius".
It's not until we see projects like Citizendium or Conservapedia that we can truly appreciate how much worse Wikipedia could have been. There's a million things they've done wrong, but these attempts to one-up them show how much they've done right.
Larry, your comments would carry a lot more weight if they didn't reek so strongly of sour grapes. It seems like you're trashing Wikipedia in an effort to prevent Citizendium from going the way of Nupedia.
I'm unaware of any accusations of sexism against Randal Schwartz. Perhaps you could enlighten me? Or did you just get on a roll with the adjectives and not want to stop?
The BBC's R&D department created a wavelet-based video codec called Dirac, and released it as open source. There are some commits to the CVS in the last few days, so the project's not dead. I don't know what they're planning to do with the codec, though.
Darn skippy. I'd like to get me some of those replacement teeth, too. A youthful addiction to gummi bears has left me with less-than-optimal chompers, and I'd be most interested in getting new ones, even if it meant being on a liquid diet for six months or a year or whatever.
Please read this list. Just because both procedures are labeled "circumcision" does not make them equivalent. The equivalent of "female circumcision" is, at the very least, removal of the entire penis.
There's no contradiction in the statement that most discoveries come from screwups, but most screwups don't lead to discoveries. (I can't actually back up the first half of that statement, of course; I'm just paraphrasing Asimov.) It's like saying that most serial killers are male, but most males aren't serial killers. Or that most prostitutes are women, but most women aren't prostitutes. Or that most suicide bombers are Arab, but most Arabs aren't suicide bombers. (Anyone I haven't offended yet with one of my examples... ?)
It's an Isaac Asimov saying, as far as I know (though I haven't seen a primary source). "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discovery, is not 'Eureka' (I found it!), but 'That's funny...'"
How odd; I was all ready to yell "DUPE!", but this isn't yet another DCA story. So, for this one, we have that it kills human tumors in vitro, and mouse tumors in vivo. We don't know if it's safe to give to humans. (Maybe we do; I haven't pulled the research paper yet.) Ah, well. Here's a picture of the molecule if anyone wants it.
NPOV doesn't mean giving equal time to any crackpot who can string two words together. For example, the article on the Holocaust doesn't give equal weight to the possibility that Hitler was just defending the hapless Aryans from predatory Jews. See undue weight. While this does happen, it's not in accordance with policy, and you should refer people who yell "NPOV!" at you to that section. It's a sad truth that those who bang on the rules the most are those who are trying to abuse them.
I looked at the "The Chronicles of Narnia" article, and noticed that the Hensher reference (about racism in the depictions of the Calormen) is hosted on the Discovery Institute, of all places, but Googling for a phrase gets a copy (with popups) citing The Independent of London, on December 4, 1999--which is a real newspaper; the criticism has been reputably put forth, and so has a place in the article.
Oh, it's exactly what you think it is. I wonder if anyone's written a driver to have it thump along with the bass beat of whatever music you're playing.
If you read up on your history of Wikipedia, you know that it started out as a way to push the open-source and Richard Stallman free gospel through an encyclopedia. [...] But try telling that to some of the people who work on the site, who are so obsessed with trying to make the site GFDL-compliant, above all else, that they've basically been willing to sacrifice the quality of the site by pushing for free resources over what's available legally.
Just like those free-software wackos agitating for free drivers when there are perfectly good black-box binary blobs available, right?
This is largely a problem with images. Most media companies put out fair-use promotional images for products and shows, along with people, but because we follow the rules so closely to the T, these images aren't available for us. In the example of people, the standard is so high as to when it's okay to allow for a fair-use image - if a person's alive, no matter how hard they are to get in touch with, there's enough possibility to allow for a license-free image that we can't even put a fair use image on the page. Identifying a person isn't a good enough reason to put a fair-use image on the page, even though that's pretty much the point of putting a photo of a person on a page.
(a) What you describe isn't policy. At best, some guy wrote an essay about that, but that doesn't reflect the consensus of the community. (b) Promotional images are specifically exempted by actual policy--while it's preferable to have free images, promotional images are acceptable. (c) For someone who supposedly works in the media, you have a mighty sketchy understanding of copyright. There's no such thing as a "fair-use promotional image". There's such a thing as a fair use of a promotional image, which is intentionally vaguely defined and intended to be sorted out by people suing each other, which really isn't the best use of all those donations the Wikimedia Foundation's been getting.
