Watergate had nothing to do with classified information/national security
You remember the Pentagon Papers?
Daniel Ellsberg, a former Marine and a researcher for the RAND corporation surreptitiously copied "the Pentagon Papers", a multi-volume history of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Hoping to inform the American public of U.S. mistakes in Vietnam, Ellsberg then released the papers to the New York Times.
President Nixon attempted, on national security grounds, to halt their publication. When the Supreme Court declined to uphold the suppression of the papers, Nixon ordered G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt to break in to Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office, hoping to find information with which to publicly smear Ellsberg.
That break-in, and the others that followed at the Watergate Building, became known as the Watergate conspiracy.
It also destroyed the government's case against Ellsberg: because of the break-in and an allegation that Nixon had ordered the CIA to "totally incapacitate" (e.g., kill) Ellsberg, the government's case against Ellsberg for conspiracy and espionage was dropped.
If you're talking to government officials, and there are leaks that potentially endanger lives of agents, and collaterally other agents in the field, you're going to get more than a sideways look from the government, as well you should.
What about leaks that endanger our ability to track Iran's nuclear capabilities.
Of course, I'm referring to the leal that burnt Valerie Plame's^W^W Joe Wilson's wife's cover.
The leak that came from the Office of the Vice President of the United States.
The Founding Fathers knew that government couldn't be trusted. That's why they wrote the Constitution, that's why they insisted on a Bill of Rights -- to protect us from an overzealous government. That's why the insisted on separation of powers.
The Founders' fears have bene borne out numerous times: from the jailing of citizens for "sedition" which including making jokes about government polices, to the Palmer Raids, to the internment of Japanese citizens, to the McCarthy hearings, to COINTELPRO and the wiretapping of non-violent activists like Martin Luther King, to the current investigations of the Catholic Workers charity and PETA and "Total Information Awareness" and the NSA's database of phone records.
This smacks of journalists pompously elevating their self-importance to levels higher than they deserve.
It's not the journalists who "elevated their self-importance." That too was the Founders, who understood that a Free Press serves to expose government over-stepping so that the citizens of a democracy can exercise their oversight at the ballot box.
For democracy to mean anything, the citizenry must have confidence that elected officials adhere to the Constitution and some idea of what their government does in the name of the citizens. A Free Press makes this possible. When government begins to monitor the Press's phone calls, that's a warning that our democracy is at risk.
This is the canary in the coal-mine. We're not served by minimizing it when the canary laying at the bottom of its cage, gasping for air.
Re:SQL is a standard. Is it?
on
SQL Cookbook
·
· Score: 4, Informative
there is in fact no real standard
Yes, there's a great deal of nonconformance and extensions.
But, there is a standard, in fact, five: SQL-86, SQL-89, SQL-92, SQL:1999 and SQL:2003 (yeah, dashes replaced by colons, go figure). SQL:2003 can be purchased from ANSI or ISO, just like the C or C++ standards.
Various sites list product conformance to the standards.
When I write SQL, I pretty rigorously stick to SQL-99, as that's likely to be supported by most vendors. If I need to deviate from that, I make sure I know how to replicate the vendor-specific code in SQL-99 (e.g, postgresql's inherits keyword -- it's useful for sub-typing, but it can be effected by using joins and views).
If the non-standard code is DML (not DDL), I'll do my best to encapsulate it in a stored procedure or a view, and let the rest of my code call the encapsulated abstraction. This is just the same layering you'd do in any programming language to wall off platform-specific code. And just as you'd typedef in C or create abstract types in C++, you create UDTs in SQL too.
Here's an example, using a useful testing date "function" that is cross-dialect, doesn't rely on any user-supplied function support, and can be incorporated into live code.
-- postgresql CREATE DOMAIN datetime_type timestamp null; create view system_datetime as select 1 as id, now() as date_now ;
-- MS SQL server create type datetime_type from datetime null; create view system_datetime as select 1 as id, getdate() as date_now ;
-- code below is SQL dialect independent -- works on postgresql or MS SQL server
-- code to use actual current date or fake date for testing purposes -- all DML that wants the current system timestamp should instead join on (or subselect) the view date_now -- this view always returns a single row
create view date_now as select coalesce( ( select test_date from test_date where id = 1) , ( select date_now from system_datetime where id = 1) ) as date_now ;
-- note: for Sybase, replace coalesce with isnull
-- see what invoices were due as of January 1: update test_date set test_date = '1/1/2006' ;
select * from invoices a, date_now b where a.issue_date <= b.date_now and ( a.paid_date > b.date_now or a.paid_date is null )
-- look at real invoices due as of now -- Query is the same, we just null out the fake date: update test_date set test_date = null ;
select * from invoices a, date_now b where a.issue_date <= b.date_now and ( a.paid_date > b.date_now or a.paid_date is null )
I don't believe there to be any hard evidence that prisoners are mistreated at Guantanamo; the greatest complaint is that they are tried before a military tribunal instead of a civilian one (could be wrong, I hardly follow the issue).
The feeding pipe was thick, thicker than my nostril, and would not go in. Blood came gushing out of my nose and tears down my cheeks, but they kept pushing until the cartilages cracked. I guess I would have screamed if I could, but I could not with the pipe in my throat.
...I was beaten again and left in a small, dirty, cold concrete cell. I was extremely thirsty, but there was only a bottle of putrid water in the cell. I was refused fresh water.... They told me that I was now in a country with no laws, and did I understand what that meant?... In desperation, I began a hunger strike.... After 37 days without food, I was dragged to the interrogation room, where a feeding tube was forced through my nose into my stomach. I became extremely ill, suffering the worst pain of my life.
