The fact remains that for controversial topics, depending on the time of day I hit the page, I'm presented with different information. That's not a good thing.
You're also presented with a button to give you the edit history. Use it.
The older versions are still there. And the comments of the people who made the changes about WHY they did so are there, too. You'll be able to tell if there is a controversy in progress and what all the sides of the argument are. Then make your own choice.
Try THAT with Brittanica. Or the New York Times. Or CBS News.
Re:Editorial Oversight != Truth (i.e. FOX News)
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When Wikipedia Fails
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Editorial Oversight does not necessarily lead to fair and balanced articles, or even truthful articles. For a great living example of this statement, pick up a copy of The New York Post or tune into FOX News.
For a better example, pick up a copy of the New York Times or tune into CBS News. B-)
Propaganda doesn't consist of JUST the Big Lie. Some even more effective tools are:
- omission of contrary opinion and events that don't support the party line,
- bias in choice of events to report, giving an incorrect view of cost/benefit ratio,
- ridicule of opposing opinion and claims - direct, by word-choice and word proximity, by false analogy, by association, etc. and a host of others. The establishment media outlets use them all - to the point that a media outlet that even mentions non-establishment opinions or events that support them appears hopelessly right-wing to many observers (such as yourself B-) ).
To make an informed decision you must first be informed. That means you have to hear all significant sides of any issue - whether their claims are true or not.
What distinguishes FOX News is that it reports both the Left and Right sides of issues.
If it gives slightly more words to the Right sides, is that because it's slightlly biased to the Right? Or is it because the Left arguments are well-aired and familiar to all viewers, while those of the Right, receiving little coverage elsewhere, need a bit more explaining?
And does it matter? Is it better to hear a few more words about one side, or to hear ONLY the other?
As to truth: I challenge you to find examples of out-and-out fraud on FOX News to match those of the weeks of sticking by the transparently-forged Rathergate documents, the pyrotechnics-enhanced "demonstration" of the gas tank hazard, or a number of other similar stunts on the establishment media's flagship shows.
You step into a blog, you know what you're getting. But if you search an encyclopedia, it's fair to expect something else. Actual facts, say. At its worst, Wikipedia is an active deception, a powerful piece of agitprop, not information
And other media aren't?
We all familiar with media bias on controversial issues in news media. But the same is true in authoratitive media - encyclopedias, scholarly journals, textbooks, and so on.
Two I'm familiar with:
Starting in the late '60s the war on drugs began to bais research reports on prohibited drugs. First there was a period where reports on research into effects - beneficial or otherwise - of these drugs would have stated conclusions that were transparently at odds with the data published in the article. (Apparently this was a reaction to the government chosing only to fund those researchers who published anti-drug conclusions.) Later the cat-and-mouse game was apparently replaced by a simple stoppage of most funding for research into the drugs in question.
Starting in the mid '70s the war on private guns produced an avalanche of bogus research and historical revisionism. This appeared in places like medical journals (attempting to usurp the function of criminological journals by treating guns use as an epidemic), historical journals, and of course the major media. But it also crept into such venues as mainstream encyclopedias.
The problem with authoritative media - scholarly or otherwise - is that they create a dominant paradigm and suppress publication of works that are in conflict with it. When the dominant paradigm is something that is factually correct (or essentially so) and the works in conflict are defective (attractively plausible but wrong or hairbrained) this works out well.
But organizations reaching a consensus on and promulgating a dominant paradigm are susceptable to honest error, ignorance, political interference, and social/religious/ideological fads. When the paradigm is wrong through error, corrections may be suppressed. When it's wrong through political/social/religious/ideological issues, such organizations become (perhaps unintentional) propaganda outlets, in two ways. First: they propagate a Big Lie. Second (and more significantly): they suppress truth and divergent opinion.
Wikipedia is an attempt to eliminate the problems of such systems by creating an encyclopedia open to editing by all. This eliminates the sin of omission, but opens it to hairbrained claims and politcal astroturf. This may go too far in the other direction. But publishing the edit history keeps the latest edit from completely suppressing its predecessors, limiting the usefulness of such openness to the malicious.
Given that Wikipedia depends on honest effort by its contributors but doesn't do much to vet them, it leaves its articles latest versions vulnerable to damage by even a small number of dishonest or psychopathic editors. Perhaps, as it becomes an ever bigger target (in the presence of millions of net-connected psychopaths) the resulting havoc will become great enough to drive the organizers to apply some sort of reputation system filtering. This would tend to reduce the vulnerability to kooks, vandals, and astroturfers, at the price of seeding the growth of a new paradigm-driven suppression of viewpoint.
Meanwhile the current system seems to be working remarkably well - especially if the user checks the edit history for paradigm thrashing. With Wikipedia, more than most authoritative sources, "the truth is in there" - usually on the surface, sometimes buried in the edit history.
Of course you can't use its surface for an authoritative source. But you can use it for a fine set of starting point, then do your own checking. Meanwhile, it attracts reasonable voices on all subjects, and a paradigm fight, astroturf battle, or other propaganda campaign will show up as an edit history thrash. So it carries with it its own alarm for situations where its surface articles may be unreliable due to controversy or vandalism.
I disagree, most users are not very bright and as such when their PC stops working they'll do just about anything to make it work... whether it be plunk down 100-300 bucks for a copy of windows or even 300-500 for a new Windows based PC.
