Some people here seem to have the Ozone layer and global warming conflated and confused.
Holes in the Ozone layer were caused by CFCs, which chemically are interesting compounds, but one problem of which is that they were depleting the ozone layer. CFCs are not a central part of the economy however, they can be, and have been substituted, and nowadays if things go on track the ozone layer should repair itself within a few decades. The manufacturers are already using the substitutes so there is not much of a lobby out there to use CFCs again.
Global warming is another matter. The international scientific consensus is it is mostly caused by the burning of fossil fuels, releasing gases like carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, contributing to the greenhouse effect and global warming. This strikes at the heart of multi-national corporations, necessitating either less usage of energy, or very expensive research on how to burn fuel cleaner, with higher CAFE standards and the like. A look at the Fortune 500, #2 Exxon-Mobil, #3 GM, #4 Chevron, #5 ConocoPhillips show how incredibly powerful the forces that this threatens the profits of on some level. Not only do they have control of vast sums of money, and have a large amount of political power, they also are quite good at shaping hegemony - they have a heavy influence on what people think about these issues.
I am not really a tree-hugger, but I have no trust of these companies and believe they are quite capable of radically screwing up the environment for a long time all for a short-term profit. What scares me is not people killed in Bhopal and whatnot - what scares me is how screwed up Connecticut beaches are due to oil leaks. Bhopal is a poor city in a relatively poor country - Connecticut is the richest (highest per capita income) state in the richest country in the world. If corporations can get away with destroying New Haven's environment, I fear the future. I don't think the world is in danger, but things could get messed up (New Orleans flood etc.)
This is not a mainstream reporter who decided to do a book on the Federal Reserve, in the manner of James Bamford writing about the NSA, or Robert Caro writing about the TBTA or the like. Griffin is a conspiracy theorist of the 9/11 truther, Alex Jones/Art Bell type. I know he is one of those people who think the Rockefellers secretly supported the Soviet Union and that type of thing. I suggest you Google his name before plonking down your money for this book.
If you want to read about what central banks are up to, I suggest you read some books on economics - from the 19th century. It was clear to people back then why governments wanted to create fiat money, whether it was sustainable and that sort of thing. They hit it right on the money back then, any other commentary nowadays is just an addendum to what was figured out then.
You mention that in 1996 the Federal Reserve stated inflation was over-stated. You neglect to mention that this inflation was retroactively downgraded after the Boskin Commission - the commission created by the congressional hearings mentioned at the head of the article - gave its report.
Aside from neglecting to mention these numbers were retroactively trended down in the direction you say they should be - Michael J. Boskin was the head economist for the Reagan White House. Revising these numbers down allowed for less government spending on Social Security. In fact it is a neat trick - the spending is cut, yet they could say they were not cutting anything, as prices were supposedly not going up quickly and Social Security was supposedly keeping pace. The AFL-CIO put out a paper that criticized the findings at the time. Of course, the AFL-CIO has a certain interest on this, but on the other hand, it was not like Reagan and Boskin had no interest in reducing government spending and were politically neutral on this. Boskin's main work going back to the 1970's was concerned not with inflation but finding a way to hit Social Security. Saying inflation was over-stated was the answer then, now they talk about privatization.
As far as technical innovation, some things are neglected. For example, in the initial years that VCRs came out, they were well-made, after a number of years of being mass-produced, they began using cheaper junk parts. Before the DVD took over completely, it was better to repair your old VCR than to buy a new one. And this is a trend in many things - it is true some things may get cheaper, but often they go from well-made, artisan like things to cheap junk. Look how professionals go to Chipotle rather than Taco Bell, Trader Joe's over Wal-Mart, organic food over non-organic etc. The mass-produced junk is not the same as the older often better but more expensive artisan like stuff. Of course some things fall in line with the inflation-head ideas - TV sets are certainly better-for-the-same-inflation-adjusted-price than they were 10, 20, 30 years ago. But there is also a lot of stuff where there is not a quality improvement handed for free to the consumer - a lot of time it is cheaper because it becomes more like junk.
As far as the substitution effect, it does not have a direct effect on CPI because it is done as a basket. If inflation was tied to one item, the substitution effect could shift CPI, since CPI is with a basket of goods, the substitution effect does not effect things. I should also point out that the substitution effect goes both ways, if CPI was tied to one product (which it isn't), CPI could be understated due to the substitution effect.
You also neglect to point out how housing costs have skyrocketed relative to CPI. It is much, much more expensive to buy or rent somewhere than it was a few decades ago. Even in the same old buildings which were around in the 1960s. Of course you mention iPods and other frivolous things, whereas the real hit to people's wallets has been in necessities like a roof over ones head. I know I am paying a larger percentage of my income to rent than I was back in the 1990s, and there certainly not has been a quality improvement in my living. In fact, my landlord spends little money on renovating his building, things are only repaired after they have completely fallen apart. Even the housing bust that is happening will not have as much of an impact as people might think.
I have been following this for a bit. There has been overtime exceptions for decades for professionals like lawyers, doctors etc. One of the problems of the changing laws is they keep revising downwards what the definition of an IT "professional" is. I make $90k base pay, but the current definition of IT "professional" has overtime for IT workers thrown out if I recall correctly below $40k, or it may even be below $30k.
As far as people who don't want government involvement - there are a host of laws limiting what we can do. The Taft-Hartley law allows the government to call off any strike. States are allowed to prevent certain agreements between workers and management (a "closed shop"). Overtime, at least below a certain salary level, is one of the things countering this. If you don't care about the ITAA etc. pushing the salary level for overtime down, down, down until it disappears, all that will exist are laws that give weight to the employer, and have the government take away your freedom in contract-making with the employer (Taft-Hartley, so-called right-to-work laws etc.) Even if you want to do away with all such laws, from our perspective it makes sense to keep these laws until the ones hurting us are done away with first, as in the meantime these just balance things on our side against the laws against us.
I have Solaris boxes where, if they crash, a core dump is generated on the file system, and I can examine it and send it to Sun as well.
