As far as the Doctor Who episodes that have made it across the pond, the series is improving. The plots are getting more interesting and more serious, and the signal-to-fart-joke ratio has increased significantly. They still have a tendency to make the moral dilemmas somewhat sophomoric and obvious, and a lot of episodes still have that deus-ex-machina feel to them. The series appears to have weathered the quick change in Doctors, as well - I liked Chris Eccleston, but David Tennant is doing a good job as well.
I say "deus ex machina" because the Tardis and the Sonic Screwdriver have scored an awful lot of points since the new series started. Those things should have more enemies than the Doctor by now. But it's different from, say, Star Trek: Voyager, which had its share of deus ex machina moments, but which also routinely terminated each episode through the use of the Magic Reset Button.
That's where five minutes from the end of the episode, someone has an epiphany (either finally realizing what the audience has known for half an hour, or making a tremendous and impossible leap in logic), does something heroic in the space of 30 seconds, and restores everything to the way it was when the episode started. Nobody dies, nothing important happens, and you could understand the series just as well without seeing the episode.
I'm guessing that the decline in iTMS sales arises from two things: an increase in competitors and saturation of the market.
The "increase in competitors" thing is pretty easy. iTMS was the first really popular online music store, with its popularity fueled by association with the ubiquitous iPod. Now everybody and their grandmother has a legit online music store, and the competition is only going to get worse, with online stores starting to abandon DRM so that they can get their music onto the iPod as well.
The "saturation of the market" is sort of a two-pronged thing, though. Part of it is that a very large portion of the people who will become iTMS customers already are customers. The other part is that, when iTMS first started up, people had a large motivation to buy a lot of music: there was a very wide selection with easy access, representing decades' worth of music. But as time passes, more and more iTMS customers will only really be choosing from new additions to the catalog because they've already exhausted what Apple already has available. Eventually, that cash cow is going to dry up.
In other words, the past few years for Apple should be considered a gigantic bonus - one that was the result of an excellent marketing strategy by early entrants to the portable digital music market. Now, the transient is ending, and things are settling down to a more realistic level. The question now is whether Steve Jobs will realize this and move on to the Next Big Thing or not.
More precisely, that is collecting on deferred benefits they contracted for in return for their work long ago. It is a straight forward exchange of benefits for work.
Not really, because it's unknown how long these folks will be collecting those benefits. Life expectancy has improved and medical care has gotten much more expensive since they were employed.
Couldn't the same effect be achieved if nobody actually exceeded the speed limit, as long as there were some people driving slower than most other drivers?
I'm not sure I agree with that assessment. The quality of work has probably increased as a result of copyright (okay, if you ignore the past ten years' worth of music...), so there's likely some minimum copyright term needed to maintain that level of creative motivation, beyond which the important motivating factor is protecting the credit given to the original author.
However, I do agree that copyright terms have been severely extended beyond that minimum (anything beyond the life of the creator comes to mind). In fact, copyright terms are so long now that creative efforts are hindered, by blocking the creativity of people who want to make derivative works or even protect the public existence of original works.
It's different in at least one notable way, namely that the DMCA Safe Harbor provision acts in favor of the technology innovator (MySpace) this time around.
If you think that the deletion policy over a particular field of articles has been handled poorly, you can always propose a new guideline for handling articles in that field. Rather than monitoring every single article on a continual basis, let the policy do the work.
If you live in the city - and by city, I mean a place where there are tons and tons of on- and off-ramps with very short merge sections - the middle lane is the safest place to be if you're not going particularly fast. It frees up the right lane (US) for people who need access either to exit or to merge, and it leaves the left lane available for people going faster than you.
The problem isn't the people driving in the middle lane. It's the people who decide to pass those people on the right (interfering with merging traffic) instead of the left (where they're supposed to). It's also the people who wait until the last second to switch lanes to get where they need to go.
If you're an Ottawanian (?) and want to go to the library to research an article in a reputable source of information like the local newspaper, more power to you. Just remember to cite the source so that someone else can go verify it if they want. There are numerous articles on Wikipedia whose sources are not online.
