Admins generally have been around a little bit longer, so they know the political landscape better. I have been able to successfully fight admins, but it takes some extra work I will admit and appealing to policies from the rest of the community. In my case by fighting the admin I became one, so who knows what it really all boils down to.
I try to act in the role of a moderator when possible, and not try to push undo influence. In particular, if there is an issue where I have a personal stake, I will usually either wait for or even request another admin to step in and evaluate the decision, not using my admin authority except for cases where I am a neutral party to the dispute. Even then I try to act only as a second opinion or to follow community concensus.
I realize that far too often people who become admins let it get to their head and abuse their position, even if it isn't overt. The solution to this is to encourage as many competent users who might qualify as admins to become one by nomination... giving more opportunities to review and even revert decisions by other admins.
The worst editorial fight I got into was with Jimbo himself... and surprisingly I won that one as well. Well... sort of anyway. It still is not completely settled, but at least he and I are not openly warring and he admits that I'm trying to help the areas I'm working on to make a better project. Undeleting content deleted by Jimbo was not an easy decision on my part.
I don't think you quite understood what I said. There were five candidates running for just one office, and I had (or could) vote for over 100 other offices each with their own slate of candidates. Simply put, an election judge simply can't accurately count that many races in precincts with over 3000 voters. Yes, you could cut down on the size of the precincts and that is done, but there does seem to be a bit of a problem just trying to find compitent judges as well.
My wife is the head election judge for my local precinct, and she has complained about hand counts where the group of judges she is working with get different counts for vote totals... sometimes different counts on the third or fourth vote. When one of the judges is just a tad bit senile and accidently recounts the ballot more than once or other innocent errors, it becomes difficult to certify the results. That is far more common than you would suspect for hand counts... keeping in mind that often it is senior citizens manning the ballot box due to the fact they have the time necessary to do the job.
I support the idea of electronic ballot preparation, not electronic voting. The best system I've seen so far has you cast your ballots into a machine that then prints out the ballots onto one or more sheets of paper that are then handed in to the election judge when you are done. That gets rid of the stupid errors like voting for more than one person in a single office, smudged or partial votes (aka the pregnet chads from Florida), and still gives a manual audit trail for you to review. To help speed up the counting, bar codes or some other OCR enabled text is also displayed that will automate the counting by machine, but this can also be done by software from multiple vendors for verification.
Diebold had come to Utah (where I live) to also put in the machines. I am a strong critic of what they are doing, but at least Diebold consented to providing a paper audit trail for all voting machines. The audit trail, however, is not something that you would want to in real life try to review except under the most extreme cases, and even then it is likely that the voting would be invalidated due to fraud.
Please read up on American election procedures before you make an off-hand remark like why not use a paper ballot. On simple elections where there is only one or two races, the local election officials where I live still use a paper ballot. This is mainly an issue for major general elections like the election where the U.S. President is selected, where sometimes as many as 100 questions are asked for various races, including some multiple selection and other weird options that are unique to each issue or office. We want to know who is going to be our new president by the next day, unless it is a very close election like Bush vs. Gore. That was a huge exception even then.
I don't think you can find this mentioned in statutory law, but instead is something that comes from common law. Copyright law is full of that, including seemingly contradictory legal precedence that seems to support and deny certain activities. This property release issue is certainly one of those issues where it depends largely on the attitude of the judge toward the issue and how well the attorney who is representing you has prepared and gone into case history to defend your right to use photography that you took with your own camera. Also important is how you intended to use the images and if you were seeking some kind of "endorsement" from the individual or landmark by association.
In short, while it may not be strictly necessary to get a property or landmark release, it would still be a good idea as a sort of insurance. Paranoid stock photography businesses are totally justified to have that as an official policy simply so they don't have to hire a full time legal staff just to deal with all of the potential B.S. that would come from not having such a policy.
Having contributed a fair bit to Commons myself, trust me when I say that licenses do get verified... much more so than comparable websites. You have to explicitly state the license, and the source of the image as well. If the image seems a little too nice to have come from an amature source the administrators on Wikicommons will try to check up on you as an individual to see if you really do have content of that quality that is original content.
I have had images that I uploaded which have been deleted. I obtained the images from some government web pages, for instance, which I thought were available under the public domain. Those in particular get some strong attention because the copyright can be tricky. It turns out after some investigation that the images were under strong copyright and no copyleft license. I did cite the page links where I got the images, which at least permitted this type of search. Those pages which don't list the source of the images are generally deleted as well because this sort of search is then impossible.
ESA (European Space Agency) images are particularly disapointing because the license is incompatable with copyleft principles in general. Wikicommons does not support a non-commercial use only restriction, for instance which the ESA has all of their content licensed under. That kills a bunch of really cool space images which previously would have been available through the public domain.
I will be the first to admit that there are still some holes on Commons, and a few images that slip through the cracks. Still, I would trust images I obtained from Wikicommons as being mostly vetted for copyright licensing, and if somebody asserts copyright on an image I obtained from Wikicommons, I would put the burden of proof on the crazy person trying to claim copyright. Most likely they would be a scam artist trying to scalp some money from you when they really don't have a valid claim.
I've been using NetTime for some time as well, and the really cool thing about it is that it is also a NTP server... if you happen to have a small Windows-only office or want to have a quick and dirty NTP app with low overhead that non-techies can install and use with relatively no fuss. Definitely a good recommendation.
One existing terrestrial mine comes to mind as a counter argument to what you are saying here. This mine I'm referencing makes almost all of its operating expenses just off of the processing of precious metals like Gold and Silver, with the profits themselves coming from the Copper as a side line... even though that is the principle metal that comes from the mine. It also serves as an example of what kinds of engineering is needed to get much deeper into the Earth as you are suggesting. Going much deeper is simply not economical or practical in most cases, and even this mine is going to be closed in about 50 years simply because they will have dug so deep that it won't stay profitable to pull the ore up from the deep hole. And this is open-pit mining where you don't have to worry about the overburden collapsing on top of you or other nasty issues inherant in mining.
Of all of the objects in the Solar Sytem that you can physically touch (i.e. excluding the Gas giants and the Sun as having metalic cores that are unreachable even by future technologies), the Earth has by far the strongest gravitation pull in the Solar System. That makes mining here on the Earth incredibly expensive and makes mine collapses a constant worry as well as a source of industrial deaths.
