How do you know that the apartment wasn't trashed by the evicted tenant, which is quite a common, and craigslist is just a tool for the landlord to recover that loss?
The title, "Woman's House Robbed After Fake Craigslist Post", makes it sound like somebody posted, "my husband died and I'm selling his $15,000 Rolex" to target some 80 year old woman living alone. When some thugs showed up and found no Rolex to snatch, they bound the 80 year old and took a bunch of her stuff before her elder care nurse found her the next morning.
Instead, we're talking about a landlord's property that has recently been vacated because of an eviction. Not even personal property mind you, but an investment property. The place sustained some damage, and an indeterminate amount of damage at that because the state of the place just after eviction was probably not established. For all we know, the landlord is responsible for the craigslist post in order to get a police report to start the insurance money flow.
The only one to feel sorry for here is craigslist and honest craigslist users who may suffer degraded service because of precautions that craigslist may take or legally be forced to take in the future.
Apparently, slashdot is hard up for headlines or nerds aren't that street smart.
John Seigenthaler Sr. was the assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the early 1960's. For a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven."
This is the same as Fox News' "some people say..." tactic. Despite Seigenthalers' outrage and subsequent legal thrashing about and op/ed salvo, there is little to be done about it whether Wikipedia or Fox said it. What separates Wikipedia from Fox is that while the former finds this an aberration in their service, the latter sees it as a useful tool. There is a difference and it's unfortunate that Seigenthaler hasn't picked up on it. Perhaps he has picked up on it but his anger has made him ignore it. I say this because he has chosen to deal with Wikipedia the way you would deal with Fox when he should have quietly and without legal recourse simply had the statement removed.
Finally, I would like to say that I side with Seigenthaler on the removal of this statement, but feel that his reaction to it was inapropriate. Wikipedia was already in the process of addressing this issue while the trend at Fox is in the opposite direction. Not all sources of information are alike.
They don't get that some facts are more important than others...
All very valid concerns that can only be addressed by increasing the competency of the contributors.
Contributors do that themselves when they take time away from editing to teach other contributors. Perhaps you should be doing more tutoring. Most, but not all, come to wikipedia because they want to learn.
#3 on your list is a hard one, but can also be helped by a more informed wiki culture. In the end, that may need to be handled the way vandalism is. Perhaps this will end anon contributions.
So you've wrestled with some pigs in the mud. So what? Did you think of correcting the articles?
Wikipedia does work. You just have to know how to use it. That's not to say that problems don't exist or shouldn't be addressed, but the real problem is this expectation that it's going to yield half a million Britannica quality articles without Britannica's shortcomings.
On the other hand, people don't hold Britannica to the same standard because their involvement isn't possible. You take what you get and go looking elsewhere when appropriate.
I have had and continue to have problems with Britannica espousing the ruling elite's view of the world and its history, but that does not make it a bad source of information. Likewise, Wikipedia also has issues but reading about the article rather than just the article alone tends to reveal them.
Silly me, I once tried to include literature citations in the entry for Julius Caesar, they were promptly deleted and someone re-entered demonstrably false information.
That's like giving up driving because someone honked at you.
Check your ego at the door. Wikipedia, like the society around you, suffers from politics, the process of decision making that tries to exclude violence.
That said, perhaps what everyone's bitching at here is that for all the mostly technical progress, we seem to be right where our prehistoric ancestors were in terms of group concensus. A good alien invasion would probably resolve that in a jiffy, but lacking that we seem stuck.
I wasn't born a cynic, but life has made me this way.
Unless you've got some kind of evidence that the history museum is being influenced
Yeah, the evidence is in the article. Follow the money. Even if he was donating to a bowling hall of fame, there would be some reason for that. You don't give that kind of money away and continue to be rich. It just doesn't happen. Most of his donations are there to protect the money from taxes and the feel good PR is a nice byproduct for him. He can even choose these shelters to appear cool, generous, interested, whatever.
What better way to secure how history perceives you than to buy it? The guy has been making tax shelters ahem "donations" for quite some time now. This happens to be a good fit between his financial and personal PR goals.