Sounds like an opportunity for Linux. Imagine:
1) A live CD that runs a version of linux that runs WINE and brings to life all (or most of) the stuff on their disabled computer, coupled with:
2) An install CD that installs linux on top of the disabled system in such a way as to present (or allow the launch of) the same "run the dead stuff" environment as the live CD, billed as "installing it on your hard drive so you can use your CD again".
And at that point they're most of the way converted. Then you show them how to run Linux stuff under/beside the WINE "undead" environment and they can migrate over gradually at their own speed.
Anybody know how close we are to that now?
Anybody interested in doing it by fall?
(Even if they don't kill the running windows systems this fall, or ever, that two-disk combo, with a few open source apps on it, might make a handy way to migrate people. It lets them try things out without committing. And having it available will make M$ think twice about pulling the trigger. B-) )
That's right. I conveniently ignored it - because it didn't relate to the subject under discussion. B-)
No, you don't get to torture them just because they weren't in uniform. Nor is torture OK even if Geneva is silent.
But people who go about in civies or fake cop uniforms, car-bombing and chemical-bombing civilians, kidnapping aid workers and soldiers, slowly cutting off their heads and posting the video on the internet, don't get the same perks as uniformed soldiers with a recognized chain of command leading to someone identifiable who can negotiate , and who will obey an order to stand down if a deal is cut with their leadership.
My worry is that SCO dies quietly when it suddenly announces bankruptcy, screws it shareholders, and abruptly the lawsuits all vanish.
Go to the bankruptcy auction.
Bid a dollar for any of SCO's remaining IP claims.
Contribute them to EFF.
B-)
Can you IMAGINE anyone - with the possible exception of Micro$oft - actually CONSIDERING pressing those claims after SCO was driven into bankruptcy trying it?
For that matter, can you imagine Micro$oft even bidding on them, after all their antitrust suit losses?
1) Developing intelligence to interdict terrorist acts.
2) Developing evidence to be used in criminal prosecution against the person being scanned.
1 is fair game. Terrorism and actions to prevent it is war, while MRI doesn't cause pain or damage to the subject (unless he happens to have, say, shrapnel in his body to be yanked on by the magnet).
2 is a violation of the prohibitions against unreasonable search and compelling an accused to testify against himself.
Seems to me the government has a choice: They can use the device on the suspected terrorist if they decide it's worth letting him go later (rather than prosecuting him) for detecting and stopping the plot.
Once they've extracted info with it and used it in their further actions, it will be essentially impossible to show that evidence they collect later was in no way derived from the information they extracted using the machine. It becomes "fruit of the poisoned tree" and inadmissable.
(By the way: Don't bring up the Geneva Accords. They specifically exclude people who violate certain "rules of civilized warfare", such as fighting in uniform, correctly identifying themselves, targeting only war infrastructure rather than civilians, etc. Terrorists miss on many of these qualifications, and it only takes one. Such people are NOT SUPPOSED to get the convention-specified treatment of a prisoner of war. This was done deliberately in the original formulation of the accords, to create an incentive for fighters, armies, and the organizations that field them to obey the rules in turn.)
There are plenty of other organizations willing to defend your 2nd amendment rights. The ACLU is a private association, it can defend rights however it sees fit.
And they're even welcome to print their poster on the bill of rights that leaves off the second (and a couple of others) entirely. (Even if it is as revolting as flag burning, it IS free speech.)
But IMHO they crossed a line when they provided a lawyer for the shooting victim of a crook to sue for damages the person from whose locked safe the gun had been stolen.
... you get land movement as amounts of water change which can break the cable.
Speaking of land movement, consider what happens if you make a practice of burying power cables in seismically active regions:
Come the quake, you've got a bunch of shear lines, and a cable fault wherever a buried cable crosses one. Meanwhile, air cables might sometimes break a segment, but can easily survive a foot or more of displacement betwen poles.
Now you've got line breaks and outages all over the area. A crew can fix a break in an air line in hours. A break in a buried cable takes weeks.
Net result: The more of your power infrastructure that's buried, the longer it takes to restore it in a quake.
... Do not concern yourself with trivialities like "tomorrow" or "TCO" or "long-term survivability." By the time any of that comes around, you'll have jumped (or been pushed) to another company that you can squeeze the same way....
You have nicely described the Harvard Business School approach to management. Joing the company, loot its future to make it look good short term, move on, cash your stock options, let your successor take the hit when the riddled shell collapses. B-)
A related item: If you are an early hire with options and EVER hear someone in upper management enthusing about "Crossing the Chasm", leave NOW, and cash your stock options within the next couple months. The punchline of the whole book is a paragraph near the end that convinces them the early hires, who actually sove the big problems and build the company, are disposable, powerless, and not worthy of the big bucks - which should go only to founders and upper management. They WILL dump you and the other people supporting the company if you don't dump yourself. And they always do it too soon, before the company is able to perform to its early standards on only late hires. Investors are looking for symptoms of this (though perhaps not conscious of why), the stock crashes on the first sign of it (long before employees expect it) and without the knowlege in the heads of the lost early-hires the company can rarely perform adequately to bring it back up.
I was under the impression that insulator stack length is a balancing act:
- momentary arcs to ground keeping the insulators clean
- extending the stack beyond a certain point can actually increase the probability of a shutdown by letting dirt accumulate until it will sustain an arc when it finally flashes over, and
- the main reliability increase from extending the stack related to avoiding damage from lightning strikes, so
- optimal stack length is a function of a location's environment (especially relative abundance of dust, plant debris & animal activity, rain, rain with lightning, dry lightning).
