No, the majority of Comcast's customers have DSL available, and nearly all of them could choose satellite or broadcast TV. These are easy, competitive alternatives for most Comcast customers, but there are also plenty of more esoteric alternatives, like satellite internet, 3g wireless internet, dial-up internet, moving somewhere with different options, or not using the internet at home. Everyone has another choice, and in this case, for most users, the other choices are much easier to use than in many situations.
It would be much easier to argue that people have "no choice" but to use Microsoft than it is to argue this for Comcast, but I doubt most of the people here agree with the Microsoft proposition.
In the old days, viruses used to do things like delete users data to be malicious. Now, virus authors go to great lengths to write stealth rootkits to be sure there is never any visible sign to the user that the virus is installed on the system.
Viruses used to written by basement hackers who wanted to be elite and cool and to show what they could do, and visibly damaging people's user experience drew a lot of attention to them. Now, viruses are authored by hackers payed by organized crime, and they are used to mail spam, steal credit card numbers, and blackmail companies for cash under threat of DDOS attacks. Today's hackers won't bother going after the kill switch, it's not in their interest. They want those machines online, unknowingly marching to their orders like a good little botnet bot should.
At $20,000 per pound to deliver more air with the space shuttle, it's very expensive air their losing, at $60,000 worth of air per day. How long would it take to leak a minor scientific research project out of the budget?
That's true, it's not the operating system's fault.
The installation of NT on my old computer at work was very stable, as long as you didn't introduce any mitigating factors like moving the mouse, pushing keys on the keyboard, or running software. In actual use it crashed an average of once or twice a day, but had I not tried to use the computer, I suspect you're right that it never would have crashed, so it's clearly not the operating system's fault.
I see. Because you had a computer running the very same operating system that this guy was running, and your computer didn't crash, then you know that there's something wrong with him personally, or he's lying, if he said his computer did crash.
When I upgrade to Leopard, if it doesn't crash, then I'll know this guy is a loser, because us 1337 Slashdot users know that there couldn't be any differences in the hardware or software or use that could cause one computer to crash and another to be stable when they're both running the same operating system.
Some people disagree with the Slashdot system that "funny" mods don't contribute to karma. So some people choose a different positive mod to use when something's funny.
I tend to agree. If I find something worthy of using a mod point for any reason, then I think it should be reflected in that user's karma. Why discriminate against humor?
Yes, I know they use high voltage DC connectors, because they have less power loss than AC. In fact, I said "DC power system," and technically, there are probably nearly two dozen DC power systems in the room with me, judging from the number of wall worts.
I wonder if they made any effort to survey demand for this and estimate a demand curve to maximize their profitability on this venture, so they could give away as many free laptops as possible. How did they arrive at the $400 price to buy one laptop for a poor child, rather than any other price, like $600 to buy two more laptops, or $300 to buy half an additional laptop. In most cases, charging a 100% premium for charitable purposes isn't the number that's going to maximize charitable contribution, especially for big ticket items. I expect that if Apple charged twice as much for a Product Red iPod and donated all that extra money (plus whatever they're donating now), they'd end up with lower total contributions, because hardly anyone would buy one.
Maybe they did research this and they're charging a reasonable price to maximize the surplus brought in through the program, and hence the number of extra laptops they can buy. It's just that nice, round number of "once extra laptop," combined with the relatively huge 100% markup on a big-ticket item, that makes me wonder if anyone bothered to think about the economics and how to maximize their charitable impact, or if someone just made up some number that sounded good. Personally, I think I'd get one for $250, and I'd think about it for $300, but $400's just too much from the point of view of the value of the laptop to me. From the point of view of charity, a $200 gift is a whole lot for me right now for a single gift. I believe in their mission, but there are a lot of other charities I believe in as much or more, and I'll split my charitable contributions among them. If I thought of it as a $200 laptop plus a $50 gift, I'd definitely sign up for one at $250. Are there four people like me for every one who'd pay $400? I don't know, but I sure hope that the OLPC project bothered to make an intelligent guess.
One intelligent thing they may be doing is testing the market, rather than surveying it. That is, perhaps they'll be $400 for a few months, and see how many they sell, then $350, etc. That would be reasonable behavior to maximize their profits and thereby contributions on this program, possibly netting a larger portion of consumer surplus than any (even carefully arrived at) single pricing plan.
Well, they don't exactly say "it wasn't them." They say "From Microsoft's perspective it's a matter of choice."