Interviewing the subject of an article would not be sufficient to be considered verifiable, unless you got your interview published in a reputable external source. There's a rule against putting original research on Wikipedia - you have to get your research published in a reputable source first, and then you can put that on Wikipedia.
How do we know whether the material in the "Megatronic Flying Squid Faces from Hell" article is true, or whether the band even exists? Once you've removed all the unverifiable stuff, there would be no article left, and that's why such articles get deleted.
There are other policies that distinguish topics whose non-notability is evident by their non-verifiability from those whose non-notability is simply because there are better ways to present information. For example, Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information. Sure, 923049123581435834435803984 may be an integer, but that information is already conveyed on the page for integer by definition. In fact, many integers do have their own articles, in particular those with unusual properties that aren't covered elsewhere.
The point is that the type of article whose notability almost always comes into dispute (ending up on Articles for Deletion) becomes disputed because there is no way to verify the material in the article. The other articles you're talking about usually end up merged into other articles by a very obvious consensus of the people interested in commenting in the deletion discussion.
In other words, if a lie falls in the forest, will anybody catch it?
You wouldn't expect that from an encyclopedia, would you? I mean, somewhere hidden in that shelf full of dusty volumes might be an article about some Britannica editor's cat. And while you may not care about the cat - and might not ever see that article - you still expect everything in that encyclopedia to be true, whether you can personally verify it or not.
Well, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia also. By its wiki nature, the truthfulness (truthiness?) of it is in constant flux, but part of the goal of the project is that everything in Wikipedia must be true. Just because that goal is unlikely ever to be completed (because of constant poor edits, the ever-marching progress of time, etc.) doesn't mean that Wikipedia should just say "screw it" and let people put up whatever crap they want to.
There are other rules on Wikipedia that are somewhat related, such as neutral point of view, no original research, and the "What Wikipedia is Not" page. These rules almost always have their roots in encouraging the verifiability of information posted to articles, and verifiability has its roots in attempting to encyclopedize just the facts (ma'am).
With notability comes verifiability. If I submit a Wikipedia article about my cat, filled with adorable pictures and tales of the cat's day-by-day exploits, it may fit into the "room for everything" model that some snubbed band members might believe is right, but who's to say that all that drivel about my cat isn't just a bunch of lies? But if it turns out that I'm the President of the United States, then my cat becomes notable, because there are undoubtedly numerous verifiable news reports from reputable agencies detailing various events in the life of my cat.
It amuses me that most of the people complaining about the "notability" requirement are the same people whose vanity-based Wikipedia articles were seen for what they are - self-aggrandizement - and subsequently removed.
This modem is advertised as having a range of 20 miles at 1 watt (though obviously that's on a really, really good day). It's being used with an autopilot produced by these folks.
There is apparently no restriction on autonomy, according to the FAA, but a craft being flown as a civil aircraft (rather than as a hobbyist model airplane - there are restrictions differentiating the two, but I was unable to locate them on the FAA's site) requires an experimental certificate if it's unmanned, regardless of whether or not it's autonomous, and the FAA is limiting issuance of those certificates for the time being.
and frankly, it seems the police can't be trusted with tasers
How many abuse incidents were there in the more than 70,000 times that tasers have been used by police? Instead of making overbroad generalizations, you should realize that tasers (and other weapons like bean bag shotgun rounds, pepper spray, and hopefully the microwave pain ray that the military's been working on) are an effective way of apprehending criminals and protecting the public without causing lasting, disfiguring injury or death in all but the most exceptional of cases. Yes, they can be abused, but so can a firearm or a broomstick.
Slashdot Mirror
As far as the Doctor Who episodes that have made it across the pond, the series is improving. The plots are getting more interesting and more serious, and the signal-to-fart-joke ratio has increased significantly. They still have a tendency to make the moral dilemmas somewhat sophomoric and obvious, and a lot of episodes still have that deus-ex-machina feel to them. The series appears to have weathered the quick change in Doctors, as well - I liked Chris Eccleston, but David Tennant is doing a good job as well.
