Germany also has roughly half the number of traffic fatalities per capita as the US, take that for what it is worth.
Given that MUCH fewer people in Germany own a car than in the US and those who do drive them shorter distances, I'd say that this statement either:
A) Proves nothing
B) Proves the opposite of what you intended
Really? So if I pick the sound code and the graphics code as an example you're telling me that there will be a sequential dependency between them? Just because two things are related does not mean that they are dependent.
This is a false argument. Even if you find two things which are not dependant on each other, it does not follow that there are no dependancies in the entire game. It's pretty damn obvious that the video and sound output DO have a sequential dependency on the controller input.
But in a game the simulation is of collisions, and gravity. In this case not all objects directly affect each other.
Well actually they do, or at least you have to assume they do until you've checked otherwise. Or are the bullets passing through the enimies with no effect? Sounds like a pretty silly game to me.
You are assuming that the parallel code and the sequential code have some sort of dependency that force them to run in sequence
Which should be plainly obvious. You're going to be playing 1 game, not 4 games with no interrelation to each other.
Your belief regarding the amount of code that can be parallelized seems to be based on a similar error. For example, with physics you'll be able to parallelize the physics of ALL THE OBJECTS THAT DON'T INTERACT WITH EACH OTHER. Having the motion of no object affected by any other object would be a screensaver, not a game.
It's also not right to just take the percentage of tasks that can be parallelized, multiply them by the number of cpus and consider that a speed increase. This is because you are not accounting for the assosciated PENALTY when these new processors do need to communicate with each other.
Maybe my parallelizable code runs 4X faster, but the other code might run half as fast with all the extra communications overhead.
Initially I thought, "No one could possibly be this stupid, he must be a troll." But then I noticed your UID, guess I was wrong.
You lack even the most elementary grasp of of what you're talking about. You're embarassing yourself. Do yourse;f a favor and read an actual history book.
Actually, it's fairly well known that academics have a left-wing bias.
This is only because REALITY has a well-known left wing bias.
Academics do disagree on subjects such as "How much gov't intervention should there be in the market?" however they all pretty much agree that dinosaurs really did exist and that the earth really does orbit the sun. If right-wing politicians stuck to arenas where there was a legitimate debate rather than trying to dispute actual facts of nature, perhaps they would find themselves less at odds with the scientific community.
Yet they shipped the PS2 with standard ports (USB, IEEE1394)
It doesn't matter because you could not use them with standard hardware.
Who cares is a game console has USB if you can't hook up anything but sony-approved USB devices? The interface is then proprietary, regardless of the connector used.
You're oversimplifying. (Which is generally the problem with economics.)
That only works if there is no four hour block where they can't work that they would instead use to stand in line. If the launch took place on a weekend and they work during the week, then they aren't really trading off the way you suggest.
Of course you can always come up with an explanation for why it made "economic sense", because economics is a model that is our attempt at explaining reality. If it doesn't make "economic sense" it's because the model is broken. Either way it doesn't necessarily mean that their actions were actually sensible. (There's nothing forbidding economics from explaining foolish behaior.)
That's a red herring. You're already using the term "convicted monopoly". That's kinda' like calling somebody that disagrees with the government a "terrorist".
That's not anywhere fucking close!
A federal court TRIED Microsoft and found that they are indeed a monopoly, in a context where DUE PROCESS was observed. It's nothing at all like you suggest.
But what can I expect from you:
The market is working just fine. Nobody is being coerced. However, you seem to be in favor of the government coercing a private business by force.
The whole concept of copyright exists because the gov't is doing what you are implying that you're against. I contend that you actually AREN'T against gov't intervention in the market, except when it does not suit you. Hell, the entire concept of a corporation only exists because the gov't intervenes to make it so.
Coercing private businesses by force is something the gov't is SUPPOSED to do. The only people who disagree with this are anarchists. Everybody else merely disagrees on what rules the gov't should be enforcing.
So basically, you're either an anarchist or your argument is dishonest.
If you make it hard for 'bad guys', you make it hard for your customers/friends too.
This isn't true, because you don't have to make it symmetrically hard.
So you can make it a "royal pain in the ass" for spammers, but only the "slightest bit inconvenient" for actual customers.
This is not a position I'm willing to debate with you.
People with much more credibility than you have decided on multiple occasions that Microsoft is NOT operating in a free market. Either you live in an alternate universe, you have a different definition of "free market" than the rest of the world, or you're simply dishonest. In any case, a rational discussion will be impossible.
