Oh really? Can you please tell us what would be the cost of building a product on a proprietary closed-source software program which doesn't grant anyone the right to extend it, let alone commercialize any derivative work?
It appears that you are one of those ignorant FLOSS detractors who tries to bitch that hijacking other people's code is "most expensive" while the alternative is... you investing your own time to fill all the countless man-hours that it took other people to build the software you are trying to sell off as if it was your own? Because you sure can't just pick up, for example, Microsoft Office, tweak it's UI and sell it off as Teckla's Office suite.
Actually I find the Copy left licences have far more demands than any commercial licence. You can spend huge amounts of time figuring out if you can link or not link, how you must publish the code and how you can distribute the application.
Of course you see "far more demands" in free software licenses than in "any commercial license". After all, while in FLOSS licenses the copyright owners have to specify clearly that you can in fact use, copy,distribute, share, alter and even sell the software while typical proprietary licenses state that you can't do anything at all with them. The latter is pretty clear, while the former may not be to some people.
But nevertheless you are wrong. Typical proprietary software licenses extend for multiple pages, where some pretty outrageous demands are put in place. For example, I've took the time to read a license of a PDF reader that was installed by default on my Android phone and burried in the details it is said that by installing that app I agreed to grant the software distributor or any representative of theirs the right to not only enter my house whenever they see fit but also let them confiscate any electronic device in my house so they can audit them and search for unauthorized copies. I defy you to find any clause in any FLOSS license that imposes any demand which is more outrageous than this.
The prize now has become so political that it's hard to take it seriously anymore.
The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to those who "shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses." Bitching about who was awarded with the Nobel Peace Prize because the process "has become so political" is therefore absurd, because the very purpose and existence of this award is political. Wars are political, relations between nations are political, acts between states are political. Therefore, by it's very nature, it's quite obvious that the purpose of this award, and the only purpose it has, is to praise a specific type of political action, which is in itself a political act.
As a consequence, it's stupid to try to downplay the Nobel Peace Prize by complaining that it "has become so political". It's stupid because this sort of accusation reflects the ignorance of those who reiterate it regarding the Nobel Peace Prize, and it demonstrates a failure to understand it's intended purpose, as set by Alfred Nobel.
More depressing than this, this sort of accusation actually is meant to convey the following complaint: "I don't like the person who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, his award means that what he does or represent has been publicly praised to a world-wide audience, and as I don't like that person then I feel I'm forced to resort to pettiness to try to downgrade that achievement". After all, you don't complain that the Nobel Peace Prize is meaningless. Instead, your complains boil down to
X was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
I don't like X
Therefore this means Nobel Peace Prize isn't good anymore
As the Nobel Piece Prize isn't good anymore, X's award means next to nothing
As X's award means next to nothing, X isn't good, and everyone should hate X, just like I do
So, to sum things up, the Nobel Peace Prize is, and always was, political in nature. And nothing other than that. So bitching about it being political is just like bitching that the water is wet.
The cliff notes of any study on the impact of implementing a daylight savings time in England shows that it helps save between 0.3% and 0.5%, which corresponds to around 0.6% of England's daily energy expenses (the relation between energy production and its' cost is non-linear)
So wait, the power output of this thing is actually 14kW, and the goal of the program is to reach 1MW. But apparently they were at 10kW four years ago... so what's this article actually about? The fact that they increased the voltage to 500kV from the previous 320kV? Why does that matter?
The article may be actually about publicity. In a time where the US government is actively cutting down on expensive US defence projects, those involved in managing those projects must do something in order to keep their precious pet project from being cancelled. One thing that they can do is advertise the project, claim that it's a success and try to shine a light (*snicker*) on their project so that the public is not only aware of it's existence but also supports it, no matter how expensive and fruitless it has been.
In this case, TFA states two things: a) the project is nowhere near it's objective and there is no real chance it will be in the following years (f not decades) b) the project is already giving away millions of dollars to multinational defence contractors to build useless toys based on the useless technology the project managed to develop.
So, they need all the public help they can get to survive the financial cuts the US government is forced inflict to the US's famously huge defence budget. So, in essence what this article amounts to is nothing more than the desperate cries of some people to avoid getting fired from their once cushy job.
These laser systems are being developed to shoot down incoming artillery and missiles. That's why the US Navy is commissioning companies to develop small enough systems to be fit in destroyers. That way, the US carrier group employs these destroyers to protect the carrier group from airborne threats while the carrier, with their fighters and bombers, occupy themselves with attacking stuff over the horizon.
Please do explain how "Hydro is very dirty from environmental view and very destructive". Then, if you are able to explain that, try to correlate your beliefs with the fact that damming rivers has a whole lot more to do with regulating floods and managing water supplies than it has to do with power generation.
You strangely omitted the fact that Nokia is developing two smartphone platforms that are competing with Android: Meego and Symbian. As they predate Android then I really doubt that anyone can accuse Nokia of" arriving late at the Android party".
You claim that those who can't watch h.264 video under linux "are doing it wrong" but yet you failed to say exactly how linux users can watch h.264 video on linux and how they can do it in a free way, both in beer and in speech. Claiming that Microsoft enabling some other program to be dependent on a piece of Microsoft technology which is only distributed in Microsoft's latest product is somehow good for everyone is disingenuous or terribly naive.
Call me sceptical but I don't believe that any senior member of any group involved in any serious campaign is stupid enough to use Facebook and the like as a communication channel for sensible information regarding their operations. If we consider that this so called anonymous organization is supposed to be proficient with computers, networking and subversive campaigns then this allegation becomes even more unbelievable.
But hey, officials have to show that they work, and nothing like an attention-grabbing headline like this one to convey that image to the clueless masses.
McAllister complains that WHATWG is dominated by a clique consisting of Google, Apple, Mozilla, and Opera. But that clique is basically a list of all the browser vendors, and doesn't that kind of make sense?