The logic is that fair-use images discourage free images, and since Wikipedia's trying to be free, we need to get rid of fair-use images. They discourage resale of content as books down the line, even though its Web form is far more useful.
Or inclusion on CDs, or as part of an OS distribution. Or free reuse of the content in general.
As a result of all this, there are a handful of editors out there who have made it their mission to remove these images wholesale, no matter how much average users protest. It's just silly.
There are editors removing promotional photos of people when no free alternative exists? If so, they're in violation of policy, and I'd very much like to know about it.
Now, I don't know about you guys, but I didn't get into Wikipedia for the free-as-in-speech part. I got into it because was freely-editable and easy for the average person to improve. But because of a draconian interpretation of a rule, many articles are having a difficulty improving. The average user is getting forgotten because the original mission is incompatible with what Wikipedia has become, and the people pushing for the original mission have clearly lost sight of this.
No, you only benefit from the free-as-in-speech part, and turn your wrath toward the editors who are realistically imposing a copyright regime that they're bound by, but certainly didn't write. Perhaps you should consider aiming some of that wrath toward a fair-use system that relies on people suing each other, on a copyright regime that locks down orphan works, and on a media industry that clutches its content so tightly as to leave nothing for the commons.
I see this claim a lot, but people seldom back it up. Most of what gets reverted is nonsense or vandalism. I'm not saying your edits fell into that category, but I'll remain skeptical until you produce this edit you had mentioned.
Thank you for mentioning the Intel drivers. Always good to see what they're up to; makes me glad that my laptop happened to come with Intel video (915GM chipset).
So, you decided against calling it Nupedia this time? Perhaps "Just As Good As Wikipedia Except I'm In Charge" next time? Or "Sour Grapes-o-Pedia"?
I kid, I kid. Honestly, variety is good (insert Gnome/KDE flamewar here); we already have enough problems with Wikipedia articles being replicated around the internet so that it becomes hard to find anything else. There's a serious free-encyclopedia vacuum out there, and it can only help to have another batch of people doing work independently of Wikipedia.
I think you're doomed to failure due to scalability issues and the likelihood of POV-pushing from your chosen elite, but I'd be very happy to be proved wrong on that one.
Just a note: the trance vibrator driver is indeed in the mainline kernel; it's not in the "input" directory, but rather "misc", now, in case you were looking for it. Here it is. Amazing what they do with computers nowadays.
Consider that you don't need a special driver for a particular brand of ATAPI CD-ROM drive, or for a particular USB Mass Storage Device. Heck, Windows has USB class drivers for Bluetooth devices, smart-card devices, hubs, HIDs (keyboards, mice, CueCats and such), mass storage devices, printers, PTP-protocol scanners and cameras, audio devices, modems and video devices. Linux has a variety of supported class drivers as well. There are, of course, more classes, and that's all just for USB devices.
Sure, there are a lot of corner cases and pathological hardware--I think video cards are the best example--but it's entirely possible and indeed desirable to support all kinds of devices in the kernel. Even if sometimes we have to say goodbye to one of them, it was worth it to have them around.
You're obviously confusing apples with oranges here trying to appear smart. HPV is _both_ transmitted by sexual intercourse as well as thought to be a virus that may be the cause of cancer at a latter date.
Yes, I'm well aware that the strains of HPV the vaccine is effective against are known to cause cervical cancer. That's why I called it a cancer vaccine, because if HPV didn't cause cancer, it wouldn't be of much concern--a majority of people end up carrying some form of the virus, because it's so easily transmitted. My point was that you seemed to be leaning toward the "oh noes our daughters will get this vaccine and then form oral sex brigades!" claims which have been showing up since the vaccine was produced, and which would be funny if women didn't, you know, die of what's now an largely preventable cancer.
As far as your herd immunity is concerned, that is theory. Another theory to which I adhere is that vaccinations carry the diseases they supposedly prevent into the population.