You see, the Nigerian Government might have choosen to go with Linux. Microsoft makes it clear, it was their decision to make. And maybe Microsoft choose to let them know that, if they made an unfortunate choice in this matter, some unfortunate events might happen to occur to the people who made that decision. And maybe Microsoft choose to let these members of the Nigerian government know that if they made a different decision, certain things might happen to go their way in the future. Maybe they could take an early retirement, or have an opportunity to buy something nice for themselves. Microsoft choose to make the members of the Nigerian Government aware of these things, and the people of the Nigerian Government exercied their ability to choose accordingly.
So you see, Microsoft's being honest: it was a matter of choice.
There have been a lot of comments to the effect that it takes more effort to send a letter than an email, so there's a selection process that means only the more die-hard loonies actually bother to get letters in the mail. I agree with this, but I think there's another selection process in place that also makes the mail more scary: age.
Of the people I've known who rant on with horrifying opinions from within their own delusional, disconnected world, there's a sharp tendency that the more loony ones were older. Not always, but there's a trend that way. I don't know if it's due to too many years of witnessing and magnifying perceived falsehoods, early onset dementia, a build-up of heavy metals in their systems, or what causes their buildup of paranoid ramblings to burst forth, but I think there's a strong age factor at work here, and that the snail mails are much more likely to come from older, and therefore more hard-core lunatics than the email, which more often originates from young lunatics-in-training who are not yet as comfortable and confident in their insanity.
You're right that Social Security works the same way- the "Social Security Surplus" is a bunch of IOU notes the government wrote to itself. But Enron was the same thing. While racking up tremendous losses, they used off-book entities that were mostly owned by Enron's CFO Andy Fastow, such as the "Raptors," where Enron's massive losses magically disappeared, transferred to the Raptors. So the Raptors were way in the red, right? What idiot investors would take all this debt off Enron's hands? Well, the Raptors were well funded in compensation for taking all this debt. Where did this money for the Raptors come from? They were funded with Enron stock.
It's been a while since I read "Conspiracy of Fools," so I may have some details wrong, but Enron was hemorrhaging money while reporting huge profits by waving their magic accounting wand. Just like Social Security, their money existed in the form of IOU's to themselves, once you finished deconstructing all the ridiculous accounting.
Mod parent up. This is a common misunderstanding, or perhaps I should call it a government lie. It's Enron accounting.
They try to encourage people to play the lottery by telling them the money all goes to schools. So they direct the whole of lottery income to the schools, on paper. But the school budget is planned in budget meetings, and the ammount the lottery brings in has no effect on school budgets. For every extra dollar brought in by the lottery, that's one less dollar of general fund money that goes to the schools, and one more dollar of total money in the government's general fund.
They can write out the accounting anyway they like to and say, "see, these dollars went here," but dollars are fungible. At the end of the day, the acid test to see if it means anything to say "lottery money goes to schools" is to see what the marginal effect on school funding is of purchasing lottery tickets. That effect is 0.
I agree. I haven't actually had many of my changes reverted, but I have friends whom I have a very high opinion of who say that all their changes were always reverted regardless of being entirely accurate and informative, so they gave up. Some of these people are people whom I don't doubt; well-spoken experts in the fields they were contributing to.
Perhaps you haven't the time or inclination to do this, and maybe it's wrong that one sometimes has to do this to get things done with high-quality contributions, but you might be able to avoid this frustrating tendency toward reversions by always starting with any changes you intend to make on the "talk" page for the article. First say "Should x be changed in such-and-sch a manner because of points A, B, and C?" Then get some feedback. You've got a forum here where your comments shouldn't ever be deleted (as long as they're not just spam or something) and where people will have to try to present some argument with you if they think you're wrong, rather than just magically making all your contributions go away. On contentious pages, when I've seen someone post useful suggested revisions on the talk page, and then some dedicated page troll came along and bashed them, more reasonable voices of dedicated wikipedians usually chime in on the talk page to defend the first guy. Other times, the first guy was well-intentioned, but some dedicated page watcher does have some very good reasons why the suggested revisions shouldn't be made as described, and the first person either happily back off, or else change their intended revisions to meet everyone's approval.
Remember, the talk page is your discussion forum that makes Wikipedia edits a collaborative process. Start there and try to build toward a consensus. If you do that and someone else goes and reverts your changes without rhyme or reason despite a consensus of people who care about the page agreeing to the revisions on the talk page, then you've got a really legitimate reason to be mad. Even then, I'd document what happened to your revision on the talk page and ask senior wikipedians what to do about it.
In "Class 11," by T.J. Waters, a book about the first class of CIA counter-terrorism field agents trained after 9/11 (on pgs 15-17 of the hardcover edition), he claims that the CIA had fully functional flying radio bugs that were nearly indistinguishable from real dragonflies unless you look at them close up and from directly overhead, and that we had these back in 1967.
