That sounds like the worst possible solution, because then you'd have Firefox working differently on different platforms. I sure don't want to go back to the Bad Old Days where FF on Linux couldn't view the same media as FF on Windows.
By that argument, drinking and driving doesn't impact you either; only drinking and crashing into you does. A drunk driver who drives home without crashing harms nobody.
It's true that many beer-drinkers will not impact you, because they end up not doing anything that will harm you (e.g. punch you while drunk, urinate on your doorstep, get into a car accident). But many drunk drivers don't, either. The only difference seems to be the likelihood: DUI has a higher rate of harming innocent other parties than merely drinking does. But both have innocent-party-harm rates above 0% and below 100%. What's your cutoff?
The bigger plus is that most of these chemicals are absorbed by the user, rather than dispersed second-hand.
That seems like it'd further reduce the argument for banning them. That people can ingest things harmful to themselves is hardly unusual or worth the government's time to stop.
Building codes are often standardized because being standardized is itself a safety benefit. If the wiring is using Standard X, the government knows that standard was vetted, its building inspectors know what that standard is supposed to require and know how to look for common failures to meet it, there is a lot of testing of best practices, etc.
But here we're talking about an efficiency measure, not a safety one, and it's not clear to me that there's any inherent value in standardization, unless it somehow serves as a means to an end of greater efficiency. With environmental things in particular, mandating specific technologies has very high risks of regulatory capture, where the mandate is used to push well-connected products and sectors, even if they don't make any sense by any objective measures (see: "clean coal", ethanol).
I don't think it's that linear. If you hassle them more about their Tetris-playing, it may cut into how much they like their job / your workplace, which may lead to exploring other options, and/or being more aggressive about looking for raises. When you squeeze your resources, they often get more expensive...
The LoC isn't archiving URL shortener targets (yet, anyway), but the Internet Archive is on it, which at least ups the likelihood that some future researcher will be able to decode what those links pointed to.
I suspect a lot of the interesting information is in the aggregate anyway, not individual tweets: things like trends, analysis of subgroups, linguistic analysis, etc.
Yeah, I don't really disagree (it's hard to, really) with "Soviet forced collectivization was a mess". But it doesn't answer: why was their agricultural/bio research full of nutty stuff like Lysenkoism, while their physics/math/etc. research is pretty universally considered top-notch? It can't be something simple like "Communism is good for science" or "Communism is bad for science". It could, of course, just be luck of the draw; maybe agricultural research got unlucky with their early prominent scientists who set the tone (Lysenko), while their physics and math institutes got lucky and got good people. But I'm not sure.
Has anyone written about why agriculture was so different from other areas? It seems like an interesting thing to investigate. Was it just because Lysenko was personally powerful? Or because it didn't lend itself to solid, hard-to-fudge experimentation as easily? Or did similar things happen in other areas? My impression is that in physics, math, astronomy, and chemistry, Soviet research was considered top-notch, even by the west.
Yeah, it's interesting how much that's true even in the mainly capitalist US. The most significant private-sector research was at quasi-governmental regulated monopolies, like the heydey of Bell Labs. Most research these days ends up being funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, or similar government body. Certainly most fundamental research is: I don't know of any significant physics research that's come out of the private sector since the Bell Labs days.
People keep funding them though, because sometimes it works. See: Google and Facebook, both of which built very popular, money-losing free services, subsequently slapped ads on them, and are now raking in billions.
That seems true from observation of their actions, but I can't imagine the business case really lines up with it. From everything I can discern, Photoshop and Illustrator are still by far their cash cows. Their ownership of PDF helps them sell some PDF authoring tools, but it's not the revenue stream that Photoshop is.
Yeah, I agree. To me, it's somewhat like roads. The government owns one set of roads everyone can use, and in return you get a bunch more competition at the higher level on top of those roads. I'm not unsympathetic to libertarian arguments that competition can improve things, but to me the idea of multiple competing private road networks sounds likely to make things worse rather than better: imagine if, say, FedEx owned an extensive network of roads that competitors weren't allowed to use.
How would you argue the free-market approach to cable television should work? Should cities let anyone dig up the road whenever they want, even if 10 companies are doing it constantly? Should they let nobody dig up the roads, and force cable companies to piece together rights of way by individually negotiating with private landowners, even though it's nearly impossible to actually piece together rights of way in that manner? Should they pick some arbitrary number, like top 3 bidders get to dig up roads? Should the city bury its own lines and sell access to multiple ISPs? I'm not quite sure what the most free-market approach is for something like that, which has physical constraints on getting to the market.
For some time I've been saying it would be best if Wikipedia could connect relatively seamlessly with specialised wikis where each local or narrow community could manage their own authentication process.