I grew up proud America stood in opposition to Soviet tortures. Are American kids growing up now supposed to take pride that American can be just as barbaric as the worst Stalinists?
I don't pirate movies or music, but I lost any sympathy for the RIAA or the MPAA when they decided to buy laws forcing me to buy hardware with pointless DRM to prevent the piracy I'm not doing.
I'm not pirating, but I have to bear the cost of the MPAA's unworkable "solution", a so-called solution that puts industry spyware in my computers and TVs, and that makes my current hardware obsolete?
I find it odd that the only people in politics that "say it how it is" can be found on the comedy channel. It's almost... funny.
There's historic precedent: in Imperial Rome, often the only public criticism of the Emperor came from comedians and satiric poets.
Additional comparisons to Rome after the fall of the Republic are left to brave commentors. (But hint: never-ending Proconsulships in the Middle East, a rubber stamp Senate ignored by the Emperor.)
I don't know anything about this format, so I probably shouldn't comment, but off the top of my head, it seems to me that for url bookmarks a human-readable format is prefferable and easier to convert or otherwise process.
With the resources and ability to dedicate even a full time team to making sure the Wikipedia article keeps them in a good light, I fear we're entering the age where people who are interested in a NPOV are outmanned by those with a profit interest.
Wikipedia is the Wal*Mart of online information.
Wal*Mart provides "low low prices", but you have no idea, on any particular shopping day, of the selection, much less where it comes from. Are Koss "Plug" headphones in stock? No, Wal*Mart couldn't get a "low low price" on them; but you'll be happy with these Sony overstocks, right, and pick up some cheap plastic trinkets made in China on your way out.
And at Wal*Mart you'll have no idea where the stuff comes from: did nine-year old Indonesian girls make those shoes for 25 cents an hour? You don't know, but the prices are low.
Wikipedia is similar: it's the convenient place to find lots of (pretty much worthless) trivia and a number of good articles. You can find an annotated list of every German Army Division in WWII, but coverage of the U.S. war in Vietnam is so sparse that Paul Harkins, the first U.S. commander in the war and arguably a big reason for the U.S. failure, gets only a single sentence.
And who writes the articles? Experts tend not to stay around, because experts' articles are so frequently "improved" by acne-faced kids with no friends and plenty of time to flame-war on "teh Intarweb". (It's no coincidence that most of Jimbo Wales's "bureaucracy" at Wikipedia consists of teenagers and kids just out of college. They have the time to play around on Wikipedia, and are inexperienced enough to think they know something about everything.
Like Wal*Mart products, Wikipedia's articles are assembled by kids. Free labor keeps Wal*Mart's products cheap and Wikipedia's free. Wal*Mart uses the cheapest possible raw materials; Wikipedia's "editors" far too often paraphrase stuff they've read elsewhere on the web. Cheap products result, but so does shoddy and uneven construction.
And just like Wal*Mart's hiring of people to change articles on it on Wikipedia, Wikipedia shows a great defensiveness and overreaction whenever it is criticized. Wikipedia currently bans linking to sites critical of Wikipedia, even in articles on criticism of Wikipedia.
Recently, a long-time Wikipedia "bureaucrat" was unilaterally and without any process de-sysopped for failing to realize that another bureaucrat had surreptitiously made a page uneditable. It turned out that to avoid "bad publicity", the page was frozen -- on Jimmy Wales's orders -- without explanation. Because the long-time bureaucrat didn't read between the lines, he was locked out of Wikipedia without warning or apology.
People who have spent years building Wikipedia are routinely banned or smeared as "vandals" "trolls" or "conspiracy mongers" just for questioning the fairness of Wikipedia administrators using their powers to ban their personal enemies.
Here on Slashdot, a few weeks ago, I asked a Wikipedia Bureaucrat a few simple questions. My questions were almost immediately modded down. Thanks to Slashdot's readership, my posts in the main article were modded back up. But all four of my comments on the bureaucrat's journal -- where most Slashdotters with mod points aren't even looking -- were modded troll. What a coincidence, huh?
Wikipedia is the online equivalent of Wal*Mart: it's big, it's convenient, but the user has no way of knowing if the articles he's getting for f
A $4500 laptop is pretty cheap for a complete site makeover. Not to mention getting dozens if not hundreds of non-winning redesigns done on spec, any of which may be mined for additional ideas:
(c) By submitting your Entry you hereby agree to the following terms: The Design will be deemed a "work made for hire", as that phrase is used in the United States copyright law, and all right, title and interest in and to the Design will vest automatically in Sponsor. To the extent the Design is not deemed to be a "work made for hire," you hereby assign, transfer and convey, and agree to further assign, transfer and convey, to Sponsor any and all your intellectual property rights in the Design.
Taco's getting a great deal here.
And more power to him, but let me suggest he sweeten the deal a bit.
(I'm not suggesting this put of self-interest: I'm a programmer, not a graphics designer. And besides, I prefer the minimalist non-graphic Slashdot interface anyway.)
In addition to the laptop, give the winner a tiny link to his (or her) site on any Slashdot page using his design. On the bottom of each page, in a small font size, something like "Page design by Winner's Name/a>.
This costs Slashdot nothing, and gives the winner free advertising that lets him participate in his own success. He can link to a site that offers redesigns for as fee, or a blog that explains his design principles and gets him some ad revenue, or whatever.