Of course more insulators means more cost. So management's tendency is to go short of the optimum, until the expected increase in maintainence and outages costs later balancees the lowered instalation cost.
So I guess I'm not really disagreeing with you on the administrative pathology, but just looking for a reality check on the failure mechanism.
Okay, now that you let the cat out of the bag, how long before the Great Chinese Firewall gets this hole plugged?
Depends on whether they can reconfigure the existing equpment to do it or if they have tobuy a bunch more stuff.
If they've implemented it as a packet sniffer that drops in a forged reset, rather than something inline, they're probably going to need a redesign and to buy a BUNCH of smarter boxes - at least for either the boundary between them and the rest of the net, or the edge between their internal net and their subscribers.
Replacing the boxes will take months - more of them if they want to do it without disrupting traffic - even if they have a better solution already qualified and ready to go once they cut the orders. Since the dotcom bust boxes like that are mainly built to backorder rather than stockpiled at the manufacturer.
Figure if they order them now they might get them by the end of Q3 or mid Q4 and be deploying them in Q1 '07
Since we're talking about a tiny percentage difference in the amount of arriving light - on an ongoing basis - rather than darkness at noon, they'll deal with it like they deal with a trace of cloud cover, a little bit of dust on the leaves, a bit of shadow from a much taller plant that isn't quite positioned right to shade them.
In other words, nothing they don't handle already.
But why do a "difficult" Google search ...
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PGP & GPG
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· Score: 1
... when you could just read the fine review?
From the ninth paragraph:
The difference between them is that PGP is a commercial piece of software, GPG (Gnu Privacy Guard) is open source,...
Sorry about being unclear. I did not mean to imply that the research is done with government money. The govenment does not need to spend a lot of money. We just need them to admit there is an issue that needs to be addressed.
No problem.
My concern is that the right course of action (if any is needed) is not yet clear. So doing something to reduce carbon emissions - especially something drasting (like Kyoto) - might be actively bad.
Yes there seems to be something going on. But what is it? Scientists were warning us about global cooling and the imminent end of the current interglacial and return of the ice age for decades - more time total than has elapsed since "globabl warming" as a buzz-phrase was coined.
And there's reason to believe that both are right. B-(
And that, if they are, the market forces are already doing EXACTLY the right thing (slowing, but not eliminating, carbon emissions - which could turn a 400-year two-degree-C-above-now hump into a thousand years of level temp before the fossil fuels run out and we have to do something else about the ice). B-)
So lets get this figured out before we go off half-cocked on something that could be horribly expensive, counter-productive, and/or crash our ability to do a real fix - or even figure out what it should be.
Meanwhile, "admitting there's something going on" is very different from believing that "working on carbon emissions... will be a net positive". We DON'T know that - so we shouldn't "admit" it.
The biggest hazard, IMHO, is that governments will use this as an excuse to tighten their control of their subjects, rip off more of their resources to feed to themselves and their cronies, and readjust the balance of power between countries to be more to their liking - while making it impossible to determine what the real problem is (or if whatever is going on is actually a problem) and fix it.
"Admitting" that "working on carbon emissions... will be a net positive", or even "that there's something going on", when the scientific evidence isn't yet clear on WHAT is up, is surrendering the first round of that battle, in the face of what is just the latest in a multi-millenia long string of chicken-little claims by proto-tyrants.
Then think for a moment about what happens to the anthropogenic bar when the fossil fuels run out.
There's another model that very well predicts the ice age cycles - right up to the start of agriculture, where the temperature suddenly leveled out when it should have started a slide, then took a slight bump at the start of the industrial revolution.
If that puppy is correct - or even roughly in the ballpark - absent human carbon emissions we'd already be as far DOWN from the last six millenia's relatively stable temperature as their more pessimistic estimates put us UP at the peak (a couple degrees and a couple hundred years down the road) before the carbon starts running out and (over another couple hundred years) we crash back onto the accellerating ice-age we've been holding off for longer than recorded history.
Working on carbon emissions, regardless of cause, will be a net positive. Not just cleaner air and water but, economic development and new technology.
They won't be a net positive if they piss away the resources and inestment needed to solve the ACTUAL problem - whatever it is.
And you're falling into the Keynsian falacy that government spending - especially on research - is a net gain. Those bucks get ripped from somewhere else. Even if they do end up providing a benefit, they lose the benefit they would have provided had they been applied their owner's intended purpose - whose spending has at least as much "muitiplier effect" as the government's. And when ripped off there's plenty of inefficiency in the process, so far more needs to be lifted than is actually spent "for good cause". The losses can far exceed the gains. (In fact, that's the typical case.)
Meanwhile, the costs of fossil-carbon fuels are rising as they are consumed. This is already bringing plenty of investment to bear in the private sector.
Wind generators are cost-effective in large instalations and being deployed. Photovoltaic is now a better buy than grid power in many places. (Capital cost less than stringing lines and mantainence costs less than fuel cost are a hard combo to beat.) Small outdoor loads (electronics, road-signs, lighting, emergency phones) and remote residences are two major examples. (Wind works for residences, too.)
Who did much of the research on designing and manufacturing practical solar panels? Arco. (Now merged with BP and still one of the biggest suppliers of solar.) They realized that they were an ENERGY company. (If there were places where people would switch from fuel to something made out of sand, Arco would be perfectly happy to stay in the game by processing the sand and selling them the panels.)
