Libby's never even been accused, let alone convicted, of leaking Valerie Plame's identity. He was accused of obstructing the investigation into that leak, but not accused of the leak itself. It later emerged that Richard Armitage leaked the name accidentally, but he isn't being charged with a crime and it's unclear he would be convicted if he were.
Back in the Bad Old Days where you could only buy things from your local store, you could only really buy the things that were most popular in your local community, because that's all that was on the shelves. I don't want to have my book reading or music listening limited by the small selection a local book or record store feels like carrying, to take just one example.
The Pontians wanted their homeland too, but eventually people decided going on fighting and killing people forever wasn't worth it. If the Palestinians want to keep fighting forever for their irredentist dream I suppose that's a position they can hold, but I think it's an immoral one.
I've never met a single serious mathematician who used anything but hand-coded LaTeX, and few (no?) mathematics journals even accept MS Word submissions. It's also still the dominant way of writing CS articles, with the exception of some of the more social-sciencey branches of CS (e.g. HCI), which prefer MS Word.
My family is Pontian Greek, from what used to be a Greek area on the Black Sea, and is now northeastern Turkey (near Trabzon, if you care). My grandfather was a refugee from that area. Was he still living in a refugee camp 50 years later? No, he was given Greek citizenship and taken in, learned standard Greek (he spoke Pontian Greek before, a non-mutually-intelligible dialect), and is now basically a Greek of Pontian descent. Why? Because the citizens of Greece saw it as a moral obligation to take in the refugees, rather than to keep them in camps as a way to maintain irredentist sentiment.
Have the neighboring Arabs treated their Arab brethren nearly as nicely? It appears not, despite the fact that, unlike the case with the Pontians as compared to the Greeks, they even speak the same, mutually intelligible language.
Yeah, I can see why the Arabs want Jerusalem back; my family would be happy to have Trabzon back, not to mention Constantinople. And I'd like there to be a separate Pontian identity and community, with its own language and homeland. But is that worth keeping people in camps for years, prohibiting them from integrating and getting on with their lives, and stoking nationalist sentiment, terrorism, and wars without end? I don't think it is.
I mean, if what you want is someone with advanced training in statistics, then a guy who knows some Perl isn't going to cut it. So how are people who don't have the relevant profile useful in filling the jobs?
Microsoft is constantly snooping around my CS graduate program trying to lure people there, either leaving early with a masters to take the cash, or for a job immediately upon graduation at MS Research. They seem paranoid that Google is going to get all the good talent, and are willing to pay a very nice premium to hire people away from both Google and academia.
But as someone deeply involved in it, I'd say at least 75% of public academic articles fit into the "runaway bullshit" category. Granted, it's much worse in some fields than others.
My point is that on Wikipedia, nobody gives a damn if you have credentials or not. That's why Sanger forked his project in the first place. Ergo, the damage of faking credentials is fairly minimal, because unlike at Citizendium, at Wikipedia they don't give you any authority in the first place. Hell, I scrutinize people with credentials in my area of expertise twice as much as I scrutinize the contributions of random amateurs, because it's the guys with PhDs who are more likely to make biased edits to push their view of how the field ought to be (as opposed to non-experts, who are more likely to make uninformed---but not malicious---edits).
The claim was that this sort of gross error in reliability on Wikipedia's part sounds its death-knell, and I would argue that if true, that the similar gross error in reliability on The New Yorker's part does similarly---retracting an incorrect article after the fact is just as "reliable" as fixing an incorrect Wikipedia article after the fact is.
In fact that was one of Larry Sanger's main complaints leading him to start Citizendium: that Wikipedians don't generally let people wave around credentials and end discussions thereby. People presenting expert credentials also get subject to scrutiny, sometimes to more scrutiny just on principle.
So now apparently Wikipedia is unreliable because it: 1) defers too much to experts; and also 2) doesn't defer enough to experts.
If Wikipedia getting duped, and as a result having inaccurate content it has to retract, is a "death-knell" for Wikipedia, then wouldn't The New Yorker getting duped, and as a result having inaccurate content it has to retract, also be a "death-knell" for The New Yorker? Here's a professional organization, with paid staff to check these things, and their article still got it every bit as wrong as Wikipedia did.
Wikipedia today is as accurate or inaccurate as it was two weeks ago. If it was appropriate to use two weeks ago, it's still appropriate now, and likewise in the negative case.