It makes sense to include them in the standardization process. It doesn't make sense to let the standardization* process be dictated by them, with no one else having a say on it, whether they are competing companies (MS included) or, ghasp, any of the thousands of people that make a living developing and maintaining the WWW.
* this isn't a standardization process per se. Once the WHATWG decided to abandon versioning numbers they effectively abandoned any attempt to define a basic set of features which any involved party should implement and/or expect to be supported by any implementation: in short, they aren't defining a standard. What they are doing is informally agreeing on a loosely defined set of features that any of those parties happened to implement in their product, which is something that only serves their own interests.
These are the people who actually need to implement the standard, so of course they should be the ones with the most influence. The only browser vendor missing from the list is MS, which is only interested in subverting standards.
You are forgetting about the countless people who invest their time and effort dealing first-hand with the result of these so called standards. The cumulative effort that goes into building sites is greater than ever effort that goes into developing any browser, and the responsibility to make sites work is also greater in the web developer's side than in the browser side.
Moreover, standards are defined so that anyone can independently develop their own implementation that provides and supports at least a basic set of features which guarantees interoperability. So, it's irrelevant if a set of browser companies is behind this sham of a standardization process. What is relevant is that no one else can be an active part of it. That means that the entire WWW is being held hostage by 4 corporations. And somehow you (and others) are ok with it.
An option is only as good as the power that is bestowed upon a user/program/protocol to enforce that wish. No matter how many flags a browser sticks into a HTTP header, if the people developing and/or running a server simply do not have any intention to follow through that request than that header becomes absolutely meaningless.
This issue is even more problematic once we acknowledge the fact that the user does not nor he can have any clue regarding what goes on in a server and what is being done with the information that is harvested from them by the people running the server. That is, you access a server and you instruct the server to not track your personal information. Then, you either get a reply from the server stating "ok" or you are left without any feedback. Either way, what guarantees do you have that your wish is being acknowledged? None. Absolutely nothing.
This idea is as bad as the one about relying on client-side plugins to stop an image from being shown if it was deemed too old. It simply cannot work. It's nothing more than a waste of resources.
An example of a wrongly deleted article would be the Zenburn colour scheme for editors. It used to have a page once and the content was accurate, fairly complete, linked to other articles and cited. It was killed for not being notable enough, even though quite a few editors have it as a built-in colour scheme and there are quite a lot of web pages for it. I can't see any valid reason for it not to have a page. Its existence doesn't detract from WP in any way, the article itself was of reasonable quality (and why not improve it instead of just deleting it?).
Boy, you sure picked an appallingly bad example to try to complain about articles being deleted. Care to know why?
Hi, I'm the author of Zenburn. Yes, Zenburn is nothing special, it's definitely not a product, just a color scheme which many people use and have ported to different editing environments. My guess is that the page at Wikipedia seems to have originally been created by one of those users. I agree with the verdict to delete
I am an avid user of Zenburn, and though I also agree that this article does not meet the important WP standards for inclusion (and should be removed)
If this is how ugly and contentious the deletion process is being run then those "deletionists", whatever that is and whoever they are, don't look so ugly all of a sudden.
I used to contribute quite a bit to WP. For an example of how it should be done I suggest comparing the Japanese and English articles on cats.
They both contain quite a bit of information, but the Japanese version goes further by including less well cited material that is generally accepted by most editors and which adds interesting points and trivia to the page. Even the language of the material is a bit softer - not less accurate, just more readable and not so much just the presentation of a series of cited facts like the English article is in places.
If you believe that the en.wikipedia article could be improved then, as this is a wiki, you only need to simply do it yourself. When I see any article which I believe I can improve, whether it's an english article or one in my native language, I simply invest some time into it. I've also translated a considerable number of articles, both to and from en.wikipedia. I've also started articles in multiple languages, just because I believed that the world would benefit from that knowledge. As a consequence, I've seen a considerable number of articles that I've created get nominated to be deleted, which I reacted by simply participating in the discussion. In short, if you want to get something done properly then you need to get on your feet and do it yourself. That's what everyone should do. If instead people just stand around idle while letting everyone do what they want with everything then you only get your way by accident.
WP is not a democracy. The idea is to reach a consensus with a senior editor reviewing the arguments and making a decision. That unfortunately leads to bias.
I didn't said that Wikipedia was a democracy. What I said was that the Wikipedia community has put in place a number of democratic processes which are designed to better reach a consensus. Nonetheless, I believe that the democratic degree of those processes vary between wikipedia communities. For example, in other wikipedia languages the deletion process is decided through the majority +1 rule. In other languages the 2/3+1 rule is used to decide if an article is deleted. Yet, no matter what wikipedia we are talking about, the process is always democratic in nature, and everyone is encourage to participate in the discussion. Just don't spend your time moping spewing absurd complains such as that some
It is quite clear that you don't get it. You simply don't know what's the idea behind wikipedia and therefore you keep confusing that wikipedia is there to act as a new geocities, which should store every piece of crap that is thrown at it, no matter how mind-numbingly wrong and self-serving it may be, just because it is there and someone happened to spend a couple of minutes spewing that nonsense on a new article. That is patently absurd and it is obvious to anyone that this would be bad for everyone.
But just to put it in terms that you can understand, consider these founding principles of a wiki:
Any user may edit
In case of conflict, the community should reach a consensus
By now you should be well aware of these two aspects, and you should have absolutely no doubt regarding their validity.
From these basic principles you must be aware that:
item 1) means that any user may add, alter and remove anything on wikipedia. This applies to simple typo corrections to deleting entire articles. No exception.
item 2) means that if two users disagree that a specific edit should be kept then the community must agree on what to do with the edit
Editing also includes deleting any content of an article. As there are no limits applied to how much anyone can edit then, obviously, that means that editing also includes eliminating an article.