The opinions you put forth have already been debated and shot down in federal court multiple times. You may as well try and claim there's no evidence linking cigarettes and cancer.
In both cases, the overwhelming evidence is right there and the experts have already deicded. You don't have any new, unconsidered evidence or theories. You just don't like the actual facts of the situation because they're damaging to your argument. This is not a position of integrity.
You say this like it's true but the findings of fact in several federal court cases disagree with you. I can pretty much stop reading at this line as you obviously live in an alternate reality.
Wow. A, what? Two year old installation disk doesn't recognize the latest and greatest drive?
First off, SATA is about 2 years old so it's about as late and great as the OS he's talking about. Second, it's not just that, it's also the difficulty providing it with the driver. A FLOPPY drive only? Come on!
I haven't used my floppy drive in YEARS, I don't even know if it still works. Virtually everything is on CD, DVD or USB mass storage device. Requiring a floppy is a lazy carryover.
And that, my friend, is where the balance lies. Any success Linux will have blah, blah, blah
Linux is ALREADY growing in users. It's been a steady, slow process but it shows no signs of stopping. You believe something that's already happening isn't going to happen because Microsoft is going to do something they have a long track record of not being able to do?
Because the majority of people aren't going to want to give up all of their old software and games and repurchase them just so they can move to a "better" platform.
You're generalizing yourself as everyone. MOST people never upgrade the OS on their PC. When it comes time to upgrade, they buy a new one, preloaded. Besides, using this silly logic every new video game console would have failed.
And if Linux expects to exploit that opening, should it come, then it had better be ready to support all of that hardware: computers and printers and cameras and everything else.
Linux already has better hardware support than windows. Neither OS supports everything the other does, of course, but this is a non-issue.
And they're better have a common face: 50-plus all slightly different and incompatible distributions and desktops and installers and drivers are not going to cut it.
Personally, I don't think you guys can get past your differences and make it happen.
It will never happen... and that's a good thing. Not all users are alike. It doesn't have to happen for linux to succeed. The goal is not to replace an old monopoly with a new one. The goal is to restore a free market.
Earlier in this thread someone made the point that Wikipedia should not be cited -- this is fundamentally due to the dynamic nature of its content.
This is a silly claim made by people who don't know what they are talking about. If you click the "cite this article" link you get a link to a non-changing version of the article in just about every bibliogrpahy format imaginable.
By that logic, proof that the system doesn't work can't even exist.
Incorrect, consider the trivial case where it is publicly know that an article is false, yet it is not corrected. This is possible and would be proof that the system does not work.
So, possibly I did expose one proof of the major flaw with Wikipedia: Citation Needed.
This isn't a "flaw" it's just being honest. There are "good" articles and "bad" articles. Articles really start out as bad and work their way to good. This is a non-issue if you understand that you shouldn't trust unverifyable statements from ANY source.
I think its far too unproven to call a success
This is something you'll be able to say forever, since it is in a constant state of change. Applying normal research skills solves this poblem, but you seem to think this is a "flaw" too. The reality is that it's something you should do for any source.
No it doesn't not for elections that are conducted on anything but DREs.
This is a dodge of the issue. If this system WORKS, then it does so as described in TFA.
If the system has vulnerabilities, additional measures NOT OUTLINED ON THEIR WEBSITE might fix them, but that's not exactly the discussion we're having.
My own suggested additional measure would be to throw all the electronic voting equipment off a bridge and go buy some pens and paper.
You really aren't thinking about this right. You need to consider the situation where the people in power have millions of dollars at their disposal and the ability to modify documents and equipment at their leisure.
The solution to this is lots of humans watching and counting, not a bunch of unverifyable black boxes.
To put it simply, I can add another step:
4) Switch 5,000 votes to another canidate before generating the final printout.
The creators of this system believe it is resistant to this, but there is entirely too much handwaving such as "it is necessary that the intermediary state of the ballots... be in random order". Rivest's solution is vastly superior to this one IMO, but both rely on "black boxes".
Well, except that that is the exact problem with other voting systems too. Once your ballot is in the box, who knows what they do with it?
I'm glad you brought this up.
With paper ballots, everyone who can see the box, knows what they do with it. It is easy to get people who can see and are willing to do so.
With electronic ballots, nobody really knows what's going on inside. It's a black box and essentially impossible to verify.