Wait, what? There's a difference between "well-supported epidemiology" and "my crackpot idea". The former (summed up as: we can't vaccinate everyone, but if we vaccinate nearly everyone, we can eliminate the disease because it won't be able to make its way between the few unvaccinated people) is well-demonstrated. The latter is one of the reasons that blockheads like you end up getting people killed.
Don't get me wrong, I have no real love for drug companies - the two most widely prescribed post-chemotherapy antinausea meds are Zofran and Kytril. Zoftan has an average wholesale price (AWP) of $26.25 _per_tablet_. Kytril is even better, at $59.67 per pill. They normally give you Kytril if Zofran doesn't work. You pay or you puke for a couple days - your choice.
Holy crap, no wonder a lot of people just smoke some weed.
There's a lot of hiding behind the volunteer nature of the military when someone mentions that the troops are sort of on indefinite stay in the desert, that they're being used as meat-shields for the President's ego, or something of that nature. Put slightly more crudely, it means that we use the poorest among us as meat-shields, and pretend that they weren't shuffled into the military by lying recruiters, by economic circumstances, or by anything else. No, no, they volunteered, so if we want to throw them all into a monstrously expensive face-saving gesture, well, they signed up for it.
but certainly, a true warrior would go through all of toughest moments of their respective career without wanting to be thanked for it each step of the way.
Absolutely. If you've never seen Bill Whittle's TRIBES, possibly the most disturbingly masturbatory piece of jingoistic military-worship ever typed, I suggest you read it. (It's been called an "interminable 5500-word pronouncement about Dorito-stained resolve".)
The initial DCA studies in Canada and the US were funded by such programs, including the FDA's own Orphan Drugs program, which has discovered a whole host of new drugs.
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That was said far better than I could have. (Though I don't think you meant to say that featured articles can have hundreds of cites for each fact.) And, indeed, you make a very good point about Citizendium--if someone manages to pull one over on Larry, considerable damage can be done because authority carries more weight there than actually being able to back up one's statements. (If it didn't, what would be the point of all this real-name, real-experts stuff?) He certainly shouldn't be dancing about all the damage Essjay was able to do.
Essjay has plenty of contributions. If he's been removing "information pointing out the hypocrisy that permeates the project", I'd like to know about it. Please provide an example of such conduct.
I don't think you understand where Larry is coming from. People on Wikipedia didn't give Larry the suck-up action he felt he deserved; you can read about it in his Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism essay over at The Other Site. Despite Larry's previous position that authorities must be kowtowed to, he's now complaining that Wikipedia provided too much deference to a self-proclaimed elite (though I'm unaware of Essjay actually bludgeoning anyone with his credentials, it's quite legitimate to presume that his claims influenced how his edits were received).
Jimbo has GodKing powers over all of Wikipedia, and the people there regard his word as law. People don't trash-talk Jimbo, because they might find themselves unexpectedly WP:OFFICE'd or somesuch. Well, gosh-darn-it, Larry wants some of that sweet dictatorship action. But he can't get it on Wikipedia, because he stomped off and missed the gravy boat. Whoopsie. His k5 essay should have been titled "Why Wikipedia Must Defer To Larry Sanger's Genius".
It's not until we see projects like Citizendium or Conservapedia that we can truly appreciate how much worse Wikipedia could have been. There's a million things they've done wrong, but these attempts to one-up them show how much they've done right.
Larry, your comments would carry a lot more weight if they didn't reek so strongly of sour grapes. It seems like you're trashing Wikipedia in an effort to prevent Citizendium from going the way of Nupedia.
I'm unaware of any accusations of sexism against Randal Schwartz. Perhaps you could enlighten me? Or did you just get on a roll with the adjectives and not want to stop?
The BBC's R&D department created a wavelet-based video codec called Dirac, and released it as open source. There are some commits to the CVS in the last few days, so the project's not dead. I don't know what they're planning to do with the codec, though.
Darn skippy. I'd like to get me some of those replacement teeth, too. A youthful addiction to gummi bears has left me with less-than-optimal chompers, and I'd be most interested in getting new ones, even if it meant being on a liquid diet for six months or a year or whatever.