The need to reach a consensus means that no single user can unilaterally impose their will on any other user, let alone the entire community. Therefore, it is quite clear that no one has the right to force the creation or deletion of articles at will just because he feels like it and in spite of the community's views or consensual position.
These consequences are quite obvious. Once we acknowledge then, and picking the example of any random article covering any irrelevant garage band that fails at achieving anything, it is easy to understand that no one has the right to create an article on that irrelevant band and just expect that, no matter how irrelevant, meaningless and inconsequential that band is, no other user can edit it, no matter how many people acknowledge that such an article has absolutely no place in a quasi-encyclopedic medium which intends to be used as a respectable reference.
You keep missing the point. One of the notability criteria is the existence of credible, relevant references. That is the notability criteria. If there are credible, relevant references regarding a band then the band is deemed notable. Why is that so hard to understand?
Besides that, wikipedia isn't myspace, where every band (and even non-band) is entitled to an article. It is not like that nor does anyone gain anything if it started to be like that. Therefore, the line must be drawn somewhere to check which band is worthy and which band isn't. If no such system is put in place then three teens who happen to spend an afternoon in a porch with a kazoo can call themselves a band and demand that they have a dedicate article on wikipedia. Why exactly should that be desirable?
And no, the "rest of the internet" is not the solution, people go to Wikipedia because they want a consistent interface, NPOV, references and all those other qualities that the rest of the internet does generally not provide.
Emphasis mine. If you demand that the content hosted and provided by a service is NPOV then you must accept the fact that other people must also have power over the content, which includes editing it to the extent they wish to edit. The NPOV aspect derives from the consensus reached by the community, whose edits you must accept if you are truly want content which isn't affected by a POV. Among those edits you also have content elimination, particularly references to absurd statements which lack any basis, let alone a reference, and also self-serving bits devoid of any relevancy.
Therefore, as it is easy to see, if an article consists of nothing more than absurd statements that lack any basis and/or are self-serving and devoid of any relevancy then, if you wish to have a repository of NPOV content then you must also accept the possibility that some content which fails to justify it's presence simply doesn't belong in a medium which aims to be an objective repository of NPOV content which can be used as a reference.
So, to put it short, if you wish to have a NPOV reference you must accept the fact that it's content must be edited, and the editing process includes, along addition of new content and tweaking of existing content, the elimination of content.
If you don't want that then you don't want a NPOV reference. If you want your own personal repository of information where you are able to exert complete editorial control over a subject then you do have other means, such as blogs and other forms of personal pages. However, if you want the benefit of having a community edit and maintain the content on a specific subject then you must accept the editing process that goes with it.
By definition, "conflating" means "merging together" stuff. You claim that I'm "conflating my position". I don't know what you mean by that, as it isn't possible to fuse a single thing with itself. As your accusation doesn't make sense and you failed to point out what exactly do you mean by that then I don't know how you can "call foul" on something which you fail to address.
Regarding your "garage band" example, please take a look at wikipedia's notability guidelines for music. According to this, a band is notable if, among other things, if it has received non-trivial coverage in a reference publication. Then, knowing this, the example you provided would satisfy the band notability criteria, unless the multiple papers were local town journals which covered mom&pop's family music ensemble performing in a cousin's birthday.
Articles on these mom&pop ensembles or some garage bands put together by teens who half the band members don't even own their instruments don't have a place in a blog, let alone a wikipedia article. They are irrelevant to everyone, maybe even to the band's members. Again, just because you can edit Wikipedia it doesn't mean that you can use Wikipedia as your personal blog or hosting company. And this is important to understand.
What is insignificant to one person is interesting and important to another person. What is the harm in having a lot of irrelevant articles that only a few people ever look at? Maybe that small insignificant band one day becomes famous. It would be nice to have the full history of page modifications on Wikipedia.
That is true, what's insignificant to one person may be interesting or even important to another person. Yet, this fact isn't being questioned, nor is Wikipedia's article deletion process designed to target uninteresting subjects. It is not nor it ever was about meaning or interest: it's about filtering out the crap which has no business in an encyclopedia-like medium to begin with. And there is no clear line in the sand that defines which is meaningful and which isn't. This is why Wikipedia relies on a democratic process, one which depends on the involvement of the entire community, to decide what to do with a contested article.
Therefore, if an article which you believe is meaningful happened to be voted off wikipedia then either you failed to get involved in the decision process or, quite bluntly, the article was in fact cruft. Either way, the process relies on users, such as yourself, to get involved, as no one single handedly decides or has the power to simply delete articles at will.
You seem to think that if there are too many insignificant articles, then we won't be able to find the important ones.
Please don't try to put words in my mouth. I never even referred to any ability to search for articles, let alone any difficulty in doing so due to the number of "insignificant articles". It is a silly, baseless idea.
Allowing these trivial contributions also encourages the submitter/editor to make other more valuable contributions. Compare this to deleting their article, however insignificant, which will likely make them never want to contribute again.
One thing that those who complain about this sort of issue tend to forget is that Wikipedia is not a free hosting company. No one has the right to host their pet project on Wikipedia's servers. There are countless hosting companies out there which provide that type of service, such as free blogs and even free wikis.
If you truly want to contribute to a knowledge repository then you must respect the principles that were set to run them. The very nature of Wikipedia is that it's a public repository of encyclopedic information which is democratically run by the wikipedia community. It is not anyone's blog, nor it is your very own personal server. Therefore, if anyone wishes to contribute to wikipedia then they need to acknowledge that:
a) anyone can edit anything b) everyone has the right to "be bold" about their edits c) in cases where conflicts happen, the community as a whole is engaged in deciding what to do.