He goes on to mention that this technology, being 40-years old, "pales in comparison" to what they have today.
You can view these pages for free at Amazon. Search inside the book for "dragonfly" and they'll come right up. It wouldn't let me direct link to the pages.
Wait, are they entirely sure that what they attached to the bird was small cameras, not, perhaps, small black monoliths, just before the birds were first observed using tools? OK, OK, they were probably pretty sure they were cameras, but they weren't black and monolith shaped, were they? Just checking here.
I can't figure out what the point of your post is. I feel you didn't understand what I was saying. For example, in your point #3, you say: "You're telling us that Randi's argument is flawed..." But I never say anything of the sort. I agree with Randi entirely, and in no way indicate I disagree with him in any respect in my post.
You talk about my lack of evidence. I really find it hard to believe anyone would mistake my family anecdote as something intended to be scientific evidence proving that there's a difference in the sound quality between telephone wire and speaker wire in ceteris paribus conditions. Of course it's an entirely non-scientific bit of family history, an amusing anecdote, not a controlled study. If anyone wants to go research whether or not its a good idea, in any electronics system at all, to use cabling of an insufficient gauge to handle the current it's expected to carry, I figured there are plenty of resources online for people to research that on their own. I was not attempting, using my single non-scientific family story, to prove that it's a bad idea to use cabling for amperage it isn't rated for; I was expecting people to either know that already, take my word for it, or look it up. Rather than trying to prove this is an error, I was explaining the repercussions of this error in one incident.
The point of my post, as I felt I stated quite clearly in both the title and the first sentence, is that it's important that Slashdotters who aren't familiar with speaker cable don't think the lesson here is "what kind of cable one uses doesn't make any difference in an audio system." I totally agree with Randi, but I wanted to be sure that people don't mistakenly think that Randi's saying that no differences in cabling matter. To make this point, I provided an example of how big of a mistake using dramatically inappropriate cabling can be.
The funny thing is that, in your lengthy refutation of everything I had to say, I can't find a single point on which you disagree. You say it's a flaw in my argument that I'm not comparing speaker wire to speaker wire; when comparing speaker wire to telephone wire is in fact the entire point of my argument. My argument was that using too low a a gauge wire is an important problem for a stereo system, so telephone wire doesn't make good speaker wire (at least if your system pushes any significant current). It would be hard to make a point about the deficiencies of using telephone wire for speaker wire if in my example I'd compared speaker wire to speaker wire.
To be clear, my two points were:
1. In some cases, what kind of wiring you use for a stereo system does matter.
2. Using an insufficient gauge cable for your current is one of those cases.
Do you think that my Dad's stereo's quality was not seriously degraded by using telephone wire? Do you think that using insufficient gauge wiring doesn't matter to the sound quality of an audio system? (you do say "Consequently, there are only three factors that impact the quality of a speaker wire transmission: impedance, capacitance and inductance. There are only two factors that affect these three characteristics: gauge and length.""). So I assume you agree that gauge can make a difference.
Please take a look at my original post again, in light of my further clarification here, and see if you still have issue with it.
I just wanted to point out to Slashdotters that the lesson here isn't that cables don't make any difference to sound systems. There's a reason Randi choose the already high-end Monster cable as the reference point for this comparison rather than the cheapest piece of crap cabling anyone could find anywhere.
In fact, I have a rather sad story about that exact same bias. My father was generally very conservative in his spending, but around 1963, he decided to splurge and buy a receiver and two stereo speakers from Acoustic Research. (yes, their well-known AR-3's.) Anyone buying Acoustic Research back in '63 was someone who'd done their homework and cared about sound, these were very well-regarded and expensive speakers.
My Dad was in vision research and taught introductory classes in sensory perception for experimental psychology majors, so he knew a thing or two about acoustics and what matters, and he designed and soldered up his own circuits for his experimental apparatus, so he knew a thing or two about electronics, too.
When he went to the store to buy the AR system, they tried to sell him very expensive cables, and he laughed and said it was a huge waste of money, and proceeded to go home and hook the system up with 24 AWG telephone cable, because the wires "don't make any difference." So he just used whatever was cheap that he already had around.
Anyone who knows much about stereos and electronics is probably already groaning at reading that. Good stereos push a high amperage current, and a 24 AWG wire is going to create a high resistance to that current, which is going to change the impedance the receiver is going to see trying to drive the speakers it was built specifically to be matched with. I don't know how to describe the specifics of the nasty effects on the signal that the speakers receive versus what was intended, but the effect on sound quality was tremendous. The system never sounded very good at all.
