I never got from the article (which for some inexplicable reason is linked to page 2, once again nice job editors.) what it has to do with reference librarians. TFA makes a good point that wikipedia has a definite leg up on yahoo answers in terms of accuracy. It also makes it pretty clear that isn't saying much. But do people really expect accuracy from a social-ask-and-answer site? IF some kid were to use this page as a reference and somehow cite it properly, I think it could lead to a good lesson for the student on how to judge the credibility of a web page. Assuming the underpaid, overworked public school teacher bothered to take such an opportunity.
fwiw yahoo answers isn't bad for opinion type questions like "what should i serve with my pot roast this holiday dinner" or something like that. it's not exactly a source of real expertise on anything of a factual nature, and anyone who treats it as such will get what they deserve.
Either that, or there is a real problem with our copyright law.
Because it's just not possible that both are true.
Seriously, you're right, in that copyright law has become fairly draconian in the U.S. at least, but this is at least partially due to the perception that people view acquiring music (that you used to have to pay for) without paying for it as perfectly ok. Most artists wish to be remunerated for their work, and while the de facto model of distribution maybe isn't completely fair to them, it worked pretty well until the paradigm shift occurred.
Now, I'll agree that the media companies lobbying efforts have been misguided, and their tactics with the lawsuits under their favorable (to them) new legislation has been pretty egregious. That said, consumer habits and attitudes aren't free of blame for the mess we're in.
Eventually they either start importing them from elsewhere right along with the drugs, or they start making them.
Importing ought to drive up the cost, especially if they have to be imported illegally, as customs will still catch quite a few. Guns have a
significant bulk/cost ratio difference from drugs, that I should think would make them an unattractive import candidate.
As Britain's finding out, not even banning handguns can keep them off the streets, nor even deter violent crime that much. Little problem, for about $100 in parts and a machine shop you can churn out a full auto gun. For ~$20, a single shot zip gun.
Thanks for bringing up Britain, who in 2002 had.41 gun deaths per 100,000 people, versus the U.S.'s 14.24... more than 30 times as many per capita source. Obviously this strategy just isn't working out for the Brits and they need to rethink the whole plan. A single shot zip gun is not going to be anywhere near as reliable or accurate as a.22 pistol, and carries the additional risk of blowing up in the owner's hand at a relatively unacceptable rate. Homemade automatics would have similar issues with respect to mass-produced, high-precision firearms-- they just don't scare me as much. Not to mention that far fewer people have the knowledge and motivation to actually do this, than do walking down to the sporting goods store and buying a gun.
FACT: Gun Dealers have to follow all the same rules and regulations at a gun show as they do elsewhere.
I'll concede this point, since I have no source, with a question: how do they typically deal with the waiting period? Do they mail you the gun later?
Not used for hunting, huh?
A generalization, I admit. I would wager that far more humans are killed by handguns than animals are each year. Besides, it would seem, that handguns used for hunting are of a different class than say semi-automatic 9mm or.45 weapons. I wouldn't think a handgun would be a very sensible hunting weapon, especially something that's likely to break your wrist, but hey... to each their own huh.
Besides, handgun usage against people is perfectly legitimate in self defense.
Ah, the oft quoted self-defense argument.
In general, research shows that guns increase, not decrease, the health risk of gun owners: risk of domestic homicide increases three times when one has a gun, and suicide increases fivefold if a gun is present in the house.
A published study showed that when guns are bought for self-protection, they are 22 more times more likely to be used to kill someone the owner knows than to be used against strangers in self-defense.
I know I'm not going to convince you of anything, but guns are not good. They are dangerous, deadly weapons. Gun control and Border control are a really really bad analogy for any number of reasons.
Why disrupt a legitimate, lawful purchase/use/possession of firearms to fight the mere possibility of an illegal use of those firearms?
It's called deterrence. See, people who make the "when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns" argument are missing some critical thinking skills. The black/white market distinction exists even without restrictions, for reasons that have already been given. Black market firearms are often cheaper, cannot be traced properly, could be by felons, etc. The 5 day waiting period and background check did not cause the black market to come into existence.
Furthermore, those black market guns have to come from somewhere. Most often, they are "legitimate" firearms that have been stolen, or sold from a private "legitimate" owner into the black market. Background checks will reduce the number of firearms that make it into the wild. If you raise the barrier to entry of firearms, it will deter the less determined buyers, meaning people who won't take better measures to secure and keep their weapons will be less inclined to procure them in the first place. Eventually, as weapons are permanently lost, damaged or confiscated, fewer weapons will find it to the black market. note i did not say "none" but fewer, since the premise is *reduction* of violence, not elimination.
Waiting periods are specifically designed to prevent crimes of passion, where someone goes and buys a gun specifically to wound or kill someone they are angry at. The waiting period wouldn't have stopped the VA Tech incident, however it is clear that the shooter had a well-documented history of mental problems and a properly-executed background check may very well have stopped it.