North America is already stocked with megafauna such as bears, wild horses, buffalo, wolves, elk and deer. Many of these species are suffering from exploding suburbia and industry themselves. Introduction of competing megafauna is not going to be good for either the indigenous species or the transplants.
Nice try, but the real answer is reduction in human population. Both Africa and Asia have seen an explosion in their populations which have stressed animal habitats to the point of crowding species out. Oh by the way, did I mention that this would be good for global warming too?
The real question people don't bring up is whether you would like more lion or human babies this year. Every time we create more humans we're effectively saying that we don't give a shit about the lions. That's pretty much what it boils down to, lower quality of life for everyone.
learning is not the point of the US ed system
on
Improving Education?
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· Score: 1
This whole discussion is tainted by the assumption that teaching/learning is somehow the goal of the education system in the United States. Perhaps the fact that the education system is so successful can explain why most people educated in the US overlook this.
The education system in America has many goals but education is not actually one of them. First you hold off a a portion of the working age population from full time employment. Second, you replace teaching with instruction and learning with skill acquisition so that the end product is a consenting worker bee. This results in a population that is satisfied with the most absurd explanations for their masters' decisions and yet able to function within a complex economy. People capable of high level functions but unable to reason their way out of a paper bag outside of their speciality.
Resulting pliability has the added benefit of making the populace avid consumers and prone to distraction from their own self interest by flickering lights on a CRT or what have you.
Naturally, you can only bypass this system if you have the required wealth to do so. The system itself is not 100% effective and so you may have fallen through the cracks and actually learned something. Likewise, private schooling does not guarantee a way out either. Nothing in society is digital, but the yields are high enough to achieve the desired results.
The key to understanding drivel from Dvorak is discerning his output between insider knowledge and wasted vowels. Apple switching to Intel is insider knowledge and confers no special badge of pontification on Dvorak. You either put in the elbow rubbing time or you haven't. He's paid to do this. Speculating what such a move will mean to the general enterprise of computing as a whole is another thing entirely. He's a publicity moth and this kind of thing accomplishes his goal of spouting drivel while getting a paycheck and attention for it.
It would be like Jessica Simpson revealing something factually accurate about an upcoming tour of hers and then offering her vision of where the music industry is headed. You don't treat both pieces of information the same way.
The air car is an alternative concept where the engine could also function as an air compressor for regenerative breaking purposes. Much simpler idea. No electric to mechanical energy conversion losses. Hardly any storage losses. Energy storage would be much safer than hydrogen and much cheaper to manufacture and cleaner to maintain than batteries. The engine would be extremely low maintenance and last eons to boot.
As an aside, generating compressed air can also be done mechanically from renewable sources like hydro and wind so there is no energy conversion loss there either. The same mechanical energy that is being harvested will be applied at your wheels when you step on the "gas" with only minor losses due to friction and moving parts.
I'm not clear on whether regenerative braking would still work
Without a permanent magnet, you have no field to generate the electric current that would recharge your storage medium (battery, flux capacitor, what have you). If the regenerative breaking is to be electric, then the use of these motors would require the additional use of generators.
As an aside, the air car is an alternative concept where the engine could also function as an air compressor for regenerative breaking purposes.
Correct, but notice how the Alexander Hamilton article was updated based on McHenry's feedback. The power of the academic elite would not be as forthcoming with change regardless of the validity of arguments for such a change.
Besides, McHenry betrays his elitism with:
The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him.
The implication here is that readers going to Britannica for information needn't fret over exercising care because they somehow "know who used the facilities before". What a load of crap.
Re:Does nobody care about handwriting?
on
Sony U750P Handtop
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· Score: 1
Drop by eBay and get yourself a Newton Messagepad 2100. 4 AA NiMH batteries last over 2 weeks with heavy use. Form factor is nearly identical. The Newt is 1.5" longer but just as thick and wide. And you still get the best handwriting recognition available. Larger screen, 2 PMCMCIA slots, serial interface and with some effort wireless and ethernet capability. Depending on the item, options and auction, it may cost you $100-200.
