It starts and ends with congress. And last time I checked, congress is a nothing more than a bunch of politicians who were able to make enough promises to get elected and will tell whatever it takes to gain more power and get reelected.
Mmhmm. And when's the last time you saw a politician drying to drum up scare tactics to get votes?
"Oh my god, the gays are going to destroy marriage, elect me so I can stop it!" "Oh my god, there's going to be world war 3, elect me so I can stop it!" "Oh my god, your kids are going to get sold drugs in school, elect me so I can stop it!" "Oh my god, your house will be worthless in the crash unless you elect me to push more fiscally irresponsible bullcrap!" "Oh my god..."
And yep... "Oh my god, the world is being destroyed by global warming, elect me so I can stop it!"
Don't tell me the leftists in Congress, and the people they've appointed to their pet agencies (which ALSO have to justify their existence... for example, the EPA has a lot less work if there's not doom-and-gloom, the-sky-is-falling crap they can use to bludgeon people) don't have a reason to push grants with a specific agenda.
Much like Al Gore. Gore testifies that both of his "businesses" are "carbon-neutral", and that everybody else had better get "carbon-neutral" (the "math" of which is just pure horse manure) too. Surprise surprise, Gore's businesses are all about selling carbon credits. He gets rich off scaring people, pure and simple.
Somebody earlier mentioned "this is why we have peer review." The unfortunate problem here is that the CRU emails show a deliberate campaign to subvert the peer review process. Any journal through which anything contradicting AGW got published had its reputation mercilessly attacked. Any shitty little crap journal which published pro-AGW papers suddenly found its lot improving as the CRU group started to pump their reputation up.
If the peer review process is subverted and not honest, then you can't take peer review seriously. That is the point we're at now. At least on the topic of "climate science", there is political suppression going on that has nothing to do with the facts, and rather than examine their own research for flaws and admit they have them, they're trying to hide the flaws and going out and pushing sensationalist nonsense in order to make it easier for politicians, and politician-appointed bureaucrats, to use the sensationalist nonsense as a way to scare people.
AGW is not real science. It's a political industry. Sad, but true.
Much of this has to do with the fact that "Climate Science" has ceased to be meaningful science.
Between the myriad scandals (sensors placed next to heat sources, mysterious "throwing out" of data not because it was bad but because it didn't match what they wanted to see, papers published through the UN rather than peer-reviewed journals to avoid having peer review because over 50% of the scientists whose data was used DISAGREED with the conclusion, AND worst of all from the CRU emails, systematic attempts to subvert the peer review process to ensure flawed pro-"Climate Change" studies pass while studies that raise real questions are suppressed, and yes they DID follow through on it) and the fact that the "explanations" are always half-baked at best, people are right to be skeptical.
It reminds me somewhat of the withering credibility of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, who at one time were respected civil rights crusaders, and now to all but a handful of people are nothing but "jerks who can't see past the color of their own nose", simply because they have cried wolf (hell, if there was any justice Sharpton would be jailed for the murder of Harry Crist) so often. Climate "scientists" have cried wolf so often, and had their credibility eroded so thoroughly for anyone who pays attention, that the fact that they would try to hide data, rig conclusions, or suppress studies questioning their methodology is no surprise.
Of course, that's the problem with being more than 2 decades old. You begin to have some history. When I was in grade school, "climate science" was all about how we were about to have another ice age. Then, it switched to "global warming." Then, the fact that massive increases in temperature they'd predicted puzzled and mystified the "climate scientists." And every time something hard-checks them and shows their figures and predictions to be Pure Weapons-Grade Bolognium, they come back insisting that "Climate Change" theory really does predict the fact that their own fucking prediction failed to happen.
- Does it have a network card? - Does it handle duplexing? - Can it handle "nonstandard" paper (cardstock, label, etc)? - Does it take just the normal 8 1/2x11 paper, or does it go all the way up to 11x17? - What's the duty cycle? (number of pages before things like imaging drum and fuser need replacement) - Does it use a toner cartridge that costs $80-90 for 6,000 pages, or like the current set of $100 piece-of-shit Sharps, a cartridge that costs $100-120 for a mere 1000 pages? - What's the tray capacity? 50, 100, 150, 500, 1000, 5000 pages? - How reliable is it? (e.g. can you expect a "random" jam error every 1000 pages, 2000, 2500, 5000...) - How much memory does it have? - What's its native printing resolution? Does it spit out 600, 1200, or higher DPI, or does it take (for example) a 2000dpi camera image and crunch it down to 600 or even a cheap-ass (looking at you again Sharp) 300 dpi? - What form of color calibration does it have, if any? How "true" are the colors it gets from manufacturer-standard cartridges?
I could go on, but I think you get the point. A cheap piece-of-shit Sharp model won't do for networking an office of 50 people after all, you need something designed robust enough for high volume and a long duty cycle...
As of the release date of Jaunty Jackalope, the command you provided (from within Hardy Heron) does NOT result in the Remote Wonder II being found, let alone able to be configured.
Which is the problem of Linux "documentation" in a nutshell.
If they don't want to write documentation, they don't have to.
But then they also don't have the right to write screeds like this and articles about how "big, evil Microsoft" is keeping them from getting widely adopted on the desktop.
It's not just MS keeping Linux from getting adopted on the desktop, it's (at least partially) the fact that their documentation is so crappy that even technically competent potential adopters try 2-3 times, scream "fuck this" in frustration after dealing with the socially retarded people in the forums as the "primary" method of troubleshooting and the completely worthless "documentation", and drop Linux like a hot potato. And without them, you will NEVER get your product in front the people who ask the nerds "hey should I try this Linux thing?"
Their response - rightly so - will be "no way in hell, it's not ready for the desktop yet."
Why not write some instructions yourself and post them to the forums? You can be part of the solution.
The answer: Because I was never - NEVER - able to get it running to the functional level I needed it to. And the forums are full of jerkasses who post back unhelpful, derisive things such as "what a fucking moron, just search the forum and you'll find [link]", where [link] is invariably either (a) for the wrong (out of date) version, (b) a very bare-bones postmortem of someone else's tweak that got it working that leaves out important steps they assumed everyone should "just know" (or that they just plain forgot about themselves), or (c) itself just a link to another, now-dead, link.
