I stand by my journal entry. As long as any random fucktard can come over and get my article, and thus possibly hours of work, deleted for no good reason, I see no reason to contribute those hours.
I am inclined to agree. I'd rather have too much stuff and the problem of organizing it than too little. I find Wikipedia's standard of relevance occasionally capricious and arbitrary.
I'd rather that data that has a narrow and specific audience get factored into subarticles rather than deleted. After all, someone worked to bring the data into a presentable format. Deletion serves nobody except the lazy and uninterested. A "see also" type link which points to the true esoteric information would serve the hard-core.
There's not even a compelling bandwidth argument. The notion of whether something is encyclopedic might make sense when drawing a cut line for a print edition, but sending an elaborate 404 page isn't much different than sending a narrow-interest article in terms of bandwidth.
I guess what I am getting at is that filtering for quality is often more likely to be objective than subjective, filtering for relevance is sometimes a bit subjective, and filtering for appeal is much more so. High quality contributions are valuable, regardless of the broadness of their appeal. There are media for which it makes sense to draw a cut line, but a search driven electronic format isn't so constrained.
I don't see what Wikipedia loses by keeping around narrow-interest articles as long as they're factual and neutral. If I happen to catalog all of the chalkboard gags, that takes nothing away from anything else. Sure, it won't be a featured article of the day. So what?
Wikipedia does lose when there's a large number of truly worthless or misleading articles. Those should get the axe. But those are worthless or misleading because their data is absent or inaccurate. I imagine sheer peer recognition of their crumminess would force them out of commission.
Last night, intelligence officials reaffirmed that the shells were old and were not the suspected weapons of mass destruction sought in Iraq after the 2003 invasion.
From your Fox News link:
Offering the official administration response to FOX News, a senior Defense Department official pointed out that the chemical weapons were not in useable conditions.
"This does not reflect a capacity that was built up after 1991," the official said, adding the munitions "are not the WMDs this country and the rest of the world believed Iraq had, and not the WMDs for which this country went to war."
Hmmm. Way to support your own argument there.
So yeah, sure, he had some rotting leftovers, but not the massive "set to attack the US" stockpiles they beat their drums about leading up to our 2003 invasion. Yeah, not everything got dismantled. But, was that malice or incompetence? Looking back at that Washington post article:
The lawmakers pointed to an unclassified summary from a report by the National Ground Intelligence Center regarding 500 chemical munitions shells that had been buried near the Iranian border, and then long forgotten, by Iraqi troops during their eight-year war with Iran, which ended in 1988.
Sounds like malice to me. Oh wait, no, that's incompetence.
This case is similar to a restaurant throwing out a paying customer (or charging them *a lot*) if they are loud, annoying and disturbing many other eaters.
Mr. Creosote, would like a mint? It is wafer thin.
Ekiga on Linux will talk to Xmeeting on Mac. That's what I currently use for talking with one of my friends.
One thing Ekiga doesn't have (at least in its official releases) is support for anything better than H.261. The video quality is therefore pretty crummy. Can't wait until they catch up with the last decade and get at least H.263 support.
That reminds me: there's a patch I've been meaning to send to the libopal developers. The H.261 decoder crashes (at least on x86-64) if some packets get dropped. What happens is the decoder sees corrupt motion vectors that point outside the image, and doesn't ignore them like it should. When it goes to dereference these, *bam* Segmentation fault.
Coccinella doesn't seem to have video support. Either that, or the website hides it pretty well. I'd say that's a pretty big strike against it in the "cross-platform video chat" department.
I guess it just seemed like the bank was trying to convince customers to explicitly pay extra for something that primarily benefited the bank.
That's exactly what they're doing. You're paying them for a system that saves them money. In the old system, if there had been fraud on your account (e.g. someone runs off and charges up thousands on your card), you're on the hook for $50. In their new system, you just pay them $50 up front, regardless of whether your card gets stolen.
and I couldn't see any change to the laws that made them responsible for money mysteriously disappearing from my account.
I think you mean "made them less responsible." I thought consumers are protected from all charges beyond the first $50 in the case of fraud. (Scroll to bottom.)
So, $50/year is a total ripoff unless you get defrauded more than once a year. It's basically guaranteeing you lose that $50 bucks annually, even if you never experience any fraud. Nice.
Huh? I don't think so. Microwaves sit smack between FM and Infrared. That's why your microwave oven, 802.11b radio and 2.4GHz cordless phone all don't get along so well. They're all in the lower part of the microwave spectrum.
And to folks who say microwaves aren't radio, please explain to me what 802.11a are doing up in that band, or how we do microwave radio relay?
Re:Who needs privacy when people are so predictabl
on
Blown to Bits
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· Score: 1
Commercial stations have a buffer between themselves and their audience through advertisers. They can get away with annoying parts of their audience by reporting the truth without worrying about losing funding.