By the 90's that system was sitting in the basement, and my brother ended up taking the speakers and hooking them up to an inexpensive Sony receiver, and I ended up taking the receiver and hooking it up to some Linaum speakers. My dad ended up hearing the speakers and commenting on how amazing the improvement in receivers has been that those old speakers could sound so good when they never sounded anywhere near that good before. Then separately he heard my speakers being driven off the old receiver, and commented how amazing advances in speakers were, that they could sound so good being driven off that old tube receiver that never sounded any good...
Of course, really the whole thing came down to the fact that my Dad spent more than he has ever spent on a car on that stereo system, the reduced the sound quality to about that of a $20 clock radio by refusing to spend an extra $10 on cables. No, he didn't need gold Monster cables (not that they existed back then anyway), and it's quite possibly true that it would have been impossible to tell the difference between the expensive cables the guy at the store was selling and NM 14-2 household electrical cable from the local hardware store. But running telephone wire for speaker cables destroyed the sound quality. There is a difference in cables, if you don't know what you're doing, don't assume any old wire will be as good as any other. The basic point that I think loony millionaire audiophiles and conservative skeptical engineers can all agree on is that having a large enough gauge cable to easily handle the current is the most important aspect of the system's cables.
I think Skype could take over the world and be worth a fortune, but Ebay's implementation has so far been lacking the key element to my plan, which I'd assumed was also their plan. They need a cheap (like, $10) home-PBX to ethernet interface box. Like Vonage sends you. In fact, they should offer a service exactly like Vonage, but with no monthly fee. A small fee for a call-in number from regular phones and a small fee for calling out to regular phones, and no charge for contacting Skype other users, just like now. Then make the thing work with everyday phones with a home PBX, so you buy this box and don't have to mess with a computer at all; all your home phones just work like regular phones, like Vonage or other VOIP phones. And all your calls to anyone else on the same system are absolutely free, because there's no per call charge/time charge/or monthly charge. It's a huge incentive to adopt the system.
Yes, for the free Skype to Skype calls using conventional phone handsets, they'd need some sort of coding so numbers dialed on the phone get translated to Skype handles by the PBX box. I don't think this would be too hard to implement.
Yes, if everyone adopted it, they would eventually lose their revenue model. But this would only happen if they came to dominate the entire home phone market, and then they can make it up with services- voice mail, ringing multiple phones with one number, call recording software, etc. Also, they'd still always make money on their fees for calling out to cell phones. I think the dangers of lost revenue do a near-monopoly on voice communications is a far-off concern.
There are a lot of posts here with variations on the specifics, but basically all say "find a place that gets high-speed landline service within line-of-sight, then use some method of wireless." I agree, if there is anyone within line-of-site who gets (or can get) high-speed access.
If not, I suggest you cut down one or two trees as necessary, buy a telephone poll or an antenna tower, locate it appropriately in your new clearing, and put a satellite dish on top of it. Unless by "north facing hillside" you mean you live immediately north of a large sheer stone cliff, this should be feasible without spending as much as it would cost to move, and avoiding all the associated inconvenience.
Just to note, I agree with certain previous posters that the root of the problem here is government granted monopolies on communications infrastructure, crippling competition. To put it in terms of the Slashdot-cliché car analogy, competition between DSL and cable is like giving Ford a monopoly on trucks and SUV's and Chevy a monopoly on cars, barring everyone else from participating in the market at all, and calling that "competition."
I'm no fan of the camera's; but they're only one aspect of Britain's Orwellian Law Enforcement plan. I'm mainly opposed to cameras because I hate the idea of a government surveillance society, not because I believe they're ineffective. Perhaps they are effective, and their deterrent effect is being offset by other crime-increasing policies?
I think there are important lessons to learn in understanding why London's crime rate has been soaring while New York's has been plummeting, but I don't think we're even close to fully understanding the causes of these trends or their relevant contributions. It's a ripe field for analysis.
Separately, the information provided in that summary makes the research appear extremely unscientific. This article makes no mention of the changes in clear-up rates over time with the installation of cameras, only comparisons across precincts. But surely there were differences in clear-up rates across precincts before the cameras. At any rate, this article only addresses the cameras in terms of solving crimes, which may be entirely irrelevant to their value if their primary benefit is deterrence.