The secondary answer: Shit like this SHOULD NOT BE "go to the forums" stuff. There should be a basic setup tutorial for supported components, and there should be a straightforward configuration for the software. Nothing in Ubuntu nor MythTV was "straightforward" for setting up. Getting it to recognize my audio hardware (standard, retail Creative Labs Audigy2)? Nightmare. Getting it to recognize the presence of my remote control, let alone configuring buttons? Pure agony. Convincing it to read correctly from standard (windows SMB) file shares? Utter nightmare. And despite the "documentation" claiming that the tuner card should be "automatically" detected in Ubuntu Gutsy (on the MythTV wiki, to this day they STILL do not mention Hardy at all) and above, that never did work correctly either, and the forums were worth precisely two things for troubleshooting: jack and shit.
If I were ever to be taken by a fit of pure insane masochism to try again and somehow, through fate and luck manage to get it working correctly, I might write a postmortem of how I did so - if only to record it for posterity in case I ever needed it again. Meanwhile, however, I'm staying the hell away from it. The existing Windows-based software for the device is aging, but still works better than the vaunted "open source" offering with shit documentation, so that's where I stay.
And there's no way in hell I ever post such a postmortem to a "forum", where it can quickly age and get misattributed or just vanish unexpectedly.
My experiences (plural) with Ubuntu, MythTV, and MythBuntu (which was supposed to "streamline" the whole process) were similar in trying to set up a DVR.
Consumer-level HDTV card (ATi HDTV Wonder, PCI). ATi video board. ATi Remote Wonder II for my remote control.
Every time a new version of Ubuntu/MythTV/Mythbuntu would come out, I'd try to load it up and get it to work correctly. Multiple people insisting it would work fine, others insisting "no support" for the stuff. Back and forth. Most of the problem stems from the fact that in every stinking version, something gets changed, then it takes them a year or more to document the crap.
In the Ubuntu Hardy Heron attempt, every bit of documentation was either Gutsy Gibbon or Feisty Fawn. No help there. Tried again at Jaunty Jackalope's release WITH Hardy Heron, and still 90% of the damn documentation hadn't been updated. I'm stuck chasing around tidbits and forum posts with "well here's how you do it, LINK" only to find out that the link is either (A) for a version I'm not running, (B) assumes information I don't have, or (C) no longer available.
Tracking down how to set up a remote control reliably with Lirc is a pain beyond torture as well. I spend 99% of my time on Windows (hey, I have better things to do with my time than fight a damn OS. Windows does what I need it to do and runs what I want to run.) This is the "tutorial" for setting my remote control up under MythTV. And let me tell you right now, this thing is a shambles.
Linux people don't write clear-cut instructions for anything. This is true and I agree, it is Linux Bug #1.
5-10 "research grants" at $50-100k/year for "Primary Investigator" salary is pretty comfy living... all you have to do is make your study eventually say what the granting organization (for "climate", mostly left wing kooks or people organized by Al Gore and standing to make bank by selling "carbon credits" or some other "green" product) wants your research to say, and they'll renew you when it comes time.
After you reach 100% grant funding for the principal investigator salary, new grants go to fund more students and more research assistants and post-docs. The more students and post-docs a PI has, the more prestige and the bigger his realm. The more overhead he provides to the Uni the more respect and more prestige he's given by the Uni. The more he can demand in offices and lab space.
It's easier than that. Were I to reveal my position, I could also reveal to you a certain "researcher" I know of who has ONE actual research project but over a dozen "project names" (one for each multi-million dollar grant), skims off ~$50-100,000 per year from each associated grant (depending on the grant's PI funding limit), funnels the rest into paying a couple grad students to "oversee" day-to-day operations and a staff of ~10-20 (depending on season) undergrads working for minimum wage handing out surveys and typing in results, and publishes back a paper every so often using the same data, just massaging the conclusion towards what they think the particular grant committee wanted to hear.
The "researcher" is rarely if ever around on campus, they rather spend a lot of time on lush vacations or in bars. With the advent of technology, half of their lectures are prerecorded and just played back on video, the other half are done via videoconference. It's really quite disturbing to hear about.
About fudging numbers. I've seen what today's grad students are being taught about data processing. If their dataset is supposed to look like a smooth line they will make it look linear, even if that means they throw 90% of it away as "outliers". There is no consideration given to why those points exist, if they don't fit the assumption about what valid data should look like, out they go. There are tools to take a plot that looks ugly and simply point at the data you want to go away, and it does. Magically, their dataset matches the prediction.
SPSS, SAS, and Excel are indeed the Devil's Work... heh.
Funny where you turn around and lie after saying this.
Games Workshop sells to distributors at 25% below retail, which is why they can offer between 10 and 15% off shop price (see Wayland Games - an actual source, compared to your baseless rant!) and does NOT forbid sales, hence why Wayland had a sale when the Valkyries were released
There's a big difference between their contracts to "distributors" (internet sales) and the contracts they write/extort for brick-and-mortar stores who want to get in the tournament/venue loop.
GW are themselves restrained from offering sales, even on damaged stock, due to a Competition Commision ruling from about 6 years ago. They can NEVER reduce instore prices to below MSRP.
Competition Commission? I'm assuming you're an Aussie then. Their conduct is quite different in the USA.
Our local indy stocks GW specialist games just fine - and they dont have to have 60% shelf space etc.
Does your indy have tournament/venue support? I'm guessing not. And again, GW operates different "down under."
In short what you said was complete crap.
In short, what you just said was (to quote Hubert Farnsworth) Pure Weapons-Grade Bolognium.
The trick is, they have enough of a player base to seem lucrative (and indeed the store sometimes does make money initially)... UNTIL they deliberately undercut you by plopping down the "Official GW" store half a mile down the road.
And unless you know that this is what they're going to do ahead of time (none of the stores did, unfortunately) how would you know not to sign the contract? It "looks like" a great deal. You "look like" you're going to get a product monopoly on a product with known interest within a certain area, steady ability to supply the gamers, all the incentive stuff (prizes, ongoing campaign/tournament support, etc) from GW. For the first 2-3 years, the game stores made money on GW merch.