That means that no one has the right to unilaterally impose changes to articles. Even when articles are deleted, their deletion is triggered by any user's suspicion that the article is unworthy of being hosted by wikipedia. Yet, the only thing that that particular user can do is simply nominate the article for deletion, where he can only present the reasons why he believes the article should be deleted. His weight on the issue is the same as everyone else's: a single vote.
There is no "deletionist" policy
Yes, there is. The fact that an article can be deleted means there is a deletionist policy.
That's absurd and even you must be aware of how silly that statement is.
Even spam articles IMO should only be hidden, and not deleted.
That's stupid. Why would Wikipedia waste their scarce resources storing the countless floods of spam that plague wikipedia? Can you imagine the amount of storage you would need if you simply never deleted a single spam email that you managed to receive?
You clearly aren't involved with wikipedia. Anyone who is remotely involved in anti-vandalism and article clean-up knows how much crap people try to shovel into wikipedia on a daily basis. I mean, besides the obvious trolls and vandals who add all sorts of puerile comments to articles, there is a constant barrage of articles being created on all sorts of absurd subjects, such as spam articles on small irrelevant companies which have just been founded, local wannabe models who managed to pay a semi-professional photographer to take a couple of amateurish photos of them, garage bands which were created last week by a set of teens that don't even own any instruments, etc etc etc...
And these are only a few examples of the obvious, clear cut trash which popped into wikipedia in the couple of minutes it took me to write this post. Now, extrapolate that to any time frame you wish to imagine. Imagine how much crap that amounts.
Another thing that you fail to understand is that there isn't a horde of meanies who are single-handedly deleting articles off of wikipedia. Wikipedia established a long time ago a democratic process. A user cannot delete articles. The only thing a user can do is nominate an article for deletion. Then, the fate of that article is decided after a week-long discussion among users, who vote on what to do with the article. There is no "deletionist" policy, only discussion among peers to decide what to do with articles covering all sorts of questionable issues. Have any doubt? Then look for yourself and discover Wikipedia's process to delete articles. You only need a valid account to vote, so put your money where your mouth is.
On top of that, people like you must understand what would wikipedia's fate be if the community didn't imposed some sort of filter on the changes being committed to their articles. To put it quite bluntly, wikipedia would be the new geocities, where 95% of the pages were filled with complete crap. This sort of criticism targetted at how wikipedia's community manages wikipedia's articles boils down to the belief that no one should ever touch your pet article, no matter the intention and no matter how absurd it may be. And that is no way to manage a knowledge repository which some people try to make it to be useful enough as a reference.
Something that the tech journalists who get infatuated with tablets seem to fail to consider is that they are lousy devices for content creation. They are good for passive experiences.
I would say the exact same thing but with a little nuance: tablets and the like (including the so called smart phones) are lousy devices for content creation but are designed for content "consumption". This little nuance is important to understand why there is such a great media hype directed towards these little limited computers, as the ones doing the pushing are the ones who stand to benefit the most from it's adoption. It's a conflict of interests.
Meanwhile, no one purchases one of these limited computers, such as tablets and smart phones, to replace their own personal computer. They may be used to handle very limited tasks, such as accessing emails and doing calendar work, but once we see why people use computers then we understand that they are not going anywhere. But a whole lot of people, as they tend to benefit from a scenario where they control what people access through their computers, are doing their best to fool everyone into believing that no one will ever need a computer once they get one of these largely useless toys.
There's no failure whatsoever to support their products if they've advertised them as compatible with Windows and OSX, but not Linux. As most do.
There you go again with the confusion. NVidia provides their own proprietary drivers for linux. AMD also provides their own proprietary drivers for linux and, thankfully, they've started to work on contributing FLOSS drivers. Through their own paid developers, which I assume are well fed. And to underline the idiocy of your previous comment, Intel is a notorious contributor of FLOSS drivers for their graphics product line, which they also employ people to do, and I assume aren't homeless and do manage to eat once in a while.
So, as you can see, your "HURR DURR developers need to eat" comment is, at best, petty and based on nonsense. The arguments you tried to use in your attempt to attack what you childishly labelled as "Stallman's free software religion" is not only completely baseless but also fails to relate to reality. Moreover, and to underline the stupidity of your comments, the principles that Stallman defends regard only the right to access and distribute the source code of any given software program, and it does absolutely nothing to hinder any commercial development or use of any software package, let alone the right of a company to hire developers or the right of anyone to be paid to write software.
Because I don't see OSS as any kind of threat to the mainstream. As I said, most programmers need to eat, so OSS, with it's high requirement for people to work for free, will never have the broad scope and quality of commercial software. For PC use it'll remain a fringe activity.
You seem to be confused. Driver writers who contribute their time to write drivers for platforms such as linux only need to contribute their work if the proprietary drivers are either non-existent or broken. In other words, the FLOSS people only need to write alternative drivers if the hardware companies do an appallingly miserable job providing their own drivers. This problem, which consists of the failure on the behalf of hardware companies to support their products, affects all platforms and is not a question of "programmers need to be paid" or "HURR DURR developers need to eat". After all, the hardware companies, the ones responsible for providing a working product, already employ people to write drivers. Who are paid to do so. By you, with the money you've spent on hardware. Which will only fail to work if those paid, eating developers did a miserable job to begin with.
Moreover, if you happen to get a broken driver for the Windows platform you don't go off crying around that Windows developers need to eat, even when you are using proprietary drivers.
So your pathetic comment is nothing more than a lame attempt to criticize a sector of the software industry that you happen to dislike. I only find it strange how you failed to throw in the tired and used "free software developers are ruining the economy, stealing our jobs and destroying the industry" angle which also tends to be thrown in for good measure. But maybe you are saving it for the articles on free software success stories, where a team of volunteers happen to churn out better code than certain teams of "professional" software developers, who need to eat more than they need to become competent at their job.
