Perhaps, instead of a flat tax or graduated tax brackets, we should switch to a logarithmic tax. Finally, a use for the log button on the average person's calculator!
I think they ought to get John Cleese to do the recording for that disclaimer. I think I could tolerate the chance of being hit just to hear that played in public.
First among them, The Long Tail, and why it would benefit the site to take advantage of it rather than ignore it.
Believe me, Wikipedia understands the long tail. They have over 1.5 million articles in the English language encyclopedia alone, dramatically outpacing every other available encyclopedia. They built their entire model on the long tail.
However, in an effort to be a reliable source of information they have standards like "verifiability". Some topics are too obscure to be able to be independently verified and cited. If a source cannot be verified and cited by secondary sources then it's not notable enough to be included. Promotional information, articles written by their own authors, or articles about obscure or local phenomena that don't have any news/history book/other coverage are simply not something that can be included.
Secretaries of State have been elected president: Thomas Jefferson is a fine example, albeit quite early in our history. So a successful Condi campaign is not inconceivable and would not be a historically unique event. Still, I find the idea of Condi winning to be an outlier at the current time.
But doesn't violently overthrowing your government also fall under the definition of treason and/or terrorism?
The point is not to protect the government, the point is to protect our liberty. Government only serves to protect our liberty. When it fails to do so, it either needs to change or be changed. Or so goes the theory. In practice...
Doing a blind-friendly redesign oughtn't be that hard really. We can already insert holograms and magnetic threading in them. Putting some raised dots in the corners--braille for the denomination--shouldn't be that hard at all. Most people probably wouldn't even notice. But the blind could just feel the corner and distinguish between a $1 and a $50.
But since we're slowly moving to a cashless society, I don't really see this as a high priority. By the time the newly redesigned blind-friendly bills enter circulation widely such that blind people can always tell the denomination at least a decade or two will have passed. By that time we'll all be using wireless RFID chips implanted in the back of our necks to automatically debit our accounts (and allow the illuminati access to our movements/thoughts/soul).
I'm not saying Microsoft is going to be successful in capturing the African American market away from the iPod because they have a brown Zune. I am saying that their marketing people thought a brown Zune would potentially help in this market. And, that black people don't view a brown Zune as some sort of absurd, hideous color, like most of the people on Slashdot seem to think.
I'm really tired of seeing this gripe on Slashdot. Yes, they have a brown Zune. Guess why? Black people. It's to appeal to black people. Because there only are a total of 5 black people on the whole of Slashdot means apparently that no one here can figure this out.
It's not a turd, it's not some unappealing color. It's retro, 70's, chocolate, hipster, whatever. Please go ask your token black friend about Zune in brown and they will get it right off the bat without going through the white-geek-boy conniptions that all Slashdotters seem to exhibit on this issue.
Whether Microsoft's appeal to the African American demographic with a brown Zune will be any more successful than the Zune's appeal in general is, of course, up for speculation. But please please please stop going over this trope of how inconceivable it is to have brown Zune. It's not. It makes perfect sense to about 11% of America.
Now there seems to be a bigger push for built-in gee-whiz features.
Actually, I'd say just the opposite: there's a push against the bloat that the community can seem to do nothing about. Lean-mean browser? Not so much anymore. More whiz-bang features keep getting added, while bugs and performance fall by the wayside.
I think there was a lot of excitement over the 1.0 push and the race to take 10% of the market. After those big milestones it's not easy to get people excited once again until another big milestone comes along. You can't just schedule when we're going to take 20% of the market. And no version number is as important for an open-source project as the 1.0 mark--that kind of fire won't come back.
I think the formula for future success I'm arriving at is:
I might be able to believe that if Wikipedia was accessible for a month or two, but a major blocking policy like this changing over a few days seems a bit insane.
This pattern of behavior was played out on a much larger scale early on in PRC history: the Hundred Flowers Campaign followed by the Anti-Rightist Movement. The pattern is: open up and seemingly liberalize communications for a brief period; then, once everyone who criticizes the government identifies themselves, you go clean them up. Pretty straightforward.
5. The "Microsoft has drawn close to the Republican party" link is six years old--pre-9/11, pre-Afghanistan, pre-Iraq, etc. Its a blatant political troll, with little or no relevance to today's reality.
Hi, I'm a Slashdot reader. As usual, I haven't bothered to read the article. However, I don't feel that limits me from expressing my strong condemnation of whatever the author was saying. I won't let a lack of facts get in the way of my analysis of where this author went wrong -- both intellectually and psychologically. Why RTFA when you can still be a pompous blowhard without the extraneous effort?
But that's just the problem with pseudoscience and original research. These are not facts. I shouldn't be able to make up my own lunatic theory and present it on Wikipedia as if it were something taken seriously by the social science community, like this ABenis did. That's fundamentally misleading, and not what Wikipedia should tolerate.
Consider a moment if was 18 and I liked a 17-year-old girl, I could be considered a "minor attracted adult" - but pedophile? I think not.