Then GW smiles broad, stick the knife in your back, and twists. The "Official Games Workshop" store opens up half a mile down the road, and you're stuck holding $40-50k (or more) worth of merch that you can't sell because GW (the same company you signed a contract with!) is undercutting your prices, and cuts you off for prize/tournament support at the same time so you have far less traffic in your store.
What was really hilarious is that after GW did this to the stores, they closed down half of their own. There's only 2 "Official GW" stores left in my area, because the other three were only there long enough to fuck the existing brick-and-mortar stores that stocked "competing" products. Once the stores were dead, GW left too and directed the gamers to the other "Official" stores 10-20 miles away if they wanted to keep playing at all.
You're joking, right? I can see, MAYBE, on the distributing of scans to keep games in service, but even that pushes the limit when you're talking about games with write-on-and-throw-away tracking sheets.
Games Jerkshop have no love from me on the storefront area either. You know what they do to regular game shops, right? If you want to carry their "product" and have gamedays/tournaments, they demand 60% of your shelf space, have a list a mile long of "competing products" that you have to agree never to stock, insist you carry a certain dollar-amount of product on shelf at all times and never hold a sale.
Then, when YOU the game store have built up the community, they plop down an "Official Games Workshop" store half a mile down the road, undercut you by selling everything at a 10% discount (remember, YOU are contractually obligated not even to hold a sale), and deliberately do their best to put you under so that nobody in the area is selling anything but GW games. Hell, at one point they actually tried to put Reaper Miniatures and D&D Miniatures on their "products you will not sell" list.
I for one think it would be best for the world if Games Jerkshop were to fold tomorrow and their IP scatter to the four winds.
Your joke of the day is that since you're at a university, you're a "government" institution, and as such a whole host of government regulations don't apply to you (because anyone trying to sue has to get government permission to sue the government, or savvy legislators specifically exempted themselves).
For example: - Your legislature probably made it so every government employee is salaried and overtime-exempt, from the secretaries on up. Either you're limited to only 20 hours a week and get no benefits, period, or you are exempt and get benefits but also get fucked over for "free" overtime regularly. - There are probably any number of OSHA type regulations they don't have to follow. - You probably have to have all sorts of permissions in order to take on any outside work (yes, I've known someone who had to get her boss's permission to go take a seasonal part-time job at Gamestop during the christmas sales season so that she had some extra cash).
That being said, employers will find any way possible to screw the employees and the system. Government regulations on what you get for being full-time? Oh, you're a "contractor." Government regulations regarding truth in hours? They'll demand "on call" time and "immediate response" and refuse to honor billing when they call you in, or insist that you "make up" the overnight hours by going home early.
Try going to work at Reynolds & Reynolds or the place that bought them, Universal Computing Systems. If you want to know how badly a place can fuck their employees, UCS is where you want to look at. Draconian "employment conditions" hidden in the "employee manual" (which isn't allowed to leave their building; sneaking one out is a firable offense!) that you don't find out until you "accept" a "contract" with them and aren't allowed to read beforehand (such as a 3-year "noncompete clause" worded so broadly you'll be lucky to find work as a Kroger checkout clerk if you ever leave), ugly restrictions on so much as managing to use the restroom, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
No kidding. They have automated tools for that now.
I tried to fix a minor issue (un-grammatical overuse of commas) in one article about a year and a half ago. I got an "automated" message from some douchebag who had used one of those tools (I think it was "Twinkle") to undo the edit AND send me a nastygram about how my edit was "unconstructive."
You kidding? That's the goal of most admins - if you have new editors, there's the possibility that "consensus" on the little fiefdoms they control might actually change.
Most Wikipedia administrators have the goal of driving off new editors as fast as possible.
"Sockpuppet" accusations are the first tool of attack in any wikipedia conflict. If you can tar your opposition as a sockpuppet/meatpuppet/etc, you instantly cut down the possibility that "consensus" will run against you by decreasing the numbers of your opposition.
Remember: if you pick off those who disagree with consensus one at a time and get them banned, consensus can never change. Thus once a fiefdom's been picked out, they ruthlessly try to tar anyone new as a "sockpuppet."
And of course the administrators gleefully go along with it. After it all, they pioneered the method, they like using it, so they'd better make sure it works well. English wikipedia now doesn't even allow people to request a checkuser to prove they're NOT a sockpuppet, because the "guilty until proven innocent and no, there's no chance to gather proof" system works so well for the entrenched abusers.
I'm saying you are not unbiased, and that you should long ago have recused yourself from articles you have a personal stake in.
This is not saying your objections don't have merit - the wording you pasted I would certainly have edited down. However, I would not completely have removed it, having taken a look at the history of the county in question. It certainly does appear that the comments about the "iron ring", as well as the writing of the law itself, relate directly to your friend's policies and behavior as Milwaukee mayor at the time, whether you want to call him a "communist" or "christian socialist" or whatever title else you wish to pin upon him.
You simply removed the wording entirely, and I can find no place where you even attempted to reach a compromise or consensus view; indeed, it appears that you behaved instead in a provocatory manner to try to goad your opponents each time into crossing the "imaginary line" of violating wikipedia policy, before you were yourself given the weapons of adminship. Additionally, your comments in past edits of the article and related edits elsewhere show that, rather than having the goal of making the encyclopedia better, you have a goal of making your deceased friend look good. That simply isn't in keeping with the making of an honest encyclopedia.
And from where I sit, your behavior - such as posting comments as to how you "will not allow" anything non-positive to be said about your "friend" - has been out of line.
At the very least, given your personal connection, you should have recused yourself from the article and let someone without a stake look over. Instead, following your edits, you appear to have banned or "called for a friend" to ban at least two people who were trying to de-POV the language you yourself had inserted glorifying your friend.
Slashdot, unlike say Digg or Youtube, has a discussion and moderation system that actually works
Your definition of "Works" may vary, of course - I can definitely see things to do that would improve Slashdot's system (one example in the past was the removal of displaying how much karma people actually had).
And having such a system encourages users to write useful comments and it also encourages moderators to give useful moderations
Oddly enough, there has been a problem on Slashdot with organized groups similar to Digg's "bury brigades" who make extraneous accounts to play the "mod point lotto" more often, and then direct their mod points negatively. Again, no system's perfect.