I say "deus ex machina" because the Tardis and the Sonic Screwdriver have scored an awful lot of points since the new series started. Those things should have more enemies than the Doctor by now. But it's different from, say, Star Trek: Voyager, which had its share of deus ex machina moments, but which also routinely terminated each episode through the use of the Magic Reset Button.
That's where five minutes from the end of the episode, someone has an epiphany (either finally realizing what the audience has known for half an hour, or making a tremendous and impossible leap in logic), does something heroic in the space of 30 seconds, and restores everything to the way it was when the episode started. Nobody dies, nothing important happens, and you could understand the series just as well without seeing the episode.
That would be the Higgs boson. And we're almost there.
As a result there may be some difficulty in following the motivations for characters or the reasons for crucial events.
I've always wondered why those red shirts kept going on away missions voluntarily. I guess now we'll never know.
I'm guessing that the decline in iTMS sales arises from two things: an increase in competitors and saturation of the market.
The "increase in competitors" thing is pretty easy. iTMS was the first really popular online music store, with its popularity fueled by association with the ubiquitous iPod. Now everybody and their grandmother has a legit online music store, and the competition is only going to get worse, with online stores starting to abandon DRM so that they can get their music onto the iPod as well.
The "saturation of the market" is sort of a two-pronged thing, though. Part of it is that a very large portion of the people who will become iTMS customers already are customers. The other part is that, when iTMS first started up, people had a large motivation to buy a lot of music: there was a very wide selection with easy access, representing decades' worth of music. But as time passes, more and more iTMS customers will only really be choosing from new additions to the catalog because they've already exhausted what Apple already has available. Eventually, that cash cow is going to dry up.
In other words, the past few years for Apple should be considered a gigantic bonus - one that was the result of an excellent marketing strategy by early entrants to the portable digital music market. Now, the transient is ending, and things are settling down to a more realistic level. The question now is whether Steve Jobs will realize this and move on to the Next Big Thing or not.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrage
More precisely, that is collecting on deferred benefits they contracted for in return for their work long ago. It is a straight forward exchange of benefits for work.
Not really, because it's unknown how long these folks will be collecting those benefits. Life expectancy has improved and medical care has gotten much more expensive since they were employed.
Couldn't the same effect be achieved if nobody actually exceeded the speed limit, as long as there were some people driving slower than most other drivers?
I had no idea that Joe Pesci was a Slashdotter, until now.
Backing up your entire hard drive on one disc, maybe. It takes a lot of 4.7 GB DVDs to back up even an inexpensive hard drive nowadays.
I'm not sure I agree with that assessment. The quality of work has probably increased as a result of copyright (okay, if you ignore the past ten years' worth of music...), so there's likely some minimum copyright term needed to maintain that level of creative motivation, beyond which the important motivating factor is protecting the credit given to the original author.
However, I do agree that copyright terms have been severely extended beyond that minimum (anything beyond the life of the creator comes to mind). In fact, copyright terms are so long now that creative efforts are hindered, by blocking the creativity of people who want to make derivative works or even protect the public existence of original works.
were deemed so useless when first conceived that they were called imaginary numbers
Those of us with an electrical engineering background prefer to call them jmaginary.
It's different in at least one notable way, namely that the DMCA Safe Harbor provision acts in favor of the technology innovator (MySpace) this time around.
One and a half cheers for the DMCA!
If you think that the deletion policy over a particular field of articles has been handled poorly, you can always propose a new guideline for handling articles in that field. Rather than monitoring every single article on a continual basis, let the policy do the work.
If you live in the city - and by city, I mean a place where there are tons and tons of on- and off-ramps with very short merge sections - the middle lane is the safest place to be if you're not going particularly fast. It frees up the right lane (US) for people who need access either to exit or to merge, and it leaves the left lane available for people going faster than you.
The problem isn't the people driving in the middle lane. It's the people who decide to pass those people on the right (interfering with merging traffic) instead of the left (where they're supposed to). It's also the people who wait until the last second to switch lanes to get where they need to go.
If you're an Ottawanian (?) and want to go to the library to research an article in a reputable source of information like the local newspaper, more power to you. Just remember to cite the source so that someone else can go verify it if they want. There are numerous articles on Wikipedia whose sources are not online.