For the non-winning submissions that become Slashdot's "work for hire" property, at least put up a gallery of those designs, hosted by Slashdot and linking to the submitters' sites, so that Slashdot's readers can check them out and give the non-winners some business or at least page views.
And Slashdot should relax the work for hire provisions of the legal contest rules; I understand that Slashdot wants to be unhindered in its use of submitted designs and careful not to open itself to any law suits, but maybe Slashdot could provide an more Open Source example than requiring that all submissions, even the non winning ones, "transfer and convey, to Sponsor any and all your intellectual property rights in the Design".
Again, more power to Taco and Slashdot. Taco's leveraged Slashdot's visibility to get some serious work done for free. Just use that leverage to reward the contest submitters too.
Most college students purposely buy used books... also because all of the important passages have already been highlighted and in many cases, answers to common questions or other notes written in the margins. They're like cheat sheets. If you're lucky, you get a book from a student that had the same professor as you, and then it's practically like getting the answers to every test.
That's why I always shelled out for new books.
sure, in used books the important passages are highlighted.
But you're gambling the previous owner was smart enough to figure out which passages are important.
And different students have different needs: some people highlight formulae; some know the formulae (or expect to look that up in a reference page), and so they underline the over-0-arching idea behind the formulae.
With a new book, you're not channeled into the way the previous owner understands it, you can understand it on your own terms.
(Me, I almost never underlined; I either got something or I didn't. If I didn't get it from reading it, going back over highlighted portions didn't do much for me. It's only been with age that I've found myself slowing down and highlighting useful.)
While looking around the web, we accidently found this site.
So every commercial site (is slashdot commercial? They sell subscriptions) should have to go to enormous expense to label it pages or risk five years of jail time -- because you and your wife make typos?
My god, do you and your wife ever make the mistake of buying the wrong toothpaste at the grocery? Perhaps we ought to abolish the Free Market and go to a Soviet system of allowing only one brand of toothpaste, to protect your family.
While we're at it, do you and the wife ever have a little too much to drink? Perhaps we ought to bring back Prohibition to save you from your hangovers.
Part of being a free citizen means not asking the government to hold your hand to prevent you from making stupid mistakes. By all means, if you feel you can't handle the consequences of typos, get rid of your Internet service. But don't ask the rest of America to go to great trouble and expense just because you can't type.
Incidentally, what lasting harm did seeing this porno site do to you, that its owners should risk five years in prison? You still seem to be around, your wife and kids are still alive -- did your marriage break up or you dog die because of this typo?
So how do you determine what's "commercial" site or not?
You can subscribe to Slashdot; does that make slashdot a commercial site? Will Slashdot have to put up a "sexually explicit" warning just in case some geek posts a comment about his hot-and-bothered thoughts about Princess Leia or Natalie Portman covered with grits?
Slashdot'll be in a real bind -- either censor comments, or get filtered out of any work sites because of the "sexually explicit" label. Indeed, any blog that accepts user comments will face the same dilemma: either start censoring, or be censored by filtering software and employer policies.
How do you determine what's "sexually explicit"? Recently someone on Fark (also a site that has subscription membership) posted about getting his balls stuck in the slats of his chair. and Fark regularly features a photoshop of a squirrel with enormous testicles.
Are those posts and pictures sexually explicit? Ask your lawyer when you're faced with five years jail time for guessing wrong.
Metafilter.com requires a one-time fee to post; it has a popular section devoted to users' questions, many of which are of a sexual nature. Does a post asking about a relationship that's lost its "sexual spark", with details of the sex life, count as sexually explicit?
Will the site owner be willing to risk five years in jail to find out?
Gonzales also wants ISPs to keep records of what sites customers browse, so here's where I think this is going:
Force sites to put up "sexually explicit" interstitial pages which require a user to explicitly click;
Force ISPs to record that the user did explicitly click to see the "sexually explicit" pages;
And then prosecute the people who do look at those pages.
Of course, they'll start with uncontroversial prosecutions of people looking at kiddie porn, but they won't stop there: next it'll be anime and manga, then it'll be BDSM, they anything -- like gay porn -- that violates the "community standards" of the most narrow-minded Federal venue they can find. Expect a lot of the cases to be tried in Utah and Georgia and the ever-conservative western District of Pennsylvania.
Look guys, it requires the House of Representatives to pass this crap. If you're an American and you're old enough tot look at "sexually explicit" stuff, you're also old enough to vote. Check out the political party Gonzales is a part of, and vote for the other one in November. Or you'll have only yourself to blame when any but the most vanilla sites disappear from the Internet.
If they're on Wikipedia to blow off steam, then they're using the wrong website. See the Wikipedia guideline on user pages.
Well, shit, people (ostensibly) volunteer with the {Democratic|Republican|Libertarian} Party to win elections for {Democrats|Republicans|Libertarians}.
But after a hard day of volunteering, most of them like to get a beer with their fellow {Democratic|Republican|Libertarian} volunteers. It's human nature.
Similarly, after volunteering to write an encyclopedia for free, most normal people are going to want to "hang out" with their buddies. The virtual way of doing that is hanging some silly banners and some fun chatter on a user page.
And for some people, the desire to socialize leads them to running for admin or bureaucrat on Wikipedia.
You can't fight people's desire to socialize -- it's a built in part of being human.
And you won't get an encyclopedia written if to try to turn your volunteers who work for free into robots.
Lighten up and learn to smile at users pages, or at least don't fuck with them. You'll get better results and happier worker bees.
Sooooo... all those people who became angry at the experienced wikipedian because their user pages changed? I wonder.