With other sites just trying to read a discussion or follow a thread is already a PITA, having a mod system limited to up down votes on top of that, instead of Slashdots Funny, Informative, Offtopic, etc. just encourages rating on agreement instead of on quality of the comment.
Oddly enough, the "troll" rating is most commonly abused on Slashdot, though all three (troll, offtopic, overrated) are regularly abused.
On Youtube the video upload can also play censor and remove any comments or lock them, which makes it pretty much impossible to comment on a controversial video. Having a character limit and a crap UI just guarantees that nobody will ever write a useful comment on that system
Letting people play censor is invariably a bad idea. Last time I suggested removing Slashdot's negative-mods and simply allowing the upmods to go all the way to 10 rather than 5 on the scale, someone said "but then we'd never get rid of the GNAA posts"... it's an odd balance in the best of times.
At what point do you hand out weapons instead of tools? In the case of both Slashdot and Wikipedia, I think there are too many weapons (which is what adminpower on Wikipedia really is these days) and not enough constructive tools.
Unfortunately, it doesn't solve the real problem, which is that Wikipedia's policies/procedures are designed around two major flaws:
#1 - Administrators are always assumed to be in the right, despite clear and frequent misbehavior on their part #2 - The assumption is that consensus never changes, and the "consensus" of whatever group (or admin-protected individual) "owns" a particular page has a vested interest in driving away all new contributors one by one, lest enough show up that the consensus indeed changes.
For example, I'm reminded of Lie #2: "Nobody new ever comes to Wikipedia."
I'll quote the relevant part: Interestingly enough, the BITE policy has a telling statement: nothing scares potentially valuable contributors away faster than hostility or elitism. Why is this interesting? Because this is precisely the goal of the abusive administrators.
The more people get away with treating newcomers as if they are plaguebearers, the more newcomers get driven off. Even established users are being treated this way more and more, and it's no surprise they give up as well. Combine hatred of newcomers with an outgoing flux of tired contributors who've simply had enough of the abusive "ruling class" administrators, and it's no surprise that they're in sharp decline.
I wouldn't know about that specifically, but I do know that Wikipedia's structure lends itself to fascist-style controls.
As one record, I'll point you to the records of the cities of Milwaukee WI and Oak Creek WI, and the page of past Milwaukee mayor (and later, co-re-founder of the US Socialist Party) Frank Zeidler.
What happened? Far from being objective, the articles for these are whitewashed to remove any mention of Zeidler that is not glowingly positive. It's been done repeatedly over the years by one "Orangemike", previously just a maltempered user with severe (codeword: WP:OWN) "ownership issues" but later given admin status thanks to being buddy-buddy with the left-wing crowd.
He admits that he's hopelessly biased, especially since he calls Zeidler a "good friend" of his, but the whitewash and abuse of power have been consistent over the years as relates to Milwaukee, Zeidler, Oak Creek, and especially the circumstances surrounding the adoption of WI 66.0215, aka "The Oak Creek Law", which was put in place specifically to stop Zeidler's extreme abuses in gobbling up small towns.
With administrators like that, it's no wonder the "encyclopedia" is failing fast. If you look at the currently-active administrators of Wikipedia, they all have their little fiefdoms of "owned" articles, they all know how to play the system (and all protect each other when questions are raised about their behavior), and so the chance of needed change happening has a statistical probability rapidly approaching zero, and likely today so small today as to be inexpressible in 32-bit floating point math.
Not really likely. You smack the wall with any legitimate force and the glue holding it to the wall shatters or releases, and/or the structure holding the wall up shatters. For normal home construction (plywood frame with shitrock/drywall construction) congratulations, you just "increased the tensile strength" of something I used to use to draw on the sidewalk with.
If they'd used a real wrecking ball, rather than a bowling-ball sized "representation", it would have done very little good. The wall is still severely damaged and in need of serious repair.
Your example of laminated glass is the same way. The best example is a car windshield - get a baseball or a good-sized chunk of rock (gee thanks, asswipes who have to haul a dump-truck full of gravel or concrete rubble on the freeway and ruined my windshield) into your windshield and you may not have it hit you in the face or get a bunch of glass shards all over (which is the goal and is legitimate, same as this wallpaper) but you still have to repair the windshield afterwards.
The problem for me is, what the heck games would I play on it?
It's overkill (hell, any 3 year old video board I could buy at Goodwill Computer is overkill) for any MMORPG. Any in any other field, the game companies have all pretty much abandoned the PC anyways, what you get these days is nothing but ports of something originally designed for a console.
We don't need "more powerful" video boards. We need well written, well designed, must-play, PC-only titles that show off what the PC, and only the PC, can offer. And that ain't happening. When MS Game Studios went "all Xbox, all the time", shit all over great franchises like Mechwarrior and Crimson Skies, and left a generation of gamers thinking Halo was 'tha be5t th1ng EVAR', the PC was doomed. It's only gotten worse with Activision, EA, and the rest following suit.
The PC didn't die as a gaming platform, but it's barely hanging on life support these days and the only thing keeping it going is the MMORPG market. Sad.
One of the interesting effects of down modding a good comment is that they CAN'T down mod all of the replies that it garners, and there are enough people that read at -1 that there will be comments
Unfortunately that rarely works well. Maybe you can see the replies, but the original comment is still a mystery till you go to -1, and unless it was very early in the discussion, finding it (and any other attached comments, since the "parent post" button never gives you the whole tree) is then a needle in a haystack.
I still think that the slashdot system is the best I have seen, I just wish there was some more stringent way of knocking people out of the moderating system, and that up mods counted for a lot more than down mods
If upmods count for more than downmods, that'd help, but you're essentially doing in only part measures what I propose to do entirely: defang downmods and make them no longer a weapon to be abused.
The problem with removing down modding is that there is then no way of filtering out the actual spam
I'm sure some form of a "report spam" button could be implemented. Browsing at -1 (which you're supposed to do, but in reality few people with modpoints ever do, thus the problem with bury brigades) is the equivalent of wading through it all anyways. It doesn't help that Slashdot randomly sets the threshold to 1 or 2 anyways.
Slashdot Mirror
It starts and ends with congress. And last time I checked, congress is a nothing more than a bunch of politicians who were able to make enough promises to get elected and will tell whatever it takes to gain more power and get reelected.