This sort of happens. Different areas have different groups of active editors who tend to be the main participants in discussions, and different norms end up prevailing. Some of them are even codified, so e.g. academics and fiction have their own separate notability policies. It happens even more as areas get more specialized--- if some article appears to be on a technical subject in chemistry, there will be fairly large deference to opinions of Wikipedians who happen to be chemists.
That's not really true. I've personally written articles on obscure German politicians, for example, and gotten no pushback at all. If you write a decent stub, and include a few citations to reputable sources, nobody will even blink at it. The citations don't even have to be in English--- a cite to some mainstream German newspapers, or to the Neue Deutsche Biographie, is plenty.
If these people really are notable, even in a niche, and there are decent references to cite for their articles, Wikipedia will eventually create articles for them.
There are ways to keep a specialist encyclopedia ahead of Wikipedia's coverage of that specialty, but they usually involve having a lot of expert authors, and/or decades of previous work that's hard to replicate. For example, Wikipedia's coverage of classical Greek and Rome isn't as good as one of the massive multi-volume encyclopedia sets on the same subject, like the German-language Pauly-Wissowa. Are Australian tech personalities really a similar case?
Another way, of course, is to genuinely cover articles Wikipedia doesn't want. Maybe if they get into a lot of detail, a separate article for every product any company has ever produced, that will be possible. But is that enough of a niche?
At least with the official Sun JRE, it never affected 64-bit Linux, because they don't support Java Web Start on the 64-bit distribution. (The 64-bit Linux OpenJDK does support JWS, though.)
Does it actually make a difference long-term? I suppose ad metrics might be bad enough that it does, but it seems that in principle it shouldn't. If a site gets 2x as many ad loads, but half of those are fake, non-displayed ad loads, shouldn't the advertisers see that the conversion rate takes a 50% nosedive, and then drop by 50% the CPM they're willing to pay? So the site ends up in the same place; twice the ad views for half the revenue per ad view.
(It's of course possible that rates are too sticky for that to actually happen, and/or advertisers don't have good enough info to notice those changes.)
In particular, it's a latency problem for how fast pages render, even if you're not worried about the bandwidth. Slow 3rd-party advertisement and analytics servers still hold up the whole parade with Chrome adblockers: the adblock will run after you've sat around waiting on all that junk to resolve and load. With FF AdBlock's approach, if you block those 3rd-party domains, they get chopped out before the browser even bothers to resolve their DNS.
Slashdot Mirror
That sounds like the worst possible solution, because then you'd have Firefox working differently on different platforms. I sure don't want to go back to the Bad Old Days where FF on Linux couldn't view the same media as FF on Windows.
I regret to inform you that your Slashdot post, registered as #31869390, is illegal textual pornography.
These one-to-four-day game-making events are usually called "game jams". I believe the idea originates with Chris Hecker circa 2002.
Not that it won't be cool to see what Sid Meier makes, but the idea of a 48-hour video game isn't some insane thing nobody's tried before!
By that argument, drinking and driving doesn't impact you either; only drinking and crashing into you does. A drunk driver who drives home without crashing harms nobody.
It's true that many beer-drinkers will not impact you, because they end up not doing anything that will harm you (e.g. punch you while drunk, urinate on your doorstep, get into a car accident). But many drunk drivers don't, either. The only difference seems to be the likelihood: DUI has a higher rate of harming innocent other parties than merely drinking does. But both have innocent-party-harm rates above 0% and below 100%. What's your cutoff?
Given the high rate of "2nd-hand drinking" injuries, via violent drunks and drunk driving, I'd say this is false.
That seems like it'd further reduce the argument for banning them. That people can ingest things harmful to themselves is hardly unusual or worth the government's time to stop.
Building codes are often standardized because being standardized is itself a safety benefit. If the wiring is using Standard X, the government knows that standard was vetted, its building inspectors know what that standard is supposed to require and know how to look for common failures to meet it, there is a lot of testing of best practices, etc.
But here we're talking about an efficiency measure, not a safety one, and it's not clear to me that there's any inherent value in standardization, unless it somehow serves as a means to an end of greater efficiency. With environmental things in particular, mandating specific technologies has very high risks of regulatory capture, where the mandate is used to push well-connected products and sectors, even if they don't make any sense by any objective measures (see: "clean coal", ethanol).
I don't think it's that linear. If you hassle them more about their Tetris-playing, it may cut into how much they like their job / your workplace, which may lead to exploring other options, and/or being more aggressive about looking for raises. When you squeeze your resources, they often get more expensive...
The LoC isn't archiving URL shortener targets (yet, anyway), but the Internet Archive is on it, which at least ups the likelihood that some future researcher will be able to decode what those links pointed to.
I suspect a lot of the interesting information is in the aggregate anyway, not individual tweets: things like trends, analysis of subgroups, linguistic analysis, etc.