The plug-in keyboard is nice and i've used it at airports with the Newt tucked away in my briefcase. No need to set it up. Just turn the Newt on, whip out the keyboard and start typing away. Works in any tight space. For shorter messages, the HW recognition is fine, but it gets cumbersome for longer input.
On the road, I carry the connection utility disk so that if i need to get something off a computer or put something on one, i can install the utils and via a USB to serial dongle, do the transfer. Never been stuck unable to communicate yet. For unix machines, there's a terminal emulator and ftp.
mining is never a cheap proposition. With the synthetics, it sounds like the raw materials are electricity, carbon, a couple of chemicals, and time.
If the manufacturing of diamonds would follow the semiconductor trend as both methods discussed in the article would suggest, then the largest expense would be equipment depreciation and not consumables.
I would think that the reactions of a few of the industry members to the results speaks volumes that they
I don't believe that the author was allowed to speak to anyone with a clue from DeBeers. How could that possibly benefit DeBeers? Deaf and blind cartel's don't remain cartels for long. I would think that DeBeers' history would show that they don't operate under such handicap.
Slashdot Mirror
1988 saw the release of Modem Wars for the C64 and DOS. Most of the elements of RTS were there as well as network play.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modem_Wars
Not every cynic you meet is automatically dysfunctional.
How do you know that the apartment wasn't trashed by the evicted tenant, which is quite a common, and craigslist is just a tool for the landlord to recover that loss?
Instead, we're talking about a landlord's property that has recently been vacated because of an eviction. Not even personal property mind you, but an investment property. The place sustained some damage, and an indeterminate amount of damage at that because the state of the place just after eviction was probably not established. For all we know, the landlord is responsible for the craigslist post in order to get a police report to start the insurance money flow.
The only one to feel sorry for here is craigslist and honest craigslist users who may suffer degraded service because of precautions that craigslist may take or legally be forced to take in the future.
Apparently, slashdot is hard up for headlines or nerds aren't that street smart.
At sizes that MEMs are made, gravity is not a significant factor. Surface tension and electrostatic charge would be the dominant forces.
This is the same as Fox News' "some people say..." tactic. Despite Seigenthalers' outrage and subsequent legal thrashing about and op/ed salvo, there is little to be done about it whether Wikipedia or Fox said it. What separates Wikipedia from Fox is that while the former finds this an aberration in their service, the latter sees it as a useful tool. There is a difference and it's unfortunate that Seigenthaler hasn't picked up on it. Perhaps he has picked up on it but his anger has made him ignore it. I say this because he has chosen to deal with Wikipedia the way you would deal with Fox when he should have quietly and without legal recourse simply had the statement removed.
Finally, I would like to say that I side with Seigenthaler on the removal of this statement, but feel that his reaction to it was inapropriate. Wikipedia was already in the process of addressing this issue while the trend at Fox is in the opposite direction. Not all sources of information are alike.
Contributors do that themselves when they take time away from editing to teach other contributors. Perhaps you should be doing more tutoring. Most, but not all, come to wikipedia because they want to learn.
#3 on your list is a hard one, but can also be helped by a more informed wiki culture. In the end, that may need to be handled the way vandalism is. Perhaps this will end anon contributions.
Wikipedia does work. You just have to know how to use it. That's not to say that problems don't exist or shouldn't be addressed, but the real problem is this expectation that it's going to yield half a million Britannica quality articles without Britannica's shortcomings.
On the other hand, people don't hold Britannica to the same standard because their involvement isn't possible. You take what you get and go looking elsewhere when appropriate.
I have had and continue to have problems with Britannica espousing the ruling elite's view of the world and its history, but that does not make it a bad source of information. Likewise, Wikipedia also has issues but reading about the article rather than just the article alone tends to reveal them.
Check your ego at the door. Wikipedia, like the society around you, suffers from politics, the process of decision making that tries to exclude violence.
That said, perhaps what everyone's bitching at here is that for all the mostly technical progress, we seem to be right where our prehistoric ancestors were in terms of group concensus. A good alien invasion would probably resolve that in a jiffy, but lacking that we seem stuck.