The advantage of mining on an asteroid... especially a small asteroid (less than 10 km diameter) is that gravity ceases to be a major issue in terms of trying to keep the whole rock supported. You also have access to huge energy sources, especially solar power, that are simply unavailble for terrestrial mines.
Another major plus for asteroidal mining operations is that the minerals will not be as nearly stratified like they are on the Earth. Here, most of the heavy metals are in the core of the Earth and might as well be in the core of Jupiter or the Sun for as much good as it will do for us. Occasionally a mountain will pull up some stuff from deeper in the Earth (which is one reason for many mine in mountainous regions). They will still be clumpy and need surveys for mineral compositions and mining candidates, but you are likely to find richer veins of rare elements in the asteroid than would be possible on the Earth.
Keep in mind that most of the early mining operations in space will be done mainly to avoid having to pull up these minerals and elements from the Earth, with the huge costs of launching something from the surface of the Earth. Volitle Chemicals like Oxygen, Hydrogen, Water, and Ammonia are going to be as likely to be mined as are metals like Iron, Magnesium, or even Gold. If any metals are going to be shipped back to the Earth for consumption on the Earth itself in large quantities, that would only happen when mining facilities in space are already well developed and already profitable from other operations.
Mining may take place, BTW, on moons that orbit Jupiter, not necessarily on the "surface" of Jupiter proper, although there are thousands of candidates in the Asteroid belt that are likely to be tapped well before anything gets done near Jupiter except for projects that are specific to manned exploration of the Jovian moons themselves. That is centuries away from happening at best.
It is interesting when you try to fly the Space Shuttle with a realistic flight simulator that you discover just how close to the edge that the design of the Shuttle really was. One spaceflight simulator I saw with a good model of the Shuttle has an option for "infinite" fuel load for their models so you can use them to do exotic things like fly the Apollo spacecraft to Jupiter or other fun things. If you try that with the Shuttle you discover that it won't even reach orbit, as the flight characteristics actually require some of the fuel to be left at the lanuch pad and in the atmosphere so it will be light enough to achieve orbital insertion.
The Apollo spacecraft (and the Saturn V) isn't quite as critical as there is plenty of extra thrust capacity in the design to get people to the Moon and beyond. The only real problem with the Apollo spacecraft is that it only has life support for just a couple of weeks at best.... just enough time to go to the Moon, plant the flag, and return. Shuttle astronauts in comparison are riding around in an orbital multi-deck RV with cable and internet access by comparison to the austerity the Apollo astronauts had to live with.
Microsoft was in the business of writing compilers in 1980, not operating systems. IBM wanted to buy the Microsoft compilers for the IBM-PC, but after getting the cold shoulder from Gary Kildal, Microsoft decided to include an operating system as well in their proposal.
To get something going right away, Microsoft bought a variant of CP/M-86 as the core of MS-DOS 1.0, and included many of the older conventions of CP/M as well. Some of the file access methods including early FAT organization was introduced as well.
In all fairness to Microsoft on this point, when MS-DOS 2.0 came out, there was a fairly substantial change to the architechture. It wasn't until DOS 2.0 that hard-drive support was offered at all, and the need for something like FAT as it currently exists. DOS 2.0 also supported sub-directories for the first time and tree navigation and diagnostics tools.
That was all still more than 20 years ago, which still begs the question about what the patents really cover and if they are original research, as most ideas in FAT were hardly new even when Microsoft used them in later versions of DOS and Windows.
NTFS might have some claims of originality, but that is another beast entirely and has its own pedigree.
The 100 year archival quality CD's were only the pressed CD-ROMs made with high quality dies... not the mass procuced CDs that AOL ships out and especially not CD-Rs.
The other thing to consider is the chemical stability of the dyes that are used for the creation of the CD-Rs that you are using. Some companies (like Mitsui and presumably Kodak) put quite a bit of effort into the quality of the dyes and having them work on multiple CD readers as well. These are likely to last much longer than the 50 cent CDs that you can pick up at your local discount store like Wal-Mart.
The real question would be who is marketing and specing CD-R manufacturing for archival quality CDs and have specs guarenteeing that they will last 10+ years without failing? There must be somebody out there doing that, but I don't know of them myself.
According to whose Christian mythology? Where? What is your source? I don't see that in the KJV Bible I have next to me, and I've heard several fairly reasonable explainations by professional astronomers who also happen to be Christan, of whom I have never heard the explaination that Polaris was this supposed star that you are refering to.
Most likely the Christmas Star was a nova of some sort, being the usual explaination of the event... or a comet. Both can seemingly appear out from nowhere and have been traditionally thought of as Celestial oracles of future events, like the birth of a king or a warning that some sort of war was going to happen.
There may be some mideval explainations that used Polaris as the Christmas Star, but Polaris wasn't even the Pole Star during the life of Christ anyway, due to the Earth's precession.
Yeah, get a class action suit where the winner will get a gift certificate to your local music store to purchase a CD. Or get some free iTunes. What a wonderful gift for having to deal with crappy lawyers who don't know the law, and is worth the pain and aggrivation.
BTW, the lawyers who file the class action will be multi-millionaires, but the ordinary consumer will get squat. What a wonderful legal system we have, isn't it.
Having just done a major repair on my car (I just replaced the head gasket and the timing belt), prescribed medicine for my children, installed my own toilet not too long ago, even put in my own electrical wiring (both high and low voltage) in my house, I guess that would seem like to some people as a little bit too self-reliant. I would have to say, though, if I get into something a bit too complex I do seek professional opinion. I didn't, for example, try to attempt an appedecimy on my daughter but instead did seek a professional surgeon. I feel comfortable fixing the Windows registry because I am a software engineer and understand the inner workings of it.
The same can be said of the law, and I feel you should be able to be your own attorney on simple matters. That the legal system is so screwed up that even for a simple matter where the law should be obvious you feel the need for a lawyer, there is something wrong. Even more when judges think you should have a lawyer.
You can simply be bold, roll with the punches if you get into some edit war, and then get into the page discussion, but for popular articles you are correct. For neglected articles that you may be knowledgeable about, going out and making change based on information that you know (like something about your hometown, for example) is perfectly acceptable and not likely to get into a fight over.
One other thing is if you find a topic that hasn't been covered yet on Wikipedia (getting harder to do all of the time now, however) you can simply add the article and work on it to your heart's content usually without much argument as well. That is something that professional writers are generally going to be lothsome to do unless they have a huge passion to get it written.
