I for one believe that the society can benefit tremendously from EVERYONE having a college-level education, just like it benefited a few centuries ago from EVERYONE learning how to read. Remember they used to say that robots will take over the manual labor and humans will have to find something else to do? It's happening. Everyone should be able to get a BS equivalent by enrolling into an heavily subsidized school, and the higher education is actually already very good, so it can be left alone. The society as a whole will reap the rewards, because it is going to be a vastly more efficient, more sophisticated organism.
4000000 tons of floating plastic is at least 4000000 m^3 in volume, which would
allow to build a nice plastberg with dimensions 10x400x1000 m. This is
a severe underestimate, so there is gotta be a way to make it into a floating
plastic island with the area of about 1 km^2. Then we can throw some dirt on top and
declare it an international wild-life preserve.
Some of them certainly would have purchased, even one percent would be quite significant financially.
And some of them certainly would not have purchased without checking it out first. Think of all the musicians
who release a crap album every other time, but also do a real nice job every now and then. Think all the single-player
computer games. Without knowing which influence is stronger, you cannot really say that the impact of sharing is
that different for files and books. Advertising to one percent of consumers is quite significant financially.
It is painfully clear that you never used one or know anything about it. It is dead easy to use, with or without unlocking. Installing texlive is not easy. Making phone calls, using SMS, email, chat, web browser, media player, transferring files, using GUI config -- dead simple and very much idiot-proof. It's not FSF we are talking here, it's Nokia.
You are thinking 2010, the year when N900 blew everything else out of the water. A (very incomplete) list of software that it runs already includes busybox, bash, GNU utils, apt-get, emacs, vim, texlive, python, gnuplot, ssh -X, mplayer (!), fennec (firefox with full plugin support), midori, lynx, pidgin, conky... Its main limitation is, hands down, the amount of RAM, and even here, with its puny 128M, it performs very similarly to somewhat cleaner and faster Android. It is a fair tradeoff, Android being a toy OS compared to Maemo.
The net neutrality legislation would be more effective in the presence of a working solution. If the backbone (the physical cables) has redundant parts owned by sufficiently different interests, then the competition should take care of the neutrality issue. IMHO, the government should build, own, and manage its own significant portion of the backbone (all governments do it with roads, and many governments are already doing it with the Internet). The law should at least require that part of the Internet to be perfectly neutral to commercial interests, as well as friendly to the political speech and the scientific research. That way the private ISPs will have to be pretty neutral if they are to be competitive at all.
Castro? The man who prevented a small and weak country from being colonized by the US? The man who provided some of the most effective social programs to all of his country's poor in the economy that was gutted by the murderous US sanctions? (Don't kid yourself: an effective embargo actually kills the civilian population more or less directly, and is a form of a genocide.) Oh, Castro is an evil-doer alright. Hitler and Stalin have a lot to learn from this man.
I would also disagree with calling distributing classified information 'political speech'.
Political speech is political because of its meaning and context. Of course not all state secrets are that. But are you willing to argue that the "Collateral Murder" video is not political speech?
I agree that it's a burden of trust, but do you have an alternative system that protects legitimate state secrets without potential for abuse?
Yes. It is a very effective system that we all used since forever. The military should simply not give sensitive information to people they don't trust; that is the way we all have to do it, and they aren't an exception. What they are doing to Manning and Assange is the worst kind of censorship: hands-on. They are not protecting a secret, since it is no longer a secret. They are censoring political speech by making an example of those who dare to speak.
I guarantee that not all of them are criminal, or even embarassing.
You are funny. How can you guarantee anything while everything is still classified? You will never find out how much the government is abusing the classification system unless it leaks.
Who gets to define neutral though? One man's fact is another man's propaganda.
A simple explanation of the "neutral point of view" is about the size of your post. People who understand what NPOV is have a tremendous common ground, and that is a fact. Try reloading this page until you find "propaganda". You'll grow old first.
You and bsDaemon are very quick to say that the problem of deciding what is NPOV is "very difficult", but not so quick to point out a clearly non-neutral Wikipedia article, or to exhibit statistics showing that such articles (or value judgments in articles) are many. And whenever we happen to find one shitty article, it often appears that it was either a vandal, or a firm advertising, or a government agency censoring and bullshitting. Many a time they will even do it from their own computers, so that the edits can be traced back to them. Because facts (as determined by experts in the field) are not on their side, they often resort to not citing anything, bullshitting, or straight up lying. Seriously, you cannot distinguish vandalism and commercial messages from NPOV?
get it and watch it regardless of
which browser they use
this is among the issues that Flash is supposed to solve
How does it solve it for text-based browsers? It cannot in principle. What about low-profile yet very capable browsers like NetSurf or Midori? I am not against embedding video, I just want a fail-safe option, and it's not like it's a hard one to implement. DDOS issue is avoided trivially by either running a torrent (popular video) or limiting the number of connections (unpopular video).
Hey I am still waiting for a feature so complicated, they haven't gotten to implementing it
after all these years: a link to a video file. I purged all flash on my computers: I am just that
afraid.