Yeah, the evidence is in the article. Follow the money. Even if he was donating to a bowling hall of fame, there would be some reason for that. You don't give that kind of money away and continue to be rich. It just doesn't happen. Most of his donations are there to protect the money from taxes and the feel good PR is a nice byproduct for him. He can even choose these shelters to appear cool, generous, interested, whatever.
What better way to secure how history perceives you than to buy it? The guy has been making tax shelters ahem "donations" for quite some time now. This happens to be a good fit between his financial and personal PR goals.
- boot to login = 29 sec.
- login = ~25 sec (extended by startup items like iCal and stickies)
- shutdown = 11 sec
These numbers are a huge improvement to 10.3.9 running on my cube but then again the cube is nearly 5 years old.Regarding the non-volatile booting, I would like to point out that my C-64 was already doing that.
Nice try, but the real answer is reduction in human population. Both Africa and Asia have seen an explosion in their populations which have stressed animal habitats to the point of crowding species out. Oh by the way, did I mention that this would be good for global warming too?
The real question people don't bring up is whether you would like more lion or human babies this year. Every time we create more humans we're effectively saying that we don't give a shit about the lions. That's pretty much what it boils down to, lower quality of life for everyone.
The education system in America has many goals but education is not actually one of them. First you hold off a a portion of the working age population from full time employment. Second, you replace teaching with instruction and learning with skill acquisition so that the end product is a consenting worker bee. This results in a population that is satisfied with the most absurd explanations for their masters' decisions and yet able to function within a complex economy. People capable of high level functions but unable to reason their way out of a paper bag outside of their speciality.
Resulting pliability has the added benefit of making the populace avid consumers and prone to distraction from their own self interest by flickering lights on a CRT or what have you.
Naturally, you can only bypass this system if you have the required wealth to do so. The system itself is not 100% effective and so you may have fallen through the cracks and actually learned something. Likewise, private schooling does not guarantee a way out either. Nothing in society is digital, but the yields are high enough to achieve the desired results.
Maltron is just an ergonomic qwerty so you'd still benefit from switching to dvorak on it!
It would be like Jessica Simpson revealing something factually accurate about an upcoming tour of hers and then offering her vision of where the music industry is headed. You don't treat both pieces of information the same way.
As an aside, generating compressed air can also be done mechanically from renewable sources like hydro and wind so there is no energy conversion loss there either. The same mechanical energy that is being harvested will be applied at your wheels when you step on the "gas" with only minor losses due to friction and moving parts.
Without a permanent magnet, you have no field to generate the electric current that would recharge your storage medium (battery, flux capacitor, what have you). If the regenerative breaking is to be electric, then the use of these motors would require the additional use of generators.
As an aside, the air car is an alternative concept where the engine could also function as an air compressor for regenerative breaking purposes.
Besides, McHenry betrays his elitism with:
The implication here is that readers going to Britannica for information needn't fret over exercising care because they somehow "know who used the facilities before". What a load of crap.The plug-in keyboard is nice and i've used it at airports with the Newt tucked away in my briefcase. No need to set it up. Just turn the Newt on, whip out the keyboard and start typing away. Works in any tight space. For shorter messages, the HW recognition is fine, but it gets cumbersome for longer input.
On the road, I carry the connection utility disk so that if i need to get something off a computer or put something on one, i can install the utils and via a USB to serial dongle, do the transfer. Never been stuck unable to communicate yet. For unix machines, there's a terminal emulator and ftp.
Your sig differs with your post.
answer me this adam smith. how do you create competition in a market that's a natural monopoly?
show me the money that i saved and i'll jump on the deregulation bandwagon. so far, the only ones on the bandwagon are those issuing the bills.
/.ing wired stories is orders of magnitude more interesting than say writing feedback to wired. IMHO.
If the manufacturing of diamonds would follow the semiconductor trend as both methods discussed in the article would suggest, then the largest expense would be equipment depreciation and not consumables.
I don't believe that the author was allowed to speak to anyone with a clue from DeBeers. How could that possibly benefit DeBeers? Deaf and blind cartel's don't remain cartels for long. I would think that DeBeers' history would show that they don't operate under such handicap.