As they have in the past, the customers and the auto companies are responding to the rising fuel prices by buying and building more fuel efficient vehicles. Already we have hybrids that get far higher mileage than most people thought possible a couple decades ago. With higher production, deployment of better battery technologies, their prices will drop, and with further fuel price rises more customers will switch. Meanwhile, burning fuel is SO much more efficient in a big stationary plant than a small self-propelled one (and accellerating from stop on stored power rather than toting an engine big enough to do the job is SO much lighter) that grid-charged vehicles can be run for about the equivalent of 75 cents/galon (with a roughly corresponding reduction in carbon emissions). Watch for "multifuel" hybrids with higher-capacity batteries and a grid-charge connection, so commutes can be mainly grid-powered and the engine used mainly for long trips and as a safety backup against running out of juice. Meanwhile, fast-charge batteries and supercapacitors are coming out of labs over then next few years which can capture even the energy from a panic stop to recycle it for accelleration, making a mile of stop-and-go almost as efficient as one of go-and-go.
These technologies are already deploying with negligible "help" from government. And they'll continue to do so, and to put downward pressure on carbon emissions, as long as we can afford them better than we can afford gas.
But that's exactly the sort of investment that would be hit by both government taxes to "fund energy research" and government restrictions to implement something like the Kyoto treaty (even if it DIDN'T bring on an economic crash to make the Great Depression look like a "slight readjustment").
So there's some shining examples of how "(government-mandated) working to reduce carbon emissions" would be a net COST, even for reducing carbon emissions.
A number of the bullets would obviously rupture the aircrafts fragile hull, and as a result of the altitude, the entire plane would begin to depressurise and disintegrate.
no it wont. popping several holes in a pressurized plane even a window will not destroy or even cause major damage to a plane.
Not only that: Air Marshals' guns fire big, slow, "frangible" bullets - optimized for a good combination of lack of penertation of windows and hull with high (or at least adequate) "stopping power" against a human body.
If X is greater than the cost of a recall, we recall the laptops and no-one gets hurt.
If X is less than the cost of a recall, then we don't recall.
(If you were really working for Dell, and believed in that computation, you wouldn't make that post, even anonymously.)
As I heard it, Ford once made that computation with Pinto gas tanks (the ones that would dump a few inches of gas into the passenger compartment if a Pinto with a full tank was rear-ended.)
Several accidents resulted in "Severe Passenger Damage".
This came out in the tiral. So did the cost of the recall. The court awarded the plantifs the cost of the recall as puntative damages.
It was making the point that the computation you described doesn't excuse deliberately, and without warning, failing to fix a design defect that creates a significant danger to the life and health of the customers. And it was making it in a way that even a psychopath can understand. It was saying "Whatever you saved by chosing to not fix such a major defect, frying a customer WILL cost you more."
This is ONE of the things those massive judgements are about, and what "tort reform" is intended to eliminate. (Another is that they might sound high - but they must be large enough to provide a lump sum whose interest is enough to pay the living and medical expenses of a maimed person for the rest of his/her life, or replace his/her contribution to the support of family, especially dependents, if he/she died.)
I read that the author wanted to use Kelo as a sort of cattle prod in order to get the telcos off their asses and fix things. I don't think he really was advocating it.
And what do you do if they call your bluff?
As the previous poster pointed out: A government buyout at a court-determined fair market price might be perceived as a BIG win for the tellcos. Cash out the centuries-old, rotting, infrastructure (which the government will then probably have to contract with you to run, at a big fee, in addition). Then invest it wherever makes more sense - or hand it back to your stockholders and hold a big party.
If you're going to bluff you have to have a plan for what to do if it's called.
Further, even if the consequences for the other player are dire, if you want to get the other player to fold you have to LOOK like you'll follow through. (That's why presidents during the Cold War under the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction had to act like they were just crazy enough to actually fight a nuclear war if the other superpowers didn't give them what they wanted. Otherwise "MAD" turns into "US Assured Destruction" and the dominoes fall.)
But the last mile is the killer part. I highly doubt google is going to become an ISP.
Watch for them to buy, lease, or option-to-lease some spectrum, or partner with someone who has.
With a backbone in place they can bootstrap up the last mile part of a service with WiMax. (They could also do it with infrared links, a WiFi mesh, or any of a number of solutions - but WiMax on licensed bandwidth has the advantage that they can make service-level agreements.)
As enough people sign up to produce crowding they can subdivide the cells, and eventually start running their own fiber (or copper) where things are REALLY dense.
And then they can eat their competitors' lunches by underselling them on voice and video, too.
Perhaps buying that fiber is just a doomsday device to rattle at recalcitrant networking providers. But if there's any company that can assemble the resources necessary to break the hold of the legacy networking companies, and has the guts to try it, it's Google.
Back in the early part of the design, the foam was supposed to have a coating of white paint. Then the engineers figured out how much it would weigh (which would come RIGHT out of payload capacity) and decided to leave the foam unpainted.
I wonder if leaving off the paint made the foam more susceptable to environmental problems - like water getting into the texture and freezing - or if the paint would have provided enough added tensile strength to the surface to avoid the fracturing and detachment.
And if so, perhaps a suitable stabilizing/strengthing paint could be found or designed that would provide enough inuslating quality to replace an equivalent weight of foam, or encourage a compensating amount of condensation or rainwater/dew to slide off during flight, that the weight penalty could be avoided.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow.
The gentleman doth protest too much, methinks.
Ad Hominem.