In any case, I'm in academia myself, and plenty of people here use it. You just have to, like any other source, use it appropriately. I wouldn't cite Wikipedia as an authoritative source for scientific facts, but then I wouldn't cite Britannica as an authoritative source for scientific facts, either. What I (and most people I know) mainly use it for is exploratory research---getting an idea of what's out there on a topic, how it relates, where to look for more information, etc..
Maybe we can't get it on Wikipedia, but at least here on Slashdot we can get neutral-point-of-view commentary from well-credentialed, unbiased parties!
Denmark, Spain, and Norway have broadly similar arrangements, in which the monarch has fairly extensive reserve powers which they by custom only exercise on the advice of the elected government. Spain's are the most extensive, perhaps because it's the most recent of the transitions to democratic rule, but Denmark and Norway also officially give the monarch veto power.
Most monarchies are de facto democratic, but not de jure such. The UK, for example, runs as a democracy on a day to day basis, but officially the Queen has fairly extensive powers she can exercise as her personal prerogative, which she by custom exercises only on the advice of Her Majesty's Government. Thus the Queen acts as the figurehead carrying out decisions made democratically... but this is entirely a conventional arrangement. If the Queen refused to follow her Government's advice on a particular subject for which Parliament has not been given (by a previous Monarch) binding authority, then there is nothing within the legal order that can be done about it, especially since Parliament is not even permitted to debate a measure to remove any of the Monarch's reserve powers without the Monarch's assenting to such debate. Of course, this would provoke a constitutional crisis.
Whether that counts as a "democracy" depends on whether you define democracy mainly by the constitutional order that ultimately holds de jure authority, or by the de facto manner in which events normally play out.
As someone in AI research myself, I'd say the more common reasons are:
1. The code is in a horrible hacked-together state and so not really fit for release, and nobody wants to put in the effort that would be needed to clean it up; or
2. The researchers don't want to release their code because keeping it secret creates a "research moat" that guarantees that they'll get to publish all the follow-up papers themselves, since anyone else who wanted to extend the work would have to first invest the time to reimplement it from scratch (this is more common in implementation-intensive areas like graphics)
This is the first conviction under the act, and who did it convict? Someone who was already guilty of a bunch of other more serious crimes, so the CAN-SPAM conviction isn't particularly useful. Now if it ever gets someone who is guilty only of violating CAN-SPAM, then it might be doing something.
An old estimate system found that it was slightly warmer than 1998, but a newer estimate system, currently undergoing testing, finds that 1998 was slightly warmer. See this NCDC discussion.
In any case, average temperature for a single year doesn't prove anything, and it's not the sort of thing that scientists rely on. If we relied on single years, then we would've concluded that there was significant global cooling between the 1930s and the 1980s, because 1934 was warmer than any of the years of the 1980s.
I know people desperately hate the idea of analyzing data to separate trends from random fluctuations, but that's what scientists actually do. The pop-science version where you say "oh it was warm this winter---must be global warming!" is not science.
Not all units of energy are as good as each other. Oil is particularly useful because it's dense energy and easily portable. If we can use energy that doesn't have those properties, especially renewable energy, to get the same amount (or even less!) worth of oil energy, it'd be a net gain. For example, if we can use one barrel's worth of solar electricity to produce a barrel of oil, that'd be great, because all we'd be "using up" in the production process is an infinitely renewable resource.
The purpose of free software is to permit anyone to modify it and redistribute their modified versions. The Mozilla Corporation is essentially trying to use their trademark to strongarm people into treating Firefox as proprietary software, in which you may not distribute modified versions without permission of the owner. Debian wisely refused to agree to such a restriction, and insists on distributing it as free software that they are free to change as they see fit.
Now whether any particular changes are good or not is something we can have a technical argument over, but the fundamental issues---that downstream distributors should have the right to modify free software and redistribute their modified versions---is so central to free software that the concept makes no sense without it.
If Hans Reiser wasn't the author of a somewhat well known filesystem, but instead some other random guy who was uninvolved in free software, his being arrested wouldn't be on Slashdot in the first place.
You wrote articles and posted them to third-party websites, which you didn't even really come back and discuss (you're notably absent from the kuro5hin comments). You didn't attempt to actually propose anything *to* the Wikipedia community, and most certainly not anything concrete and implementable. You basically consider yourself some sort of elite who is too important to discuss things with the plebians, which is why nobody took you seriously then, and why your project isn't going to get anybody editing it now.
Hint: Many of us plebians have are experts in our fields too (even with PhDs!). You're not somehow unique in that respect.