Linux does not have anything like that. I need to have my machine firmware as well as Red Hat version constantly patched, at a level unneeded with Solaris and Sun. Then I need to go through a rigamarole to set up netdump or the like. Even after that Red Hat or Dell/HP/whoever are often clueless, especially the hardware people. With Sun I can quickly examine the core dump, replace a component, and feel safe I've fixed a problem, when Red Hat is a different story, usually I tag the host as unreliable and that's that, we don't really have the time or luxury to figure out why a server running Red Hat crashed. Anyhow, whatever the problems of working with different components is, or the desire on the part of others perhaps that the corporation I work for devote more resources to this over what Solaris needs, with Sun you get an easy, enterprise solution for deducing why a system crashed, and I feel somewhat confident people at Sun are examining these for consistent problems, with Linux it is all over the place and I suspect most people just usually throw up their hands like I do when a Linux system crashes.
I have not paid much attention to the story, the reporting I heard kept mentioning the warmest year was 1934 and what we've been hearing from the people with the "global warming agenda" (whatever that is, everyone has to wear Birkenstocks?) was false. Of course they somehow neglected to mention that only the figures for the US were off, and only for the past seven years.
More understandably, they neglected to mention that May 1934 was some of the worst weather to hit the US for a long time, and it wiped out the agriculture of many states, it was called the "Dust Bowl". And it was caused by agriculture concerns that had no concern whatsoever for the environment. So they are pointing back to an earlier environmental disaster.
This sort of things gives me flashbacks to the end of the dot bomb era. It is like the proverbial guy with the shoeshine box giving stock tips.
I would say that people here never experienced an economic bump, although with the dot bomb bust from 2000-? I guess people have experienced at least one. Before that was the early 1990s recession, the 1982 recession, downturns in the 1970s etc. All of which have really been minor recessions - the economy derailed in the 1930s, only brought back by a major war and the government taking a permanent central spending role in the economy. There have been depressions before that as well.
The economy has gone in the toilet every decade or so for the last few decades, so I don't see why this is "chicken little"-ish. I personally think the opposite, I think people haven't seen a big bust since the 1930s in the US, and probably in my lifetime they're going to be reintroduced to a full-out depression. The way things are headed, there is plenty of fuel for that fire - overproduction, widening gap between rich and poor, the annulment of the Glass Steagall act, a housing bubble, massive debt in every sphere (government, personal) etc. I don't think doom is around the corner (although it could be), but anyone who thinks the US can not enter another depression is a fool.
Here is an edit by someone coming from the IP 214.13.216.142 on Wikipedia. His or her edits are focused on diminishing the massacre at No Gun Ri during the Korean War, as well as related atrocities during the Korean war.
Well, where is that IP from? At the time I did an nslookup and I resolved to
n-mnstci-142.mnstci.iraq.centcom.mil (the IP now resolves to a different CENTCOM host, host216-142.iraq.centcom.mil). CentCom I remember from the film "Control Room", they are the people trying to spin the Iraq war for the world (and especially the US) media. But MNSTCI? A little checking around showed me MNSTCI stood for the United States Central Command's Multi-National Security Transition Command - Iraq.
I brought this up at the time, but everyone I brought it up to dismissed it. This is CENTCOM's job - US taxpayer's dollars to rewrite history, so that the US can keep going overseas militarily. It particularly annoyed me that I was paying the salary of the person trying to rewrite history. I kind of felt like I was battling someone in the bowels of the US's Orwellian version of "Minitru".
In the mid-1990s, I got a strange SNMP request from an army intelligence outfit in Quantico, Virginia after reading Australian web sites which discussed possible CIA involvement in overthrowing Australia's government in the 1970's (the Whitlam/Kerr thing). This was back in the (usually) non-NAT'ed days - I had just assigned this IP and had an unusual amount of monitoring set up, I'm sure most people would have noticed the query. With the PATRIOT act, split fibers at the major telcos going to who knows where and so forth, I guess this is normal nowadays. The next step for those who support all of this is to just to either dismiss it, or attack the people who complain about.
Yes, most of the H1-Bs I met had PHDs - not. One H1-B I knew had never touched a computer before coming to the US. If we were just giving our H1Bs for PHDs from IIT, we wouldn't be handing out tens of thousands of them a year
One option is, as you stated, a small shop or group where you are doing everything.
I really think the next easiest option is to look at the things you have done and specialize in what you like the most. If you like programming, learn to program well, be able to answer basic questions like what is a linked list (or more complex questions) - learn one language well, as well as the basics of programming that you find in books like "Code Complete". If you like server management do that.
I am a UNIX systems administrator, and for me, even this is a very broad definition. I understand that firmware/time-of-day should be in sync across CPU/memory boards on Sun Enterprise 4000's, or that the file/etc/redhat-release is the file which shows which version of Red Hat you are running, but I can tell you it is very, very rare in interviews to find people who would know both those things. You're lucky if someone "strong in Linux" even knows that about Red Hat. I have to say that Solaris people tend to know their stuff better (and this is coming from a Linux fan). So I consider it difficult to bridge these two things, which are very close, and you are talking about all over the place.
My suggestion would be to specialize in one thing, and learn it well. I had to rank a Google job application on how well I knew something, I forget if the scale was 1-10 or not, but you should specialize in something and get to know it as a 9. Being a jack of all trade is fine, meaning having 3-6 ability in other things, but you should know one thing well - something you enjoy and think has a future. Once you master that one thing, then you can work on getting other things up to 9, but I meet so few people who are at level 10, 9, or even 8 for what I need, I would reiterate to learn one thing well. A real jack of all trades knows multiple things at say an 8 level, but that is rare. We have one where I work, but he knows many things at a high level. Someone who knows lots of things at a 4-6 level I generally find useless, in any environment.
The answer is quite obviously no, to those in the know. Go to an IETF or NANOG meeting and ask if we're moving to IPv6 soon. The only difference in the response will be whether they think you realize that you just told a joke, thus either laughing with you or at you.
We are not moving to IPv6 any time soon. Period. We will all be multicasting over the MBONE before we are using IPv6 in stead of IPv4 in any meaningful way.