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No, the majority of Comcast's customers have DSL available, and nearly all of them could choose satellite or broadcast TV. These are easy, competitive alternatives for most Comcast customers, but there are also plenty of more esoteric alternatives, like satellite internet, 3g wireless internet, dial-up internet, moving somewhere with different options, or not using the internet at home. Everyone has another choice, and in this case, for most users, the other choices are much easier to use than in many situations.
It would be much easier to argue that people have "no choice" but to use Microsoft than it is to argue this for Comcast, but I doubt most of the people here agree with the Microsoft proposition.
He'd dual Bill Gates with a lightsaber?
Kodak recommends shooting Tmax 3200 up to ISO 25,000 and pushing it accordingly in development.
In the old days, viruses used to do things like delete users data to be malicious. Now, virus authors go to great lengths to write stealth rootkits to be sure there is never any visible sign to the user that the virus is installed on the system.
Viruses used to written by basement hackers who wanted to be elite and cool and to show what they could do, and visibly damaging people's user experience drew a lot of attention to them. Now, viruses are authored by hackers payed by organized crime, and they are used to mail spam, steal credit card numbers, and blackmail companies for cash under threat of DDOS attacks. Today's hackers won't bother going after the kill switch, it's not in their interest. They want those machines online, unknowingly marching to their orders like a good little botnet bot should.
At $20,000 per pound to deliver more air with the space shuttle, it's very expensive air their losing, at $60,000 worth of air per day. How long would it take to leak a minor scientific research project out of the budget?
That's true, it's not the operating system's fault.
The installation of NT on my old computer at work was very stable, as long as you didn't introduce any mitigating factors like moving the mouse, pushing keys on the keyboard, or running software. In actual use it crashed an average of once or twice a day, but had I not tried to use the computer, I suspect you're right that it never would have crashed, so it's clearly not the operating system's fault.
I see. Because you had a computer running the very same operating system that this guy was running, and your computer didn't crash, then you know that there's something wrong with him personally, or he's lying, if he said his computer did crash.
When I upgrade to Leopard, if it doesn't crash, then I'll know this guy is a loser, because us 1337 Slashdot users know that there couldn't be any differences in the hardware or software or use that could cause one computer to crash and another to be stable when they're both running the same operating system.
Washington State, or Washington DC?
Some people disagree with the Slashdot system that "funny" mods don't contribute to karma. So some people choose a different positive mod to use when something's funny.
I tend to agree. If I find something worthy of using a mod point for any reason, then I think it should be reflected in that user's karma. Why discriminate against humor?
Yes, I know they use high voltage DC connectors, because they have less power loss than AC. In fact, I said "DC power system," and technically, there are probably nearly two dozen DC power systems in the room with me, judging from the number of wall worts.
You knew what I meant.
Frankly, I'm shocked that there was still a DC power system in use in the US.
I wonder if they made any effort to survey demand for this and estimate a demand curve to maximize their profitability on this venture, so they could give away as many free laptops as possible. How did they arrive at the $400 price to buy one laptop for a poor child, rather than any other price, like $600 to buy two more laptops, or $300 to buy half an additional laptop. In most cases, charging a 100% premium for charitable purposes isn't the number that's going to maximize charitable contribution, especially for big ticket items. I expect that if Apple charged twice as much for a Product Red iPod and donated all that extra money (plus whatever they're donating now), they'd end up with lower total contributions, because hardly anyone would buy one.
Maybe they did research this and they're charging a reasonable price to maximize the surplus brought in through the program, and hence the number of extra laptops they can buy. It's just that nice, round number of "once extra laptop," combined with the relatively huge 100% markup on a big-ticket item, that makes me wonder if anyone bothered to think about the economics and how to maximize their charitable impact, or if someone just made up some number that sounded good. Personally, I think I'd get one for $250, and I'd think about it for $300, but $400's just too much from the point of view of the value of the laptop to me. From the point of view of charity, a $200 gift is a whole lot for me right now for a single gift. I believe in their mission, but there are a lot of other charities I believe in as much or more, and I'll split my charitable contributions among them. If I thought of it as a $200 laptop plus a $50 gift, I'd definitely sign up for one at $250. Are there four people like me for every one who'd pay $400? I don't know, but I sure hope that the OLPC project bothered to make an intelligent guess.
One intelligent thing they may be doing is testing the market, rather than surveying it. That is, perhaps they'll be $400 for a few months, and see how many they sell, then $350, etc. That would be reasonable behavior to maximize their profits and thereby contributions on this program, possibly netting a larger portion of consumer surplus than any (even carefully arrived at) single pricing plan.
Well, they don't exactly say "it wasn't them." They say "From Microsoft's perspective it's a matter of choice."