Strange as it seems, I've seen some mirroring of Everything2 content in Wikipedia. Not a whole lot, but it is creeping in there as well. I'm sure plenty of cross polination is going on both ways.
From my own viewpoint, I think a website that culled from Wikipedia and was the "Best-of" Wikipedia would do very well. The current list of proposals has huge inconsistancies and in most cases requires a huge amount of CPU bandwidth to deal with... something the Wikimedia servers are seriously short on anyway. That would include article rating systems and metrics to show who is a valued editor and who is the latest troll to sack pages real quick.
On the whole I like your idea... the problem is mainly how do you implement the idea without killing the server farm? If Wikipedia can get ahead of the bandwidth curve for more than a year, more innovative ideas like this certainly can be tried. Unfortunately there are a bunch of really cool features already implemented in the MediaWiki software that have been turned off for Wikipedia that I don't have too much hope.
DMOZ corruption is far from simply selling link approval. There is the whole heirarchy aspect of levels of editors which is nasty, and there is even more problems within due to the approval process of getting accepted into new categories, where you have to do some serious buttocks kissing just to get a chance. That and the rules change so much that if you try to follow what is happening in the public forums it becomes a full-time job.
DMOZ was a good idea, but poorly implemented and even more poorly administered as of late. And if you challenge a policy (or policy change), it is like speaking into a vaccum, especially if it is one of those higher ups in the heirarchy. While I've had some similar problems with the Wikimedia Foundation, at least I feel I can get heard through the din of what is happening, and have a forum to complain if I'm being run roughshod. Slashdot, by comparison, is purely hopeless, but I do get some good jokes to read every now and them.
There is a discussion of trying to do a "Wikipedia 1.0" publication. There are several views of what to do, including some sort of Slashdot type of moderation system to content and users, as well as a "community" approval of articles to be submitted through a moderation system of some sort to be placed in a "authoritative article" section... perhaps even a seperate website of certified articles.
The problem with doing that is that it raises the bar on what is expected there as well. The/. style of moderation (well.... various forms of reader authentication) I don't think will work too well, but it at least is an attempt.
Certainly something needs to be done to raise the standards of Wikipedia. As far as reliability, however, I consider Wikipedia to be about equal for a random article compared to Britannica about the same subject. Some things Britannica will do better, although I think Wikipedia is much more up-to-date on the topic, especially if they are about something in current events like Hurricane Katrina. It does much poorer on things like Argentinian Sea Turtles or 19th Century mayors of Seattle.
All of these were made book of the month. The Japanese Wikibook is a little bit embarassing as it was recently restructured, but the participants ganged up on the voting page for the book of the month to try and get some additional exposure to their little project. Even so, there has been some significant progress there, and they are learning from some other well-done language Wikibooks, including Portuguese and Chinese
Another section where we are trying to learn a little bit from our earlier mistakes on Wikibooks is the Wikijunior sub-project where we are trying to make introductory texts for elementary school children. There are four "books" there right now in various stages of completion, and are more than just a few screen fulls of text. There is a big push right now to try and get the Big Cats book ready into a formally published format, and the Solar System book is undergoing a huge editorial revision right now to simplify and provide encyclopedia-level citation coverage for every fact in the book. We are also trying in Wikijunior to avoid the mistake of having everybody run off into all directions and instead try to make it more of a group project to actually complete something.
That really is the largest problem right now, a lack of focus. A couple of people come onto Wikibooks and try to write a book, only to discover that it is a much harder process to complete than it seemed right in the beginning. They usually get an outline written (if they are any good at all) and start a chapter and a half, then get bored and move on.
Another problem we have contended with is that there was a period of about a year where Wikibooks was incredibly neglected by the original founders, who moved onto other projects. A whole new group has essentially taken over what was on Wikibooks in the past six months or so and really tried to reorganize the whole thing. That is an ongoing task, and there is a lot of stuff to clean out that shouldn't be there. Some huge debates over what should be there and what should not is continuing, and an attempt to re-focus the aims of the project. We are also trying to get people with real leadership qualities to try and help build the project, including not just recruitment but also raising the standards to make some very real book-length projects instead of a bunch of mini-encyclopedias.
In terms of Alexa ratings, Wikibooks is now in the top 10,000 websites (see http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? q=&url=wikibooks.org for more information), and the #1 e-book related website in terms of number of visitors. This beats even the "professional" e-book websites. The Assayer by contrast is only in the top 2,000,000 websites (it does have some specialized features though that are very good). BTW, I have also contributed to The Assayer in the past, so it wasn't a completely new site to me either. I would like to in fact add some links to your site, but I hope you can handle the increased bandwidth as a result.
The #1 problem I see with your assessment of Wikibooks, Mr. Crowell, is that it is very premature to realistically judge the final output of what you find there. Some progress is being made, and some discussions are being done to make a "best of..." section that really shows off the substantive books (not just computer gaming guides) that might be valuable to those involved.
It is much harder to write a book than a simple encyclopedia article, and like almost all book publishing about 90% of everything written is pure garbage not even worth the time to composte. Wikibooks also suffers from the specter of being a vanity book publisher after a fashion, and I have been involved personally in trying to stem that tide. Still, there are some real gems of books that can be viewed, and some very interesting progress with a number of projects.
I'll also openly admit that the participants of Wikibooks need to do a better job of advertising the high quality books and removing the cruft. As an e-book author, I hope you also appreciate the huge commitment it takes to actually sit down and author a book on any subject, particularly one that requires in depth technical knowledge. Getting a group of volunteers together to write something coherant is particularly difficult.
I'm in the middle of writing/publishing my own little e-book, and using Wikibooks as a work-in-progress forum. The thing that I have found beneficial is that while I'm writing there has already been a substantial amount of input from people who are reading it, including technical corrections where I made a mistake. Upon review I found out I was wrong... and that was on a very obscure technical point that many people even familiar with the content would likely miss. Or correcting typos on very technical tables and footnotes. I have even placed a temporary note in the middle of my text suggesting that I do some research to flesh out a point, only to find that somebody has gone in and filled in that missing space removing the need to do the research. In short, I have had a very positive experience in writing using Wikibooks as a forum. And all of this through what amounts to be volunteer labor.