You make a valid point and I agree with much of it. As I mentioned that Wikipedia's article on the Pythagorean theorem is good, I don't think it's disingenuous to point out that articles like Palestine are what Wikipedia handles badly. More importantly, I don't think the people running Wikipedia have much interested in solving the problem.
Personally, I see wikis like Demopedia, Conservapedia, Red Wiki, Dkosopedia and so forth as the answer. I would rather read several points of view and make up my own mind. I don't Wikipedia has the ability to handle controversial articles, and IMHO this ability is decreasing, as far as Wikipedia is concerned.
As I said in my post above, I knew that all I had to do to get some rabid response was to jokingly refer to the leadership as a cabal, and mention the existence of Wikipedia Review. And lo and behold, an admin takes the bait, despite me even saying that openly, hook, line and sinker.
A lot of us are Internet old-timers here on Slashdot, did the Usenet "leadership" flip out like this when some jokingly (or not) called them a cabal? Of course not. So how come so many admins on Wikipedia like this guy do?
Some people have called Wikipedia a cult. While not all of the leadership is like this, for example, Flcelloguy was just elected to ArbCom and is a normal, balanced person, posts like this make you wonder. I just looked on the net for signs of being in a cult -
http://www.rickross.com/warningsigns.html
Ten warning signs of a potentially unsafe group/leader.
2. No tolerance for questions or critical inquiry.
4. Unreasonable fear about the outside world, such as impending catastrophe, evil conspiracies and persecutions.
5. There is no legitimate reason to leave, former followers are always wrong in leaving, negative or even evil.
As far as Wikipedia Review, it is a message board, like Slashdot. The only difference between it and Wikipedia is Wikipedia has no control over it, which is what really drives them crazy. It is an open board, so I guess someone could post a link to some crank who posted there which will "shoot its credibility" if you would be the type to think me posting some link to the GNAA's handiwork on Slashdot would shoot Slashdot's credibility.
As far as a WR campaign to "call their employers to complain about them to get them fired.", you are leaving something out. The employer you are talking about is a Wikipedia offshoot. The calls were regarding Essjay, who claimed for years to be a tenured professor when he was hired by a Wikipedia offshoot, when the truth was, he was not. He had made it all up. He even lied to the New Yorker about it, whom Wikipedia had pointed to him as someone to represent Wikipedia. THAT is what shoots credibility. That detective work is the kind of thing going on on Wikipedia Review as well.
I am not as involved in all of this as I once was, but the Internet is a new medium and all of that crap. I don't think the William F. Buckley's and the Katrina vanden Heuvel's of the world think they are not going to be criticized, and I can assure you that Jimbo and his crowd are going to be criticized whether they like it or not. For my part, I now spend less time on criticism and more time working on wiki alternatives to Wikipedia which I think will leave Wikipedia in the dust a few years down the road. Larry Sanger, the creator of Wikipedia, had a great idea and I am sure it will be born out, although definitely not in Wikipedia, or possibly even Sanger's new project. But it will come about in the coming years, and the importance of Sanger's idea will continue, but the importance of the Wikipedia.org domain is not as assured.
Hayek did not win the Nobel Prize as there is no such thing as a Nobel Prize in Economics. Hayek won the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.
I began editing on Wikipedia in 2003 and used it a lot for a while until over time I began realizing that the problems with it were not going to go away, but seemed to be getting worse, so now I do not edit it any more.
One thing I learned is there are two sides of Wikipedia. In the upper right hand corner of the main page you can see what are called the "master categories". The categories such as Mathematics and Science highlight what is best about Wikipedia. The categories such as History and Society highlight what is worst about Wikipedia. You do not really have big battles over articles like "Pythagorean theorem", and they usually do a good job of explaining what that is. On the other hand, if you look at the top of an article like "Palestine" you will see that it is semi-protected, meaning new users can not edit the article. You can also see eight pages of discussion which really doesn't get anywhere. The article is garbage. The Wikipedia cabal likes to say things like cooler heads eventually prevail on such articles, but that is just a lot of bullshit. The cabal itself can often be the problem - if you look at the article's originator, it is Ed Poor, who has not only an admin but a bureaucrat at Wikipedia. He is also a Moonie, with some very strange beliefs, not only religious, which I could care less about, but politically. It's typical Wikipedia that he would create the article, and more so that he has held such high level positions.
Actually I antagonize in using the Wikipedia cabal phrase as these people are so paranoid they have replied to messages like this on Slashdot in the past with stuff like "AHA! YOU SAID CABAL! YOU ARE ONE OF 'THEM'! AN ENEMY! ONLY ENEMIES OF WIKIPEDIA USE THAT PHRASE". Or maybe I could say Wikipediareview.com has some good criticisms of Wikipedia, since they're fanatical about that site to where you are not allowed to mention it on the "Criticism of Wikipedia" article.
I spent a bit of time on Wikipedia and used to care more about this due to that time spent etc. Nowadays I just contribute to other wikis I like which I feel are more balanced. I should note that Jimbo Wales ran the Ayn Rand mailing list for years, has said "[F. A.] Hayek's work...is central to my own thinking about how to manage the Wikipedia project.", and I can give dozens of more examples of where Wales's somewhat far out political biases lay. This political bias starts at the top and works its way down, as one can see with his appointment of people who did not make the cut electorally such as JayJG to Arbcom.
My advice to people is to patronize other wikis - the concept of a wiki encyclopedia is a great idea, but their political views are so far out, that it fragmenting is a certainty.
The first paragraph of this article says "Ryan Lackey...is 26 years old." Which is the age he was in this 2005 Wired article. So this article is not news, it is two years old.
The article says he was just married - this guy is a war profiteer vulture, I hope the next article I read about him is how his car ran over an IED, possibly winning him the 2007 Darwin Award, a big component of which of course is that he can not breed and will be weeded out of the gene pool.