Well, the proof's in the pudding: an Arbitrator appointed by Jimbo (whose choices, you'll admit, are almost always given great deference on Wikipedia) was voted out of office by a 2-1 majority.
Sounds like quite a few people were pissed.
I don't think anyone really went out and touched any userpages directly.
This I admit, is unclear to me; you may be right.
I do know that the vandalizing arbitrator, in her own defense, claimed that she went through users' pages alphabetically, which suggests that she was editing the user pages directly, not the template.
But if you can shed some more light on this, enlighten me. (And tell me how you derived the editor's numbers -- I take your word, but that would be a handy trick to know.)
Oh, and let us all know who you are on Wikipedia, and create an account on Slashdot if you don't have one already, so we can continue this conversation!
Let's see. You're talking about Userboxes, aren't you? I still haven't worked out what they're good for myself.
I don't know what the Userboxes are good (or bad) for myself. That's not the point.
The point is, many editors slave away adding content to wikipedia, working hard to adhere to a Neutral Point of View, working hard to add citations, etc, all for free. They enjoy having a space on their own userpages to say what they want, to blow off a little steam.
The problem is, their userpages were without warning or discussion or even a "by your leave", altered by an administrator on a self-imposed "mission". As it happens the administrator at the time served on the highest quasi-judicial hearing board on wikipedia, a position of much power -- and, we would hope, responsibility.
That board is called, ironically, the "Arbitration Committee", but this arbitrator couldn't even be bothered to ask -- much less arbitrate with -- the "little people", the people who do the actual editing, if they minded having their personal pages vandalized. Rather than arbitrate, she just went ahead and crapped on everyone's personal work, because she thought it best.
That's just not polite.
In the aftermath, the administrator wasn't sanctioned -- when the community tried to make a "Request for Comments", they were told that the damage could be undone, but the administrator herself couldn't be held responsible. In other words, "too bad, you lose".
The community responded by giving the Arbitrator vandal a vote of "no confidence" when she ran for re-election to the Arbitration Committee. They didn't trust a hothead on a mission to be a calm and impartial arbitrator, and no wonder.
After her 2-1 loss, she further disparged the average worker bees, in harsh and personal language.
But rather than heed the community's vote of no confidence, the Arbitration Committee decided to create a wholly novel office, previously unheard of, of "Clerk" -- essentially a chief prosecutor -- and appointed the vandalizing ex-Arbitrator chair of the "Clerks".
That's just a slap in the face of the hard-working people who work hard day in and day out, to contribute to wikipedia.
And it speaks of a great disconnect between the "average" worker-bees and the Administrative queen bees of wikipedia.
mindspillage is not responsible to the Slashdot hordes.... go through the channels available to you on Wikipedia talk pages or the mailing list.
She posted here.
She even told us she did so because criticism that "goes through channels" usually isn't publicly seen. I applaud her attempt at transparency. (And I'm sure she can fight her own battles.)
She said she had nothing to hide and wanted to answer the question.
So why shouldn't she reply here, to those you've called the "Slashdot hordes"?
How interesting that my posting above, which asks a top Wikiipedia bureaucrat about out-of-process Wikipedia policies in a story about out-of-process Wikipedia censorship, had been modded flamebait in only fourty-five minutes.
There's a certain fanaticism about wikipedia groupies that lends itself to the suppression of opinions that question the wikipedia group-think or the cult of personality surrounding its founder.
But don't take my word for it: read the transcript of a lecture by Jason Scott The Great Failure of Wikipedia". It covers the mysterious deletion of these articles, and a lot more. Here's one telling bit, I urge you to read the entire transcript:
The Wikipedia people then vote. Does the majority win? No! Many times, Wikipedia works off of a consensus policy. Consensus essentially means when the administrator shows up, he makes a decision, based on the voices of what people have said. This is how houses are destroyed, using eminent domain. You have everybody say "this is a bad idea", and then the guy sitting in the seat goes "hmmm, but man, they're giving us some cash," and that's the end of that house.
In Wikipedia you will have 75-to-45 votes, in which the 45 win simply because of the quality or because of the number of neutrals. You have this enormous amount of weight that can be pushed around by an administrator. It is also possible to vote for the adding and deletion of administrators, and (in what I consider to be insane) there is something called the "Miscellany For Delete," and what this means is you can actually reach consensus on what other people on Wikipedia are allowed to do. All of this shouldn't be surprising in the case if there was a politic vacuum -- the fact that people allowed to kind of reach a consensus on everything started saying "well, I can do this". So the notability debate becomes an issue.
Why is this relevant to this thread? I'll happily answer, and even post it publicly to avoid accusations that I'm hiding anything, somewhere else. Try the talk page of the arbcom page or the clerks page
This Slashdot story is about a lack of transparency at Wikipedia -- had the articles been deleted normally, through community consensus, the "rogue admins" wouldn't have set up a site to complain about the deletions.
But the deletions were not done by process, but instead by the fiat of a heretofore unheard of "Front Office", an end-run around the community consensus that wikipedia presents as its public face.
The Arbitration Committee has, at the least, created the appearance of a similar end-run, by creating a special and heretofore unheard-of office for editors whom the voters -- by an over 2 to 1 margin -- rejected as trustworthy.
Besides, if you post your answer on wikipedia, most slashdot readers won't see it. And I see that page where you promise to post your explanation is "archived" more frequently than most, and there are already accusations that's done to hide things.
As I'm sure your explanation is convincing, and as you say yourself you don't want to hide anything, why not just explain here, where Slashdot reads?