In short, especially with technical documentation, I think it is better to use something like a Wiki than sitting down with a Word Processor. Proofreading and peer review are especially invaluable from my experience, and something that for a novice to book publishing is almost impossible to find. For somebody who already has the book publishing background and connections to reviewers and competent editors, there is no need for something like Wikibooks.
This is an honest reply to counter the hoards of "Of course you have to register anonymously" complaints. ICANN should make it automatic revokation of a domain if the information is bogus... and all you have to do is simply put up a challenge and offer to buy the domain using legitimate contact information. By even allowing bogus information it completely depreciates the WHOIS database to uselessness.
This is IMHO no different than when you file for a business license with your local municipal government, and that information is also available (at least for my community) on-line for anybody to access, including the applicant's name and legal street address. It isn't any harder to get at than the WHOIS database, at least if you wanted to go through the trouble. And if you put bogus contact information it would probably land you in jail.
If you feel this way, you should also be supportive of much, much shorter term limits on copyrighted material. The current poltical setup is life + 75 years, or just 75 years if it is a "work for hire" from a corporation. With this reckoning, there is at least 25 more years beyond the 50 you have just mentioned.
Personally, I don't see why anything needs to be copyrighted beyond 24 years (12 years + 12 more with formal renewal registration). Copyright starts as soon as it is "published" in a public forum, so that would still allow widows of people like John Lennon (thank you Yoko) to continue to earn some extra money from the estate of their spouse for many more years after the death of that "artist". Think of the computer software that was written 24 years ago, and you know it isn't really worth the media it is recorded on except for historical reference and maintaining obsolete computer systems. Certainly no computer programmer that I know of is earning royalties off of computer software written 24 years ago... or really that many earning royalties off of software they wrote 24 days ago for that matter, but that is another issue entirely. It is a very rare musician earning money off of recordings done more than 20 years ago, if you can even get a music publisher to even acknowledge that they have royalties coming their way.
Writing a RISK game is a derivitive product from the original source, aka the board game. Yes, they can come and sue your ass for $150,000 even if it was a non-commercial venture. There is also no statute of limitations on copyright infringement either. Copyright laws for board games is rather unusual though that only the game rules themselves can be copyrighted and not the board itself (except as a specific image). This was decided in the case of Parker Brothers vs. the folks who made Anti-Monopoly (I can't remember the exact case name here). Parker Brothers sued this other group due to trademark infringement (the name Anti-Monopoly came up) and a very similar shaped board even though the rules for the game were quite a bit different. Anti-Monopoly is where you are a Justice Dept. lawyer with the assignment to break up monopolies on the standard Monopoly board and a few unique twists. The judicial decision was that game copyright only applied to just the rules and not the rest of the contents of the game as long as it wasn't a direct photocopy of the game (aka a cheap clone copy pretending to be made by Parker Brothers in this case). Tokens could only be copyrighted like other 3D models, with similar restrictions, and wasn't an issue in the Anti-Monopoly case.
I just wanted to point out that the act of sleeping is sometimes refered to as the brain's way of defragmentation. You tend to edit the thoughts of the day through your sleep, and if you don't get enough sleep (not just resting, but REM sleep and deeper) you start to behave irratically and jam up in your thinking so you can't process as quickly and effeciently as you can when you are well rested.
I will admit that the brain is more of an analog computer, not a digital one, with circuits more akin to quantum computing than any other conventional information processing system currently available.
There has usually been a gross underestimation of what human intelligence really involves by AI researchers, especially in regards to what kinds of computing power is going to be required in order to achieve artificial sentience (what most people think about with real AI). A self-aware computer that has philosophical discussions with its creator is years or even centuries away.
Another huge misconception is that all of human thought exists exclusively within the brain itself. The rest of the nervous system is all interconnected, and there are as many if not more neurons outside of the head as there are within the brain itself. When the phrase is said that "he thinks with his stomach", there may be some truth to that statement in reality. That the brain is necessary for quick actions and thought processing, memory storage and emotions need a more holistic approach to the entire nervous system. Organ transplant patients sometimes talk about memories of things that happened from the donor upon verification.
I've been a research assistant at Utah State. This doesn't give me much confidence that this will ammount to anything... especially coming from the USU CS Dept. Still...I know Utah State has been working with neural networks and network programming for more than a decade now, so this isn't really that new on the surface.
And wasn't this the guy that was on Art Bell's Coast to Coast radio show about AI and future human intelligence?
I think there is a whole lot more to AI than what appears on the surface, and (unfortunately) there needs to be much more integration between various academic discliplines before it is even remotely achieved. Marvin Minsky was predicting that by the 1980's we would have some very realistic AI... and that ended up where?
Applying quantum techniques to algorithm searches is an interesting approach. I havn't kept up on the field because my interests have been elsewhere for the past couple of decades since I really checked into AI as a disclipline. Oh, I've kept a layman's (or more a general programmer) pulse check on the field, and there seem to be a bunch that have made a boatload of money on Wall Street using AI techniques to predict the stock market (they are called "Rocket Scientists" there because of their geeky intuition and approach). There are many other similar practical applications like weather forecasting and traffic prediction (not just vehicles on a freeway, but also purchases of items from a fast-food store or attendance at an amusement park) that a good neural network would have real practical value and paying customers if they (the potential customers) could come to a realization of the value of such a product.
The trick is to go from these relatively mundane applications to what is discussed with this article of "true AI", whatever that may mean. Or in other words, a computer like HAL that would at least be able to communicate via textual interfaces and smoke the pants off of ALICE in terms of passing a limited Turing Test of AI by convincing the person on the terminal in a 10 minute conversation that it is a real person they are talking to and not some computer program instead. Going from textual interfaces to voice recognition is really a trivial next step by comparison. One of the key parts of that is to send in plain English (not some programming or formal symbolic language) some instructions that the computer has not been exposed to previously and "learn" the task to be performed, including trying to guess between the lines on the request. Even being able to do this on a limited basis would transform the software industry, especially if you could prototype a software idea in this fashion.
From an ethical standpoint, you would have to start guessing if you need to incorporate Asimov's three laws of robotics into your designs as well, and decide what would happen if you don't. I know your designs are far from this point, but besides a philosophical discussion there has not even been the need to discuss this very real possibility.
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Admins generally have been around a little bit longer, so they know the political landscape better. I have been able to successfully fight admins, but it takes some extra work I will admit and appealing to policies from the rest of the community. In my case by fighting the admin I became one, so who knows what it really all boils down to.