MI5, MI6, the MoD etc. have always seen their number one enemy as the British people. This goes from the forgery of the Zinoviev Letter up to the miners' strike in the 1980s and beyond. Former assistant MI5 director Peter Wright goes into this a little bit in Spycatcher.
While most wage slaves are watching TV, porn, or praying to Jesus, the powers-that-be are deathly afraid people will one day "shape transnational processes in their own class interest". Actually, Marx's Capital has a pretty good history of the English working class - it slowly lost its feudal rights over several centuries with the onset of industrialization, but began organizing and began expanding its rights again.
It is easy for me to see this for a number of reasons.
1 - Is the entire corporation's IT department centralized? HP is a F1000 company - is HP and Compaq's computer networks fully merged? Or for Citigroup, is the old Citicorp network fully merged with the Travelers network? Or were Travelers Salomon Brothers and Smith Barney networks merged before that? And so forth. Wal-Mart's corporate network is probably standardized, but a lot of companies are the resut of many mergers over the years. Or some companies are just of a type where different divisions are very different so there is no or not much centralized corporate IT.
2 - Does the corporation have a global network? Global multi-national corporations have computers all over the world, and it can be hard to have a standard network in New York, Tokyo and London (etc.) New York and Tokyo may be solid, but London may be open to problems etc.
One thing Solaris does well which Linux is still struggling with is crash dumps and crash dump analysis. I know it is easier with Solaris due to the integration between the OS and the hardware, as opposed to say Red Hat and a variety of supported vendors, but is definitely a nice thing to have. Especially if a system crashes and you bring it back up without a good analysis of what went wrong - you might have a $10000 system for the business unit (with everything included) yet if you don't know why it crashed, you're always nervous about the box. The Linux core team talks about having to get to the enterprise level, and Linux still has a way to go in terms of this, to get to the level of Sun and vendors like that in this respect.
Ubuntu is derived from Debian. I had qualms about making my main desktop Linux for various reasons, but in 2005 an attempt to have my Windows do wireless screwed up the whole system, and then I needed to use that OEM Windows CD crap, which not only mucked with my C drive but erased my whole D drive for some reason. I got tired of it and switched to Debian.
I thought I would miss some things in Windows but I didn't. The thing I thought I would miss most was Microsoft Word, but Abiword did fine. I was always concerned I would have to modify my resume and send it out in a nice Word format that Linux wouldn't have, but that was never a problem. I never missed Windows for anything. They talk about Windows having better hardware support, but my (then) 802.11b wireless was a hell of a lot easier to install on my system then Linux. I also liked the ability to open a shell and just be able to do stuff - do an awk or sort or whatever on a file, have multiple windows and so forth. It had all the nice user brain-dead stuff of Windows, but I could drop to a shell and actually do stuff, instead of getting some MS-DOS prompt crap. It's much better nowadays than my old days when I had a Linux kernel version 1 running fvwm as one of my work desktops (the other desktop at that time was a Sun IPX running SunOS 4.1.3_U1).
If Wikipedia was interested in being a reliable encyclopedia, we would know who the top people are (Arbitration Committee etc.), a lot of them would have PHD's, and there would also be a place up there for techies and so forth.
So when the Arbitration Committee had elections (which Jimbo didn't want), who did he appoint that did not get the most votes? JayJG, who had 98 people oppose him going onto ArbCom, which was a hell of a lot for the position (it was over 100, but they attacked people's votes, cajoled people into changing their votes, erased questions and comments about his misconduct etc.) Filiocht had the same number of votes for him as did JayJG, yet only 18 opposing him. Filiocht is someone almost everyone can agree is fair, a lot of people have problems with JayJG and his biases. A number of people met the vote threshold and got a higher percentage than JayJG, so we thought we finally won and got him off the committee, which he had never been elected to. But Jimbo appointed him again, just like he did the first time.
Why? Because he agrees with him politically. Jimbo ran the Ayn Rand mailing list for years and is one of those Randroid nuts. He appoints people like Fred Bauder, a lawyer who was disbarred for telling one of his woman clients to pay him in sex. Larry Sanger is who built Wikipedia anyway, but Jimbo was his boss so he not only wanted to grab the glory, he denies Sanger any credit.
The problems at the top are massive, and I don't think Wikipedia will survive it. I see a split happening, and competitors, and the first real competitor will win and Wikipedia will disappear. I saw Gopher and Archie and Veronica be overtaken by Opentext on the web (anyone remember them?) and then Webcrawler and then Alta Vista and finally Google. Larry Sanger's creation is too good to not get competition. Of course, Jimbo pushed Larry aside and is ruining things. The next Wikipedia competitor will make Wikipedia history, just like Opentext is more or less history nowadays.
Re:Wikipedia is good for some things but not all
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Re:Wikipedia is good for some things but not all
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"Links to Wikipedia Review are removed because Wikipedia Review isn't a legitimate review site" - this says it all - the Wikipedia cabal has decided Wikipedia Review is not "legitimate" and thus wants to prevent the average user using Wikipedia from clicking the link.
With regards to notability, that might have been pertinent if I was talking about an article about Wikipedia Review (the cabal has deleted and locked that article page, so people can't re-create it), but I'm not, I am talking about a link to the web site. The idea that a web site has to be over 300,000 on Alexa (which Wikipedia Review is , but according to you still doesn't warrant it being linked to) to be on Wikipedia is ridiculous - a cursory look at a few Wikipedia pages will show many links to pages below that rank on Alexa, without the furious deletions that we see with this link. In fact, this is the only link I can recall that is deleted constantly by the cabal. Your apologetics are pretty weak, thankfully forums can exist (like here, or Wikipedia Review) where opinions can be expressed freely, unlike on Wikipedia. I also find it funny you think the mention of "vile trolls" will mean anything on Slashdot like it does within the Wikipedia cult. Anyone reading through Slashdot can find GNAA trolls and so forth. So what? Does Wikipedia not link to Slashdot due to this? Your arguments are weak when they are not just Wikipedia cultees chanting the same nonsense to each other in reinforcement of each other.