I win. B-)
The fact remains that for controversial topics, depending on the time of day I hit the page, I'm presented with different information. That's not a good thing.
You're also presented with a button to give you the edit history. Use it.
The older versions are still there. And the comments of the people who made the changes about WHY they did so are there, too. You'll be able to tell if there is a controversy in progress and what all the sides of the argument are. Then make your own choice.
Try THAT with Brittanica. Or the New York Times. Or CBS News.
Editorial Oversight does not necessarily lead to fair and balanced articles, or even truthful articles. For a great living example of this statement, pick up a copy of The New York Post or tune into FOX News.
For a better example, pick up a copy of the New York Times or tune into CBS News. B-)
Propaganda doesn't consist of JUST the Big Lie. Some even more effective tools are:
- omission of contrary opinion and events that don't support the party line,
- bias in choice of events to report, giving an incorrect view of cost/benefit ratio,
- ridicule of opposing opinion and claims - direct, by word-choice and word proximity, by false analogy, by association, etc.
and a host of others. The establishment media outlets use them all - to the point that a media outlet that even mentions non-establishment opinions or events that support them appears hopelessly right-wing to many observers (such as yourself B-) ).
To make an informed decision you must first be informed. That means you have to hear all significant sides of any issue - whether their claims are true or not.
What distinguishes FOX News is that it reports both the Left and Right sides of issues.
If it gives slightly more words to the Right sides, is that because it's slightlly biased to the Right? Or is it because the Left arguments are well-aired and familiar to all viewers, while those of the Right, receiving little coverage elsewhere, need a bit more explaining?
And does it matter? Is it better to hear a few more words about one side, or to hear ONLY the other?
As to truth: I challenge you to find examples of out-and-out fraud on FOX News to match those of the weeks of sticking by the transparently-forged Rathergate documents, the pyrotechnics-enhanced "demonstration" of the gas tank hazard, or a number of other similar stunts on the establishment media's flagship shows.
You step into a blog, you know what you're getting. But if you search an encyclopedia, it's fair to expect something else. Actual facts, say. At its worst, Wikipedia is an active deception, a powerful piece of agitprop, not information
And other media aren't?
We all familiar with media bias on controversial issues in news media. But the same is true in authoratitive media - encyclopedias, scholarly journals, textbooks, and so on.
Two I'm familiar with:
Starting in the late '60s the war on drugs began to bais research reports on prohibited drugs. First there was a period where reports on research into effects - beneficial or otherwise - of these drugs would have stated conclusions that were transparently at odds with the data published in the article. (Apparently this was a reaction to the government chosing only to fund those researchers who published anti-drug conclusions.) Later the cat-and-mouse game was apparently replaced by a simple stoppage of most funding for research into the drugs in question.
Starting in the mid '70s the war on private guns produced an avalanche of bogus research and historical revisionism. This appeared in places like medical journals (attempting to usurp the function of criminological journals by treating guns use as an epidemic), historical journals, and of course the major media. But it also crept into such venues as mainstream encyclopedias.
The problem with authoritative media - scholarly or otherwise - is that they create a dominant paradigm and suppress publication of works that are in conflict with it. When the dominant paradigm is something that is factually correct (or essentially so) and the works in conflict are defective (attractively plausible but wrong or hairbrained) this works out well.
But organizations reaching a consensus on and promulgating a dominant paradigm are susceptable to honest error, ignorance, political interference, and social/religious/ideological fads. When the paradigm is wrong through error, corrections may be suppressed. When it's wrong through political/social/religious/ideological issues, such organizations become (perhaps unintentional) propaganda outlets, in two ways. First: they propagate a Big Lie. Second (and more significantly): they suppress truth and divergent opinion.
Wikipedia is an attempt to eliminate the problems of such systems by creating an encyclopedia open to editing by all. This eliminates the sin of omission, but opens it to hairbrained claims and politcal astroturf. This may go too far in the other direction. But publishing the edit history keeps the latest edit from completely suppressing its predecessors, limiting the usefulness of such openness to the malicious.
Given that Wikipedia depends on honest effort by its contributors but doesn't do much to vet them, it leaves its articles latest versions vulnerable to damage by even a small number of dishonest or psychopathic editors. Perhaps, as it becomes an ever bigger target (in the presence of millions of net-connected psychopaths) the resulting havoc will become great enough to drive the organizers to apply some sort of reputation system filtering. This would tend to reduce the vulnerability to kooks, vandals, and astroturfers, at the price of seeding the growth of a new paradigm-driven suppression of viewpoint.
Meanwhile the current system seems to be working remarkably well - especially if the user checks the edit history for paradigm thrashing. With Wikipedia, more than most authoritative sources, "the truth is in there" - usually on the surface, sometimes buried in the edit history.
Of course you can't use its surface for an authoritative source. But you can use it for a fine set of starting point, then do your own checking. Meanwhile, it attracts reasonable voices on all subjects, and a paradigm fight, astroturf battle, or other propaganda campaign will show up as an edit history thrash. So it carries with it its own alarm for situations where its surface articles may be unreliable due to controversy or vandalism.
What convenience!
I disagree, most users are not very bright and as such when their PC stops working they'll do just about anything to make it work... whether it be plunk down 100-300 bucks for a copy of windows or even 300-500 for a new Windows based PC.