Liking one specific girl with a one-year difference from you does not remotely qualify you as a minor-attracted adult. A 30-year old professing attraction to an entire swath of girls because of their trait as a minor qualifies you as a minor-attracted adult. Let's not split hairs here.
Perhaps this idea of what is worthy to be included is somewhat subjective?
Yes, it very much is. And in internal Wikipedia culture, there are people who more strongly favor deletion of borderline cases of notability versus people who favor inclusion on the basis that eventually a good article will be made out of the information. These are called, shockingly, "deletionists" and "inclusionists."
A deletionist would look at all the information on random games only a dozen people have ever heard of and see a number of potential Articles for Deletion nominations. An inclusionist would see them and then let them be, figuring that eventually someone will make them into worthwhile articles. Deletionists get quite upset over things they term "fancruft": the hundreds of articles on obscure points in the Pokemon universe, for instance. Lots of time is spent arguing over what to do with all this information--some of it gets deleted, and some of it gets merged with other articles, and some of it gets kept. But you're right, there are very few truly objective measures of notability.
You're right, every idea does need a place to flourish, and a wiki is a good place for this to happen. Just not Wikipedia. Wikipedia doesn't allow non-notable or original research topics. Wikipedia is not a place for growing ideas. It's where established ideas and dead ideas go to be vandalized and revert-warred over.
Well, you clearly have a different standard of notability than mainstream Wikipedians. Although Wikipedia is far more inclusive than a paper encyclopedia, they are not indiscriminate in what they will take. While Wikipedia is not paper, it's also not a place for a person's original research, nor is it an information dump.
If someone publishes a vanity book on their own personal theory which no one in their field has read, criticized, cited, expanded upon, analyzed, etc., it's flat-out not notable. It's doubly not appropriate for the author of said theory to use Wikipedia as a means of self promotion.
Finally, simply because something exists in the world does not mean that Wikipedia ought to have an article devoted to it. No one thinks that there should be a Wikipedia article for every dime-store romance novel ever published, and rightly so--the overwhelming majority are not notable. Neither is this crank's theory.
Is it possible to read deleted articles on Wikipedia in any way?
Wikipedia admins are able to view deleted edits and deleted articles. General users cannot, however. As a rule, very few things ever completely disappear from Wikipedia--someone, at some rank, can access past and deleted versions.
The article was deleted. Wikipedia admins can still view it, but general users will no longer have access. Not really all that interesting an article anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps, instead of a flat tax or graduated tax brackets, we should switch to a logarithmic tax. Finally, a use for the log button on the average person's calculator!
I think they ought to get John Cleese to do the recording for that disclaimer. I think I could tolerate the chance of being hit just to hear that played in public.
Believe me, Wikipedia understands the long tail. They have over 1.5 million articles in the English language encyclopedia alone, dramatically outpacing every other available encyclopedia. They built their entire model on the long tail.
However, in an effort to be a reliable source of information they have standards like "verifiability". Some topics are too obscure to be able to be independently verified and cited. If a source cannot be verified and cited by secondary sources then it's not notable enough to be included. Promotional information, articles written by their own authors, or articles about obscure or local phenomena that don't have any news/history book/other coverage are simply not something that can be included.
Secretaries of State have been elected president: Thomas Jefferson is a fine example, albeit quite early in our history. So a successful Condi campaign is not inconceivable and would not be a historically unique event. Still, I find the idea of Condi winning to be an outlier at the current time.
Parent said:
Please allow me to speak for American when I say, Hahahahahahahah hahhahhaahahha hahahahah hahahhahahhaa HAHAHA hahahahha HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Oh man.
The point is not to protect the government, the point is to protect our liberty. Government only serves to protect our liberty. When it fails to do so, it either needs to change or be changed. Or so goes the theory. In practice...
Ray Charles would feel their wrist to determine if they were a fatty or a nubile pretty young thing. Seemed to work fairly well most of the time.
Doing a blind-friendly redesign oughtn't be that hard really. We can already insert holograms and magnetic threading in them. Putting some raised dots in the corners--braille for the denomination--shouldn't be that hard at all. Most people probably wouldn't even notice. But the blind could just feel the corner and distinguish between a $1 and a $50.
But since we're slowly moving to a cashless society, I don't really see this as a high priority. By the time the newly redesigned blind-friendly bills enter circulation widely such that blind people can always tell the denomination at least a decade or two will have passed. By that time we'll all be using wireless RFID chips implanted in the back of our necks to automatically debit our accounts (and allow the illuminati access to our movements/thoughts/soul).
I'm not saying Microsoft is going to be successful in capturing the African American market away from the iPod because they have a brown Zune. I am saying that their marketing people thought a brown Zune would potentially help in this market. And, that black people don't view a brown Zune as some sort of absurd, hideous color, like most of the people on Slashdot seem to think.