You see, the Nigerian Government might have choosen to go with Linux. Microsoft makes it clear, it was their decision to make. And maybe Microsoft choose to let them know that, if they made an unfortunate choice in this matter, some unfortunate events might happen to occur to the people who made that decision. And maybe Microsoft choose to let these members of the Nigerian government know that if they made a different decision, certain things might happen to go their way in the future. Maybe they could take an early retirement, or have an opportunity to buy something nice for themselves. Microsoft choose to make the members of the Nigerian Government aware of these things, and the people of the Nigerian Government exercied their ability to choose accordingly.
So you see, Microsoft's being honest: it was a matter of choice.
There have been a lot of comments to the effect that it takes more effort to send a letter than an email, so there's a selection process that means only the more die-hard loonies actually bother to get letters in the mail. I agree with this, but I think there's another selection process in place that also makes the mail more scary: age.
Of the people I've known who rant on with horrifying opinions from within their own delusional, disconnected world, there's a sharp tendency that the more loony ones were older. Not always, but there's a trend that way. I don't know if it's due to too many years of witnessing and magnifying perceived falsehoods, early onset dementia, a build-up of heavy metals in their systems, or what causes their buildup of paranoid ramblings to burst forth, but I think there's a strong age factor at work here, and that the snail mails are much more likely to come from older, and therefore more hard-core lunatics than the email, which more often originates from young lunatics-in-training who are not yet as comfortable and confident in their insanity.
You're right that Social Security works the same way- the "Social Security Surplus" is a bunch of IOU notes the government wrote to itself. But Enron was the same thing. While racking up tremendous losses, they used off-book entities that were mostly owned by Enron's CFO Andy Fastow, such as the "Raptors," where Enron's massive losses magically disappeared, transferred to the Raptors. So the Raptors were way in the red, right? What idiot investors would take all this debt off Enron's hands? Well, the Raptors were well funded in compensation for taking all this debt. Where did this money for the Raptors come from? They were funded with Enron stock.
It's been a while since I read "Conspiracy of Fools," so I may have some details wrong, but Enron was hemorrhaging money while reporting huge profits by waving their magic accounting wand. Just like Social Security, their money existed in the form of IOU's to themselves, once you finished deconstructing all the ridiculous accounting.
Mod parent up. This is a common misunderstanding, or perhaps I should call it a government lie. It's Enron accounting.
They try to encourage people to play the lottery by telling them the money all goes to schools. So they direct the whole of lottery income to the schools, on paper. But the school budget is planned in budget meetings, and the ammount the lottery brings in has no effect on school budgets. For every extra dollar brought in by the lottery, that's one less dollar of general fund money that goes to the schools, and one more dollar of total money in the government's general fund.
They can write out the accounting anyway they like to and say, "see, these dollars went here," but dollars are fungible. At the end of the day, the acid test to see if it means anything to say "lottery money goes to schools" is to see what the marginal effect on school funding is of purchasing lottery tickets. That effect is 0.
I agree. I haven't actually had many of my changes reverted, but I have friends whom I have a very high opinion of who say that all their changes were always reverted regardless of being entirely accurate and informative, so they gave up. Some of these people are people whom I don't doubt; well-spoken experts in the fields they were contributing to.
Perhaps you haven't the time or inclination to do this, and maybe it's wrong that one sometimes has to do this to get things done with high-quality contributions, but you might be able to avoid this frustrating tendency toward reversions by always starting with any changes you intend to make on the "talk" page for the article. First say "Should x be changed in such-and-sch a manner because of points A, B, and C?" Then get some feedback. You've got a forum here where your comments shouldn't ever be deleted (as long as they're not just spam or something) and where people will have to try to present some argument with you if they think you're wrong, rather than just magically making all your contributions go away. On contentious pages, when I've seen someone post useful suggested revisions on the talk page, and then some dedicated page troll came along and bashed them, more reasonable voices of dedicated wikipedians usually chime in on the talk page to defend the first guy. Other times, the first guy was well-intentioned, but some dedicated page watcher does have some very good reasons why the suggested revisions shouldn't be made as described, and the first person either happily back off, or else change their intended revisions to meet everyone's approval.
Remember, the talk page is your discussion forum that makes Wikipedia edits a collaborative process. Start there and try to build toward a consensus. If you do that and someone else goes and reverts your changes without rhyme or reason despite a consensus of people who care about the page agreeing to the revisions on the talk page, then you've got a really legitimate reason to be mad. Even then, I'd document what happened to your revision on the talk page and ask senior wikipedians what to do about it.