To give you an example, for about $1 million I could design a keyboard driver chip that behaves just like a normal keyboard driver except under very special circumstances. The only way to catch this is to have someone involved in the production confess or to depackage the chip and examine it under an electron microscope. How often do you think that is going to happen?
they will be able to tell that the votes you punched in didn't match your vote as they tallied it.
No they can't.
The can verify that the election authority had the ABILITY to count their vote properly, but they cannot prove that it was actually counted correctly, only that it was counted.
Ronald Rivest has actually developed a system which is superior in this respect.
It also can't be used to verify that your vote was associated with a particular candidate
Which makes it useless for PRACITCAL purposes.
What do I give a shit that my vote gets counted if I have no assurance of who it was counted for?
This system CREATES a step in the system where it is possible to rig an election. Sure the numbers add up to the correct total, but that's not the point of an election.
Look at Ronald Rivest's work on this subject. It makes much more sense.
The problem with either system is it requres you to trust a computer.
In the case of Rivest's work, you must trust a computer to do certain logical computations. (Engineers and professors can do them in their head, but 90+% of the public in a given country do not have that skill.)
In the case of Chaum's system, which I believe to be an inferior version of Rivest's work, you must trust that the A and B the computer showed you are the same A and B actually used to tally your vote. It deals with the case of a false scan, but it DOES NOTHING TO SOLVE THE CASE OF DELIBERATE MANIPULATION.
Both systems add practically unverifyable processes to a system that previously didn't have them. (Assuming you were using paper ballots.) As an electrical engineer, believe me that PAPER is the way to go.
That is not the same degree of control. Again, terrorism is random acts in random places
This isn't true. If you look at the targets of major terrorist attacks they certainly AREN'T random.
too near a dirty bomb
See above. Your odds of being near ANY sort of bomb are directly affected by who you assoswciated yourself with. You are a lot less likely to be having coffee in a fedral building if you don't work in a federal building.
You have loads of control over the likleyhood of being hurt or even killed in a car "accident".
You have control over you likelihood of being killed in a terrorist act as well simply by controlling who you associate yourself with.
Joining some new Israeli settlement is a lot more risky than being a dentist in Finland for example.
Meanwhile being hurt in a terrorist act is true chance.
This would only be true if every terrorist chose their targets randomly.
This is obviously false. It's not as if 9/11 was the first attack on the WTC, for example.
The fearmongers would have you believe that there's a terrorist hiding under every rock. I suggest you actually look at the past 20 years worth of attacks.
I'm not going to respond to what meager arguments you made, but as an sub-editor, research scientist and educator,
What a lame response:
"I'm right because of my position in society! I don't have to actually defend the merits of my arguments!"
What it comes down to is that it is no more difficult to archive web sites than it is print media. (Did you actually look up anything I mentioned?) If it is VITALLY important that you be able to access your original sources years from now (some cases it's not), you should take responsibility and archive them, regardless of format.
I only recommend web citations if it is absolutely unavoidable.
There is a cavernous difference between "don't recommend" and "forbid".
The real problem seems to be that you're pointing at symptoms rather than causes.
Neither you, nor the other poster showed a fundamental problem with web sources that does not exist with print sources. The correct way to deal with this is not to apply blanket prejudices against media formats, but to evaluate individual sources on their merits. You should teach your students a set of criteria for evaluating sources of ANY format.
BTW, showing specfic negative examples is partularly silly since it is possible to do so for ANY media format.
My problem is that professors are giving blanket directives in their classes that are silly and counter to the development of useful research skills for a modern environment. It think some of this is an unconscious response by universities to their fading status as the (almost) sole keepers or authoitative information. In other ways, it's due to computer illiteracy. The don't know how and where to find the good stuff on the internet yet, and they don't have a command of the tools necessary to work with it. If I ever need to cite Newton's Principia, I'm going to cite a link on a reputable website. I'm going to allow my collegaues to take advantage of the wealth on information that is seconds away. There's no good reason not to.
Slashdot Mirror
Germany also has roughly half the number of traffic fatalities per capita as the US, take that for what it is worth.
Given that MUCH fewer people in Germany own a car than in the US and those who do drive them shorter distances, I'd say that this statement either:
A) Proves nothing
B) Proves the opposite of what you intended
Really? So if I pick the sound code and the graphics code as an example you're telling me that there will be a sequential dependency between them? Just because two things are related does not mean that they are dependent.
This is a false argument. Even if you find two things which are not dependant on each other, it does not follow that there are no dependancies in the entire game. It's pretty damn obvious that the video and sound output DO have a sequential dependency on the controller input.