Mmhmm. And when's the last time you saw a politician drying to drum up scare tactics to get votes?
"Oh my god, the gays are going to destroy marriage, elect me so I can stop it!"
"Oh my god, there's going to be world war 3, elect me so I can stop it!"
"Oh my god, your kids are going to get sold drugs in school, elect me so I can stop it!"
"Oh my god, your house will be worthless in the crash unless you elect me to push more fiscally irresponsible bullcrap!"
"Oh my god..."
And yep... "Oh my god, the world is being destroyed by global warming, elect me so I can stop it!"
Don't tell me the leftists in Congress, and the people they've appointed to their pet agencies (which ALSO have to justify their existence... for example, the EPA has a lot less work if there's not doom-and-gloom, the-sky-is-falling crap they can use to bludgeon people) don't have a reason to push grants with a specific agenda.
Much like Al Gore. Gore testifies that both of his "businesses" are "carbon-neutral", and that everybody else had better get "carbon-neutral" (the "math" of which is just pure horse manure) too. Surprise surprise, Gore's businesses are all about selling carbon credits. He gets rich off scaring people, pure and simple.
Somebody earlier mentioned "this is why we have peer review." The unfortunate problem here is that the CRU emails show a deliberate campaign to subvert the peer review process. Any journal through which anything contradicting AGW got published had its reputation mercilessly attacked. Any shitty little crap journal which published pro-AGW papers suddenly found its lot improving as the CRU group started to pump their reputation up.
If the peer review process is subverted and not honest, then you can't take peer review seriously. That is the point we're at now. At least on the topic of "climate science", there is political suppression going on that has nothing to do with the facts, and rather than examine their own research for flaws and admit they have them, they're trying to hide the flaws and going out and pushing sensationalist nonsense in order to make it easier for politicians, and politician-appointed bureaucrats, to use the sensationalist nonsense as a way to scare people.
AGW is not real science. It's a political industry. Sad, but true.
Much of this has to do with the fact that "Climate Science" has ceased to be meaningful science.
Between the myriad scandals (sensors placed next to heat sources, mysterious "throwing out" of data not because it was bad but because it didn't match what they wanted to see, papers published through the UN rather than peer-reviewed journals to avoid having peer review because over 50% of the scientists whose data was used DISAGREED with the conclusion, AND worst of all from the CRU emails, systematic attempts to subvert the peer review process to ensure flawed pro-"Climate Change" studies pass while studies that raise real questions are suppressed, and yes they DID follow through on it) and the fact that the "explanations" are always half-baked at best, people are right to be skeptical.
It reminds me somewhat of the withering credibility of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, who at one time were respected civil rights crusaders, and now to all but a handful of people are nothing but "jerks who can't see past the color of their own nose", simply because they have cried wolf (hell, if there was any justice Sharpton would be jailed for the murder of Harry Crist) so often. Climate "scientists" have cried wolf so often, and had their credibility eroded so thoroughly for anyone who pays attention, that the fact that they would try to hide data, rig conclusions, or suppress studies questioning their methodology is no surprise.
Of course, that's the problem with being more than 2 decades old. You begin to have some history. When I was in grade school, "climate science" was all about how we were about to have another ice age. Then, it switched to "global warming." Then, the fact that massive increases in temperature they'd predicted puzzled and mystified the "climate scientists." And every time something hard-checks them and shows their figures and predictions to be Pure Weapons-Grade Bolognium, they come back insisting that "Climate Change" theory really does predict the fact that their own fucking prediction failed to happen.
There are.
- Does it have a network card?
- Does it handle duplexing?
- Can it handle "nonstandard" paper (cardstock, label, etc)?
- Does it take just the normal 8 1/2x11 paper, or does it go all the way up to 11x17?
- What's the duty cycle? (number of pages before things like imaging drum and fuser need replacement)
- Does it use a toner cartridge that costs $80-90 for 6,000 pages, or like the current set of $100 piece-of-shit Sharps, a cartridge that costs $100-120 for a mere 1000 pages?
- What's the tray capacity? 50, 100, 150, 500, 1000, 5000 pages?
- How reliable is it? (e.g. can you expect a "random" jam error every 1000 pages, 2000, 2500, 5000...)
- How much memory does it have?
- What's its native printing resolution? Does it spit out 600, 1200, or higher DPI, or does it take (for example) a 2000dpi camera image and crunch it down to 600 or even a cheap-ass (looking at you again Sharp) 300 dpi?
- What form of color calibration does it have, if any? How "true" are the colors it gets from manufacturer-standard cartridges?
I could go on, but I think you get the point. A cheap piece-of-shit Sharp model won't do for networking an office of 50 people after all, you need something designed robust enough for high volume and a long duty cycle...
As of the release date of Jaunty Jackalope, the command you provided (from within Hardy Heron) does NOT result in the Remote Wonder II being found, let alone able to be configured.
Which is the problem of Linux "documentation" in a nutshell.
If they don't want to write documentation, they don't have to.
But then they also don't have the right to write screeds like this and articles about how "big, evil Microsoft" is keeping them from getting widely adopted on the desktop.
It's not just MS keeping Linux from getting adopted on the desktop, it's (at least partially) the fact that their documentation is so crappy that even technically competent potential adopters try 2-3 times, scream "fuck this" in frustration after dealing with the socially retarded people in the forums as the "primary" method of troubleshooting and the completely worthless "documentation", and drop Linux like a hot potato. And without them, you will NEVER get your product in front the people who ask the nerds "hey should I try this Linux thing?"
Their response - rightly so - will be "no way in hell, it's not ready for the desktop yet."
Why not write some instructions yourself and post them to the forums? You can be part of the solution.
The answer: Because I was never - NEVER - able to get it running to the functional level I needed it to. And the forums are full of jerkasses who post back unhelpful, derisive things such as "what a fucking moron, just search the forum and you'll find [link]", where [link] is invariably either (a) for the wrong (out of date) version, (b) a very bare-bones postmortem of someone else's tweak that got it working that leaves out important steps they assumed everyone should "just know" (or that they just plain forgot about themselves), or (c) itself just a link to another, now-dead, link.