Sounds like an opportunity for Linux. Imagine:
1) A live CD that runs a version of linux that runs WINE and brings to life all (or most of) the stuff on their disabled computer, coupled with:
2) An install CD that installs linux on top of the disabled system in such a way as to present (or allow the launch of) the same "run the dead stuff" environment as the live CD, billed as "installing it on your hard drive so you can use your CD again".
And at that point they're most of the way converted. Then you show them how to run Linux stuff under/beside the WINE "undead" environment and they can migrate over gradually at their own speed.
Anybody know how close we are to that now?
Anybody interested in doing it by fall?
(Even if they don't kill the running windows systems this fall, or ever, that two-disk combo, with a few open source apps on it, might make a handy way to migrate people. It lets them try things out without committing. And having it available will make M$ think twice about pulling the trigger. B-) )
That's right. I conveniently ignored it - because it didn't relate to the subject under discussion. B-)
No, you don't get to torture them just because they weren't in uniform. Nor is torture OK even if Geneva is silent.
But people who go about in civies or fake cop uniforms, car-bombing and chemical-bombing civilians, kidnapping aid workers and soldiers, slowly cutting off their heads and posting the video on the internet, don't get the same perks as uniformed soldiers with a recognized chain of command leading to someone identifiable who can negotiate , and who will obey an order to stand down if a deal is cut with their leadership.
My worry is that SCO dies quietly when it suddenly announces bankruptcy, screws it shareholders, and abruptly the lawsuits all vanish.
Go to the bankruptcy auction.
Bid a dollar for any of SCO's remaining IP claims.
Contribute them to EFF.
B-)
Can you IMAGINE anyone - with the possible exception of Micro$oft - actually CONSIDERING pressing those claims after SCO was driven into bankruptcy trying it?
For that matter, can you imagine Micro$oft even bidding on them, after all their antitrust suit losses?
Seems to me there are two possible uses:
1) Developing intelligence to interdict terrorist acts.
2) Developing evidence to be used in criminal prosecution against the person being scanned.
1 is fair game. Terrorism and actions to prevent it is war, while MRI doesn't cause pain or damage to the subject (unless he happens to have, say, shrapnel in his body to be yanked on by the magnet).
2 is a violation of the prohibitions against unreasonable search and compelling an accused to testify against himself.
Seems to me the government has a choice: They can use the device on the suspected terrorist if they decide it's worth letting him go later (rather than prosecuting him) for detecting and stopping the plot.
Once they've extracted info with it and used it in their further actions, it will be essentially impossible to show that evidence they collect later was in no way derived from the information they extracted using the machine. It becomes "fruit of the poisoned tree" and inadmissable.
(By the way: Don't bring up the Geneva Accords. They specifically exclude people who violate certain "rules of civilized warfare", such as fighting in uniform, correctly identifying themselves, targeting only war infrastructure rather than civilians, etc. Terrorists miss on many of these qualifications, and it only takes one. Such people are NOT SUPPOSED to get the convention-specified treatment of a prisoner of war. This was done deliberately in the original formulation of the accords, to create an incentive for fighters, armies, and the organizations that field them to obey the rules in turn.)
There are plenty of other organizations willing to defend your 2nd amendment rights. The ACLU is a private association, it can defend rights however it sees fit.
And they're even welcome to print their poster on the bill of rights that leaves off the second (and a couple of others) entirely. (Even if it is as revolting as flag burning, it IS free speech.)
But IMHO they crossed a line when they provided a lawyer for the shooting victim of a crook to sue for damages the person from whose locked safe the gun had been stolen.
... you get land movement as amounts of water change which can break the cable.
Speaking of land movement, consider what happens if you make a practice of burying power cables in seismically active regions:
Come the quake, you've got a bunch of shear lines, and a cable fault wherever a buried cable crosses one. Meanwhile, air cables might sometimes break a segment, but can easily survive a foot or more of displacement betwen poles.
Now you've got line breaks and outages all over the area. A crew can fix a break in an air line in hours. A break in a buried cable takes weeks.
Net result: The more of your power infrastructure that's buried, the longer it takes to restore it in a quake.
... Do not concern yourself with trivialities like "tomorrow" or "TCO" or "long-term survivability." By the time any of that comes around, you'll have jumped (or been pushed) to another company that you can squeeze the same way. ...
You have nicely described the Harvard Business School approach to management. Joing the company, loot its future to make it look good short term, move on, cash your stock options, let your successor take the hit when the riddled shell collapses. B-)
A related item: If you are an early hire with options and EVER hear someone in upper management enthusing about "Crossing the Chasm", leave NOW, and cash your stock options within the next couple months. The punchline of the whole book is a paragraph near the end that convinces them the early hires, who actually sove the big problems and build the company, are disposable, powerless, and not worthy of the big bucks - which should go only to founders and upper management. They WILL dump you and the other people supporting the company if you don't dump yourself. And they always do it too soon, before the company is able to perform to its early standards on only late hires. Investors are looking for symptoms of this (though perhaps not conscious of why), the stock crashes on the first sign of it (long before employees expect it) and without the knowlege in the heads of the lost early-hires the company can rarely perform adequately to bring it back up.
I was under the impression that insulator stack length is a balancing act:
- momentary arcs to ground keeping the insulators clean
- extending the stack beyond a certain point can actually increase the probability of a shutdown by letting dirt accumulate until it will sustain an arc when it finally flashes over, and
- the main reliability increase from extending the stack related to avoiding damage from lightning strikes, so
- optimal stack length is a function of a location's environment (especially relative abundance of dust, plant debris & animal activity, rain, rain with lightning, dry lightning).