I'm really tired of seeing this gripe on Slashdot. Yes, they have a brown Zune. Guess why? Black people. It's to appeal to black people. Because there only are a total of 5 black people on the whole of Slashdot means apparently that no one here can figure this out.
It's not a turd, it's not some unappealing color. It's retro, 70's, chocolate, hipster, whatever. Please go ask your token black friend about Zune in brown and they will get it right off the bat without going through the white-geek-boy conniptions that all Slashdotters seem to exhibit on this issue.
Whether Microsoft's appeal to the African American demographic with a brown Zune will be any more successful than the Zune's appeal in general is, of course, up for speculation. But please please please stop going over this trope of how inconceivable it is to have brown Zune. It's not. It makes perfect sense to about 11% of America.
Actually, I'd say just the opposite: there's a push against the bloat that the community can seem to do nothing about. Lean-mean browser? Not so much anymore. More whiz-bang features keep getting added, while bugs and performance fall by the wayside.
I think there was a lot of excitement over the 1.0 push and the race to take 10% of the market. After those big milestones it's not easy to get people excited once again until another big milestone comes along. You can't just schedule when we're going to take 20% of the market. And no version number is as important for an open-source project as the 1.0 mark--that kind of fire won't come back.
I think the formula for future success I'm arriving at is:
This pattern of behavior was played out on a much larger scale early on in PRC history: the Hundred Flowers Campaign followed by the Anti-Rightist Movement. The pattern is: open up and seemingly liberalize communications for a brief period; then, once everyone who criticizes the government identifies themselves, you go clean them up. Pretty straightforward.
Here's the clip:
Hodgeman on Daily Show "i'm a PC"
5. The "Microsoft has drawn close to the Republican party" link is six years old--pre-9/11, pre-Afghanistan, pre-Iraq, etc. Its a blatant political troll, with little or no relevance to today's reality.
Nation-building can be achieved by killing the correct segments of the population.
I can't wait to open source my wallet. I hereby release my finances, including stocks and bonds, under the GPL to the Slashdot community.
Hi, I'm a Slashdot reader. As usual, I haven't bothered to read the article. However, I don't feel that limits me from expressing my strong condemnation of whatever the author was saying. I won't let a lack of facts get in the way of my analysis of where this author went wrong -- both intellectually and psychologically. Why RTFA when you can still be a pompous blowhard without the extraneous effort?
But that's just the problem with pseudoscience and original research. These are not facts. I shouldn't be able to make up my own lunatic theory and present it on Wikipedia as if it were something taken seriously by the social science community, like this ABenis did. That's fundamentally misleading, and not what Wikipedia should tolerate.
Liking one specific girl with a one-year difference from you does not remotely qualify you as a minor-attracted adult. A 30-year old professing attraction to an entire swath of girls because of their trait as a minor qualifies you as a minor-attracted adult. Let's not split hairs here.
Yes, it very much is. And in internal Wikipedia culture, there are people who more strongly favor deletion of borderline cases of notability versus people who favor inclusion on the basis that eventually a good article will be made out of the information. These are called, shockingly, "deletionists" and "inclusionists."
A deletionist would look at all the information on random games only a dozen people have ever heard of and see a number of potential Articles for Deletion nominations. An inclusionist would see them and then let them be, figuring that eventually someone will make them into worthwhile articles. Deletionists get quite upset over things they term "fancruft": the hundreds of articles on obscure points in the Pokemon universe, for instance. Lots of time is spent arguing over what to do with all this information--some of it gets deleted, and some of it gets merged with other articles, and some of it gets kept. But you're right, there are very few truly objective measures of notability.
You're right, every idea does need a place to flourish, and a wiki is a good place for this to happen. Just not Wikipedia. Wikipedia doesn't allow non-notable or original research topics. Wikipedia is not a place for growing ideas. It's where established ideas and dead ideas go to be vandalized and revert-warred over.
Well, you clearly have a different standard of notability than mainstream Wikipedians. Although Wikipedia is far more inclusive than a paper encyclopedia, they are not indiscriminate in what they will take. While Wikipedia is not paper, it's also not a place for a person's original research, nor is it an information dump.
If someone publishes a vanity book on their own personal theory which no one in their field has read, criticized, cited, expanded upon, analyzed, etc., it's flat-out not notable. It's doubly not appropriate for the author of said theory to use Wikipedia as a means of self promotion.
Finally, simply because something exists in the world does not mean that Wikipedia ought to have an article devoted to it. No one thinks that there should be a Wikipedia article for every dime-store romance novel ever published, and rightly so--the overwhelming majority are not notable. Neither is this crank's theory.
Wikipedia admins are able to view deleted edits and deleted articles. General users cannot, however. As a rule, very few things ever completely disappear from Wikipedia--someone, at some rank, can access past and deleted versions.
The vast bulk of the page was written by User:ABenis. You can still view that user's contributions here.
The article was deleted. Wikipedia admins can still view it, but general users will no longer have access. Not really all that interesting an article anyway.