The secondary answer: Shit like this SHOULD NOT BE "go to the forums" stuff. There should be a basic setup tutorial for supported components, and there should be a straightforward configuration for the software. Nothing in Ubuntu nor MythTV was "straightforward" for setting up. Getting it to recognize my audio hardware (standard, retail Creative Labs Audigy2)? Nightmare. Getting it to recognize the presence of my remote control, let alone configuring buttons? Pure agony. Convincing it to read correctly from standard (windows SMB) file shares? Utter nightmare. And despite the "documentation" claiming that the tuner card should be "automatically" detected in Ubuntu Gutsy (on the MythTV wiki, to this day they STILL do not mention Hardy at all) and above, that never did work correctly either, and the forums were worth precisely two things for troubleshooting: jack and shit.
If I were ever to be taken by a fit of pure insane masochism to try again and somehow, through fate and luck manage to get it working correctly, I might write a postmortem of how I did so - if only to record it for posterity in case I ever needed it again. Meanwhile, however, I'm staying the hell away from it. The existing Windows-based software for the device is aging, but still works better than the vaunted "open source" offering with shit documentation, so that's where I stay.
And there's no way in hell I ever post such a postmortem to a "forum", where it can quickly age and get misattributed or just vanish unexpectedly.
My experiences (plural) with Ubuntu, MythTV, and MythBuntu (which was supposed to "streamline" the whole process) were similar in trying to set up a DVR.
Consumer-level HDTV card (ATi HDTV Wonder, PCI). ATi video board. ATi Remote Wonder II for my remote control.
Every time a new version of Ubuntu/MythTV/Mythbuntu would come out, I'd try to load it up and get it to work correctly. Multiple people insisting it would work fine, others insisting "no support" for the stuff. Back and forth. Most of the problem stems from the fact that in every stinking version, something gets changed, then it takes them a year or more to document the crap.
In the Ubuntu Hardy Heron attempt, every bit of documentation was either Gutsy Gibbon or Feisty Fawn. No help there. Tried again at Jaunty Jackalope's release WITH Hardy Heron, and still 90% of the damn documentation hadn't been updated. I'm stuck chasing around tidbits and forum posts with "well here's how you do it, LINK" only to find out that the link is either (A) for a version I'm not running, (B) assumes information I don't have, or (C) no longer available.
Tracking down how to set up a remote control reliably with Lirc is a pain beyond torture as well. I spend 99% of my time on Windows (hey, I have better things to do with my time than fight a damn OS. Windows does what I need it to do and runs what I want to run.) This is the "tutorial" for setting my remote control up under MythTV. And let me tell you right now, this thing is a shambles.
Linux people don't write clear-cut instructions for anything. This is true and I agree, it is Linux Bug #1.
5-10 "research grants" at $50-100k/year for "Primary Investigator" salary is pretty comfy living... all you have to do is make your study eventually say what the granting organization (for "climate", mostly left wing kooks or people organized by Al Gore and standing to make bank by selling "carbon credits" or some other "green" product) wants your research to say, and they'll renew you when it comes time.
Well put.
After you reach 100% grant funding for the principal investigator salary, new grants go to fund more students and more research assistants and post-docs. The more students and post-docs a PI has, the more prestige and the bigger his realm. The more overhead he provides to the Uni the more respect and more prestige he's given by the Uni. The more he can demand in offices and lab space.
It's easier than that. Were I to reveal my position, I could also reveal to you a certain "researcher" I know of who has ONE actual research project but over a dozen "project names" (one for each multi-million dollar grant), skims off ~$50-100,000 per year from each associated grant (depending on the grant's PI funding limit), funnels the rest into paying a couple grad students to "oversee" day-to-day operations and a staff of ~10-20 (depending on season) undergrads working for minimum wage handing out surveys and typing in results, and publishes back a paper every so often using the same data, just massaging the conclusion towards what they think the particular grant committee wanted to hear.
The "researcher" is rarely if ever around on campus, they rather spend a lot of time on lush vacations or in bars. With the advent of technology, half of their lectures are prerecorded and just played back on video, the other half are done via videoconference. It's really quite disturbing to hear about.
About fudging numbers. I've seen what today's grad students are being taught about data processing. If their dataset is supposed to look like a smooth line they will make it look linear, even if that means they throw 90% of it away as "outliers". There is no consideration given to why those points exist, if they don't fit the assumption about what valid data should look like, out they go. There are tools to take a plot that looks ugly and simply point at the data you want to go away, and it does. Magically, their dataset matches the prediction.
SPSS, SAS, and Excel are indeed the Devil's Work... heh.
Well, except for the facts that
Funny where you turn around and lie after saying this.
Games Workshop sells to distributors at 25% below retail, which is why they can offer between 10 and 15% off shop price (see Wayland Games - an actual source, compared to your baseless rant!) and does NOT forbid sales, hence why Wayland had a sale when the Valkyries were released
There's a big difference between their contracts to "distributors" (internet sales) and the contracts they write/extort for brick-and-mortar stores who want to get in the tournament/venue loop.
GW are themselves restrained from offering sales, even on damaged stock, due to a Competition Commision ruling from about 6 years ago. They can NEVER reduce instore prices to below MSRP.
Competition Commission? I'm assuming you're an Aussie then. Their conduct is quite different in the USA.
Our local indy stocks GW specialist games just fine - and they dont have to have 60% shelf space etc.
Does your indy have tournament/venue support? I'm guessing not. And again, GW operates different "down under."
In short what you said was complete crap.
In short, what you just said was (to quote Hubert Farnsworth) Pure Weapons-Grade Bolognium.
I've seen them kill five stores this way.
The trick is, they have enough of a player base to seem lucrative (and indeed the store sometimes does make money initially)... UNTIL they deliberately undercut you by plopping down the "Official GW" store half a mile down the road.
And unless you know that this is what they're going to do ahead of time (none of the stores did, unfortunately) how would you know not to sign the contract? It "looks like" a great deal. You "look like" you're going to get a product monopoly on a product with known interest within a certain area, steady ability to supply the gamers, all the incentive stuff (prizes, ongoing campaign/tournament support, etc) from GW. For the first 2-3 years, the game stores made money on GW merch.