But in a game the simulation is of collisions, and gravity. In this case not all objects directly affect each other.
Well actually they do, or at least you have to assume they do until you've checked otherwise. Or are the bullets passing through the enimies with no effect? Sounds like a pretty silly game to me.
You are assuming that the parallel code and the sequential code have some sort of dependency that force them to run in sequence
Which should be plainly obvious. You're going to be playing 1 game, not 4 games with no interrelation to each other.
Your belief regarding the amount of code that can be parallelized seems to be based on a similar error. For example, with physics you'll be able to parallelize the physics of ALL THE OBJECTS THAT DON'T INTERACT WITH EACH OTHER. Having the motion of no object affected by any other object would be a screensaver, not a game.
It's also not right to just take the percentage of tasks that can be parallelized, multiply them by the number of cpus and consider that a speed increase. This is because you are not accounting for the assosciated PENALTY when these new processors do need to communicate with each other.
Maybe my parallelizable code runs 4X faster, but the other code might run half as fast with all the extra communications overhead.
Initially I thought, "No one could possibly be this stupid, he must be a troll." But then I noticed your UID, guess I was wrong.
You lack even the most elementary grasp of of what you're talking about. You're embarassing yourself. Do yourse;f a favor and read an actual history book.
Actually, it's fairly well known that academics have a left-wing bias.
This is only because REALITY has a well-known left wing bias.
Academics do disagree on subjects such as "How much gov't intervention should there be in the market?" however they all pretty much agree that dinosaurs really did exist and that the earth really does orbit the sun.
If right-wing politicians stuck to arenas where there was a legitimate debate rather than trying to dispute actual facts of nature, perhaps they would find themselves less at odds with the scientific community.
Yeah, you can make fun of Sony for Memory Stick and Betamax
And memory stick pro.
And minidisc.
And netmd.
And their non-mp3 player ipod wannabe.
And the "walkman bean".
And UMD.
And suing Lik-sang out of business.
And possible RAM price fixing.
And who can forget their exploding batteries!
Oh yeah and what about the criminal investigations for installing rootkits on you PC?
Yet they shipped the PS2 with standard ports (USB, IEEE1394)
It doesn't matter because you could not use them with standard hardware.
Who cares is a game console has USB if you can't hook up anything but sony-approved USB devices? The interface is then proprietary, regardless of the connector used.
You may as well deny the moon landing. You'll have people who agree with you there as well. You've just a raving nut.
You're oversimplifying. (Which is generally the problem with economics.)
That only works if there is no four hour block where they can't work that they would instead use to stand in line. If the launch took place on a weekend and they work during the week, then they aren't really trading off the way you suggest.
Of course you can always come up with an explanation for why it made "economic sense", because economics is a model that is our attempt at explaining reality. If it doesn't make "economic sense" it's because the model is broken. Either way it doesn't necessarily mean that their actions were actually sensible. (There's nothing forbidding economics from explaining foolish behaior.)
That's a red herring. You're already using the term "convicted monopoly". That's kinda' like calling somebody that disagrees with the government a "terrorist".
That's not anywhere fucking close!
A federal court TRIED Microsoft and found that they are indeed a monopoly, in a context where DUE PROCESS was observed. It's nothing at all like you suggest.
But what can I expect from you:
The market is working just fine. Nobody is being coerced. However, you seem to be in favor of the government coercing a private business by force.
The whole concept of copyright exists because the gov't is doing what you are implying that you're against. I contend that you actually AREN'T against gov't intervention in the market, except when it does not suit you. Hell, the entire concept of a corporation only exists because the gov't intervenes to make it so.
Coercing private businesses by force is something the gov't is SUPPOSED to do. The only people who disagree with this are anarchists. Everybody else merely disagrees on what rules the gov't should be enforcing.
So basically, you're either an anarchist or your argument is dishonest.
If you make it hard for 'bad guys', you make it hard for your customers/friends too.
This isn't true, because you don't have to make it symmetrically hard.
So you can make it a "royal pain in the ass" for spammers, but only the "slightest bit inconvenient" for actual customers.
This is not a position I'm willing to debate with you.
People with much more credibility than you have decided on multiple occasions that Microsoft is NOT operating in a free market. Either you live in an alternate universe, you have a different definition of "free market" than the rest of the world, or you're simply dishonest. In any case, a rational discussion will be impossible.
The opinions you put forth have already been debated and shot down in federal court multiple times. You may as well try and claim there's no evidence linking cigarettes and cancer.