It's lack of transparency that is causing this mistrust of Wikipedia, so why add to it by posting your response elsewhere?
Well, I answer some of the mail that Wikimedia gets,
Hey, great to see you here, and thanks for giving us the straight dope.
Maybe you could clear up something else. You were appointed to Wikipedia's "Arbitration Committee" a quasi-judicial body, and afterward won your seat as top vote-getter.
Three other editors who ran for seats on that committee lost with significant community disapproval, including one who -- arbitrarily and without prior discussion -- deleted (censored?) portions of many editors' personal pages.
But despite those three failing to receive the community's trust, you and the rest of the Arbitration Committee then created novel and previously unheard of official positions for them as "clerks" -- a role approximately that of prosecutor. The creation of these new positions was done apparently without any discussion or community consensus.
Why did you and your fellow arbitrators create positions without anyone's input, and staff them with three persons whom the community, just a few weeks before, had unequivocally rejected as not having the trust of the community, one of whom had engaged in massive vandalization of users' personal pages?
Why were these novel positions created without any transparency or community consensus?
As the top vote-getter in the race for the Arbitration Committee seat, did you have any qualms that doing so might be seen as an abuse of the trust placed in you by the voters?
Do you think the lack of transparency harms wikipedia?
Do you now regret doing this without community consensus?
Yes, for instance we could say it is malicious if it wouldn't halt
It's a sad commentary on Slashdot's users that this is only modded to (as of this writing) +3.
Come on guys, shouldn't every coder have at least some vague idea of what the Halting Problem is, not to mention its implications for computing in particular and the limits of what is knowable in general.
Hilbert's Program is dead! Since 1931! Quick, somebody inform Slashdot!:)
Slashdot Mirror
Watergate had nothing to do with classified information/national security
You remember the Pentagon Papers?
Daniel Ellsberg, a former Marine and a researcher for the RAND corporation surreptitiously copied "the Pentagon Papers", a multi-volume history of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Hoping to inform the American public of U.S. mistakes in Vietnam, Ellsberg then released the papers to the New York Times.
President Nixon attempted, on national security grounds, to halt their publication. When the Supreme Court declined to uphold the suppression of the papers, Nixon ordered G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt to break in to Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office, hoping to find information with which to publicly smear Ellsberg.
That break-in, and the others that followed at the Watergate Building, became known as the Watergate conspiracy.
It also destroyed the government's case against Ellsberg: because of the break-in and an allegation that Nixon had ordered the CIA to "totally incapacitate" (e.g., kill) Ellsberg, the government's case against Ellsberg for conspiracy and espionage was dropped.
What about leaks that endanger our ability to track Iran's nuclear capabilities.
Of course, I'm referring to the leal that burnt Valerie Plame's^W^W Joe Wilson's wife's cover.
The leak that came from the Office of the Vice President of the United States.
The Founding Fathers knew that government couldn't be trusted. That's why they wrote the Constitution, that's why they insisted on a Bill of Rights -- to protect us from an overzealous government. That's why the insisted on separation of powers.
The Founders' fears have bene borne out numerous times: from the jailing of citizens for "sedition" which including making jokes about government polices, to the Palmer Raids, to the internment of Japanese citizens, to the McCarthy hearings, to COINTELPRO and the wiretapping of non-violent activists like Martin Luther King, to the current investigations of the Catholic Workers charity and PETA and "Total Information Awareness" and the NSA's database of phone records.
This smacks of journalists pompously elevating their self-importance to levels higher than they deserve.
It's not the journalists who "elevated their self-importance." That too was the Founders, who understood that a Free Press serves to expose government over-stepping so that the citizens of a democracy can exercise their oversight at the ballot box.
For democracy to mean anything, the citizenry must have confidence that elected officials adhere to the Constitution and some idea of what their government does in the name of the citizens. A Free Press makes this possible. When government begins to monitor the Press's phone calls, that's a warning that our democracy is at risk.
This is the canary in the coal-mine. We're not served by minimizing it when the canary laying at the bottom of its cage, gasping for air.
Yes, there's a great deal of nonconformance and extensions.
But, there is a standard, in fact, five: SQL-86, SQL-89, SQL-92, SQL:1999 and SQL:2003 (yeah, dashes replaced by colons, go figure). SQL:2003 can be purchased from ANSI or ISO, just like the C or C++ standards.
Various sites list product conformance to the standards.
When I write SQL, I pretty rigorously stick to SQL-99, as that's likely to be supported by most vendors. If I need to deviate from that, I make sure I know how to replicate the vendor-specific code in SQL-99 (e.g, postgresql's inherits keyword -- it's useful for sub-typing, but it can be effected by using joins and views).
If the non-standard code is DML (not DDL), I'll do my best to encapsulate it in a stored procedure or a view, and let the rest of my code call the encapsulated abstraction. This is just the same layering you'd do in any programming language to wall off platform-specific code. And just as you'd typedef in C or create abstract types in C++, you create UDTs in SQL too.
Here's an example, using a useful testing date "function" that is cross-dialect, doesn't rely on any user-supplied function support, and can be incorporated into live code.
(And yes, you can hire me.)
Vladimir Bukovsky, an innocent Russian tortured by the Soviet Union's KGB:
Khaled El-Masri, a innocent German citizen kidnapped and tortured by the CIA:
I grew up proud America stood in opposition to Soviet tortures. Are American kids growing up now supposed to take pride that American can be just as barbaric as the worst Stalinists?
Ah fuck 'em.