You have to take into account the absolute pain which is to manage a multi-language project, let alone debug any problem. Moreover, the level of mind-numbing bloatedness which interpreted languages such as those you described (ruby, python and the like) may, in your opinion, make a language a bit easier to program in, but in practical terms it leads to terribly bloated software which, unless you are running a high end desktop, runs mind-numbingly slow when compared with native, 100% C++ apps.
They also tend to separate civil engineers and construction workers. Just because someone knows how to lay up a brick wall or weld a steel beam it doesn't mean he is an engineer. The same applies to IT. Just because someone knows how to write code in a specific language it doesn't mean that he is an engineer.
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Oh really? Can you please tell us what would be the cost of building a product on a proprietary closed-source software program which doesn't grant anyone the right to extend it, let alone commercialize any derivative work?
It appears that you are one of those ignorant FLOSS detractors who tries to bitch that hijacking other people's code is "most expensive" while the alternative is... you investing your own time to fill all the countless man-hours that it took other people to build the software you are trying to sell off as if it was your own? Because you sure can't just pick up, for example, Microsoft Office, tweak it's UI and sell it off as Teckla's Office suite.
Of course you see "far more demands" in free software licenses than in "any commercial license". After all, while in FLOSS licenses the copyright owners have to specify clearly that you can in fact use, copy,distribute, share, alter and even sell the software while typical proprietary licenses state that you can't do anything at all with them. The latter is pretty clear, while the former may not be to some people.
But nevertheless you are wrong. Typical proprietary software licenses extend for multiple pages, where some pretty outrageous demands are put in place. For example, I've took the time to read a license of a PDF reader that was installed by default on my Android phone and burried in the details it is said that by installing that app I agreed to grant the software distributor or any representative of theirs the right to not only enter my house whenever they see fit but also let them confiscate any electronic device in my house so they can audit them and search for unauthorized copies. I defy you to find any clause in any FLOSS license that imposes any demand which is more outrageous than this.
The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to those who "shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses." Bitching about who was awarded with the Nobel Peace Prize because the process "has become so political" is therefore absurd, because the very purpose and existence of this award is political. Wars are political, relations between nations are political, acts between states are political. Therefore, by it's very nature, it's quite obvious that the purpose of this award, and the only purpose it has, is to praise a specific type of political action, which is in itself a political act.
As a consequence, it's stupid to try to downplay the Nobel Peace Prize by complaining that it "has become so political". It's stupid because this sort of accusation reflects the ignorance of those who reiterate it regarding the Nobel Peace Prize, and it demonstrates a failure to understand it's intended purpose, as set by Alfred Nobel.
More depressing than this, this sort of accusation actually is meant to convey the following complaint: "I don't like the person who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, his award means that what he does or represent has been publicly praised to a world-wide audience, and as I don't like that person then I feel I'm forced to resort to pettiness to try to downgrade that achievement". After all, you don't complain that the Nobel Peace Prize is meaningless. Instead, your complains boil down to
So, to sum things up, the Nobel Peace Prize is, and always was, political in nature. And nothing other than that. So bitching about it being political is just like bitching that the water is wet.
Have you even bothered to search for them?
The cliff notes of any study on the impact of implementing a daylight savings time in England shows that it helps save between 0.3% and 0.5%, which corresponds to around 0.6% of England's daily energy expenses (the relation between energy production and its' cost is non-linear)
The article may be actually about publicity. In a time where the US government is actively cutting down on expensive US defence projects, those involved in managing those projects must do something in order to keep their precious pet project from being cancelled. One thing that they can do is advertise the project, claim that it's a success and try to shine a light (*snicker*) on their project so that the public is not only aware of it's existence but also supports it, no matter how expensive and fruitless it has been.
In this case, TFA states two things:
a) the project is nowhere near it's objective and there is no real chance it will be in the following years (f not decades)
b) the project is already giving away millions of dollars to multinational defence contractors to build useless toys based on the useless technology the project managed to develop.
So, they need all the public help they can get to survive the financial cuts the US government is forced inflict to the US's famously huge defence budget. So, in essence what this article amounts to is nothing more than the desperate cries of some people to avoid getting fired from their once cushy job.
These laser systems are being developed to shoot down incoming artillery and missiles. That's why the US Navy is commissioning companies to develop small enough systems to be fit in destroyers. That way, the US carrier group employs these destroyers to protect the carrier group from airborne threats while the carrier, with their fighters and bombers, occupy themselves with attacking stuff over the horizon.
Please do explain how "Hydro is very dirty from environmental view and very destructive". Then, if you are able to explain that, try to correlate your beliefs with the fact that damming rivers has a whole lot more to do with regulating floods and managing water supplies than it has to do with power generation.
You strangely omitted the fact that Nokia is developing two smartphone platforms that are competing with Android: Meego and Symbian. As they predate Android then I really doubt that anyone can accuse Nokia of" arriving late at the Android party".
You claim that those who can't watch h.264 video under linux "are doing it wrong" but yet you failed to say exactly how linux users can watch h.264 video on linux and how they can do it in a free way, both in beer and in speech. Claiming that Microsoft enabling some other program to be dependent on a piece of Microsoft technology which is only distributed in Microsoft's latest product is somehow good for everyone is disingenuous or terribly naive.
Exactly. That's why claiming that they are arresting "senior members of the group" is a pretty clueless thing to do, as it is patently absurd.
Call me sceptical but I don't believe that any senior member of any group involved in any serious campaign is stupid enough to use Facebook and the like as a communication channel for sensible information regarding their operations. If we consider that this so called anonymous organization is supposed to be proficient with computers, networking and subversive campaigns then this allegation becomes even more unbelievable.
But hey, officials have to show that they work, and nothing like an attention-grabbing headline like this one to convey that image to the clueless masses.