I try to act in the role of a moderator when possible, and not try to push undo influence. In particular, if there is an issue where I have a personal stake, I will usually either wait for or even request another admin to step in and evaluate the decision, not using my admin authority except for cases where I am a neutral party to the dispute. Even then I try to act only as a second opinion or to follow community concensus.
I realize that far too often people who become admins let it get to their head and abuse their position, even if it isn't overt. The solution to this is to encourage as many competent users who might qualify as admins to become one by nomination... giving more opportunities to review and even revert decisions by other admins.
The worst editorial fight I got into was with Jimbo himself... and surprisingly I won that one as well. Well... sort of anyway. It still is not completely settled, but at least he and I are not openly warring and he admits that I'm trying to help the areas I'm working on to make a better project. Undeleting content deleted by Jimbo was not an easy decision on my part.
I don't think you quite understood what I said. There were five candidates running for just one office, and I had (or could) vote for over 100 other offices each with their own slate of candidates. Simply put, an election judge simply can't accurately count that many races in precincts with over 3000 voters. Yes, you could cut down on the size of the precincts and that is done, but there does seem to be a bit of a problem just trying to find compitent judges as well.
My wife is the head election judge for my local precinct, and she has complained about hand counts where the group of judges she is working with get different counts for vote totals... sometimes different counts on the third or fourth vote. When one of the judges is just a tad bit senile and accidently recounts the ballot more than once or other innocent errors, it becomes difficult to certify the results. That is far more common than you would suspect for hand counts... keeping in mind that often it is senior citizens manning the ballot box due to the fact they have the time necessary to do the job.
I support the idea of electronic ballot preparation , not electronic voting. The best system I've seen so far has you cast your ballots into a machine that then prints out the ballots onto one or more sheets of paper that are then handed in to the election judge when you are done. That gets rid of the stupid errors like voting for more than one person in a single office, smudged or partial votes (aka the pregnet chads from Florida), and still gives a manual audit trail for you to review. To help speed up the counting, bar codes or some other OCR enabled text is also displayed that will automate the counting by machine, but this can also be done by software from multiple vendors for verification.
Diebold had come to Utah (where I live) to also put in the machines. I am a strong critic of what they are doing, but at least Diebold consented to providing a paper audit trail for all voting machines. The audit trail, however, is not something that you would want to in real life try to review except under the most extreme cases, and even then it is likely that the voting would be invalidated due to fraud.
Please read up on American election procedures before you make an off-hand remark like why not use a paper ballot. On simple elections where there is only one or two races, the local election officials where I live still use a paper ballot. This is mainly an issue for major general elections like the election where the U.S. President is selected, where sometimes as many as 100 questions are asked for various races, including some multiple selection and other weird options that are unique to each issue or office. We want to know who is going to be our new president by the next day, unless it is a very close election like Bush vs. Gore. That was a huge exception even then.
I don't think you can find this mentioned in statutory law, but instead is something that comes from common law. Copyright law is full of that, including seemingly contradictory legal precedence that seems to support and deny certain activities. This property release issue is certainly one of those issues where it depends largely on the attitude of the judge toward the issue and how well the attorney who is representing you has prepared and gone into case history to defend your right to use photography that you took with your own camera. Also important is how you intended to use the images and if you were seeking some kind of "endorsement" from the individual or landmark by association.
In short, while it may not be strictly necessary to get a property or landmark release, it would still be a good idea as a sort of insurance. Paranoid stock photography businesses are totally justified to have that as an official policy simply so they don't have to hire a full time legal staff just to deal with all of the potential B.S. that would come from not having such a policy.
Having contributed a fair bit to Commons myself, trust me when I say that licenses do get verified... much more so than comparable websites. You have to explicitly state the license, and the source of the image as well. If the image seems a little too nice to have come from an amature source the administrators on Wikicommons will try to check up on you as an individual to see if you really do have content of that quality that is original content.
I have had images that I uploaded which have been deleted. I obtained the images from some government web pages, for instance, which I thought were available under the public domain. Those in particular get some strong attention because the copyright can be tricky. It turns out after some investigation that the images were under strong copyright and no copyleft license. I did cite the page links where I got the images, which at least permitted this type of search. Those pages which don't list the source of the images are generally deleted as well because this sort of search is then impossible.
ESA (European Space Agency) images are particularly disapointing because the license is incompatable with copyleft principles in general. Wikicommons does not support a non-commercial use only restriction, for instance which the ESA has all of their content licensed under. That kills a bunch of really cool space images which previously would have been available through the public domain.
I will be the first to admit that there are still some holes on Commons, and a few images that slip through the cracks. Still, I would trust images I obtained from Wikicommons as being mostly vetted for copyright licensing, and if somebody asserts copyright on an image I obtained from Wikicommons, I would put the burden of proof on the crazy person trying to claim copyright. Most likely they would be a scam artist trying to scalp some money from you when they really don't have a valid claim.
I've been using NetTime for some time as well, and the really cool thing about it is that it is also a NTP server... if you happen to have a small Windows-only office or want to have a quick and dirty NTP app with low overhead that non-techies can install and use with relatively no fuss. Definitely a good recommendation.
One existing terrestrial mine comes to mind as a counter argument to what you are saying here. This mine I'm referencing makes almost all of its operating expenses just off of the processing of precious metals like Gold and Silver, with the profits themselves coming from the Copper as a side line... even though that is the principle metal that comes from the mine. It also serves as an example of what kinds of engineering is needed to get much deeper into the Earth as you are suggesting. Going much deeper is simply not economical or practical in most cases, and even this mine is going to be closed in about 50 years simply because they will have dug so deep that it won't stay profitable to pull the ore up from the deep hole. And this is open-pit mining where you don't have to worry about the overburden collapsing on top of you or other nasty issues inherant in mining.
Of all of the objects in the Solar Sytem that you can physically touch (i.e. excluding the Gas giants and the Sun as having metalic cores that are unreachable even by future technologies), the Earth has by far the strongest gravitation pull in the Solar System. That makes mining here on the Earth incredibly expensive and makes mine collapses a constant worry as well as a source of industrial deaths.
The advantage of mining on an asteroid... especially a small asteroid (less than 10 km diameter) is that gravity ceases to be a major issue in terms of trying to keep the whole rock supported. You also have access to huge energy sources, especially solar power, that are simply unavailble for terrestrial mines.