Yeah, I don't really disagree (it's hard to, really) with "Soviet forced collectivization was a mess". But it doesn't answer: why was their agricultural/bio research full of nutty stuff like Lysenkoism, while their physics/math/etc. research is pretty universally considered top-notch? It can't be something simple like "Communism is good for science" or "Communism is bad for science". It could, of course, just be luck of the draw; maybe agricultural research got unlucky with their early prominent scientists who set the tone (Lysenko), while their physics and math institutes got lucky and got good people. But I'm not sure.
They're that upset about their PageRank, eh?
Has anyone written about why agriculture was so different from other areas? It seems like an interesting thing to investigate. Was it just because Lysenko was personally powerful? Or because it didn't lend itself to solid, hard-to-fudge experimentation as easily? Or did similar things happen in other areas? My impression is that in physics, math, astronomy, and chemistry, Soviet research was considered top-notch, even by the west.
Yeah, it's interesting how much that's true even in the mainly capitalist US. The most significant private-sector research was at quasi-governmental regulated monopolies, like the heydey of Bell Labs. Most research these days ends up being funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, or similar government body. Certainly most fundamental research is: I don't know of any significant physics research that's come out of the private sector since the Bell Labs days.
Well, not plural billions yet, but estimates of 2010 revenues seem to be a bit over $1b.
People keep funding them though, because sometimes it works. See: Google and Facebook, both of which built very popular, money-losing free services, subsequently slapped ads on them, and are now raking in billions.
That seems true from observation of their actions, but I can't imagine the business case really lines up with it. From everything I can discern, Photoshop and Illustrator are still by far their cash cows. Their ownership of PDF helps them sell some PDF authoring tools, but it's not the revenue stream that Photoshop is.
Yeah, I agree. To me, it's somewhat like roads. The government owns one set of roads everyone can use, and in return you get a bunch more competition at the higher level on top of those roads. I'm not unsympathetic to libertarian arguments that competition can improve things, but to me the idea of multiple competing private road networks sounds likely to make things worse rather than better: imagine if, say, FedEx owned an extensive network of roads that competitors weren't allowed to use.
How would you argue the free-market approach to cable television should work? Should cities let anyone dig up the road whenever they want, even if 10 companies are doing it constantly? Should they let nobody dig up the roads, and force cable companies to piece together rights of way by individually negotiating with private landowners, even though it's nearly impossible to actually piece together rights of way in that manner? Should they pick some arbitrary number, like top 3 bidders get to dig up roads? Should the city bury its own lines and sell access to multiple ISPs? I'm not quite sure what the most free-market approach is for something like that, which has physical constraints on getting to the market.
This sort of happens. Different areas have different groups of active editors who tend to be the main participants in discussions, and different norms end up prevailing. Some of them are even codified, so e.g. academics and fiction have their own separate notability policies. It happens even more as areas get more specialized--- if some article appears to be on a technical subject in chemistry, there will be fairly large deference to opinions of Wikipedians who happen to be chemists.
That's not really true. I've personally written articles on obscure German politicians, for example, and gotten no pushback at all. If you write a decent stub, and include a few citations to reputable sources, nobody will even blink at it. The citations don't even have to be in English--- a cite to some mainstream German newspapers, or to the Neue Deutsche Biographie, is plenty.
If these people really are notable, even in a niche, and there are decent references to cite for their articles, Wikipedia will eventually create articles for them.
There are ways to keep a specialist encyclopedia ahead of Wikipedia's coverage of that specialty, but they usually involve having a lot of expert authors, and/or decades of previous work that's hard to replicate. For example, Wikipedia's coverage of classical Greek and Rome isn't as good as one of the massive multi-volume encyclopedia sets on the same subject, like the German-language Pauly-Wissowa. Are Australian tech personalities really a similar case?
Another way, of course, is to genuinely cover articles Wikipedia doesn't want. Maybe if they get into a lot of detail, a separate article for every product any company has ever produced, that will be possible. But is that enough of a niche?
At least with the official Sun JRE, it never affected 64-bit Linux, because they don't support Java Web Start on the 64-bit distribution. (The 64-bit Linux OpenJDK does support JWS, though.)
Does it actually make a difference long-term? I suppose ad metrics might be bad enough that it does, but it seems that in principle it shouldn't. If a site gets 2x as many ad loads, but half of those are fake, non-displayed ad loads, shouldn't the advertisers see that the conversion rate takes a 50% nosedive, and then drop by 50% the CPM they're willing to pay? So the site ends up in the same place; twice the ad views for half the revenue per ad view.
(It's of course possible that rates are too sticky for that to actually happen, and/or advertisers don't have good enough info to notice those changes.)
In particular, it's a latency problem for how fast pages render, even if you're not worried about the bandwidth. Slow 3rd-party advertisement and analytics servers still hold up the whole parade with Chrome adblockers: the adblock will run after you've sat around waiting on all that junk to resolve and load. With FF AdBlock's approach, if you block those 3rd-party domains, they get chopped out before the browser even bothers to resolve their DNS.