Of course more insulators means more cost. So management's tendency is to go short of the optimum, until the expected increase in maintainence and outages costs later balancees the lowered instalation cost.
So I guess I'm not really disagreeing with you on the administrative pathology, but just looking for a reality check on the failure mechanism.
Okay, now that you let the cat out of the bag, how long before the Great Chinese Firewall gets this hole plugged?
Depends on whether they can reconfigure the existing equpment to do it or if they have tobuy a bunch more stuff.
If they've implemented it as a packet sniffer that drops in a forged reset, rather than something inline, they're probably going to need a redesign and to buy a BUNCH of smarter boxes - at least for either the boundary between them and the rest of the net, or the edge between their internal net and their subscribers.
Replacing the boxes will take months - more of them if they want to do it without disrupting traffic - even if they have a better solution already qualified and ready to go once they cut the orders. Since the dotcom bust boxes like that are mainly built to backorder rather than stockpiled at the manufacturer.
Figure if they order them now they might get them by the end of Q3 or mid Q4 and be deploying them in Q1 '07
Since we're talking about a tiny percentage difference in the amount of arriving light - on an ongoing basis - rather than darkness at noon, they'll deal with it like they deal with a trace of cloud cover, a little bit of dust on the leaves, a bit of shadow from a much taller plant that isn't quite positioned right to shade them.
In other words, nothing they don't handle already.
... when you could just read the fine review?
...
From the ninth paragraph:
The difference between them is that PGP is a commercial piece of software, GPG (Gnu Privacy Guard) is open source,
Sorry about being unclear. I did not mean to imply that the research is done with government money. The govenment does not need to spend a lot of money. We just need them to admit there is an issue that needs to be addressed.
... will be a net positive". We DON'T know that - so we shouldn't "admit" it.
... will be a net positive", or even "that there's something going on", when the scientific evidence isn't yet clear on WHAT is up, is surrendering the first round of that battle, in the face of what is just the latest in a multi-millenia long string of chicken-little claims by proto-tyrants.
No problem.
My concern is that the right course of action (if any is needed) is not yet clear. So doing something to reduce carbon emissions - especially something drasting (like Kyoto) - might be actively bad.
Yes there seems to be something going on. But what is it? Scientists were warning us about global cooling and the imminent end of the current interglacial and return of the ice age for decades - more time total than has elapsed since "globabl warming" as a buzz-phrase was coined.
And there's reason to believe that both are right. B-(
And that, if they are, the market forces are already doing EXACTLY the right thing (slowing, but not eliminating, carbon emissions - which could turn a 400-year two-degree-C-above-now hump into a thousand years of level temp before the fossil fuels run out and we have to do something else about the ice). B-)
So lets get this figured out before we go off half-cocked on something that could be horribly expensive, counter-productive, and/or crash our ability to do a real fix - or even figure out what it should be.
Meanwhile, "admitting there's something going on" is very different from believing that "working on carbon emissions
The biggest hazard, IMHO, is that governments will use this as an excuse to tighten their control of their subjects, rip off more of their resources to feed to themselves and their cronies, and readjust the balance of power between countries to be more to their liking - while making it impossible to determine what the real problem is (or if whatever is going on is actually a problem) and fix it.
"Admitting" that "working on carbon emissions
Then think for a moment about what happens to the anthropogenic bar when the fossil fuels run out.
There's another model that very well predicts the ice age cycles - right up to the start of agriculture, where the temperature suddenly leveled out when it should have started a slide, then took a slight bump at the start of the industrial revolution.
If that puppy is correct - or even roughly in the ballpark - absent human carbon emissions we'd already be as far DOWN from the last six millenia's relatively stable temperature as their more pessimistic estimates put us UP at the peak (a couple degrees and a couple hundred years down the road) before the carbon starts running out and (over another couple hundred years) we crash back onto the accellerating ice-age we've been holding off for longer than recorded history.
Working on carbon emissions, regardless of cause, will be a net positive. Not just cleaner air and water but, economic development and new technology.
They won't be a net positive if they piss away the resources and inestment needed to solve the ACTUAL problem - whatever it is.
And you're falling into the Keynsian falacy that government spending - especially on research - is a net gain. Those bucks get ripped from somewhere else. Even if they do end up providing a benefit, they lose the benefit they would have provided had they been applied their owner's intended purpose - whose spending has at least as much "muitiplier effect" as the government's. And when ripped off there's plenty of inefficiency in the process, so far more needs to be lifted than is actually spent "for good cause". The losses can far exceed the gains. (In fact, that's the typical case.)
Meanwhile, the costs of fossil-carbon fuels are rising as they are consumed. This is already bringing plenty of investment to bear in the private sector.
Wind generators are cost-effective in large instalations and being deployed. Photovoltaic is now a better buy than grid power in many places. (Capital cost less than stringing lines and mantainence costs less than fuel cost are a hard combo to beat.) Small outdoor loads (electronics, road-signs, lighting, emergency phones) and remote residences are two major examples. (Wind works for residences, too.)
Who did much of the research on designing and manufacturing practical solar panels? Arco. (Now merged with BP and still one of the biggest suppliers of solar.) They realized that they were an ENERGY company. (If there were places where people would switch from fuel to something made out of sand, Arco would be perfectly happy to stay in the game by processing the sand and selling them the panels.)