Symantec's Internet Security Threat Report states that a remote code execution
in Adobe Reader and Flash Player was the second most attacked vulnerability in 2009. -WIKI
These affect GNU/Linux plugin just as well, so burn in hell, Adobe. And you, Web designers,
get a clue and link to your bloody videos so that people can get it and watch it regardless of
which browser they use.
I generally had a very positive experience with editing WIkipedia. Your examples indicate that there is a lot of bullshit going on behind the scenes, but still, we need this friction, because without it it would be little better than uncyclopedia. If I wanted to edit articles in the earnest, I would definitely create an account, I would write intelligible comments explaining my edits, and I would start asking to lock articles with dumb-skull bots guarding them, and get my way after a proper bureaucratic process. The end result is a better article, so it is totally worth the effort.
Wikipedia strives to provide a reference for every fact:
The President ran in the cornfield naked - bullshit.
On July 1 2010 New York Times reported that the President ran in the cornfield naked - fact, easily checked.
Of course, there are gray areas, but to claim that the distinction between fact and fiction is too vague to achieve
a decently neutral point of view in most cases is just pure sophistry.
Publishers need to stop being so fucking greedy when it comes to schools.
By now it's pretty clear that traditional scientific publishers won't stop until they are completely
ejected from the academic circles. They are going to learn the hard way that they cannot charge
$150 for an undergrad calculus textbook, not when Wikibooks is as good as it is already. They
will continue to suck the blood of institutions who continue using their materials, and they will get more
and more aggressive in defending their copyrights. They won't change their business practice simply because they can't: scientists (especially theoretical ones)
are more than happy to share information among themselves, and now they have extremely cheap
means of doing that. Beyond the inertial movement we are experiencing today, there is no more money
to be made publishing textbooks on general topics. (The best writers will still get paid, just in a different way.)
Polygraphs aren't lie detectors. They are used to assess truthfulness.
This does not make even a lick of sense. A person is truthful if and only if the person is not lying,
that's how the model works, I suppose. If a polygraph test allows you to assign
probabilities so that you can say "the answer to the question A is more likely to be truthful than
the answer to the question B", then it necessarily follows that "the answer to the question
B is more likely to be a lie than the answer to the question A". It is ridiculous to say that
the test only "detects" truthful answers. It's like saying that a thermometer measures hotness,
but not coldness.
Slashdot Mirror
And another -10% is honesty.
I for one believe that the society can benefit tremendously from EVERYONE having a college-level education, just like it benefited a few centuries ago from EVERYONE learning how to read. Remember they used to say that robots will take over the manual labor and humans will have to find something else to do? It's happening. Everyone should be able to get a BS equivalent by enrolling into an heavily subsidized school, and the higher education is actually already very good, so it can be left alone. The society as a whole will reap the rewards, because it is going to be a vastly more efficient, more sophisticated organism.
We may never learn their names, but we know the password on their luggage: 12345
In the game of chess, you can never let your adversary see your pieces
-Zapp Brannigan
Base ten is so second millennium. Now it's all about 15625/4096 gibigrams.
4000000 tons of floating plastic is at least 4000000 m^3 in volume, which would allow to build a nice plastberg with dimensions 10x400x1000 m. This is a severe underestimate, so there is gotta be a way to make it into a floating plastic island with the area of about 1 km^2. Then we can throw some dirt on top and declare it an international wild-life preserve.
Some of them certainly would have purchased, even one percent would be quite significant financially.
And some of them certainly would not have purchased without checking it out first. Think of all the musicians who release a crap album every other time, but also do a real nice job every now and then. Think all the single-player computer games. Without knowing which influence is stronger, you cannot really say that the impact of sharing is that different for files and books. Advertising to one percent of consumers is quite significant financially.
Oops, sorry about that. You are right.
it wasn't usable for the 95% of the population
It is painfully clear that you never used one or know anything about it. It is dead easy to use, with or without unlocking. Installing texlive is not easy. Making phone calls, using SMS, email, chat, web browser, media player, transferring files, using GUI config -- dead simple and very much idiot-proof. It's not FSF we are talking here, it's Nokia.
You are thinking 2010, the year when N900 blew everything else out of the water. A (very incomplete) list of software that it runs already includes busybox, bash, GNU utils, apt-get, emacs, vim, texlive, python, gnuplot, ssh -X, mplayer (!), fennec (firefox with full plugin support), midori, lynx, pidgin, conky... Its main limitation is, hands down, the amount of RAM, and even here, with its puny 128M, it performs very similarly to somewhat cleaner and faster Android. It is a fair tradeoff, Android being a toy OS compared to Maemo.
The net neutrality legislation would be more effective in the presence of a working solution. If the backbone (the physical cables) has redundant parts owned by sufficiently different interests, then the competition should take care of the neutrality issue. IMHO, the government should build, own, and manage its own significant portion of the backbone (all governments do it with roads, and many governments are already doing it with the Internet). The law should at least require that part of the Internet to be perfectly neutral to commercial interests, as well as friendly to the political speech and the scientific research. That way the private ISPs will have to be pretty neutral if they are to be competitive at all.
What if X is robot? Did you personally move on past that one?