I don't pirate movies or music, but I lost any sympathy for the RIAA or the MPAA when they decided to buy laws forcing me to buy hardware with pointless DRM to prevent the piracy I'm not doing.
I'm not pirating, but I have to bear the cost of the MPAA's unworkable "solution", a so-called solution that puts industry spyware in my computers and TVs, and that makes my current hardware obsolete?
Fuck those fat cats.
I find it odd that the only people in politics that "say it how it is" can be found on the comedy channel. It's almost... funny.
There's historic precedent: in Imperial Rome, often the only public criticism of the Emperor came from comedians and satiric poets.
Additional comparisons to Rome after the fall of the Republic are left to brave commentors. (But hint: never-ending Proconsulships in the Middle East, a rubber stamp Senate ignored by the Emperor.)
I don't know anything about this format, so I probably shouldn't comment, but off the top of my head, it seems to me that for url bookmarks a human-readable format is prefferable and easier to convert or otherwise process.
Wikipedia is the Wal*Mart of online information.
Wal*Mart provides "low low prices", but you have no idea, on any particular shopping day, of the selection, much less where it comes from. Are Koss "Plug" headphones in stock? No, Wal*Mart couldn't get a "low low price" on them; but you'll be happy with these Sony overstocks, right, and pick up some cheap plastic trinkets made in China on your way out.
And at Wal*Mart you'll have no idea where the stuff comes from: did nine-year old Indonesian girls make those shoes for 25 cents an hour? You don't know, but the prices are low.
Wikipedia is similar: it's the convenient place to find lots of (pretty much worthless) trivia and a number of good articles. You can find an annotated list of every German Army Division in WWII, but coverage of the U.S. war in Vietnam is so sparse that Paul Harkins, the first U.S. commander in the war and arguably a big reason for the U.S. failure, gets only a single sentence.
And who writes the articles? Experts tend not to stay around, because experts' articles are so frequently "improved" by acne-faced kids with no friends and plenty of time to flame-war on "teh Intarweb". (It's no coincidence that most of Jimbo Wales's "bureaucracy" at Wikipedia consists of teenagers and kids just out of college. They have the time to play around on Wikipedia, and are inexperienced enough to think they know something about everything.
Like Wal*Mart products, Wikipedia's articles are assembled by kids. Free labor keeps Wal*Mart's products cheap and Wikipedia's free. Wal*Mart uses the cheapest possible raw materials; Wikipedia's "editors" far too often paraphrase stuff they've read elsewhere on the web. Cheap products result, but so does shoddy and uneven construction.
And just like Wal*Mart's hiring of people to change articles on it on Wikipedia, Wikipedia shows a great defensiveness and overreaction whenever it is criticized. Wikipedia currently bans linking to sites critical of Wikipedia, even in articles on criticism of Wikipedia.
Recently, a long-time Wikipedia "bureaucrat" was unilaterally and without any process de-sysopped for failing to realize that another bureaucrat had surreptitiously made a page uneditable. It turned out that to avoid "bad publicity", the page was frozen -- on Jimmy Wales's orders -- without explanation. Because the long-time bureaucrat didn't read between the lines, he was locked out of Wikipedia without warning or apology.
People who have spent years building Wikipedia are routinely banned or smeared as "vandals" "trolls" or "conspiracy mongers" just for questioning the fairness of Wikipedia administrators using their powers to ban their personal enemies.
To further avoid publicity, Wikipedia's founder, Jimbo Wales, is alleged to now ask editors he trusts to make silent changes to articles on his behalf "because the stupid media watches everything I do now".
Here on Slashdot, a few weeks ago, I asked a Wikipedia Bureaucrat a few simple questions. My questions were almost immediately modded down. Thanks to Slashdot's readership, my posts in the main article were modded back up. But all four of my comments on the bureaucrat's journal -- where most Slashdotters with mod points aren't even looking -- were modded troll. What a coincidence, huh?
Wikipedia is the online equivalent of Wal*Mart: it's big, it's convenient, but the user has no way of knowing if the articles he's getting for f
Taco's getting a great deal here.
And more power to him, but let me suggest he sweeten the deal a bit.
(I'm not suggesting this put of self-interest: I'm a programmer, not a graphics designer. And besides, I prefer the minimalist non-graphic Slashdot interface anyway.)
In addition to the laptop, give the winner a tiny link to his (or her) site on any Slashdot page using his design. On the bottom of each page, in a small font size, something like "Page design by Winner's Name/a>.
This costs Slashdot nothing, and gives the winner free advertising that lets him participate in his own success. He can link to a site that offers redesigns for as fee, or a blog that explains his design principles and gets him some ad revenue, or whatever.
For the non-winning submissions that become Slashdot's "work for hire" property, at least put up a gallery of those designs, hosted by Slashdot and linking to the submitters' sites, so that Slashdot's readers can check them out and give the non-winners some business or at least page views.
And Slashdot should relax the work for hire provisions of the legal contest rules; I understand that Slashdot wants to be unhindered in its use of submitted designs and careful not to open itself to any law suits, but maybe Slashdot could provide an more Open Source example than requiring that all submissions, even the non winning ones, "transfer and convey, to Sponsor any and all your intellectual property rights in the Design".
Again, more power to Taco and Slashdot. Taco's leveraged Slashdot's visibility to get some serious work done for free. Just use that leverage to reward the contest submitters too.
It's complicated for a reason.
You know what's faster? Hiring an American.
Give me a call.