In both cases, the overwhelming evidence is right there and the experts have already deicded. You don't have any new, unconsidered evidence or theories. You just don't like the actual facts of the situation because they're damaging to your argument. This is not a position of integrity.
News flash. We're IN a free market.
You say this like it's true but the findings of fact in several federal court cases disagree with you. I can pretty much stop reading at this line as you obviously live in an alternate reality.
Wow. A, what? Two year old installation disk doesn't recognize the latest and greatest drive?
First off, SATA is about 2 years old so it's about as late and great as the OS he's talking about. Second, it's not just that, it's also the difficulty providing it with the driver. A FLOPPY drive only? Come on!
I haven't used my floppy drive in YEARS, I don't even know if it still works. Virtually everything is on CD, DVD or USB mass storage device. Requiring a floppy is a lazy carryover.
And that, my friend, is where the balance lies. Any success Linux will have blah, blah, blah
Linux is ALREADY growing in users. It's been a steady, slow process but it shows no signs of stopping. You believe something that's already happening isn't going to happen because Microsoft is going to do something they have a long track record of not being able to do?
Because the majority of people aren't going to want to give up all of their old software and games and repurchase them just so they can move to a "better" platform.
You're generalizing yourself as everyone. MOST people never upgrade the OS on their PC. When it comes time to upgrade, they buy a new one, preloaded. Besides, using this silly logic every new video game console would have failed.
And if Linux expects to exploit that opening, should it come, then it had better be ready to support all of that hardware: computers and printers and cameras and everything else.
Linux already has better hardware support than windows. Neither OS supports everything the other does, of course, but this is a non-issue.
And they're better have a common face: 50-plus all slightly different and incompatible distributions and desktops and installers and drivers are not going to cut it.
Personally, I don't think you guys can get past your differences and make it happen.
It will never happen... and that's a good thing. Not all users are alike. It doesn't have to happen for linux to succeed. The goal is not to replace an old monopoly with a new one. The goal is to restore a free market.
Earlier in this thread someone made the point that Wikipedia should not be cited -- this is fundamentally due to the dynamic nature of its content.
This is a silly claim made by people who don't know what they are talking about. If you click the "cite this article" link you get a link to a non-changing version of the article in just about every bibliogrpahy format imaginable.
By that logic, proof that the system doesn't work can't even exist.
Incorrect, consider the trivial case where it is publicly know that an article is false, yet it is not corrected. This is possible and would be proof that the system does not work.
So, possibly I did expose one proof of the major flaw with Wikipedia: Citation Needed.
This isn't a "flaw" it's just being honest. There are "good" articles and "bad" articles. Articles really start out as bad and work their way to good. This is a non-issue if you understand that you shouldn't trust unverifyable statements from ANY source.
I think its far too unproven to call a success
This is something you'll be able to say forever, since it is in a constant state of change. Applying normal research skills solves this poblem, but you seem to think this is a "flaw" too. The reality is that it's something you should do for any source.
I'd say it's more like proof that the system works.
Sure you can create a false article. It's not like scientists have never falsified their research and published it in a journal, for example.
The proof is whether they're caught and the mistakes are corrected. In an obscure subject this may take a while in ANY format.
People need to learn to apply good research skills across the board, not just to wikis.
Considering the source is one of these.
No it doesn't not for elections that are conducted on anything but DREs.
... be in random order". Rivest's solution is vastly superior to this one IMO, but both rely on "black boxes".
This is a dodge of the issue. If this system WORKS, then it does so as described in TFA.
If the system has vulnerabilities, additional measures NOT OUTLINED ON THEIR WEBSITE might fix them, but that's not exactly the discussion we're having.
My own suggested additional measure would be to throw all the electronic voting equipment off a bridge and go buy some pens and paper.
You really aren't thinking about this right. You need to consider the situation where the people in power have millions of dollars at their disposal and the ability to modify documents and equipment at their leisure.
The solution to this is lots of humans watching and counting, not a bunch of unverifyable black boxes.
To put it simply, I can add another step:
4) Switch 5,000 votes to another canidate before generating the final printout.
The creators of this system believe it is resistant to this, but there is entirely too much handwaving such as "it is necessary that the intermediary state of the ballots
Well, except that that is the exact problem with other voting systems too. Once your ballot is in the box, who knows what they do with it?
I'm glad you brought this up.
With paper ballots, everyone who can see the box, knows what they do with it. It is easy to get people who can see and are willing to do so.