Interviewing the subject of an article would not be sufficient to be considered verifiable, unless you got your interview published in a reputable external source. There's a rule against putting original research on Wikipedia - you have to get your research published in a reputable source first, and then you can put that on Wikipedia.
How do we know whether the material in the "Megatronic Flying Squid Faces from Hell" article is true, or whether the band even exists? Once you've removed all the unverifiable stuff, there would be no article left, and that's why such articles get deleted.
There are other policies that distinguish topics whose non-notability is evident by their non-verifiability from those whose non-notability is simply because there are better ways to present information. For example, Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information. Sure, 923049123581435834435803984 may be an integer, but that information is already conveyed on the page for integer by definition. In fact, many integers do have their own articles, in particular those with unusual properties that aren't covered elsewhere.
The point is that the type of article whose notability almost always comes into dispute (ending up on Articles for Deletion) becomes disputed because there is no way to verify the material in the article. The other articles you're talking about usually end up merged into other articles by a very obvious consensus of the people interested in commenting in the deletion discussion.
In other words, if a lie falls in the forest, will anybody catch it?
You wouldn't expect that from an encyclopedia, would you? I mean, somewhere hidden in that shelf full of dusty volumes might be an article about some Britannica editor's cat. And while you may not care about the cat - and might not ever see that article - you still expect everything in that encyclopedia to be true, whether you can personally verify it or not.
Well, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia also. By its wiki nature, the truthfulness (truthiness?) of it is in constant flux, but part of the goal of the project is that everything in Wikipedia must be true. Just because that goal is unlikely ever to be completed (because of constant poor edits, the ever-marching progress of time, etc.) doesn't mean that Wikipedia should just say "screw it" and let people put up whatever crap they want to.
There are other rules on Wikipedia that are somewhat related, such as neutral point of view, no original research, and the "What Wikipedia is Not" page. These rules almost always have their roots in encouraging the verifiability of information posted to articles, and verifiability has its roots in attempting to encyclopedize just the facts (ma'am).
With notability comes verifiability. If I submit a Wikipedia article about my cat, filled with adorable pictures and tales of the cat's day-by-day exploits, it may fit into the "room for everything" model that some snubbed band members might believe is right, but who's to say that all that drivel about my cat isn't just a bunch of lies? But if it turns out that I'm the President of the United States, then my cat becomes notable, because there are undoubtedly numerous verifiable news reports from reputable agencies detailing various events in the life of my cat.
It amuses me that most of the people complaining about the "notability" requirement are the same people whose vanity-based Wikipedia articles were seen for what they are - self-aggrandizement - and subsequently removed.
Also, for the record, I don't have a cat.
Maybe while they're at it, they could teach the user to read a new word with every use.
This modem is advertised as having a range of 20 miles at 1 watt (though obviously that's on a really, really good day). It's being used with an autopilot produced by these folks.
http://www.faa.gov/aircraft/air_cert/design_approv als/uas/uas_faq/
There is apparently no restriction on autonomy, according to the FAA, but a craft being flown as a civil aircraft (rather than as a hobbyist model airplane - there are restrictions differentiating the two, but I was unable to locate them on the FAA's site) requires an experimental certificate if it's unmanned, regardless of whether or not it's autonomous, and the FAA is limiting issuance of those certificates for the time being.
and frankly, it seems the police can't be trusted with tasers
How many abuse incidents were there in the more than 70,000 times that tasers have been used by police? Instead of making overbroad generalizations, you should realize that tasers (and other weapons like bean bag shotgun rounds, pepper spray, and hopefully the microwave pain ray that the military's been working on) are an effective way of apprehending criminals and protecting the public without causing lasting, disfiguring injury or death in all but the most exceptional of cases. Yes, they can be abused, but so can a firearm or a broomstick.
Damn cops, can't trust 'em with a broomstick.
Hattie: Millionaires, nothing! The stock's only worth three kajiggers!
So, how long until we discover the mass of the Higgs boson, thus compressing the Earth down to the size of a pea?