Slashdot Mirror
Libby's never even been accused, let alone convicted, of leaking Valerie Plame's identity. He was accused of obstructing the investigation into that leak, but not accused of the leak itself. It later emerged that Richard Armitage leaked the name accidentally, but he isn't being charged with a crime and it's unclear he would be convicted if he were.
Ron Paul is against this tax because Ron Paul is against any tax.
Back in the Bad Old Days where you could only buy things from your local store, you could only really buy the things that were most popular in your local community, because that's all that was on the shelves. I don't want to have my book reading or music listening limited by the small selection a local book or record store feels like carrying, to take just one example.
The Pontians wanted their homeland too, but eventually people decided going on fighting and killing people forever wasn't worth it. If the Palestinians want to keep fighting forever for their irredentist dream I suppose that's a position they can hold, but I think it's an immoral one.
I've never met a single serious mathematician who used anything but hand-coded LaTeX, and few (no?) mathematics journals even accept MS Word submissions. It's also still the dominant way of writing CS articles, with the exception of some of the more social-sciencey branches of CS (e.g. HCI), which prefer MS Word.
My family is Pontian Greek, from what used to be a Greek area on the Black Sea, and is now northeastern Turkey (near Trabzon, if you care). My grandfather was a refugee from that area. Was he still living in a refugee camp 50 years later? No, he was given Greek citizenship and taken in, learned standard Greek (he spoke Pontian Greek before, a non-mutually-intelligible dialect), and is now basically a Greek of Pontian descent. Why? Because the citizens of Greece saw it as a moral obligation to take in the refugees, rather than to keep them in camps as a way to maintain irredentist sentiment.
Have the neighboring Arabs treated their Arab brethren nearly as nicely? It appears not, despite the fact that, unlike the case with the Pontians as compared to the Greeks, they even speak the same, mutually intelligible language.
Yeah, I can see why the Arabs want Jerusalem back; my family would be happy to have Trabzon back, not to mention Constantinople. And I'd like there to be a separate Pontian identity and community, with its own language and homeland. But is that worth keeping people in camps for years, prohibiting them from integrating and getting on with their lives, and stoking nationalist sentiment, terrorism, and wars without end? I don't think it is.
I mean, if what you want is someone with advanced training in statistics, then a guy who knows some Perl isn't going to cut it. So how are people who don't have the relevant profile useful in filling the jobs?
Microsoft is constantly snooping around my CS graduate program trying to lure people there, either leaving early with a masters to take the cash, or for a job immediately upon graduation at MS Research. They seem paranoid that Google is going to get all the good talent, and are willing to pay a very nice premium to hire people away from both Google and academia.
But as someone deeply involved in it, I'd say at least 75% of public academic articles fit into the "runaway bullshit" category. Granted, it's much worse in some fields than others.
My point is that on Wikipedia, nobody gives a damn if you have credentials or not. That's why Sanger forked his project in the first place. Ergo, the damage of faking credentials is fairly minimal, because unlike at Citizendium, at Wikipedia they don't give you any authority in the first place. Hell, I scrutinize people with credentials in my area of expertise twice as much as I scrutinize the contributions of random amateurs, because it's the guys with PhDs who are more likely to make biased edits to push their view of how the field ought to be (as opposed to non-experts, who are more likely to make uninformed---but not malicious---edits).
The claim was that this sort of gross error in reliability on Wikipedia's part sounds its death-knell, and I would argue that if true, that the similar gross error in reliability on The New Yorker's part does similarly---retracting an incorrect article after the fact is just as "reliable" as fixing an incorrect Wikipedia article after the fact is.
In fact that was one of Larry Sanger's main complaints leading him to start Citizendium: that Wikipedians don't generally let people wave around credentials and end discussions thereby. People presenting expert credentials also get subject to scrutiny, sometimes to more scrutiny just on principle.
So now apparently Wikipedia is unreliable because it: 1) defers too much to experts; and also 2) doesn't defer enough to experts.
If Wikipedia getting duped, and as a result having inaccurate content it has to retract, is a "death-knell" for Wikipedia, then wouldn't The New Yorker getting duped, and as a result having inaccurate content it has to retract, also be a "death-knell" for The New Yorker? Here's a professional organization, with paid staff to check these things, and their article still got it every bit as wrong as Wikipedia did.
Wikipedia today is as accurate or inaccurate as it was two weeks ago. If it was appropriate to use two weeks ago, it's still appropriate now, and likewise in the negative case.