McAllister complains that WHATWG is dominated by a clique consisting of Google, Apple, Mozilla, and Opera. But that clique is basically a list of all the browser vendors, and doesn't that kind of make sense?
It makes sense to include them in the standardization process. It doesn't make sense to let the standardization* process be dictated by them, with no one else having a say on it, whether they are competing companies (MS included) or, ghasp, any of the thousands of people that make a living developing and maintaining the WWW.
* this isn't a standardization process per se. Once the WHATWG decided to abandon versioning numbers they effectively abandoned any attempt to define a basic set of features which any involved party should implement and/or expect to be supported by any implementation: in short, they aren't defining a standard. What they are doing is informally agreeing on a loosely defined set of features that any of those parties happened to implement in their product, which is something that only serves their own interests.
These are the people who actually need to implement the standard, so of course they should be the ones with the most influence. The only browser vendor missing from the list is MS, which is only interested in subverting standards.
You are forgetting about the countless people who invest their time and effort dealing first-hand with the result of these so called standards. The cumulative effort that goes into building sites is greater than ever effort that goes into developing any browser, and the responsibility to make sites work is also greater in the web developer's side than in the browser side.
Moreover, standards are defined so that anyone can independently develop their own implementation that provides and supports at least a basic set of features which guarantees interoperability. So, it's irrelevant if a set of browser companies is behind this sham of a standardization process. What is relevant is that no one else can be an active part of it. That means that the entire WWW is being held hostage by 4 corporations. And somehow you (and others) are ok with it.
Or ignore it.
This.
An option is only as good as the power that is bestowed upon a user/program/protocol to enforce that wish. No matter how many flags a browser sticks into a HTTP header, if the people developing and/or running a server simply do not have any intention to follow through that request than that header becomes absolutely meaningless.
This issue is even more problematic once we acknowledge the fact that the user does not nor he can have any clue regarding what goes on in a server and what is being done with the information that is harvested from them by the people running the server. That is, you access a server and you instruct the server to not track your personal information. Then, you either get a reply from the server stating "ok" or you are left without any feedback. Either way, what guarantees do you have that your wish is being acknowledged? None. Absolutely nothing.
This idea is as bad as the one about relying on client-side plugins to stop an image from being shown if it was deemed too old. It simply cannot work. It's nothing more than a waste of resources.
An example of a wrongly deleted article would be the Zenburn colour scheme for editors. It used to have a page once and the content was accurate, fairly complete, linked to other articles and cited. It was killed for not being notable enough, even though quite a few editors have it as a built-in colour scheme and there are quite a lot of web pages for it. I can't see any valid reason for it not to have a page. Its existence doesn't detract from WP in any way, the article itself was of reasonable quality (and why not improve it instead of just deleting it?).
Boy, you sure picked an appallingly bad example to try to complain about articles being deleted. Care to know why?
Well, here is Wikipedia's debate on the deletion of the Zenburn article. Please do read it. I'll paste here a couple of quotes from that discussion:
If this is how ugly and contentious the deletion process is being run then those "deletionists", whatever that is and whoever they are, don't look so ugly all of a sudden.
I used to contribute quite a bit to WP. For an example of how it should be done I suggest comparing the Japanese and English articles on cats.
They both contain quite a bit of information, but the Japanese version goes further by including less well cited material that is generally accepted by most editors and which adds interesting points and trivia to the page. Even the language of the material is a bit softer - not less accurate, just more readable and not so much just the presentation of a series of cited facts like the English article is in places.
If you believe that the en.wikipedia article could be improved then, as this is a wiki, you only need to simply do it yourself. When I see any article which I believe I can improve, whether it's an english article or one in my native language, I simply invest some time into it. I've also translated a considerable number of articles, both to and from en.wikipedia. I've also started articles in multiple languages, just because I believed that the world would benefit from that knowledge. As a consequence, I've seen a considerable number of articles that I've created get nominated to be deleted, which I reacted by simply participating in the discussion. In short, if you want to get something done properly then you need to get on your feet and do it yourself. That's what everyone should do. If instead people just stand around idle while letting everyone do what they want with everything then you only get your way by accident.
WP is not a democracy. The idea is to reach a consensus with a senior editor reviewing the arguments and making a decision. That unfortunately leads to bias.
I didn't said that Wikipedia was a democracy. What I said was that the Wikipedia community has put in place a number of democratic processes which are designed to better reach a consensus. Nonetheless, I believe that the democratic degree of those processes vary between wikipedia communities. For example, in other wikipedia languages the deletion process is decided through the majority +1 rule. In other languages the 2/3+1 rule is used to decide if an article is deleted. Yet, no matter what wikipedia we are talking about, the process is always democratic in nature, and everyone is encourage to participate in the discussion. Just don't spend your time moping spewing absurd complains such as that some
It is quite clear that you don't get it. You simply don't know what's the idea behind wikipedia and therefore you keep confusing that wikipedia is there to act as a new geocities, which should store every piece of crap that is thrown at it, no matter how mind-numbingly wrong and self-serving it may be, just because it is there and someone happened to spend a couple of minutes spewing that nonsense on a new article. That is patently absurd and it is obvious to anyone that this would be bad for everyone.
But just to put it in terms that you can understand, consider these founding principles of a wiki:
By now you should be well aware of these two aspects, and you should have absolutely no doubt regarding their validity.
From these basic principles you must be aware that:
Editing also includes deleting any content of an article. As there are no limits applied to how much anyone can edit then, obviously, that means that editing also includes eliminating an article.
The need to reach a consensus means that no single user can unilaterally impose their will on any other user, let alone the entire community. Therefore, it is quite clear that no one has the right to force the creation or deletion of articles at will just because he feels like it and in spite of the community's views or consensual position.