Then GW smiles broad, stick the knife in your back, and twists. The "Official Games Workshop" store opens up half a mile down the road, and you're stuck holding $40-50k (or more) worth of merch that you can't sell because GW (the same company you signed a contract with!) is undercutting your prices, and cuts you off for prize/tournament support at the same time so you have far less traffic in your store.
What was really hilarious is that after GW did this to the stores, they closed down half of their own. There's only 2 "Official GW" stores left in my area, because the other three were only there long enough to fuck the existing brick-and-mortar stores that stocked "competing" products. Once the stores were dead, GW left too and directed the gamers to the other "Official" stores 10-20 miles away if they wanted to keep playing at all.
You're joking, right? I can see, MAYBE, on the distributing of scans to keep games in service, but even that pushes the limit when you're talking about games with write-on-and-throw-away tracking sheets.
Games Jerkshop have no love from me on the storefront area either. You know what they do to regular game shops, right? If you want to carry their "product" and have gamedays/tournaments, they demand 60% of your shelf space, have a list a mile long of "competing products" that you have to agree never to stock, insist you carry a certain dollar-amount of product on shelf at all times and never hold a sale.
Then, when YOU the game store have built up the community, they plop down an "Official Games Workshop" store half a mile down the road, undercut you by selling everything at a 10% discount (remember, YOU are contractually obligated not even to hold a sale), and deliberately do their best to put you under so that nobody in the area is selling anything but GW games. Hell, at one point they actually tried to put Reaper Miniatures and D&D Miniatures on their "products you will not sell" list.
I for one think it would be best for the world if Games Jerkshop were to fold tomorrow and their IP scatter to the four winds.
Your joke of the day is that since you're at a university, you're a "government" institution, and as such a whole host of government regulations don't apply to you (because anyone trying to sue has to get government permission to sue the government, or savvy legislators specifically exempted themselves).
For example:
- Your legislature probably made it so every government employee is salaried and overtime-exempt, from the secretaries on up. Either you're limited to only 20 hours a week and get no benefits, period, or you are exempt and get benefits but also get fucked over for "free" overtime regularly.
- There are probably any number of OSHA type regulations they don't have to follow.
- You probably have to have all sorts of permissions in order to take on any outside work (yes, I've known someone who had to get her boss's permission to go take a seasonal part-time job at Gamestop during the christmas sales season so that she had some extra cash).
That being said, employers will find any way possible to screw the employees and the system. Government regulations on what you get for being full-time? Oh, you're a "contractor." Government regulations regarding truth in hours? They'll demand "on call" time and "immediate response" and refuse to honor billing when they call you in, or insist that you "make up" the overnight hours by going home early.
Try going to work at Reynolds & Reynolds or the place that bought them, Universal Computing Systems. If you want to know how badly a place can fuck their employees, UCS is where you want to look at. Draconian "employment conditions" hidden in the "employee manual" (which isn't allowed to leave their building; sneaking one out is a firable offense!) that you don't find out until you "accept" a "contract" with them and aren't allowed to read beforehand (such as a 3-year "noncompete clause" worded so broadly you'll be lucky to find work as a Kroger checkout clerk if you ever leave), ugly restrictions on so much as managing to use the restroom, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
No kidding. They have automated tools for that now.
I tried to fix a minor issue (un-grammatical overuse of commas) in one article about a year and a half ago. I got an "automated" message from some douchebag who had used one of those tools (I think it was "Twinkle") to undo the edit AND send me a nastygram about how my edit was "unconstructive."
You kidding? That's the goal of most admins - if you have new editors, there's the possibility that "consensus" on the little fiefdoms they control might actually change.
Most Wikipedia administrators have the goal of driving off new editors as fast as possible.
"Sockpuppet" accusations are the first tool of attack in any wikipedia conflict. If you can tar your opposition as a sockpuppet/meatpuppet/etc, you instantly cut down the possibility that "consensus" will run against you by decreasing the numbers of your opposition.
Remember: if you pick off those who disagree with consensus one at a time and get them banned, consensus can never change. Thus once a fiefdom's been picked out, they ruthlessly try to tar anyone new as a "sockpuppet."
And of course the administrators gleefully go along with it. After it all, they pioneered the method, they like using it, so they'd better make sure it works well. English wikipedia now doesn't even allow people to request a checkuser to prove they're NOT a sockpuppet, because the "guilty until proven innocent and no, there's no chance to gather proof" system works so well for the entrenched abusers.
I'm saying you are not unbiased, and that you should long ago have recused yourself from articles you have a personal stake in.
This is not saying your objections don't have merit - the wording you pasted I would certainly have edited down. However, I would not completely have removed it, having taken a look at the history of the county in question. It certainly does appear that the comments about the "iron ring", as well as the writing of the law itself, relate directly to your friend's policies and behavior as Milwaukee mayor at the time, whether you want to call him a "communist" or "christian socialist" or whatever title else you wish to pin upon him.
You simply removed the wording entirely, and I can find no place where you even attempted to reach a compromise or consensus view; indeed, it appears that you behaved instead in a provocatory manner to try to goad your opponents each time into crossing the "imaginary line" of violating wikipedia policy, before you were yourself given the weapons of adminship. Additionally, your comments in past edits of the article and related edits elsewhere show that, rather than having the goal of making the encyclopedia better, you have a goal of making your deceased friend look good. That simply isn't in keeping with the making of an honest encyclopedia.
Sigh... no, I'm not. I'm an outside observer.
And from where I sit, your behavior - such as posting comments as to how you "will not allow" anything non-positive to be said about your "friend" - has been out of line.
At the very least, given your personal connection, you should have recused yourself from the article and let someone without a stake look over. Instead, following your edits, you appear to have banned or "called for a friend" to ban at least two people who were trying to de-POV the language you yourself had inserted glorifying your friend.
Slashdot, unlike say Digg or Youtube, has a discussion and moderation system that actually works
Your definition of "Works" may vary, of course - I can definitely see things to do that would improve Slashdot's system (one example in the past was the removal of displaying how much karma people actually had).
And having such a system encourages users to write useful comments and it also encourages moderators to give useful moderations
Oddly enough, there has been a problem on Slashdot with organized groups similar to Digg's "bury brigades" who make extraneous accounts to play the "mod point lotto" more often, and then direct their mod points negatively. Again, no system's perfect.