In any case, I'm in academia myself, and plenty of people here use it. You just have to, like any other source, use it appropriately. I wouldn't cite Wikipedia as an authoritative source for scientific facts, but then I wouldn't cite Britannica as an authoritative source for scientific facts, either. What I (and most people I know) mainly use it for is exploratory research---getting an idea of what's out there on a topic, how it relates, where to look for more information, etc..
Maybe we can't get it on Wikipedia, but at least here on Slashdot we can get neutral-point-of-view commentary from well-credentialed, unbiased parties!
Denmark, Spain, and Norway have broadly similar arrangements, in which the monarch has fairly extensive reserve powers which they by custom only exercise on the advice of the elected government. Spain's are the most extensive, perhaps because it's the most recent of the transitions to democratic rule, but Denmark and Norway also officially give the monarch veto power.
Most monarchies are de facto democratic, but not de jure such. The UK, for example, runs as a democracy on a day to day basis, but officially the Queen has fairly extensive powers she can exercise as her personal prerogative, which she by custom exercises only on the advice of Her Majesty's Government. Thus the Queen acts as the figurehead carrying out decisions made democratically... but this is entirely a conventional arrangement. If the Queen refused to follow her Government's advice on a particular subject for which Parliament has not been given (by a previous Monarch) binding authority, then there is nothing within the legal order that can be done about it, especially since Parliament is not even permitted to debate a measure to remove any of the Monarch's reserve powers without the Monarch's assenting to such debate. Of course, this would provoke a constitutional crisis.
Whether that counts as a "democracy" depends on whether you define democracy mainly by the constitutional order that ultimately holds de jure authority, or by the de facto manner in which events normally play out.
As someone in AI research myself, I'd say the more common reasons are:
1. The code is in a horrible hacked-together state and so not really fit for release, and nobody wants to put in the effort that would be needed to clean it up; or
2. The researchers don't want to release their code because keeping it secret creates a "research moat" that guarantees that they'll get to publish all the follow-up papers themselves, since anyone else who wanted to extend the work would have to first invest the time to reimplement it from scratch (this is more common in implementation-intensive areas like graphics)
This is the first conviction under the act, and who did it convict? Someone who was already guilty of a bunch of other more serious crimes, so the CAN-SPAM conviction isn't particularly useful. Now if it ever gets someone who is guilty only of violating CAN-SPAM, then it might be doing something.
An old estimate system found that it was slightly warmer than 1998, but a newer estimate system, currently undergoing testing, finds that 1998 was slightly warmer. See this NCDC discussion.
In any case, average temperature for a single year doesn't prove anything, and it's not the sort of thing that scientists rely on. If we relied on single years, then we would've concluded that there was significant global cooling between the 1930s and the 1980s, because 1934 was warmer than any of the years of the 1980s.
I know people desperately hate the idea of analyzing data to separate trends from random fluctuations, but that's what scientists actually do. The pop-science version where you say "oh it was warm this winter---must be global warming!" is not science.
Being branded a traitor tends to work better as a fear-installation device if you're deathly afraid of it.
Not all units of energy are as good as each other. Oil is particularly useful because it's dense energy and easily portable. If we can use energy that doesn't have those properties, especially renewable energy, to get the same amount (or even less!) worth of oil energy, it'd be a net gain. For example, if we can use one barrel's worth of solar electricity to produce a barrel of oil, that'd be great, because all we'd be "using up" in the production process is an infinitely renewable resource.
The purpose of free software is to permit anyone to modify it and redistribute their modified versions. The Mozilla Corporation is essentially trying to use their trademark to strongarm people into treating Firefox as proprietary software, in which you may not distribute modified versions without permission of the owner. Debian wisely refused to agree to such a restriction, and insists on distributing it as free software that they are free to change as they see fit.
Now whether any particular changes are good or not is something we can have a technical argument over, but the fundamental issues---that downstream distributors should have the right to modify free software and redistribute their modified versions---is so central to free software that the concept makes no sense without it.
If Hans Reiser wasn't the author of a somewhat well known filesystem, but instead some other random guy who was uninvolved in free software, his being arrested wouldn't be on Slashdot in the first place.
You wrote articles and posted them to third-party websites, which you didn't even really come back and discuss (you're notably absent from the kuro5hin comments). You didn't attempt to actually propose anything *to* the Wikipedia community, and most certainly not anything concrete and implementable. You basically consider yourself some sort of elite who is too important to discuss things with the plebians, which is why nobody took you seriously then, and why your project isn't going to get anybody editing it now.
Hint: Many of us plebians have are experts in our fields too (even with PhDs!). You're not somehow unique in that respect.