These consequences are quite obvious. Once we acknowledge then, and picking the example of any random article covering any irrelevant garage band that fails at achieving anything, it is easy to understand that no one has the right to create an article on that irrelevant band and just expect that, no matter how irrelevant, meaningless and inconsequential that band is, no other user can edit it, no matter how many people acknowledge that such an article has absolutely no place in a quasi-encyclopedic medium which intends to be used as a respectable reference.
You keep missing the point. One of the notability criteria is the existence of credible, relevant references. That is the notability criteria. If there are credible, relevant references regarding a band then the band is deemed notable. Why is that so hard to understand?
Besides that, wikipedia isn't myspace, where every band (and even non-band) is entitled to an article. It is not like that nor does anyone gain anything if it started to be like that. Therefore, the line must be drawn somewhere to check which band is worthy and which band isn't. If no such system is put in place then three teens who happen to spend an afternoon in a porch with a kazoo can call themselves a band and demand that they have a dedicate article on wikipedia. Why exactly should that be desirable?
And no, the "rest of the internet" is not the solution, people go to Wikipedia because they want a consistent interface, NPOV, references and all those other qualities that the rest of the internet does generally not provide.
Emphasis mine. If you demand that the content hosted and provided by a service is NPOV then you must accept the fact that other people must also have power over the content, which includes editing it to the extent they wish to edit. The NPOV aspect derives from the consensus reached by the community, whose edits you must accept if you are truly want content which isn't affected by a POV. Among those edits you also have content elimination, particularly references to absurd statements which lack any basis, let alone a reference, and also self-serving bits devoid of any relevancy.
Therefore, as it is easy to see, if an article consists of nothing more than absurd statements that lack any basis and/or are self-serving and devoid of any relevancy then, if you wish to have a repository of NPOV content then you must also accept the possibility that some content which fails to justify it's presence simply doesn't belong in a medium which aims to be an objective repository of NPOV content which can be used as a reference.
So, to put it short, if you wish to have a NPOV reference you must accept the fact that it's content must be edited, and the editing process includes, along addition of new content and tweaking of existing content, the elimination of content.
If you don't want that then you don't want a NPOV reference. If you want your own personal repository of information where you are able to exert complete editorial control over a subject then you do have other means, such as blogs and other forms of personal pages. However, if you want the benefit of having a community edit and maintain the content on a specific subject then you must accept the editing process that goes with it.
By definition, "conflating" means "merging together" stuff. You claim that I'm "conflating my position". I don't know what you mean by that, as it isn't possible to fuse a single thing with itself. As your accusation doesn't make sense and you failed to point out what exactly do you mean by that then I don't know how you can "call foul" on something which you fail to address.
Regarding your "garage band" example, please take a look at wikipedia's notability guidelines for music. According to this, a band is notable if, among other things, if it has received non-trivial coverage in a reference publication. Then, knowing this, the example you provided would satisfy the band notability criteria, unless the multiple papers were local town journals which covered mom&pop's family music ensemble performing in a cousin's birthday.
Articles on these mom&pop ensembles or some garage bands put together by teens who half the band members don't even own their instruments don't have a place in a blog, let alone a wikipedia article. They are irrelevant to everyone, maybe even to the band's members. Again, just because you can edit Wikipedia it doesn't mean that you can use Wikipedia as your personal blog or hosting company. And this is important to understand.
What is insignificant to one person is interesting and important to another person. What is the harm in having a lot of irrelevant articles that only a few people ever look at? Maybe that small insignificant band one day becomes famous. It would be nice to have the full history of page modifications on Wikipedia.
That is true, what's insignificant to one person may be interesting or even important to another person. Yet, this fact isn't being questioned, nor is Wikipedia's article deletion process designed to target uninteresting subjects. It is not nor it ever was about meaning or interest: it's about filtering out the crap which has no business in an encyclopedia-like medium to begin with. And there is no clear line in the sand that defines which is meaningful and which isn't. This is why Wikipedia relies on a democratic process, one which depends on the involvement of the entire community, to decide what to do with a contested article.
Therefore, if an article which you believe is meaningful happened to be voted off wikipedia then either you failed to get involved in the decision process or, quite bluntly, the article was in fact cruft. Either way, the process relies on users, such as yourself, to get involved, as no one single handedly decides or has the power to simply delete articles at will.
You seem to think that if there are too many insignificant articles, then we won't be able to find the important ones.
Please don't try to put words in my mouth. I never even referred to any ability to search for articles, let alone any difficulty in doing so due to the number of "insignificant articles". It is a silly, baseless idea.
Allowing these trivial contributions also encourages the submitter/editor to make other more valuable contributions. Compare this to deleting their article, however insignificant, which will likely make them never want to contribute again.
One thing that those who complain about this sort of issue tend to forget is that Wikipedia is not a free hosting company. No one has the right to host their pet project on Wikipedia's servers. There are countless hosting companies out there which provide that type of service, such as free blogs and even free wikis.
If you truly want to contribute to a knowledge repository then you must respect the principles that were set to run them. The very nature of Wikipedia is that it's a public repository of encyclopedic information which is democratically run by the wikipedia community. It is not anyone's blog, nor it is your very own personal server. Therefore, if anyone wishes to contribute to wikipedia then they need to acknowledge that:
a) anyone can edit anything
b) everyone has the right to "be bold" about their edits
c) in cases where conflicts happen, the community as a whole is engaged in deciding what to do.
That means that no one has the right to unilaterally impose changes to articles. Even when articles are deleted, their deletion is triggered by any user's suspicion that the article is unworthy of being hosted by wikipedia. Yet, the only thing that that particular user can do is simply nominate the article for deletion, where he can only present the reasons why he believes the article should be deleted. His weight on the issue is the same as everyone else's: a single vote.
There is no "deletionist" policy
Yes, there is. The fact that an article can be deleted means there is a deletionist policy.
That's absurd and even you must be aware of how silly that statement is.
Even spam articles IMO should only be hidden, and not deleted.