At any rate, some people who might wish to commit a firearm crime don't have access to the black market and so some deterrence will take place. Purchasing from an illegal market has it's drawbacks. If you don't have a gun, and you go to buy one from the black market, what's to stop the fellow with the gun from pointing it at you, taking your money, and leaving?
So really, the bigger problem is the "gray market" such as gun shows, where legal weapons are sold without restriction and without a proper paper trail. These remaining loopholes in the system need to be closed.
honestly, though, handguns, which are usually the subject of these federal laws, ought to be outright banned since their only legitimate use is hurting people. You don't hunt with a handgun, and you only practice shooting them to get better at hurting people.
Given the headache that incompatibility between GPLv3 and GPLv2 is causing developers, will we see more of this?
No.
Not in a manner disproportionate to what we've seen in the past anyway. Some people will keep gpl2 as their license, others will go gpl3, bsd, or one of any of the OSI licenses for the most part, because people like attribution, they like retaining (some) control of their work.
Vista is a bust I haven't looked at adoption numbers recently, but XP was pretty well a bust for its first year as well. It was really only after SP1 came out that corporate clients, which are who microsoft really cares about, decided to tune in. Now, consider that XP was actually a pretty big leap forward from win2k in terms of end-user and administrator benefits and at the time I think most people were still running some variant of Win95 (98,98SE,ME). Once people got familiar with it at work, they wanted their home machines to be just as good. Gamers, while a small market, are more likely to replace their PC more frequently and so they are a critical market to snag with platform-exclusivity.
In other words, tell me in two years if you still think Vista's a bust.
But when MS looks at this question, they see no reason to do it. In fact, it would cost them one of their main reasons to upgrade to vista.
As far as someone else doing it, unlikely. The most logical candidate for porting outside of MS is a game company, and as part of their licensing with MS they can't. Also, for any third party, it's not just a 'port' but rather a complete reimplementation since MS isn't going to share source. I think nobody who would do a good job will find value in doing such a port, so don't hold your breath.
I'm going to guess you're not a parent since you may not have noticed that whooshing sound that was my point going over your head. You don't need to know some specific piece of knowledge to be a caring, loving human being, this being bar none the most important quality of a good parent.
Furthermore, as a historical note, the concept of negative numbers didn't exist until around 100 BC. we were well out of caves by that point, and in fact there had been a significant amount of philosophy, engineering and other sciences prior to this time.
As for throwing rocks, again, I think rocks would be better than bunker busters and tactical nuclear weapons, but I guess that's a matter of opinion.
I'm not clear if you think I was flaming you, which I wasn't, or if you're saying that I wasn't promoting discussion, which I was.
You said, "imagine if," so I did. Maybe we wouldn't have medical tech, and maybe we wouldn't have nukes. I'm just saying the world doesn't hinge as firmly on the existence of negative integers as you might like to believe. Hell, humanity made it for centuries without even having "zero" as a concept. The pyramids were almost all constructed before the invention of zero, so clearly it's not even essential to all engineering. And certainly if someone advocates "darwinizing" people because they don't know this or that, it's not helping the cause of humanism much.
All those JPGs and GIFs and PNGs must be converted to raw or bitmap files to display them on the screen. Well, yes and no. They do have to be converted when placed into display memory (VRAM) but the decompression *can* happen on the fly. I believe that it usually doesn't for performance reasons though, since each scroll of the page would require another decompression pass.
Imagine how far we'd be if no one could understand how to count below zero.
There's a vast gulf between *some people* being unable to comprehend negative integers, and *no one* being able to comprehend them.
For better or worse, there's no correlation between being a whiz at math and being an excellent parent, being a good friend or even being a decent human being. Without that level of understanding, humanity would probably have never developed decent medical science, but on the other hand we wouldn't have made it to nuclear weapon phase either. Hard to say what leaves us better off.
perhaps what they should be doing is slowly evolving a system
Yeah, they should be doing that. But you're right on the mark, it's not going to justify new OS sales if they don't "revolutionize" things every few years. Look at how slow Vista has been taking off, even with many OEM's shipping it unless you specify otherwise.
Here's what I think the next evolution of windows will be: vista with a fresh coat of paint and a few new system-intensive bells and whistles that don't add much in terms of actual functionality. The key "feature" will be a bunch of built in hooks to use pay-as-you-go subscription web applications hosted by MS.
Try multiplying that by 50. Well I was specifically referring to this billion. By some assesments, all of the $600 Billion already spent on the war was wasted.
Can you imagine a flying beowulf cluster of these?
In soviet russia, car flies you!