Wikipedia is good for some things but not all
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I think Wikipedia does a good job for articles like "Newtonian mechanics" and "Pythagorean theorem". Some of the editors really understand the topic and have expertise, and the majority of editors will band together against a few stray editors who want to make unusual, non-encylopedic edits on these types of pages. Wikipedia has eight "master categories", and articles in these two fields, science and mathematics, are often among the best.
On the other hand, on the other end of the spectrum are the categories History and Society. Wikipedia is horrible at such articles. You have two conflicting sides fighting over an article. Let's take a look at the current protected pages. "2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict" and "Taba Summit" are both protected. Semi-protected is "1972 Summer Olympics", "Zionism" and other similar articles. Israelis and Palestinians are shooting each other over there, and such a thing spills over onto Wikipedia. It even spills over onto Slashdot - the last time I said this about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict on Slashdot, in a pretty neutral and moderate tone, someone lambasted me for "taking sides".
Jimbo Wales is not politically neutral. He ran the Ayn Rand mailing list for years. His appointees to the Arbitration Committee are people like JayJG, who could not get voted in and who had over 100 votes against them during elections (including me). He says he uses Friedrich Hayek's theories as a model of how to run Wikipedia. He has personally harrassed people like Secretlondon. He is not a fanatic, or Wikipedia would have never taken off, but he is biased, and his bias is reflected. The Wikipedia "cabal" is sort of cultish - check out the Criticism of Wikipedia page and how obsessed the "cabal" is with criticism they can not control. Dozens of people have tried to link to the Wikipedia Review web site and the link is removed over and over. It is really cultish behavior, the idea that criticism of Wikipedia can happen which they can't control drives them crazy.
I know the society and history articles will always be crap, unless it's something like 1755 Lisbon Earthquake or something which no one cares much about any more. But by and large they are junk and not encyclopedic. The solution I think is for these types of articles to move onto other wiki encyclopedias. This has already happened. I've written a number of articles elsewhere that people put back into Wikipedia. Some of the ones I have done I know could never be put back because they are of the "Taba Summit" type. There is only one wiki encylopedia now, which makes sense, but this will not continue and in fact Wikipedia already has some minor competition in Demopedia, dKosopedia, Internet Encyclopedia (Wikinfo), Red Wiki, Anarchopedia and so forth. This trend will continue.
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Holes in the Ozone layer were caused by CFCs, which chemically are interesting compounds, but one problem of which is that they were depleting the ozone layer. CFCs are not a central part of the economy however, they can be, and have been substituted, and nowadays if things go on track the ozone layer should repair itself within a few decades. The manufacturers are already using the substitutes so there is not much of a lobby out there to use CFCs again.
Global warming is another matter. The international scientific consensus is it is mostly caused by the burning of fossil fuels, releasing gases like carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, contributing to the greenhouse effect and global warming. This strikes at the heart of multi-national corporations, necessitating either less usage of energy, or very expensive research on how to burn fuel cleaner, with higher CAFE standards and the like. A look at the Fortune 500, #2 Exxon-Mobil, #3 GM, #4 Chevron, #5 ConocoPhillips show how incredibly powerful the forces that this threatens the profits of on some level. Not only do they have control of vast sums of money, and have a large amount of political power, they also are quite good at shaping hegemony - they have a heavy influence on what people think about these issues.
I am not really a tree-hugger, but I have no trust of these companies and believe they are quite capable of radically screwing up the environment for a long time all for a short-term profit. What scares me is not people killed in Bhopal and whatnot - what scares me is how screwed up Connecticut beaches are due to oil leaks. Bhopal is a poor city in a relatively poor country - Connecticut is the richest (highest per capita income) state in the richest country in the world. If corporations can get away with destroying New Haven's environment, I fear the future. I don't think the world is in danger, but things could get messed up (New Orleans flood etc.)
Manufacturing stuff that blows up (people)?
If you want to read about what central banks are up to, I suggest you read some books on economics - from the 19th century. It was clear to people back then why governments wanted to create fiat money, whether it was sustainable and that sort of thing. They hit it right on the money back then, any other commentary nowadays is just an addendum to what was figured out then.
Aside from neglecting to mention these numbers were retroactively trended down in the direction you say they should be - Michael J. Boskin was the head economist for the Reagan White House. Revising these numbers down allowed for less government spending on Social Security. In fact it is a neat trick - the spending is cut, yet they could say they were not cutting anything, as prices were supposedly not going up quickly and Social Security was supposedly keeping pace. The AFL-CIO put out a paper that criticized the findings at the time. Of course, the AFL-CIO has a certain interest on this, but on the other hand, it was not like Reagan and Boskin had no interest in reducing government spending and were politically neutral on this. Boskin's main work going back to the 1970's was concerned not with inflation but finding a way to hit Social Security. Saying inflation was over-stated was the answer then, now they talk about privatization.
As far as technical innovation, some things are neglected. For example, in the initial years that VCRs came out, they were well-made, after a number of years of being mass-produced, they began using cheaper junk parts. Before the DVD took over completely, it was better to repair your old VCR than to buy a new one. And this is a trend in many things - it is true some things may get cheaper, but often they go from well-made, artisan like things to cheap junk. Look how professionals go to Chipotle rather than Taco Bell, Trader Joe's over Wal-Mart, organic food over non-organic etc. The mass-produced junk is not the same as the older often better but more expensive artisan like stuff. Of course some things fall in line with the inflation-head ideas - TV sets are certainly better-for-the-same-inflation-adjusted-price than they were 10, 20, 30 years ago. But there is also a lot of stuff where there is not a quality improvement handed for free to the consumer - a lot of time it is cheaper because it becomes more like junk.
As far as the substitution effect, it does not have a direct effect on CPI because it is done as a basket. If inflation was tied to one item, the substitution effect could shift CPI, since CPI is with a basket of goods, the substitution effect does not effect things. I should also point out that the substitution effect goes both ways, if CPI was tied to one product (which it isn't), CPI could be understated due to the substitution effect.