Another major plus for asteroidal mining operations is that the minerals will not be as nearly stratified like they are on the Earth. Here, most of the heavy metals are in the core of the Earth and might as well be in the core of Jupiter or the Sun for as much good as it will do for us. Occasionally a mountain will pull up some stuff from deeper in the Earth (which is one reason for many mine in mountainous regions). They will still be clumpy and need surveys for mineral compositions and mining candidates, but you are likely to find richer veins of rare elements in the asteroid than would be possible on the Earth.
Keep in mind that most of the early mining operations in space will be done mainly to avoid having to pull up these minerals and elements from the Earth, with the huge costs of launching something from the surface of the Earth. Volitle Chemicals like Oxygen, Hydrogen, Water, and Ammonia are going to be as likely to be mined as are metals like Iron, Magnesium, or even Gold. If any metals are going to be shipped back to the Earth for consumption on the Earth itself in large quantities, that would only happen when mining facilities in space are already well developed and already profitable from other operations.
Mining may take place, BTW, on moons that orbit Jupiter, not necessarily on the "surface" of Jupiter proper, although there are thousands of candidates in the Asteroid belt that are likely to be tapped well before anything gets done near Jupiter except for projects that are specific to manned exploration of the Jovian moons themselves. That is centuries away from happening at best.
It is interesting when you try to fly the Space Shuttle with a realistic flight simulator that you discover just how close to the edge that the design of the Shuttle really was. One spaceflight simulator I saw with a good model of the Shuttle has an option for "infinite" fuel load for their models so you can use them to do exotic things like fly the Apollo spacecraft to Jupiter or other fun things. If you try that with the Shuttle you discover that it won't even reach orbit, as the flight characteristics actually require some of the fuel to be left at the lanuch pad and in the atmosphere so it will be light enough to achieve orbital insertion.
The Apollo spacecraft (and the Saturn V) isn't quite as critical as there is plenty of extra thrust capacity in the design to get people to the Moon and beyond. The only real problem with the Apollo spacecraft is that it only has life support for just a couple of weeks at best.... just enough time to go to the Moon, plant the flag, and return. Shuttle astronauts in comparison are riding around in an orbital multi-deck RV with cable and internet access by comparison to the austerity the Apollo astronauts had to live with.
Microsoft was in the business of writing compilers in 1980, not operating systems. IBM wanted to buy the Microsoft compilers for the IBM-PC, but after getting the cold shoulder from Gary Kildal, Microsoft decided to include an operating system as well in their proposal.
To get something going right away, Microsoft bought a variant of CP/M-86 as the core of MS-DOS 1.0, and included many of the older conventions of CP/M as well. Some of the file access methods including early FAT organization was introduced as well.
In all fairness to Microsoft on this point, when MS-DOS 2.0 came out, there was a fairly substantial change to the architechture. It wasn't until DOS 2.0 that hard-drive support was offered at all, and the need for something like FAT as it currently exists. DOS 2.0 also supported sub-directories for the first time and tree navigation and diagnostics tools.
That was all still more than 20 years ago, which still begs the question about what the patents really cover and if they are original research, as most ideas in FAT were hardly new even when Microsoft used them in later versions of DOS and Windows.
NTFS might have some claims of originality, but that is another beast entirely and has its own pedigree.
The 100 year archival quality CD's were only the pressed CD-ROMs made with high quality dies... not the mass procuced CDs that AOL ships out and especially not CD-Rs.
The other thing to consider is the chemical stability of the dyes that are used for the creation of the CD-Rs that you are using. Some companies (like Mitsui and presumably Kodak) put quite a bit of effort into the quality of the dyes and having them work on multiple CD readers as well. These are likely to last much longer than the 50 cent CDs that you can pick up at your local discount store like Wal-Mart.
The real question would be who is marketing and specing CD-R manufacturing for archival quality CDs and have specs guarenteeing that they will last 10+ years without failing? There must be somebody out there doing that, but I don't know of them myself.
According to whose Christian mythology? Where? What is your source? I don't see that in the KJV Bible I have next to me, and I've heard several fairly reasonable explainations by professional astronomers who also happen to be Christan, of whom I have never heard the explaination that Polaris was this supposed star that you are refering to.
Most likely the Christmas Star was a nova of some sort, being the usual explaination of the event... or a comet. Both can seemingly appear out from nowhere and have been traditionally thought of as Celestial oracles of future events, like the birth of a king or a warning that some sort of war was going to happen.
There may be some mideval explainations that used Polaris as the Christmas Star, but Polaris wasn't even the Pole Star during the life of Christ anyway, due to the Earth's precession.
Yeah, get a class action suit where the winner will get a gift certificate to your local music store to purchase a CD. Or get some free iTunes. What a wonderful gift for having to deal with crappy lawyers who don't know the law, and is worth the pain and aggrivation.
BTW, the lawyers who file the class action will be multi-millionaires, but the ordinary consumer will get squat. What a wonderful legal system we have, isn't it.
Having just done a major repair on my car (I just replaced the head gasket and the timing belt), prescribed medicine for my children, installed my own toilet not too long ago, even put in my own electrical wiring (both high and low voltage) in my house, I guess that would seem like to some people as a little bit too self-reliant. I would have to say, though, if I get into something a bit too complex I do seek professional opinion. I didn't, for example, try to attempt an appedecimy on my daughter but instead did seek a professional surgeon. I feel comfortable fixing the Windows registry because I am a software engineer and understand the inner workings of it.
The same can be said of the law, and I feel you should be able to be your own attorney on simple matters. That the legal system is so screwed up that even for a simple matter where the law should be obvious you feel the need for a lawyer, there is something wrong. Even more when judges think you should have a lawyer.
You can simply be bold, roll with the punches if you get into some edit war, and then get into the page discussion, but for popular articles you are correct. For neglected articles that you may be knowledgeable about, going out and making change based on information that you know (like something about your hometown, for example) is perfectly acceptable and not likely to get into a fight over.
One other thing is if you find a topic that hasn't been covered yet on Wikipedia (getting harder to do all of the time now, however) you can simply add the article and work on it to your heart's content usually without much argument as well. That is something that professional writers are generally going to be lothsome to do unless they have a huge passion to get it written.