Most college students purposely buy used books... also because all of the important passages have already been highlighted and in many cases, answers to common questions or other notes written in the margins. They're like cheat sheets. If you're lucky, you get a book from a student that had the same professor as you, and then it's practically like getting the answers to every test.
That's why I always shelled out for new books.
sure, in used books the important passages are highlighted.
But you're gambling the previous owner was smart enough to figure out which passages are important.
And different students have different needs: some people highlight formulae; some know the formulae (or expect to look that up in a reference page), and so they underline the over-0-arching idea behind the formulae.
With a new book, you're not channeled into the way the previous owner understands it, you can understand it on your own terms.
(Me, I almost never underlined; I either got something or I didn't. If I didn't get it from reading it, going back over highlighted portions didn't do much for me. It's only been with age that I've found myself slowing down and highlighting useful.)
While looking around the web, we accidently found this site.
So every commercial site (is slashdot commercial? They sell subscriptions) should have to go to enormous expense to label it pages or risk five years of jail time -- because you and your wife make typos?
My god, do you and your wife ever make the mistake of buying the wrong toothpaste at the grocery? Perhaps we ought to abolish the Free Market and go to a Soviet system of allowing only one brand of toothpaste, to protect your family.
While we're at it, do you and the wife ever have a little too much to drink? Perhaps we ought to bring back Prohibition to save you from your hangovers.
Part of being a free citizen means not asking the government to hold your hand to prevent you from making stupid mistakes. By all means, if you feel you can't handle the consequences of typos, get rid of your Internet service. But don't ask the rest of America to go to great trouble and expense just because you can't type.
Incidentally, what lasting harm did seeing this porno site do to you, that its owners should risk five years in prison? You still seem to be around, your wife and kids are still alive -- did your marriage break up or you dog die because of this typo?
You can subscribe to Slashdot; does that make slashdot a commercial site? Will Slashdot have to put up a "sexually explicit" warning just in case some geek posts a comment about his hot-and-bothered thoughts about Princess Leia or Natalie Portman covered with grits?
Slashdot'll be in a real bind -- either censor comments, or get filtered out of any work sites because of the "sexually explicit" label. Indeed, any blog that accepts user comments will face the same dilemma: either start censoring, or be censored by filtering software and employer policies.
How do you determine what's "sexually explicit"? Recently someone on Fark (also a site that has subscription membership) posted about getting his balls stuck in the slats of his chair. and Fark regularly features a photoshop of a squirrel with enormous testicles.
Are those posts and pictures sexually explicit? Ask your lawyer when you're faced with five years jail time for guessing wrong.
Metafilter.com requires a one-time fee to post; it has a popular section devoted to users' questions, many of which are of a sexual nature. Does a post asking about a relationship that's lost its "sexual spark", with details of the sex life, count as sexually explicit?
Will the site owner be willing to risk five years in jail to find out?
Gonzales also wants ISPs to keep records of what sites customers browse, so here's where I think this is going:
Of course, they'll start with uncontroversial prosecutions of people looking at kiddie porn, but they won't stop there: next it'll be anime and manga, then it'll be BDSM, they anything -- like gay porn -- that violates the "community standards" of the most narrow-minded Federal venue they can find. Expect a lot of the cases to be tried in Utah and Georgia and the ever-conservative western District of Pennsylvania.
Look guys, it requires the House of Representatives to pass this crap. If you're an American and you're old enough tot look at "sexually explicit" stuff, you're also old enough to vote. Check out the political party Gonzales is a part of, and vote for the other one in November. Or you'll have only yourself to blame when any but the most vanilla sites disappear from the Internet.
If they're on Wikipedia to blow off steam, then they're using the wrong website. See the Wikipedia guideline on user pages.
Well, shit, people (ostensibly) volunteer with the {Democratic|Republican|Libertarian} Party to win elections for {Democrats|Republicans|Libertarians}.
But after a hard day of volunteering, most of them like to get a beer with their fellow {Democratic|Republican|Libertarian} volunteers. It's human nature.
Similarly, after volunteering to write an encyclopedia for free, most normal people are going to want to "hang out" with their buddies. The virtual way of doing that is hanging some silly banners and some fun chatter on a user page.
And for some people, the desire to socialize leads them to running for admin or bureaucrat on Wikipedia.
You can't fight people's desire to socialize -- it's a built in part of being human.
And you won't get an encyclopedia written if to try to turn your volunteers who work for free into robots.
Lighten up and learn to smile at users pages, or at least don't fuck with them. You'll get better results and happier worker bees.
But they can't patent this.
RFC 3514 proposed the Evil Bit in 2003.
Well, the proof's in the pudding: an Arbitrator appointed by Jimbo (whose choices, you'll admit, are almost always given great deference on Wikipedia) was voted out of office by a 2-1 majority.
Sounds like quite a few people were pissed.
I don't think anyone really went out and touched any userpages directly.
This I admit, is unclear to me; you may be right.
I do know that the vandalizing arbitrator, in her own defense, claimed that she went through users' pages alphabetically, which suggests that she was editing the user pages directly, not the template.
But if you can shed some more light on this, enlighten me. (And tell me how you derived the editor's numbers -- I take your word, but that would be a handy trick to know.)
Oh, and let us all know who you are on Wikipedia, and create an account on Slashdot if you don't have one already, so we can continue this conversation!
Thanks for the numbers!
I don't know what the Userboxes are good (or bad) for myself. That's not the point.
The point is, many editors slave away adding content to wikipedia, working hard to adhere to a Neutral Point of View, working hard to add citations, etc, all for free. They enjoy having a space on their own userpages to say what they want, to blow off a little steam.