You also neglect to point out how housing costs have skyrocketed relative to CPI. It is much, much more expensive to buy or rent somewhere than it was a few decades ago. Even in the same old buildings which were around in the 1960s. Of course you mention iPods and other frivolous things, whereas the real hit to people's wallets has been in necessities like a roof over ones head. I know I am paying a larger percentage of my income to rent than I was back in the 1990s, and there certainly not has been a quality improvement in my living. In fact, my landlord spends little money on renovating his building, things are only repaired after they have completely fallen apart. Even the housing bust that is happening will not have as much of an impact as people might think.
As far as people who don't want government involvement - there are a host of laws limiting what we can do. The Taft-Hartley law allows the government to call off any strike. States are allowed to prevent certain agreements between workers and management (a "closed shop"). Overtime, at least below a certain salary level, is one of the things countering this. If you don't care about the ITAA etc. pushing the salary level for overtime down, down, down until it disappears, all that will exist are laws that give weight to the employer, and have the government take away your freedom in contract-making with the employer (Taft-Hartley, so-called right-to-work laws etc.) Even if you want to do away with all such laws, from our perspective it makes sense to keep these laws until the ones hurting us are done away with first, as in the meantime these just balance things on our side against the laws against us.
Linux does not have anything like that. I need to have my machine firmware as well as Red Hat version constantly patched, at a level unneeded with Solaris and Sun. Then I need to go through a rigamarole to set up netdump or the like. Even after that Red Hat or Dell/HP/whoever are often clueless, especially the hardware people. With Sun I can quickly examine the core dump, replace a component, and feel safe I've fixed a problem, when Red Hat is a different story, usually I tag the host as unreliable and that's that, we don't really have the time or luxury to figure out why a server running Red Hat crashed. Anyhow, whatever the problems of working with different components is, or the desire on the part of others perhaps that the corporation I work for devote more resources to this over what Solaris needs, with Sun you get an easy, enterprise solution for deducing why a system crashed, and I feel somewhat confident people at Sun are examining these for consistent problems, with Linux it is all over the place and I suspect most people just usually throw up their hands like I do when a Linux system crashes.
More understandably, they neglected to mention that May 1934 was some of the worst weather to hit the US for a long time, and it wiped out the agriculture of many states, it was called the "Dust Bowl". And it was caused by agriculture concerns that had no concern whatsoever for the environment. So they are pointing back to an earlier environmental disaster.
I would say that people here never experienced an economic bump, although with the dot bomb bust from 2000-? I guess people have experienced at least one. Before that was the early 1990s recession, the 1982 recession, downturns in the 1970s etc. All of which have really been minor recessions - the economy derailed in the 1930s, only brought back by a major war and the government taking a permanent central spending role in the economy. There have been depressions before that as well.
The economy has gone in the toilet every decade or so for the last few decades, so I don't see why this is "chicken little"-ish. I personally think the opposite, I think people haven't seen a big bust since the 1930s in the US, and probably in my lifetime they're going to be reintroduced to a full-out depression. The way things are headed, there is plenty of fuel for that fire - overproduction, widening gap between rich and poor, the annulment of the Glass Steagall act, a housing bubble, massive debt in every sphere (government, personal) etc. I don't think doom is around the corner (although it could be), but anyone who thinks the US can not enter another depression is a fool.
Well, where is that IP from? At the time I did an nslookup and I resolved to n-mnstci-142.mnstci.iraq.centcom.mil (the IP now resolves to a different CENTCOM host, host216-142.iraq.centcom.mil). CentCom I remember from the film "Control Room", they are the people trying to spin the Iraq war for the world (and especially the US) media. But MNSTCI? A little checking around showed me MNSTCI stood for the United States Central Command's Multi-National Security Transition Command - Iraq.
I brought this up at the time, but everyone I brought it up to dismissed it. This is CENTCOM's job - US taxpayer's dollars to rewrite history, so that the US can keep going overseas militarily. It particularly annoyed me that I was paying the salary of the person trying to rewrite history. I kind of felt like I was battling someone in the bowels of the US's Orwellian version of "Minitru".
In the mid-1990s, I got a strange SNMP request from an army intelligence outfit in Quantico, Virginia after reading Australian web sites which discussed possible CIA involvement in overthrowing Australia's government in the 1970's (the Whitlam/Kerr thing). This was back in the (usually) non-NAT'ed days - I had just assigned this IP and had an unusual amount of monitoring set up, I'm sure most people would have noticed the query. With the PATRIOT act, split fibers at the major telcos going to who knows where and so forth, I guess this is normal nowadays. The next step for those who support all of this is to just to either dismiss it, or attack the people who complain about.
Yes, most of the H1-Bs I met had PHDs - not. One H1-B I knew had never touched a computer before coming to the US. If we were just giving our H1Bs for PHDs from IIT, we wouldn't be handing out tens of thousands of them a year
I really think the next easiest option is to look at the things you have done and specialize in what you like the most. If you like programming, learn to program well, be able to answer basic questions like what is a linked list (or more complex questions) - learn one language well, as well as the basics of programming that you find in books like "Code Complete". If you like server management do that.
I am a UNIX systems administrator, and for me, even this is a very broad definition. I understand that firmware/time-of-day should be in sync across CPU/memory boards on Sun Enterprise 4000's, or that the file /etc/redhat-release is the file which shows which version of Red Hat you are running, but I can tell you it is very, very rare in interviews to find people who would know both those things. You're lucky if someone "strong in Linux" even knows that about Red Hat. I have to say that Solaris people tend to know their stuff better (and this is coming from a Linux fan). So I consider it difficult to bridge these two things, which are very close, and you are talking about all over the place.
My suggestion would be to specialize in one thing, and learn it well. I had to rank a Google job application on how well I knew something, I forget if the scale was 1-10 or not, but you should specialize in something and get to know it as a 9. Being a jack of all trade is fine, meaning having 3-6 ability in other things, but you should know one thing well - something you enjoy and think has a future. Once you master that one thing, then you can work on getting other things up to 9, but I meet so few people who are at level 10, 9, or even 8 for what I need, I would reiterate to learn one thing well. A real jack of all trades knows multiple things at say an 8 level, but that is rare. We have one where I work, but he knows many things at a high level. Someone who knows lots of things at a 4-6 level I generally find useless, in any environment.