Strange as it seems, I've seen some mirroring of Everything2 content in Wikipedia. Not a whole lot, but it is creeping in there as well. I'm sure plenty of cross polination is going on both ways.
From my own viewpoint, I think a website that culled from Wikipedia and was the "Best-of" Wikipedia would do very well. The current list of proposals has huge inconsistancies and in most cases requires a huge amount of CPU bandwidth to deal with... something the Wikimedia servers are seriously short on anyway. That would include article rating systems and metrics to show who is a valued editor and who is the latest troll to sack pages real quick.
On the whole I like your idea... the problem is mainly how do you implement the idea without killing the server farm? If Wikipedia can get ahead of the bandwidth curve for more than a year, more innovative ideas like this certainly can be tried. Unfortunately there are a bunch of really cool features already implemented in the MediaWiki software that have been turned off for Wikipedia that I don't have too much hope.
DMOZ corruption is far from simply selling link approval. There is the whole heirarchy aspect of levels of editors which is nasty, and there is even more problems within due to the approval process of getting accepted into new categories, where you have to do some serious buttocks kissing just to get a chance. That and the rules change so much that if you try to follow what is happening in the public forums it becomes a full-time job.
DMOZ was a good idea, but poorly implemented and even more poorly administered as of late. And if you challenge a policy (or policy change), it is like speaking into a vaccum, especially if it is one of those higher ups in the heirarchy. While I've had some similar problems with the Wikimedia Foundation, at least I feel I can get heard through the din of what is happening, and have a forum to complain if I'm being run roughshod. Slashdot, by comparison, is purely hopeless, but I do get some good jokes to read every now and them.
There is a discussion of trying to do a "Wikipedia 1.0" publication. There are several views of what to do, including some sort of Slashdot type of moderation system to content and users, as well as a "community" approval of articles to be submitted through a moderation system of some sort to be placed in a "authoritative article" section... perhaps even a seperate website of certified articles.
/. style of moderation (well.... various forms of reader authentication) I don't think will work too well, but it at least is an attempt.
The problem with doing that is that it raises the bar on what is expected there as well. The
Certainly something needs to be done to raise the standards of Wikipedia. As far as reliability, however, I consider Wikipedia to be about equal for a random article compared to Britannica about the same subject. Some things Britannica will do better, although I think Wikipedia is much more up-to-date on the topic, especially if they are about something in current events like Hurricane Katrina. It does much poorer on things like Argentinian Sea Turtles or 19th Century mayors of Seattle.
Some books that were original and have been created almost entirely by Wikibooks authors that I consider to have some value include:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/US_History%3A_Content s (A book about U.S. History)
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Consciousness_studies
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming About Ada programming
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D/Noob_to_Pr o Introduction to design using Blender
All of these were made book of the month. The Japanese Wikibook is a little bit embarassing as it was recently restructured, but the participants ganged up on the voting page for the book of the month to try and get some additional exposure to their little project. Even so, there has been some significant progress there, and they are learning from some other well-done language Wikibooks, including Portuguese and Chinese
Another section where we are trying to learn a little bit from our earlier mistakes on Wikibooks is the Wikijunior sub-project where we are trying to make introductory texts for elementary school children. There are four "books" there right now in various stages of completion, and are more than just a few screen fulls of text. There is a big push right now to try and get the Big Cats book ready into a formally published format, and the Solar System book is undergoing a huge editorial revision right now to simplify and provide encyclopedia-level citation coverage for every fact in the book. We are also trying in Wikijunior to avoid the mistake of having everybody run off into all directions and instead try to make it more of a group project to actually complete something.
That really is the largest problem right now, a lack of focus. A couple of people come onto Wikibooks and try to write a book, only to discover that it is a much harder process to complete than it seemed right in the beginning. They usually get an outline written (if they are any good at all) and start a chapter and a half, then get bored and move on.
Another problem we have contended with is that there was a period of about a year where Wikibooks was incredibly neglected by the original founders, who moved onto other projects. A whole new group has essentially taken over what was on Wikibooks in the past six months or so and really tried to reorganize the whole thing. That is an ongoing task, and there is a lot of stuff to clean out that shouldn't be there. Some huge debates over what should be there and what should not is continuing, and an attempt to re-focus the aims of the project. We are also trying to get people with real leadership qualities to try and help build the project, including not just recruitment but also raising the standards to make some very real book-length projects instead of a bunch of mini-encyclopedias.
In terms of Alexa ratings, Wikibooks is now in the top 10,000 websites (see http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? q=&url=wikibooks.org for more information), and the #1 e-book related website in terms of number of visitors. This beats even the "professional" e-book websites. The Assayer by contrast is only in the top 2,000,000 websites (it does have some specialized features though that are very good). BTW, I have also contributed to The Assayer in the past, so it wasn't a completely new site to me either. I would like to in fact add some links to your site, but I hope you can handle the increased bandwidth as a result.
I do want to thank you for
The #1 problem I see with your assessment of Wikibooks, Mr. Crowell, is that it is very premature to realistically judge the final output of what you find there. Some progress is being made, and some discussions are being done to make a "best of..." section that really shows off the substantive books (not just computer gaming guides) that might be valuable to those involved.
It is much harder to write a book than a simple encyclopedia article, and like almost all book publishing about 90% of everything written is pure garbage not even worth the time to composte. Wikibooks also suffers from the specter of being a vanity book publisher after a fashion, and I have been involved personally in trying to stem that tide. Still, there are some real gems of books that can be viewed, and some very interesting progress with a number of projects.
I'll also openly admit that the participants of Wikibooks need to do a better job of advertising the high quality books and removing the cruft. As an e-book author, I hope you also appreciate the huge commitment it takes to actually sit down and author a book on any subject, particularly one that requires in depth technical knowledge. Getting a group of volunteers together to write something coherant is particularly difficult.
I'm in the middle of writing/publishing my own little e-book, and using Wikibooks as a work-in-progress forum. The thing that I have found beneficial is that while I'm writing there has already been a substantial amount of input from people who are reading it, including technical corrections where I made a mistake. Upon review I found out I was wrong... and that was on a very obscure technical point that many people even familiar with the content would likely miss. Or correcting typos on very technical tables and footnotes. I have even placed a temporary note in the middle of my text suggesting that I do some research to flesh out a point, only to find that somebody has gone in and filled in that missing space removing the need to do the research. In short, I have had a very positive experience in writing using Wikibooks as a forum. And all of this through what amounts to be volunteer labor.