The problem is, their userpages were without warning or discussion or even a "by your leave", altered by an administrator on a self-imposed "mission". As it happens the administrator at the time served on the highest quasi-judicial hearing board on wikipedia, a position of much power -- and, we would hope, responsibility.
That board is called, ironically, the "Arbitration Committee", but this arbitrator couldn't even be bothered to ask -- much less arbitrate with -- the "little people", the people who do the actual editing, if they minded having their personal pages vandalized. Rather than arbitrate, she just went ahead and crapped on everyone's personal work, because she thought it best.
That's just not polite.
In the aftermath, the administrator wasn't sanctioned -- when the community tried to make a "Request for Comments", they were told that the damage could be undone, but the administrator herself couldn't be held responsible. In other words, "too bad, you lose".
The community responded by giving the Arbitrator vandal a vote of "no confidence" when she ran for re-election to the Arbitration Committee. They didn't trust a hothead on a mission to be a calm and impartial arbitrator, and no wonder.
After her 2-1 loss, she further disparged the average worker bees, in harsh and personal language.
But rather than heed the community's vote of no confidence, the Arbitration Committee decided to create a wholly novel office, previously unheard of, of "Clerk" -- essentially a chief prosecutor -- and appointed the vandalizing ex-Arbitrator chair of the "Clerks".
That's just a slap in the face of the hard-working people who work hard day in and day out, to contribute to wikipedia.
And it speaks of a great disconnect between the "average" worker-bees and the Administrative queen bees of wikipedia.
mindspillage is not responsible to the Slashdot hordes.... go through the channels available to you on Wikipedia talk pages or the mailing list.
She posted here.
She even told us she did so because criticism that "goes through channels" usually isn't publicly seen. I applaud her attempt at transparency. (And I'm sure she can fight her own battles.)
She said she had nothing to hide and wanted to answer the question.
So why shouldn't she reply here, to those you've called the "Slashdot hordes"?
How interesting that my posting above, which asks a top Wikiipedia bureaucrat about out-of-process Wikipedia policies in a story about out-of-process Wikipedia censorship, had been modded flamebait in only fourty-five minutes.
There's a certain fanaticism about wikipedia groupies that lends itself to the suppression of opinions that question the wikipedia group-think or the cult of personality surrounding its founder.
But don't take my word for it: read the transcript of a lecture by Jason Scott The Great Failure of Wikipedia". It covers the mysterious deletion of these articles, and a lot more. Here's one telling bit, I urge you to read the entire transcript:
Why is this relevant to this thread? I'll happily answer, and even post it publicly to avoid accusations that I'm hiding anything, somewhere else. Try the talk page of the arbcom page or the clerks page
This Slashdot story is about a lack of transparency at Wikipedia -- had the articles been deleted normally, through community consensus, the "rogue admins" wouldn't have set up a site to complain about the deletions.
But the deletions were not done by process, but instead by the fiat of a heretofore unheard of "Front Office", an end-run around the community consensus that wikipedia presents as its public face.
The Arbitration Committee has, at the least, created the appearance of a similar end-run, by creating a special and heretofore unheard-of office for editors whom the voters -- by an over 2 to 1 margin -- rejected as trustworthy.
Besides, if you post your answer on wikipedia, most slashdot readers won't see it. And I see that page where you promise to post your explanation is "archived" more frequently than most, and there are already accusations that's done to hide things.
As I'm sure your explanation is convincing, and as you say yourself you don't want to hide anything, why not just explain here, where Slashdot reads?
It's lack of transparency that is causing this mistrust of Wikipedia, so why add to it by posting your response elsewhere?
If you don't like the system you're working with... start your own Wikipedia-like project.
How do you distinguish your suggestion from the hackneyed phrase, "America, love it or leave it"?
Well, I answer some of the mail that Wikimedia gets,
Hey, great to see you here, and thanks for giving us the straight dope.
Maybe you could clear up something else. You were appointed to Wikipedia's "Arbitration Committee" a quasi-judicial body, and afterward won your seat as top vote-getter.
Three other editors who ran for seats on that committee lost with significant community disapproval, including one who -- arbitrarily and without prior discussion -- deleted (censored?) portions of many editors' personal pages.
But despite those three failing to receive the community's trust, you and the rest of the Arbitration Committee then created novel and previously unheard of official positions for them as "clerks" -- a role approximately that of prosecutor. The creation of these new positions was done apparently without any discussion or community consensus.
Why did you and your fellow arbitrators create positions without anyone's input, and staff them with three persons whom the community, just a few weeks before, had unequivocally rejected as not having the trust of the community, one of whom had engaged in massive vandalization of users' personal pages?
Why were these novel positions created without any transparency or community consensus?
As the top vote-getter in the race for the Arbitration Committee seat, did you have any qualms that doing so might be seen as an abuse of the trust placed in you by the voters?
Do you think the lack of transparency harms wikipedia?
Do you now regret doing this without community consensus?
No, silly, I meant the OP should have been modded +5 Funny.
It's a sad commentary on Slashdot's users that this is only modded to (as of this writing) +3.
Come on guys, shouldn't every coder have at least some vague idea of what the Halting Problem is, not to mention its implications for computing in particular and the limits of what is knowable in general.
Hilbert's Program is dead! Since 1931! Quick, somebody inform Slashdot!
"Most addictions are to do with internal emptiness, wanting to fill up dead space...."
Well, I have filled up my hard drive.
Western Digital and Separate thank the porn industry.