The answer is quite obviously no, to those in the know. Go to an IETF or NANOG meeting and ask if we're moving to IPv6 soon. The only difference in the response will be whether they think you realize that you just told a joke, thus either laughing with you or at you. We are not moving to IPv6 any time soon. Period. We will all be multicasting over the MBONE before we are using IPv6 in stead of IPv4 in any meaningful way.
Personally, I see wikis like Demopedia, Conservapedia, Red Wiki, Dkosopedia and so forth as the answer. I would rather read several points of view and make up my own mind. I don't Wikipedia has the ability to handle controversial articles, and IMHO this ability is decreasing, as far as Wikipedia is concerned.
A lot of us are Internet old-timers here on Slashdot, did the Usenet "leadership" flip out like this when some jokingly (or not) called them a cabal? Of course not. So how come so many admins on Wikipedia like this guy do?
Some people have called Wikipedia a cult. While not all of the leadership is like this, for example, Flcelloguy was just elected to ArbCom and is a normal, balanced person, posts like this make you wonder. I just looked on the net for signs of being in a cult -
As far as Wikipedia Review, it is a message board, like Slashdot. The only difference between it and Wikipedia is Wikipedia has no control over it, which is what really drives them crazy. It is an open board, so I guess someone could post a link to some crank who posted there which will "shoot its credibility" if you would be the type to think me posting some link to the GNAA's handiwork on Slashdot would shoot Slashdot's credibility.As far as a WR campaign to "call their employers to complain about them to get them fired.", you are leaving something out. The employer you are talking about is a Wikipedia offshoot. The calls were regarding Essjay, who claimed for years to be a tenured professor when he was hired by a Wikipedia offshoot, when the truth was, he was not. He had made it all up. He even lied to the New Yorker about it, whom Wikipedia had pointed to him as someone to represent Wikipedia. THAT is what shoots credibility. That detective work is the kind of thing going on on Wikipedia Review as well.
I am not as involved in all of this as I once was, but the Internet is a new medium and all of that crap. I don't think the William F. Buckley's and the Katrina vanden Heuvel's of the world think they are not going to be criticized, and I can assure you that Jimbo and his crowd are going to be criticized whether they like it or not. For my part, I now spend less time on criticism and more time working on wiki alternatives to Wikipedia which I think will leave Wikipedia in the dust a few years down the road. Larry Sanger, the creator of Wikipedia, had a great idea and I am sure it will be born out, although definitely not in Wikipedia, or possibly even Sanger's new project. But it will come about in the coming years, and the importance of Sanger's idea will continue, but the importance of the Wikipedia.org domain is not as assured.
Hayek did not win the Nobel Prize as there is no such thing as a Nobel Prize in Economics. Hayek won the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.
One thing I learned is there are two sides of Wikipedia. In the upper right hand corner of the main page you can see what are called the "master categories". The categories such as Mathematics and Science highlight what is best about Wikipedia. The categories such as History and Society highlight what is worst about Wikipedia. You do not really have big battles over articles like "Pythagorean theorem", and they usually do a good job of explaining what that is. On the other hand, if you look at the top of an article like "Palestine" you will see that it is semi-protected, meaning new users can not edit the article. You can also see eight pages of discussion which really doesn't get anywhere. The article is garbage. The Wikipedia cabal likes to say things like cooler heads eventually prevail on such articles, but that is just a lot of bullshit. The cabal itself can often be the problem - if you look at the article's originator, it is Ed Poor, who has not only an admin but a bureaucrat at Wikipedia. He is also a Moonie, with some very strange beliefs, not only religious, which I could care less about, but politically. It's typical Wikipedia that he would create the article, and more so that he has held such high level positions.
Actually I antagonize in using the Wikipedia cabal phrase as these people are so paranoid they have replied to messages like this on Slashdot in the past with stuff like "AHA! YOU SAID CABAL! YOU ARE ONE OF 'THEM'! AN ENEMY! ONLY ENEMIES OF WIKIPEDIA USE THAT PHRASE". Or maybe I could say Wikipediareview.com has some good criticisms of Wikipedia, since they're fanatical about that site to where you are not allowed to mention it on the "Criticism of Wikipedia" article.
I spent a bit of time on Wikipedia and used to care more about this due to that time spent etc. Nowadays I just contribute to other wikis I like which I feel are more balanced. I should note that Jimbo Wales ran the Ayn Rand mailing list for years, has said "[F. A.] Hayek's work...is central to my own thinking about how to manage the Wikipedia project.", and I can give dozens of more examples of where Wales's somewhat far out political biases lay. This political bias starts at the top and works its way down, as one can see with his appointment of people who did not make the cut electorally such as JayJG to Arbcom.
My advice to people is to patronize other wikis - the concept of a wiki encyclopedia is a great idea, but their political views are so far out, that it fragmenting is a certainty.
The article says he was just married - this guy is a war profiteer vulture, I hope the next article I read about him is how his car ran over an IED, possibly winning him the 2007 Darwin Award, a big component of which of course is that he can not breed and will be weeded out of the gene pool.
While most wage slaves are watching TV, porn, or praying to Jesus, the powers-that-be are deathly afraid people will one day "shape transnational processes in their own class interest". Actually, Marx's Capital has a pretty good history of the English working class - it slowly lost its feudal rights over several centuries with the onset of industrialization, but began organizing and began expanding its rights again.
1 - Is the entire corporation's IT department centralized? HP is a F1000 company - is HP and Compaq's computer networks fully merged? Or for Citigroup, is the old Citicorp network fully merged with the Travelers network? Or were Travelers Salomon Brothers and Smith Barney networks merged before that? And so forth. Wal-Mart's corporate network is probably standardized, but a lot of companies are the resut of many mergers over the years. Or some companies are just of a type where different divisions are very different so there is no or not much centralized corporate IT.