In "Class 11," by T.J. Waters, a book about the first class of CIA counter-terrorism field agents trained after 9/11 (on pgs 15-17 of the hardcover edition), he claims that the CIA had fully functional flying radio bugs that were nearly indistinguishable from real dragonflies unless you look at them close up and from directly overhead, and that we had these back in 1967.
He goes on to mention that this technology, being 40-years old, "pales in comparison" to what they have today.
You can view these pages for free at Amazon. Search inside the book for "dragonfly" and they'll come right up. It wouldn't let me direct link to the pages.
Wait, are they entirely sure that what they attached to the bird was small cameras, not, perhaps, small black monoliths, just before the birds were first observed using tools? OK, OK, they were probably pretty sure they were cameras, but they weren't black and monolith shaped, were they? Just checking here.
I can't figure out what the point of your post is. I feel you didn't understand what I was saying. For example, in your point #3, you say:
"You're telling us that Randi's argument is flawed..."
But I never say anything of the sort. I agree with Randi entirely, and in no way indicate I disagree with him in any respect in my post.
You talk about my lack of evidence. I really find it hard to believe anyone would mistake my family anecdote as something intended to be scientific evidence proving that there's a difference in the sound quality between telephone wire and speaker wire in ceteris paribus conditions. Of course it's an entirely non-scientific bit of family history, an amusing anecdote, not a controlled study. If anyone wants to go research whether or not its a good idea, in any electronics system at all, to use cabling of an insufficient gauge to handle the current it's expected to carry, I figured there are plenty of resources online for people to research that on their own. I was not attempting, using my single non-scientific family story, to prove that it's a bad idea to use cabling for amperage it isn't rated for; I was expecting people to either know that already, take my word for it, or look it up. Rather than trying to prove this is an error, I was explaining the repercussions of this error in one incident.
The point of my post, as I felt I stated quite clearly in both the title and the first sentence, is that it's important that Slashdotters who aren't familiar with speaker cable don't think the lesson here is "what kind of cable one uses doesn't make any difference in an audio system." I totally agree with Randi, but I wanted to be sure that people don't mistakenly think that Randi's saying that no differences in cabling matter. To make this point, I provided an example of how big of a mistake using dramatically inappropriate cabling can be.
The funny thing is that, in your lengthy refutation of everything I had to say, I can't find a single point on which you disagree. You say it's a flaw in my argument that I'm not comparing speaker wire to speaker wire; when comparing speaker wire to telephone wire is in fact the entire point of my argument. My argument was that using too low a a gauge wire is an important problem for a stereo system, so telephone wire doesn't make good speaker wire (at least if your system pushes any significant current). It would be hard to make a point about the deficiencies of using telephone wire for speaker wire if in my example I'd compared speaker wire to speaker wire.
To be clear, my two points were:
1. In some cases, what kind of wiring you use for a stereo system does matter.
2. Using an insufficient gauge cable for your current is one of those cases.
Do you think that my Dad's stereo's quality was not seriously degraded by using telephone wire? Do you think that using insufficient gauge wiring doesn't matter to the sound quality of an audio system? (you do say "Consequently, there are only three factors that impact the quality of a speaker wire transmission: impedance, capacitance and inductance. There are only two factors that affect these three characteristics: gauge and length.""). So I assume you agree that gauge can make a difference.
Please take a look at my original post again, in light of my further clarification here, and see if you still have issue with it.
I just wanted to point out to Slashdotters that the lesson here isn't that cables don't make any difference to sound systems. There's a reason Randi choose the already high-end Monster cable as the reference point for this comparison rather than the cheapest piece of crap cabling anyone could find anywhere.
In fact, I have a rather sad story about that exact same bias. My father was generally very conservative in his spending, but around 1963, he decided to splurge and buy a receiver and two stereo speakers from Acoustic Research. (yes, their well-known AR-3's.) Anyone buying Acoustic Research back in '63 was someone who'd done their homework and cared about sound, these were very well-regarded and expensive speakers.
My Dad was in vision research and taught introductory classes in sensory perception for experimental psychology majors, so he knew a thing or two about acoustics and what matters, and he designed and soldered up his own circuits for his experimental apparatus, so he knew a thing or two about electronics, too.
When he went to the store to buy the AR system, they tried to sell him very expensive cables, and he laughed and said it was a huge waste of money, and proceeded to go home and hook the system up with 24 AWG telephone cable, because the wires "don't make any difference." So he just used whatever was cheap that he already had around.