Now, that out of the way... FTFA:
To activate the mechanism that folds or deploys the wings, you have to be on the ground. There are sensors that tell the plane if you are on the ground. The engine also needs to be off. So much for flipping out the wings while driving down a clear stretch of highway and taking off. rats.
If I had NASAs track record, I wouldn't be talking about rewarding smart people, because they've proven pretty well that they're not.
Quite the contrary. Getting that bucket of bolts off the pad without a fireball is enough of a miracle to warrant a million-dollar party.
There's no funding for a new shuttle design. A billion goes missing in Iraq and that announcement barely lasts a single news cycle. Spend it on NASA and you'll hear people bitching about it for years and years.
Slashdot Mirror
I never got from the article (which for some inexplicable reason is linked to page 2, once again nice job editors.) what it has to do with reference librarians. TFA makes a good point that wikipedia has a definite leg up on yahoo answers in terms of accuracy. It also makes it pretty clear that isn't saying much. But do people really expect accuracy from a social-ask-and-answer site? IF some kid were to use this page as a reference and somehow cite it properly, I think it could lead to a good lesson for the student on how to judge the credibility of a web page. Assuming the underpaid, overworked public school teacher bothered to take such an opportunity.
fwiw yahoo answers isn't bad for opinion type questions like "what should i serve with my pot roast this holiday dinner" or something like that. it's not exactly a source of real expertise on anything of a factual nature, and anyone who treats it as such will get what they deserve.
why not? it could spare us another messy invasion. (just kidding guys)
Oh and...
6. Profit!
Because it's just not possible that both are true.
Seriously, you're right, in that copyright law has become fairly draconian in the U.S. at least, but this is at least partially due to the perception that people view acquiring music (that you used to have to pay for) without paying for it as perfectly ok. Most artists wish to be remunerated for their work, and while the de facto model of distribution maybe isn't completely fair to them, it worked pretty well until the paradigm shift occurred.
Now, I'll agree that the media companies lobbying efforts have been misguided, and their tactics with the lawsuits under their favorable (to them) new legislation has been pretty egregious. That said, consumer habits and attitudes aren't free of blame for the mess we're in.
yes, but is it ready for the hud?
Importing ought to drive up the cost, especially if they have to be imported illegally, as customs will still catch quite a few. Guns have a significant bulk/cost ratio difference from drugs, that I should think would make them an unattractive import candidate.
As Britain's finding out, not even banning handguns can keep them off the streets, nor even deter violent crime that much. Little problem, for about $100 in parts and a machine shop you can churn out a full auto gun. For ~$20, a single shot zip gun.Thanks for bringing up Britain, who in 2002 had .41 gun deaths per 100,000 people, versus the U.S.'s 14.24... more than 30 times as many per capita source. Obviously this strategy just isn't working out for the Brits and they need to rethink the whole plan. A single shot zip gun is not going to be anywhere near as reliable or accurate as a .22 pistol, and carries the additional risk of blowing up in the owner's hand at a relatively unacceptable rate. Homemade automatics would have similar issues with respect to mass-produced, high-precision firearms-- they just don't scare me as much. Not to mention that far fewer people have the knowledge and motivation to actually do this, than do walking down to the sporting goods store and buying a gun.
FACT: Gun Dealers have to follow all the same rules and regulations at a gun show as they do elsewhere.I'll concede this point, since I have no source, with a question: how do they typically deal with the waiting period? Do they mail you the gun later?
Not used for hunting, huh?A generalization, I admit. I would wager that far more humans are killed by handguns than animals are each year. Besides, it would seem, that handguns used for hunting are of a different class than say semi-automatic 9mm or .45 weapons. I wouldn't think a handgun would be a very sensible hunting weapon, especially something that's likely to break your wrist, but hey... to each their own huh.
Besides, handgun usage against people is perfectly legitimate in self defense.Ah, the oft quoted self-defense argument.
sourceI know I'm not going to convince you of anything, but guns are not good. They are dangerous, deadly weapons. Gun control and Border control are a really really bad analogy for any number of reasons.
It's called deterrence. See, people who make the "when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns" argument are missing some critical thinking skills. The black/white market distinction exists even without restrictions, for reasons that have already been given. Black market firearms are often cheaper, cannot be traced properly, could be by felons, etc. The 5 day waiting period and background check did not cause the black market to come into existence.
Furthermore, those black market guns have to come from somewhere. Most often, they are "legitimate" firearms that have been stolen, or sold from a private "legitimate" owner into the black market. Background checks will reduce the number of firearms that make it into the wild. If you raise the barrier to entry of firearms, it will deter the less determined buyers, meaning people who won't take better measures to secure and keep their weapons will be less inclined to procure them in the first place. Eventually, as weapons are permanently lost, damaged or confiscated, fewer weapons will find it to the black market. note i did not say "none" but fewer, since the premise is *reduction* of violence, not elimination.