2 - Does the corporation have a global network? Global multi-national corporations have computers all over the world, and it can be hard to have a standard network in New York, Tokyo and London (etc.) New York and Tokyo may be solid, but London may be open to problems etc.
One thing Solaris does well which Linux is still struggling with is crash dumps and crash dump analysis. I know it is easier with Solaris due to the integration between the OS and the hardware, as opposed to say Red Hat and a variety of supported vendors, but is definitely a nice thing to have. Especially if a system crashes and you bring it back up without a good analysis of what went wrong - you might have a $10000 system for the business unit (with everything included) yet if you don't know why it crashed, you're always nervous about the box. The Linux core team talks about having to get to the enterprise level, and Linux still has a way to go in terms of this, to get to the level of Sun and vendors like that in this respect.
I thought I would miss some things in Windows but I didn't. The thing I thought I would miss most was Microsoft Word, but Abiword did fine. I was always concerned I would have to modify my resume and send it out in a nice Word format that Linux wouldn't have, but that was never a problem. I never missed Windows for anything. They talk about Windows having better hardware support, but my (then) 802.11b wireless was a hell of a lot easier to install on my system then Linux. I also liked the ability to open a shell and just be able to do stuff - do an awk or sort or whatever on a file, have multiple windows and so forth. It had all the nice user brain-dead stuff of Windows, but I could drop to a shell and actually do stuff, instead of getting some MS-DOS prompt crap. It's much better nowadays than my old days when I had a Linux kernel version 1 running fvwm as one of my work desktops (the other desktop at that time was a Sun IPX running SunOS 4.1.3_U1).
So when the Arbitration Committee had elections (which Jimbo didn't want), who did he appoint that did not get the most votes? JayJG, who had 98 people oppose him going onto ArbCom, which was a hell of a lot for the position (it was over 100, but they attacked people's votes, cajoled people into changing their votes, erased questions and comments about his misconduct etc.) Filiocht had the same number of votes for him as did JayJG, yet only 18 opposing him. Filiocht is someone almost everyone can agree is fair, a lot of people have problems with JayJG and his biases. A number of people met the vote threshold and got a higher percentage than JayJG, so we thought we finally won and got him off the committee, which he had never been elected to. But Jimbo appointed him again, just like he did the first time.
Why? Because he agrees with him politically. Jimbo ran the Ayn Rand mailing list for years and is one of those Randroid nuts. He appoints people like Fred Bauder, a lawyer who was disbarred for telling one of his woman clients to pay him in sex. Larry Sanger is who built Wikipedia anyway, but Jimbo was his boss so he not only wanted to grab the glory, he denies Sanger any credit.
The problems at the top are massive, and I don't think Wikipedia will survive it. I see a split happening, and competitors, and the first real competitor will win and Wikipedia will disappear. I saw Gopher and Archie and Veronica be overtaken by Opentext on the web (anyone remember them?) and then Webcrawler and then Alta Vista and finally Google. Larry Sanger's creation is too good to not get competition. Of course, Jimbo pushed Larry aside and is ruining things. The next Wikipedia competitor will make Wikipedia history, just like Opentext is more or less history nowadays.
Try this ZIP file.
With regards to notability, that might have been pertinent if I was talking about an article about Wikipedia Review (the cabal has deleted and locked that article page, so people can't re-create it), but I'm not, I am talking about a link to the web site. The idea that a web site has to be over 300,000 on Alexa (which Wikipedia Review is , but according to you still doesn't warrant it being linked to) to be on Wikipedia is ridiculous - a cursory look at a few Wikipedia pages will show many links to pages below that rank on Alexa, without the furious deletions that we see with this link. In fact, this is the only link I can recall that is deleted constantly by the cabal. Your apologetics are pretty weak, thankfully forums can exist (like here, or Wikipedia Review) where opinions can be expressed freely, unlike on Wikipedia. I also find it funny you think the mention of "vile trolls" will mean anything on Slashdot like it does within the Wikipedia cult. Anyone reading through Slashdot can find GNAA trolls and so forth. So what? Does Wikipedia not link to Slashdot due to this? Your arguments are weak when they are not just Wikipedia cultees chanting the same nonsense to each other in reinforcement of each other.
On the other hand, on the other end of the spectrum are the categories History and Society. Wikipedia is horrible at such articles. You have two conflicting sides fighting over an article. Let's take a look at the current protected pages. "2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict" and "Taba Summit" are both protected. Semi-protected is "1972 Summer Olympics", "Zionism" and other similar articles. Israelis and Palestinians are shooting each other over there, and such a thing spills over onto Wikipedia. It even spills over onto Slashdot - the last time I said this about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict on Slashdot, in a pretty neutral and moderate tone, someone lambasted me for "taking sides".
Jimbo Wales is not politically neutral. He ran the Ayn Rand mailing list for years. His appointees to the Arbitration Committee are people like JayJG, who could not get voted in and who had over 100 votes against them during elections (including me). He says he uses Friedrich Hayek's theories as a model of how to run Wikipedia. He has personally harrassed people like Secretlondon. He is not a fanatic, or Wikipedia would have never taken off, but he is biased, and his bias is reflected. The Wikipedia "cabal" is sort of cultish - check out the Criticism of Wikipedia page and how obsessed the "cabal" is with criticism they can not control. Dozens of people have tried to link to the Wikipedia Review web site and the link is removed over and over. It is really cultish behavior, the idea that criticism of Wikipedia can happen which they can't control drives them crazy.
I know the society and history articles will always be crap, unless it's something like 1755 Lisbon Earthquake or something which no one cares much about any more. But by and large they are junk and not encyclopedic. The solution I think is for these types of articles to move onto other wiki encyclopedias. This has already happened. I've written a number of articles elsewhere that people put back into Wikipedia. Some of the ones I have done I know could never be put back because they are of the "Taba Summit" type. There is only one wiki encylopedia now, which makes sense, but this will not continue and in fact Wikipedia already has some minor competition in Demopedia, dKosopedia, Internet Encyclopedia (Wikinfo), Red Wiki, Anarchopedia and so forth. This trend will continue.