In short, especially with technical documentation, I think it is better to use something like a Wiki than sitting down with a Word Processor. Proofreading and peer review are especially invaluable from my experience, and something that for a novice to book publishing is almost impossible to find. For somebody who already has the book publishing background and connections to reviewers and competent editors, there is no need for something like Wikibooks.
This is an honest reply to counter the hoards of "Of course you have to register anonymously" complaints. ICANN should make it automatic revokation of a domain if the information is bogus... and all you have to do is simply put up a challenge and offer to buy the domain using legitimate contact information. By even allowing bogus information it completely depreciates the WHOIS database to uselessness.
This is IMHO no different than when you file for a business license with your local municipal government, and that information is also available (at least for my community) on-line for anybody to access, including the applicant's name and legal street address. It isn't any harder to get at than the WHOIS database, at least if you wanted to go through the trouble. And if you put bogus contact information it would probably land you in jail.
If you feel this way, you should also be supportive of much, much shorter term limits on copyrighted material. The current poltical setup is life + 75 years, or just 75 years if it is a "work for hire" from a corporation. With this reckoning, there is at least 25 more years beyond the 50 you have just mentioned.
Personally, I don't see why anything needs to be copyrighted beyond 24 years (12 years + 12 more with formal renewal registration). Copyright starts as soon as it is "published" in a public forum, so that would still allow widows of people like John Lennon (thank you Yoko) to continue to earn some extra money from the estate of their spouse for many more years after the death of that "artist". Think of the computer software that was written 24 years ago, and you know it isn't really worth the media it is recorded on except for historical reference and maintaining obsolete computer systems. Certainly no computer programmer that I know of is earning royalties off of computer software written 24 years ago... or really that many earning royalties off of software they wrote 24 days ago for that matter, but that is another issue entirely. It is a very rare musician earning money off of recordings done more than 20 years ago, if you can even get a music publisher to even acknowledge that they have royalties coming their way.
Writing a RISK game is a derivitive product from the original source, aka the board game. Yes, they can come and sue your ass for $150,000 even if it was a non-commercial venture. There is also no statute of limitations on copyright infringement either. Copyright laws for board games is rather unusual though that only the game rules themselves can be copyrighted and not the board itself (except as a specific image). This was decided in the case of Parker Brothers vs. the folks who made Anti-Monopoly (I can't remember the exact case name here). Parker Brothers sued this other group due to trademark infringement (the name Anti-Monopoly came up) and a very similar shaped board even though the rules for the game were quite a bit different. Anti-Monopoly is where you are a Justice Dept. lawyer with the assignment to break up monopolies on the standard Monopoly board and a few unique twists. The judicial decision was that game copyright only applied to just the rules and not the rest of the contents of the game as long as it wasn't a direct photocopy of the game (aka a cheap clone copy pretending to be made by Parker Brothers in this case). Tokens could only be copyrighted like other 3D models, with similar restrictions, and wasn't an issue in the Anti-Monopoly case.
I just wanted to point out that the act of sleeping is sometimes refered to as the brain's way of defragmentation. You tend to edit the thoughts of the day through your sleep, and if you don't get enough sleep (not just resting, but REM sleep and deeper) you start to behave irratically and jam up in your thinking so you can't process as quickly and effeciently as you can when you are well rested.
I will admit that the brain is more of an analog computer, not a digital one, with circuits more akin to quantum computing than any other conventional information processing system currently available.
There has usually been a gross underestimation of what human intelligence really involves by AI researchers, especially in regards to what kinds of computing power is going to be required in order to achieve artificial sentience (what most people think about with real AI). A self-aware computer that has philosophical discussions with its creator is years or even centuries away.
Another huge misconception is that all of human thought exists exclusively within the brain itself. The rest of the nervous system is all interconnected, and there are as many if not more neurons outside of the head as there are within the brain itself. When the phrase is said that "he thinks with his stomach", there may be some truth to that statement in reality. That the brain is necessary for quick actions and thought processing, memory storage and emotions need a more holistic approach to the entire nervous system. Organ transplant patients sometimes talk about memories of things that happened from the donor upon verification.
I've been a research assistant at Utah State. This doesn't give me much confidence that this will ammount to anything... especially coming from the USU CS Dept. Still...I know Utah State has been working with neural networks and network programming for more than a decade now, so this isn't really that new on the surface.
And wasn't this the guy that was on Art Bell's Coast to Coast radio show about AI and future human intelligence?
I think there is a whole lot more to AI than what appears on the surface, and (unfortunately) there needs to be much more integration between various academic discliplines before it is even remotely achieved. Marvin Minsky was predicting that by the 1980's we would have some very realistic AI... and that ended up where?
Applying quantum techniques to algorithm searches is an interesting approach. I havn't kept up on the field because my interests have been elsewhere for the past couple of decades since I really checked into AI as a disclipline. Oh, I've kept a layman's (or more a general programmer) pulse check on the field, and there seem to be a bunch that have made a boatload of money on Wall Street using AI techniques to predict the stock market (they are called "Rocket Scientists" there because of their geeky intuition and approach). There are many other similar practical applications like weather forecasting and traffic prediction (not just vehicles on a freeway, but also purchases of items from a fast-food store or attendance at an amusement park) that a good neural network would have real practical value and paying customers if they (the potential customers) could come to a realization of the value of such a product.
The trick is to go from these relatively mundane applications to what is discussed with this article of "true AI", whatever that may mean. Or in other words, a computer like HAL that would at least be able to communicate via textual interfaces and smoke the pants off of ALICE in terms of passing a limited Turing Test of AI by convincing the person on the terminal in a 10 minute conversation that it is a real person they are talking to and not some computer program instead. Going from textual interfaces to voice recognition is really a trivial next step by comparison. One of the key parts of that is to send in plain English (not some programming or formal symbolic language) some instructions that the computer has not been exposed to previously and "learn" the task to be performed, including trying to guess between the lines on the request. Even being able to do this on a limited basis would transform the software industry, especially if you could prototype a software idea in this fashion.
From an ethical standpoint, you would have to start guessing if you need to incorporate Asimov's three laws of robotics into your designs as well, and decide what would happen if you don't. I know your designs are far from this point, but besides a philosophical discussion there has not even been the need to discuss this very real possibility.