Waiting periods are specifically designed to prevent crimes of passion, where someone goes and buys a gun specifically to wound or kill someone they are angry at. The waiting period wouldn't have stopped the VA Tech incident, however it is clear that the shooter had a well-documented history of mental problems and a properly-executed background check may very well have stopped it.
At any rate, some people who might wish to commit a firearm crime don't have access to the black market and so some deterrence will take place. Purchasing from an illegal market has it's drawbacks. If you don't have a gun, and you go to buy one from the black market, what's to stop the fellow with the gun from pointing it at you, taking your money, and leaving?
So really, the bigger problem is the "gray market" such as gun shows, where legal weapons are sold without restriction and without a proper paper trail. These remaining loopholes in the system need to be closed.
honestly, though, handguns, which are usually the subject of these federal laws, ought to be outright banned since their only legitimate use is hurting people. You don't hunt with a handgun, and you only practice shooting them to get better at hurting people.
No.
Not in a manner disproportionate to what we've seen in the past anyway. Some people will keep gpl2 as their license, others will go gpl3, bsd, or one of any of the OSI licenses for the most part, because people like attribution, they like retaining (some) control of their work.
I've got my own variation of this, which i think is original
avoid reinventing the wheel if you can, but sometimes you don't need wheels, you need tank treads or an airscrew.
In other words, tell me in two years if you still think Vista's a bust.
What business model? Let your product line atrophy and then blame everyone else?
But when MS looks at this question, they see no reason to do it. In fact, it would cost them one of their main reasons to upgrade to vista.
As far as someone else doing it, unlikely. The most logical candidate for porting outside of MS is a game company, and as part of their licensing with MS they can't. Also, for any third party, it's not just a 'port' but rather a complete reimplementation since MS isn't going to share source. I think nobody who would do a good job will find value in doing such a port, so don't hold your breath.
I'm going to guess you're not a parent since you may not have noticed that whooshing sound that was my point going over your head. You don't need to know some specific piece of knowledge to be a caring, loving human being, this being bar none the most important quality of a good parent.
Furthermore, as a historical note, the concept of negative numbers didn't exist until around 100 BC. we were well out of caves by that point, and in fact there had been a significant amount of philosophy, engineering and other sciences prior to this time.
As for throwing rocks, again, I think rocks would be better than bunker busters and tactical nuclear weapons, but I guess that's a matter of opinion.
I'm not clear if you think I was flaming you, which I wasn't, or if you're saying that I wasn't promoting discussion, which I was.
You said, "imagine if," so I did. Maybe we wouldn't have medical tech, and maybe we wouldn't have nukes. I'm just saying the world doesn't hinge as firmly on the existence of negative integers as you might like to believe. Hell, humanity made it for centuries without even having "zero" as a concept. The pyramids were almost all constructed before the invention of zero, so clearly it's not even essential to all engineering. And certainly if someone advocates "darwinizing" people because they don't know this or that, it's not helping the cause of humanism much.
There's a vast gulf between *some people* being unable to comprehend negative integers, and *no one* being able to comprehend them.
For better or worse, there's no correlation between being a whiz at math and being an excellent parent, being a good friend or even being a decent human being. Without that level of understanding, humanity would probably have never developed decent medical science, but on the other hand we wouldn't have made it to nuclear weapon phase either. Hard to say what leaves us better off.
If you don't understand it, you probably will never own any.
Unless they were already using linux because it was available in native-language versions...
Yeah, they should be doing that. But you're right on the mark, it's not going to justify new OS sales if they don't "revolutionize" things every few years. Look at how slow Vista has been taking off, even with many OEM's shipping it unless you specify otherwise.
Here's what I think the next evolution of windows will be: vista with a fresh coat of paint and a few new system-intensive bells and whistles that don't add much in terms of actual functionality. The key "feature" will be a bunch of built in hooks to use pay-as-you-go subscription web applications hosted by MS.
- Sure, but will it run linux?
- Can you imagine a flying beowulf cluster of these?
- In soviet russia, car flies you!
Now, that out of the way... FTFA: To activate the mechanism that folds or deploys the wings, you have to be on the ground. There are sensors that tell the plane if you are on the ground. The engine also needs to be off. So much for flipping out the wings while driving down a clear stretch of highway and taking off. rats.Quite the contrary. Getting that bucket of bolts off the pad without a fireball is enough of a miracle to warrant a million-dollar party.
There's no funding for a new shuttle design. A billion goes missing in Iraq and that announcement barely lasts a single news cycle. Spend it on NASA and you'll hear people bitching about it for years and years.
More likely someone was outbribed.
Unlike here in the US, where I pay $60 for the only carrier available in my area for 1.5 mbps down and 128k up.
Competition is good. Maybe if you're lucky enough to live in a large enough city that has consumer choice, you can see how good it is first hand.