Please read this list. Just because both procedures are labeled "circumcision" does not make them equivalent. The equivalent of "female circumcision" is, at the very least, removal of the entire penis.
There's no contradiction in the statement that most discoveries come from screwups, but most screwups don't lead to discoveries. (I can't actually back up the first half of that statement, of course; I'm just paraphrasing Asimov.) It's like saying that most serial killers are male, but most males aren't serial killers. Or that most prostitutes are women, but most women aren't prostitutes. Or that most suicide bombers are Arab, but most Arabs aren't suicide bombers. (Anyone I haven't offended yet with one of my examples... ?)
You know, I'm not ready to call Roy Plunkett an idiot for discovering Teflon. Everybody makes mistakes; geniuses just capitalize on them.
It's an Isaac Asimov saying, as far as I know (though I haven't seen a primary source). "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discovery, is not 'Eureka' (I found it!), but 'That's funny...'"
How odd; I was all ready to yell "DUPE!", but this isn't yet another DCA story. So, for this one, we have that it kills human tumors in vitro, and mouse tumors in vivo. We don't know if it's safe to give to humans. (Maybe we do; I haven't pulled the research paper yet.) Ah, well. Here's a picture of the molecule if anyone wants it.
NPOV doesn't mean giving equal time to any crackpot who can string two words together. For example, the article on the Holocaust doesn't give equal weight to the possibility that Hitler was just defending the hapless Aryans from predatory Jews. See undue weight. While this does happen, it's not in accordance with policy, and you should refer people who yell "NPOV!" at you to that section. It's a sad truth that those who bang on the rules the most are those who are trying to abuse them.
I looked at the "The Chronicles of Narnia" article, and noticed that the Hensher reference (about racism in the depictions of the Calormen) is hosted on the Discovery Institute, of all places, but Googling for a phrase gets a copy (with popups) citing The Independent of London, on December 4, 1999--which is a real newspaper; the criticism has been reputably put forth, and so has a place in the article.
Oh, it's exactly what you think it is. I wonder if anyone's written a driver to have it thump along with the bass beat of whatever music you're playing.
I see this claim a lot, but people seldom back it up. Most of what gets reverted is nonsense or vandalism. I'm not saying your edits fell into that category, but I'll remain skeptical until you produce this edit you had mentioned.
Thank you for mentioning the Intel drivers. Always good to see what they're up to; makes me glad that my laptop happened to come with Intel video (915GM chipset).
So, you decided against calling it Nupedia this time? Perhaps "Just As Good As Wikipedia Except I'm In Charge" next time? Or "Sour Grapes-o-Pedia"?
I kid, I kid. Honestly, variety is good (insert Gnome/KDE flamewar here); we already have enough problems with Wikipedia articles being replicated around the internet so that it becomes hard to find anything else. There's a serious free-encyclopedia vacuum out there, and it can only help to have another batch of people doing work independently of Wikipedia.
I think you're doomed to failure due to scalability issues and the likelihood of POV-pushing from your chosen elite, but I'd be very happy to be proved wrong on that one.
I called you names? I called you "that guy", and then I explained what I meant by that. Is that what you meant?
Just a note: the trance vibrator driver is indeed in the mainline kernel; it's not in the "input" directory, but rather "misc", now, in case you were looking for it. Here it is. Amazing what they do with computers nowadays.
Consider that you don't need a special driver for a particular brand of ATAPI CD-ROM drive, or for a particular USB Mass Storage Device. Heck, Windows has USB class drivers for Bluetooth devices, smart-card devices, hubs, HIDs (keyboards, mice, CueCats and such), mass storage devices, printers, PTP-protocol scanners and cameras, audio devices, modems and video devices. Linux has a variety of supported class drivers as well. There are, of course, more classes, and that's all just for USB devices.
Sure, there are a lot of corner cases and pathological hardware--I think video cards are the best example--but it's entirely possible and indeed desirable to support all kinds of devices in the kernel. Even if sometimes we have to say goodbye to one of them, it was worth it to have them around.
The initial DCA studies in Canada and the US were funded by such programs, including the FDA's own Orphan Drugs program, which has discovered a whole host of new drugs.