As they have in the past, the customers and the auto companies are responding to the rising fuel prices by buying and building more fuel efficient vehicles. Already we have hybrids that get far higher mileage than most people thought possible a couple decades ago. With higher production, deployment of better battery technologies, their prices will drop, and with further fuel price rises more customers will switch. Meanwhile, burning fuel is SO much more efficient in a big stationary plant than a small self-propelled one (and accellerating from stop on stored power rather than toting an engine big enough to do the job is SO much lighter) that grid-charged vehicles can be run for about the equivalent of 75 cents/galon (with a roughly corresponding reduction in carbon emissions). Watch for "multifuel" hybrids with higher-capacity batteries and a grid-charge connection, so commutes can be mainly grid-powered and the engine used mainly for long trips and as a safety backup against running out of juice. Meanwhile, fast-charge batteries and supercapacitors are coming out of labs over then next few years which can capture even the energy from a panic stop to recycle it for accelleration, making a mile of stop-and-go almost as efficient as one of go-and-go.
These technologies are already deploying with negligible "help" from government. And they'll continue to do so, and to put downward pressure on carbon emissions, as long as we can afford them better than we can afford gas.
But that's exactly the sort of investment that would be hit by both government taxes to "fund energy research" and government restrictions to implement something like the Kyoto treaty (even if it DIDN'T bring on an economic crash to make the Great Depression look like a "slight readjustment").
So there's some shining examples of how "(government-mandated) working to reduce carbon emissions" would be a net COST, even for reducing carbon emissions.
A number of the bullets would obviously rupture the aircrafts fragile hull, and as a result of the altitude, the entire plane would begin to depressurise and disintegrate.
no it wont. popping several holes in a pressurized plane even a window will not destroy or even cause major damage to a plane.
Not only that: Air Marshals' guns fire big, slow, "frangible" bullets - optimized for a good combination of lack of penertation of windows and hull with high (or at least adequate) "stopping power" against a human body.
... when it could actually create it?
If X is greater than the cost of a recall, we recall the laptops and no-one gets hurt.
If X is less than the cost of a recall, then we don't recall.
(If you were really working for Dell, and believed in that computation, you wouldn't make that post, even anonymously.)
As I heard it, Ford once made that computation with Pinto gas tanks (the ones that would dump a few inches of gas into the passenger compartment if a Pinto with a full tank was rear-ended.)
Several accidents resulted in "Severe Passenger Damage".
This came out in the tiral. So did the cost of the recall. The court awarded the plantifs the cost of the recall as puntative damages.
It was making the point that the computation you described doesn't excuse deliberately, and without warning, failing to fix a design defect that creates a significant danger to the life and health of the customers. And it was making it in a way that even a psychopath can understand. It was saying "Whatever you saved by chosing to not fix such a major defect, frying a customer WILL cost you more."
This is ONE of the things those massive judgements are about, and what "tort reform" is intended to eliminate. (Another is that they might sound high - but they must be large enough to provide a lump sum whose interest is enough to pay the living and medical expenses of a maimed person for the rest of his/her life, or replace his/her contribution to the support of family, especially dependents, if he/she died.)
I read that the author wanted to use Kelo as a sort of cattle prod in order to get the telcos off their asses and fix things. I don't think he really was advocating it.
And what do you do if they call your bluff?
As the previous poster pointed out: A government buyout at a court-determined fair market price might be perceived as a BIG win for the tellcos. Cash out the centuries-old, rotting, infrastructure (which the government will then probably have to contract with you to run, at a big fee, in addition). Then invest it wherever makes more sense - or hand it back to your stockholders and hold a big party.
If you're going to bluff you have to have a plan for what to do if it's called.
Further, even if the consequences for the other player are dire, if you want to get the other player to fold you have to LOOK like you'll follow through. (That's why presidents during the Cold War under the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction had to act like they were just crazy enough to actually fight a nuclear war if the other superpowers didn't give them what they wanted. Otherwise "MAD" turns into "US Assured Destruction" and the dominoes fall.)
But the last mile is the killer part. I highly doubt google is going to become an ISP.
Watch for them to buy, lease, or option-to-lease some spectrum, or partner with someone who has.
With a backbone in place they can bootstrap up the last mile part of a service with WiMax. (They could also do it with infrared links, a WiFi mesh, or any of a number of solutions - but WiMax on licensed bandwidth has the advantage that they can make service-level agreements.)
As enough people sign up to produce crowding they can subdivide the cells, and eventually start running their own fiber (or copper) where things are REALLY dense.
And then they can eat their competitors' lunches by underselling them on voice and video, too.
Perhaps buying that fiber is just a doomsday device to rattle at recalcitrant networking providers. But if there's any company that can assemble the resources necessary to break the hold of the legacy networking companies, and has the guts to try it, it's Google.
Back in the early part of the design, the foam was supposed to have a coating of white paint. Then the engineers figured out how much it would weigh (which would come RIGHT out of payload capacity) and decided to leave the foam unpainted.
I wonder if leaving off the paint made the foam more susceptable to environmental problems - like water getting into the texture and freezing - or if the paint would have provided enough added tensile strength to the surface to avoid the fracturing and detachment.
And if so, perhaps a suitable stabilizing/strengthing paint could be found or designed that would provide enough inuslating quality to replace an equivalent weight of foam, or encourage a compensating amount of condensation or rainwater/dew to slide off during flight, that the weight penalty could be avoided.
Have to update the old joke about the ineffectiveness of using coffee to sober up.
Q: What do you get when you feed coffee to a drunk?
A: A wide-awake drunk (with a healthy liver.)