Castro? The man who prevented a small and weak country from being colonized by the US? The man who provided some of the most effective social programs to all of his country's poor in the economy that was gutted by the murderous US sanctions? (Don't kid yourself: an effective embargo actually kills the civilian population more or less directly, and is a form of a genocide.) Oh, Castro is an evil-doer alright. Hitler and Stalin have a lot to learn from this man.
This is just wishful thinking. The following statements badly need citations:
The only noncontroversial statement you've made is about the price of education going up. I am not sure if it is "skyrocketing", though.
I would also disagree with calling distributing classified information 'political speech'.
Political speech is political because of its meaning and context. Of course not all state secrets are that. But are you willing to argue that the "Collateral Murder" video is not political speech?
I agree that it's a burden of trust, but do you have an alternative system that protects legitimate state secrets without potential for abuse?
Yes. It is a very effective system that we all used since forever. The military should simply not give sensitive information to people they don't trust; that is the way we all have to do it, and they aren't an exception. What they are doing to Manning and Assange is the worst kind of censorship: hands-on. They are not protecting a secret, since it is no longer a secret. They are censoring political speech by making an example of those who dare to speak.
I guarantee that not all of them are criminal, or even embarassing.
You are funny. How can you guarantee anything while everything is still classified? You will never find out how much the government is abusing the classification system unless it leaks.
"Fuckhead" would suffice.
It would work on Gorbachev, who knows English. Putin would understand "yeblo", "yebalo", "dolboyob", or "poyeben'".
Just to remind you, you are defending this guy:
Who gets to define neutral though? One man's fact is another man's propaganda.
A simple explanation of the "neutral point of view" is about the size of your post. People who understand what NPOV is have a tremendous common ground, and that is a fact. Try reloading this page until you find "propaganda". You'll grow old first.
You and bsDaemon are very quick to say that the problem of deciding what is NPOV is "very difficult", but not so quick to point out a clearly non-neutral Wikipedia article, or to exhibit statistics showing that such articles (or value judgments in articles) are many. And whenever we happen to find one shitty article, it often appears that it was either a vandal, or a firm advertising, or a government agency censoring and bullshitting. Many a time they will even do it from their own computers, so that the edits can be traced back to them. Because facts (as determined by experts in the field) are not on their side, they often resort to not citing anything, bullshitting, or straight up lying. Seriously, you cannot distinguish vandalism and commercial messages from NPOV?
get it and watch it regardless of which browser they use
this is among the issues that Flash is supposed to solve
How does it solve it for text-based browsers? It cannot in principle. What about low-profile yet very capable browsers like NetSurf or Midori? I am not against embedding video, I just want a fail-safe option, and it's not like it's a hard one to implement. DDOS issue is avoided trivially by either running a torrent (popular video) or limiting the number of connections (unpopular video).
Hey I am still waiting for a feature so complicated, they haven't gotten to implementing it after all these years: a link to a video file. I purged all flash on my computers: I am just that afraid.
Symantec's Internet Security Threat Report states that a remote code execution in Adobe Reader and Flash Player was the second most attacked vulnerability in 2009. -WIKI
These affect GNU/Linux plugin just as well, so burn in hell, Adobe. And you, Web designers, get a clue and link to your bloody videos so that people can get it and watch it regardless of which browser they use.
I generally had a very positive experience with editing WIkipedia. Your examples indicate that there is a lot of bullshit going on behind the scenes, but still, we need this friction, because without it it would be little better than uncyclopedia. If I wanted to edit articles in the earnest, I would definitely create an account, I would write intelligible comments explaining my edits, and I would start asking to lock articles with dumb-skull bots guarding them, and get my way after a proper bureaucratic process. The end result is a better article, so it is totally worth the effort.
Wikipedia strives to provide a reference for every fact:
The President ran in the cornfield naked - bullshit.
On July 1 2010 New York Times reported that the President ran in the cornfield naked - fact, easily checked.
Of course, there are gray areas, but to claim that the distinction between fact and fiction is too vague to achieve a decently neutral point of view in most cases is just pure sophistry.
Publishers need to stop being so fucking greedy when it comes to schools.
By now it's pretty clear that traditional scientific publishers won't stop until they are completely ejected from the academic circles. They are going to learn the hard way that they cannot charge $150 for an undergrad calculus textbook, not when Wikibooks is as good as it is already. They will continue to suck the blood of institutions who continue using their materials, and they will get more and more aggressive in defending their copyrights. They won't change their business practice simply because they can't: scientists (especially theoretical ones) are more than happy to share information among themselves, and now they have extremely cheap means of doing that. Beyond the inertial movement we are experiencing today, there is no more money to be made publishing textbooks on general topics. (The best writers will still get paid, just in a different way.)
Polygraphs aren't lie detectors. They are used to assess truthfulness.
This does not make even a lick of sense. A person is truthful if and only if the person is not lying, that's how the model works, I suppose. If a polygraph test allows you to assign probabilities so that you can say "the answer to the question A is more likely to be truthful than the answer to the question B", then it necessarily follows that "the answer to the question B is more likely to be a lie than the answer to the question A". It is ridiculous to say that the test only "detects" truthful answers. It's like saying that a thermometer measures hotness, but not coldness.