With other sites just trying to read a discussion or follow a thread is already a PITA, having a mod system limited to up down votes on top of that, instead of Slashdots Funny, Informative, Offtopic, etc. just encourages rating on agreement instead of on quality of the comment.
Oddly enough, the "troll" rating is most commonly abused on Slashdot, though all three (troll, offtopic, overrated) are regularly abused.
On Youtube the video upload can also play censor and remove any comments or lock them, which makes it pretty much impossible to comment on a controversial video. Having a character limit and a crap UI just guarantees that nobody will ever write a useful comment on that system
Letting people play censor is invariably a bad idea. Last time I suggested removing Slashdot's negative-mods and simply allowing the upmods to go all the way to 10 rather than 5 on the scale, someone said "but then we'd never get rid of the GNAA posts"... it's an odd balance in the best of times.
At what point do you hand out weapons instead of tools? In the case of both Slashdot and Wikipedia, I think there are too many weapons (which is what adminpower on Wikipedia really is these days) and not enough constructive tools.
Unfortunately, it doesn't solve the real problem, which is that Wikipedia's policies/procedures are designed around two major flaws:
#1 - Administrators are always assumed to be in the right, despite clear and frequent misbehavior on their part
#2 - The assumption is that consensus never changes, and the "consensus" of whatever group (or admin-protected individual) "owns" a particular page has a vested interest in driving away all new contributors one by one, lest enough show up that the consensus indeed changes.
For example, I'm reminded of Lie #2: "Nobody new ever comes to Wikipedia."
I'll quote the relevant part:
Interestingly enough, the BITE policy has a telling statement: nothing scares potentially valuable contributors away faster than hostility or elitism. Why is this interesting? Because this is precisely the goal of the abusive administrators.
The more people get away with treating newcomers as if they are plaguebearers, the more newcomers get driven off. Even established users are being treated this way more and more, and it's no surprise they give up as well. Combine hatred of newcomers with an outgoing flux of tired contributors who've simply had enough of the abusive "ruling class" administrators, and it's no surprise that they're in sharp decline.
I wouldn't know about that specifically, but I do know that Wikipedia's structure lends itself to fascist-style controls.
As one record, I'll point you to the records of the cities of Milwaukee WI and Oak Creek WI, and the page of past Milwaukee mayor (and later, co-re-founder of the US Socialist Party) Frank Zeidler.
What happened? Far from being objective, the articles for these are whitewashed to remove any mention of Zeidler that is not glowingly positive. It's been done repeatedly over the years by one "Orangemike", previously just a maltempered user with severe (codeword: WP:OWN) "ownership issues" but later given admin status thanks to being buddy-buddy with the left-wing crowd.
He admits that he's hopelessly biased, especially since he calls Zeidler a "good friend" of his, but the whitewash and abuse of power have been consistent over the years as relates to Milwaukee, Zeidler, Oak Creek, and especially the circumstances surrounding the adoption of WI 66.0215, aka "The Oak Creek Law", which was put in place specifically to stop Zeidler's extreme abuses in gobbling up small towns.
With administrators like that, it's no wonder the "encyclopedia" is failing fast. If you look at the currently-active administrators of Wikipedia, they all have their little fiefdoms of "owned" articles, they all know how to play the system (and all protect each other when questions are raised about their behavior), and so the chance of needed change happening has a statistical probability rapidly approaching zero, and likely today so small today as to be inexpressible in 32-bit floating point math.
Not really likely. You smack the wall with any legitimate force and the glue holding it to the wall shatters or releases, and/or the structure holding the wall up shatters. For normal home construction (plywood frame with shitrock/drywall construction) congratulations, you just "increased the tensile strength" of something I used to use to draw on the sidewalk with.
If they'd used a real wrecking ball, rather than a bowling-ball sized "representation", it would have done very little good. The wall is still severely damaged and in need of serious repair.
Your example of laminated glass is the same way. The best example is a car windshield - get a baseball or a good-sized chunk of rock (gee thanks, asswipes who have to haul a dump-truck full of gravel or concrete rubble on the freeway and ruined my windshield) into your windshield and you may not have it hit you in the face or get a bunch of glass shards all over (which is the goal and is legitimate, same as this wallpaper) but you still have to repair the windshield afterwards.
The problem for me is, what the heck games would I play on it?
It's overkill (hell, any 3 year old video board I could buy at Goodwill Computer is overkill) for any MMORPG. Any in any other field, the game companies have all pretty much abandoned the PC anyways, what you get these days is nothing but ports of something originally designed for a console.
We don't need "more powerful" video boards. We need well written, well designed, must-play, PC-only titles that show off what the PC, and only the PC, can offer. And that ain't happening. When MS Game Studios went "all Xbox, all the time", shit all over great franchises like Mechwarrior and Crimson Skies, and left a generation of gamers thinking Halo was 'tha be5t th1ng EVAR', the PC was doomed. It's only gotten worse with Activision, EA, and the rest following suit.
The PC didn't die as a gaming platform, but it's barely hanging on life support these days and the only thing keeping it going is the MMORPG market. Sad.
By your logic we should shut down all the roads and confiscate all the cars. After all, some people use them to smuggle drugs...
One of the interesting effects of down modding a good comment is that they CAN'T down mod all of the replies that it garners, and there are enough people that read at -1 that there will be comments
Unfortunately that rarely works well. Maybe you can see the replies, but the original comment is still a mystery till you go to -1, and unless it was very early in the discussion, finding it (and any other attached comments, since the "parent post" button never gives you the whole tree) is then a needle in a haystack.
I still think that the slashdot system is the best I have seen, I just wish there was some more stringent way of knocking people out of the moderating system, and that up mods counted for a lot more than down mods
If upmods count for more than downmods, that'd help, but you're essentially doing in only part measures what I propose to do entirely: defang downmods and make them no longer a weapon to be abused.
The problem with removing down modding is that there is then no way of filtering out the actual spam
I'm sure some form of a "report spam" button could be implemented. Browsing at -1 (which you're supposed to do, but in reality few people with modpoints ever do, thus the problem with bury brigades) is the equivalent of wading through it all anyways. It doesn't help that Slashdot randomly sets the threshold to 1 or 2 anyways.