That's stupid. Why would Wikipedia waste their scarce resources storing the countless floods of spam that plague wikipedia? Can you imagine the amount of storage you would need if you simply never deleted a single spam email that you managed to receive?
You clearly aren't involved with wikipedia. Anyone who is remotely involved in anti-vandalism and article clean-up knows how much crap people try to shovel into wikipedia on a daily basis. I mean, besides the obvious trolls and vandals who add all sorts of puerile comments to articles, there is a constant barrage of articles being created on all sorts of absurd subjects, such as spam articles on small irrelevant companies which have just been founded, local wannabe models who managed to pay a semi-professional photographer to take a couple of amateurish photos of them, garage bands which were created last week by a set of teens that don't even own any instruments, etc etc etc...
And these are only a few examples of the obvious, clear cut trash which popped into wikipedia in the couple of minutes it took me to write this post. Now, extrapolate that to any time frame you wish to imagine. Imagine how much crap that amounts.
Another thing that you fail to understand is that there isn't a horde of meanies who are single-handedly deleting articles off of wikipedia. Wikipedia established a long time ago a democratic process. A user cannot delete articles. The only thing a user can do is nominate an article for deletion. Then, the fate of that article is decided after a week-long discussion among users, who vote on what to do with the article. There is no "deletionist" policy, only discussion among peers to decide what to do with articles covering all sorts of questionable issues. Have any doubt? Then look for yourself and discover Wikipedia's process to delete articles. You only need a valid account to vote, so put your money where your mouth is.
On top of that, people like you must understand what would wikipedia's fate be if the community didn't imposed some sort of filter on the changes being committed to their articles. To put it quite bluntly, wikipedia would be the new geocities, where 95% of the pages were filled with complete crap. This sort of criticism targetted at how wikipedia's community manages wikipedia's articles boils down to the belief that no one should ever touch your pet article, no matter the intention and no matter how absurd it may be. And that is no way to manage a knowledge repository which some people try to make it to be useful enough as a reference.
I would say the exact same thing but with a little nuance: tablets and the like (including the so called smart phones) are lousy devices for content creation but are designed for content "consumption". This little nuance is important to understand why there is such a great media hype directed towards these little limited computers, as the ones doing the pushing are the ones who stand to benefit the most from it's adoption. It's a conflict of interests.
Meanwhile, no one purchases one of these limited computers, such as tablets and smart phones, to replace their own personal computer. They may be used to handle very limited tasks, such as accessing emails and doing calendar work, but once we see why people use computers then we understand that they are not going anywhere. But a whole lot of people, as they tend to benefit from a scenario where they control what people access through their computers, are doing their best to fool everyone into believing that no one will ever need a computer once they get one of these largely useless toys.
There's no failure whatsoever to support their products if they've advertised them as compatible with Windows and OSX, but not Linux. As most do.
There you go again with the confusion. NVidia provides their own proprietary drivers for linux. AMD also provides their own proprietary drivers for linux and, thankfully, they've started to work on contributing FLOSS drivers. Through their own paid developers, which I assume are well fed. And to underline the idiocy of your previous comment, Intel is a notorious contributor of FLOSS drivers for their graphics product line, which they also employ people to do, and I assume aren't homeless and do manage to eat once in a while.
So, as you can see, your "HURR DURR developers need to eat" comment is, at best, petty and based on nonsense. The arguments you tried to use in your attempt to attack what you childishly labelled as "Stallman's free software religion" is not only completely baseless but also fails to relate to reality. Moreover, and to underline the stupidity of your comments, the principles that Stallman defends regard only the right to access and distribute the source code of any given software program, and it does absolutely nothing to hinder any commercial development or use of any software package, let alone the right of a company to hire developers or the right of anyone to be paid to write software.
Because I don't see OSS as any kind of threat to the mainstream. As I said, most programmers need to eat, so OSS, with it's high requirement for people to work for free, will never have the broad scope and quality of commercial software. For PC use it'll remain a fringe activity.
You seem to be confused. Driver writers who contribute their time to write drivers for platforms such as linux only need to contribute their work if the proprietary drivers are either non-existent or broken. In other words, the FLOSS people only need to write alternative drivers if the hardware companies do an appallingly miserable job providing their own drivers. This problem, which consists of the failure on the behalf of hardware companies to support their products, affects all platforms and is not a question of "programmers need to be paid" or "HURR DURR developers need to eat". After all, the hardware companies, the ones responsible for providing a working product, already employ people to write drivers. Who are paid to do so. By you, with the money you've spent on hardware. Which will only fail to work if those paid, eating developers did a miserable job to begin with.
Moreover, if you happen to get a broken driver for the Windows platform you don't go off crying around that Windows developers need to eat, even when you are using proprietary drivers.
So your pathetic comment is nothing more than a lame attempt to criticize a sector of the software industry that you happen to dislike. I only find it strange how you failed to throw in the tired and used "free software developers are ruining the economy, stealing our jobs and destroying the industry" angle which also tends to be thrown in for good measure. But maybe you are saving it for the articles on free software success stories, where a team of volunteers happen to churn out better code than certain teams of "professional" software developers, who need to eat more than they need to become competent at their job.
You have to take into account the absolute pain which is to manage a multi-language project, let alone debug any problem. Moreover, the level of mind-numbing bloatedness which interpreted languages such as those you described (ruby, python and the like) may, in your opinion, make a language a bit easier to program in, but in practical terms it leads to terribly bloated software which, unless you are running a high end desktop, runs mind-numbingly slow when compared with native, 100% C++ apps.
They also tend to separate civil engineers and construction workers. Just because someone knows how to lay up a brick wall or weld a steel beam it doesn't mean he is an engineer. The same applies to IT. Just because someone knows how to write code in a specific language it doesn't mean that he is an engineer.