With electronic ballots, nobody really knows what's going on inside. It's a black box and essentially impossible to verify.
To give you an example, for about $1 million I could design a keyboard driver chip that behaves just like a normal keyboard driver except under very special circumstances. The only way to catch this is to have someone involved in the production confess or to depackage the chip and examine it under an electron microscope. How often do you think that is going to happen?
they will be able to tell that the votes you punched in didn't match your vote as they tallied it.
No they can't.
The can verify that the election authority had the ABILITY to count their vote properly, but they cannot prove that it was actually counted correctly, only that it was counted.
Ronald Rivest has actually developed a system which is superior in this respect.
It also can't be used to verify that your vote was associated with a particular candidate
Which makes it useless for PRACITCAL purposes.
What do I give a shit that my vote gets counted if I have no assurance of who it was counted for?
This system CREATES a step in the system where it is possible to rig an election. Sure the numbers add up to the correct total, but that's not the point of an election.
Look at Ronald Rivest's work on this subject. It makes much more sense.
This "new" voting system sounds remarkably similar to a system proposed by Ronald Rivest (of RSA fame).
The problem with either system is it requres you to trust a computer.
In the case of Rivest's work, you must trust a computer to do certain logical computations. (Engineers and professors can do them in their head, but 90+% of the public in a given country do not have that skill.)
In the case of Chaum's system, which I believe to be an inferior version of Rivest's work, you must trust that the A and B the computer showed you are the same A and B actually used to tally your vote. It deals with the case of a false scan, but it DOES NOTHING TO SOLVE THE CASE OF DELIBERATE MANIPULATION.
Both systems add practically unverifyable processes to a system that previously didn't have them. (Assuming you were using paper ballots.) As an electrical engineer, believe me that PAPER is the way to go.
That is not the same degree of control. Again, terrorism is random acts in random places
This isn't true. If you look at the targets of major terrorist attacks they certainly AREN'T random.
too near a dirty bomb
See above. Your odds of being near ANY sort of bomb are directly affected by who you assoswciated yourself with. You are a lot less likely to be having coffee in a fedral building if you don't work in a federal building.
Your argument is one of fear, not statistics.
You have loads of control over the likleyhood of being hurt or even killed in a car "accident".
You have control over you likelihood of being killed in a terrorist act as well simply by controlling who you associate yourself with.
Joining some new Israeli settlement is a lot more risky than being a dentist in Finland for example.
Meanwhile being hurt in a terrorist act is true chance.
This would only be true if every terrorist chose their targets randomly.
This is obviously false. It's not as if 9/11 was the first attack on the WTC, for example.
The fearmongers would have you believe that there's a terrorist hiding under every rock. I suggest you actually look at the past 20 years worth of attacks.
The only time you should not run synthetic is when you've got an oil leak.
Acutally, there's another case.
If you've got a Mazda rotary engine.
In that case, you've actually got an oil injector.
(Although some guys do remove it and premix two-cycle oil in their gas tanks.)
I'm not going to respond to what meager arguments you made, but as an sub-editor, research scientist and educator,
What a lame response:
"I'm right because of my position in society! I don't have to actually defend the merits of my arguments!"
What it comes down to is that it is no more difficult to archive web sites than it is print media. (Did you actually look up anything I mentioned?) If it is VITALLY important that you be able to access your original sources years from now (some cases it's not), you should take responsibility and archive them, regardless of format.
I only recommend web citations if it is absolutely unavoidable.
There is a cavernous difference between "don't recommend" and "forbid".
The real problem seems to be that you're pointing at symptoms rather than causes.
Neither you, nor the other poster showed a fundamental problem with web sources that does not exist with print sources. The correct way to deal with this is not to apply blanket prejudices against media formats, but to evaluate individual sources on their merits. You should teach your students a set of criteria for evaluating sources of ANY format.
BTW, showing specfic negative examples is partularly silly since it is possible to do so for ANY media format.
My problem is that professors are giving blanket directives in their classes that are silly and counter to the development of useful research skills for a modern environment. It think some of this is an unconscious response by universities to their fading status as the (almost) sole keepers or authoitative information. In other ways, it's due to computer illiteracy. The don't know how and where to find the good stuff on the internet yet, and they don't have a command of the tools necessary to work with it. If I ever need to cite Newton's Principia, I'm going to cite a link on a reputable website. I'm going to allow my collegaues to take advantage of the wealth on information that is seconds away. There's no good reason not to.