Anyone who knows much about stereos and electronics is probably already groaning at reading that. Good stereos push a high amperage current, and a 24 AWG wire is going to create a high resistance to that current, which is going to change the impedance the receiver is going to see trying to drive the speakers it was built specifically to be matched with. I don't know how to describe the specifics of the nasty effects on the signal that the speakers receive versus what was intended, but the effect on sound quality was tremendous. The system never sounded very good at all.
By the 90's that system was sitting in the basement, and my brother ended up taking the speakers and hooking them up to an inexpensive Sony receiver, and I ended up taking the receiver and hooking it up to some Linaum speakers. My dad ended up hearing the speakers and commenting on how amazing the improvement in receivers has been that those old speakers could sound so good when they never sounded anywhere near that good before. Then separately he heard my speakers being driven off the old receiver, and commented how amazing advances in speakers were, that they could sound so good being driven off that old tube receiver that never sounded any good...
Of course, really the whole thing came down to the fact that my Dad spent more than he has ever spent on a car on that stereo system, the reduced the sound quality to about that of a $20 clock radio by refusing to spend an extra $10 on cables. No, he didn't need gold Monster cables (not that they existed back then anyway), and it's quite possibly true that it would have been impossible to tell the difference between the expensive cables the guy at the store was selling and NM 14-2 household electrical cable from the local hardware store. But running telephone wire for speaker cables destroyed the sound quality. There is a difference in cables, if you don't know what you're doing, don't assume any old wire will be as good as any other. The basic point that I think loony millionaire audiophiles and conservative skeptical engineers can all agree on is that having a large enough gauge cable to easily handle the current is the most important aspect of the system's cables.
I think Skype could take over the world and be worth a fortune, but Ebay's implementation has so far been lacking the key element to my plan, which I'd assumed was also their plan. They need a cheap (like, $10) home-PBX to ethernet interface box. Like Vonage sends you. In fact, they should offer a service exactly like Vonage, but with no monthly fee. A small fee for a call-in number from regular phones and a small fee for calling out to regular phones, and no charge for contacting Skype other users, just like now. Then make the thing work with everyday phones with a home PBX, so you buy this box and don't have to mess with a computer at all; all your home phones just work like regular phones, like Vonage or other VOIP phones. And all your calls to anyone else on the same system are absolutely free, because there's no per call charge/time charge/or monthly charge. It's a huge incentive to adopt the system.
Yes, for the free Skype to Skype calls using conventional phone handsets, they'd need some sort of coding so numbers dialed on the phone get translated to Skype handles by the PBX box. I don't think this would be too hard to implement.
Yes, if everyone adopted it, they would eventually lose their revenue model. But this would only happen if they came to dominate the entire home phone market, and then they can make it up with services- voice mail, ringing multiple phones with one number, call recording software, etc. Also, they'd still always make money on their fees for calling out to cell phones. I think the dangers of lost revenue do a near-monopoly on voice communications is a far-off concern.
There are a lot of posts here with variations on the specifics, but basically all say "find a place that gets high-speed landline service within line-of-sight, then use some method of wireless." I agree, if there is anyone within line-of-site who gets (or can get) high-speed access.
If not, I suggest you cut down one or two trees as necessary, buy a telephone poll or an antenna tower, locate it appropriately in your new clearing, and put a satellite dish on top of it. Unless by "north facing hillside" you mean you live immediately north of a large sheer stone cliff, this should be feasible without spending as much as it would cost to move, and avoiding all the associated inconvenience.
Just to note, I agree with certain previous posters that the root of the problem here is government granted monopolies on communications infrastructure, crippling competition. To put it in terms of the Slashdot-cliché car analogy, competition between DSL and cable is like giving Ford a monopoly on trucks and SUV's and Chevy a monopoly on cars, barring everyone else from participating in the market at all, and calling that "competition."
I'm no fan of the camera's; but they're only one aspect of Britain's Orwellian Law Enforcement plan. I'm mainly opposed to cameras because I hate the idea of a government surveillance society, not because I believe they're ineffective. Perhaps they are effective, and their deterrent effect is being offset by other crime-increasing policies?
I think there are important lessons to learn in understanding why London's crime rate has been soaring while New York's has been plummeting, but I don't think we're even close to fully understanding the causes of these trends or their relevant contributions. It's a ripe field for analysis.
Separately, the information provided in that summary makes the research appear extremely unscientific. This article makes no mention of the changes in clear-up rates over time with the installation of cameras, only comparisons across precincts. But surely there were differences in clear-up rates across precincts before the cameras. At any rate, this article only addresses the cameras in terms of solving crimes, which may be entirely irrelevant to their value if their primary benefit is deterrence.
Just look at the evidence. There's no way they could ever make Google compatible with Macs or Linux.