Hmmm.... I don't buy it. Why else would Arbitron ratings matter so much to the commercial radio stations? It wouldn't be because listener share determines how much the station can charge for ads, now would it? And advertisers DO pull out of programs when there's too much controversy. Remember Michael Savage?
NPR and PBS, on the other hand, receive most of their funding by their audience. The rest they get from advertisers and taxes, so they do have a slight buffer, but it's nothing like commercial news sources. They either tow the party-line of their audience, or they get no donations.
Well, about a third of NPR's money comes pledge drives, and those occur only a couple times a year. The rest comes from grants and from corporate underwriting. In those pledge drives, only about 1 in 10 listeners to NPR donates. That's 90% of their audience that underwriters are trying to reach that aren't picking up the phone during the pledge drive. So, I don't think the effect is as stark as you think.
That said, people are going to tune into stations that fit their bias, whether commercial or public. I think NPR tends to shoot down the middle more than it shoots to the left. Compare this to, say, WBAP here in D/FW. You can't tell me that their current lineup is less biased than NPR. Quoting Wikipedia:
After Davis's show ends, the station relies on syndicated programming for the rest of the day, carrying the standard Citadel lineup of Paul Harvey, The Rush Limbaugh Show, The Sean Hannity Show and Mark Levin, all in their entirety and live. Jerry Doyle is broadcast on a tape delay after Levin, followed by The Greg Knapp Experience.
Well, if a version for your not-Windows-platform-of-choice is On The Way, getting an advance preview might be interesting to find out whether it's worth waiting for. I, for one, am interested in how well it works so I know whether to rush out and download the Linux version when it's available.
From the sounds of it, it's got some interesting advantages, but I probably won't rush out and download it when a Linux version becomes available. Ad blocking, for instance, is the big hurdle for me.
I guess you missed the memo? If that article's to be believed, Firefox 3's memory usage is around 50% - 75% of Opera 9.5's. Or am I misreading the graphs?
MagdjTK was referring to the interest banks pay YOU for keeping money with them, either in interest bearing savings/checking accounts, or in money markets, CDs, etc. Interest banks pay you is certainly NOT profit for the bank.
That said, teller fees (automated or human), etc. do certainly add up, and detract from any interest you might earn on your deposits.
Yeah, that sounds a little harsh. I would have first converted the password DB to a one-way hash (salted, naturally) keeping the original passwords, and then set peoples' passwords to expire over the next month or two along with nag screens reminding them to change their password when they log in, until they've actually changed it. Let accounts with expired passwords log in if they change their password immediately, along with verifying some additional information (billing ZIP code or similar), or through a password reset that generates a one-time password sent to the registered email account.
Couple that with a "we're migrating our system. Please log into your account normally to verify the changes" announcement message and I think it would go over much better.
The initial conversion to one-way hash immediately closes up the primary hole (passwords are visible to employees), and it gently nudges everyone into fresh passwords.
I'm sure the presumed rogue operator isn't scheduled to work for the full set of hours the call center is open. "After hours" just means "outside the operator's normal scheduled hours" in this context. If it weren't for the fact they might be on hold for 20 minutes, this could even occur during one of their twice daily 15 minute breaks.
This sounds an awful lot like the technology behind the "lucky" telescope". The basic idea, at least, is similar: Take the clearest images obtained over several samples and composite it into an image that otherwise couldn't be obtained given the distortion field.
This should work great for relatively stationary things. For moving objects, I imagine the effectiveness would be greatly diminished.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that certainly looks to be a trainwreck.
I am inclined to agree. I'd rather have too much stuff and the problem of organizing it than too little. I find Wikipedia's standard of relevance occasionally capricious and arbitrary.
I'd rather that data that has a narrow and specific audience get factored into subarticles rather than deleted. After all, someone worked to bring the data into a presentable format. Deletion serves nobody except the lazy and uninterested. A "see also" type link which points to the true esoteric information would serve the hard-core.
There's not even a compelling bandwidth argument. The notion of whether something is encyclopedic might make sense when drawing a cut line for a print edition, but sending an elaborate 404 page isn't much different than sending a narrow-interest article in terms of bandwidth.
I guess what I am getting at is that filtering for quality is often more likely to be objective than subjective, filtering for relevance is sometimes a bit subjective, and filtering for appeal is much more so. High quality contributions are valuable, regardless of the broadness of their appeal. There are media for which it makes sense to draw a cut line, but a search driven electronic format isn't so constrained.
I don't see what Wikipedia loses by keeping around narrow-interest articles as long as they're factual and neutral. If I happen to catalog all of the chalkboard gags, that takes nothing away from anything else. Sure, it won't be a featured article of the day. So what?
Wikipedia does lose when there's a large number of truly worthless or misleading articles. Those should get the axe. But those are worthless or misleading because their data is absent or inaccurate. I imagine sheer peer recognition of their crumminess would force them out of commission.
I turn left 157 degrees each time. GP is an insensitive clod.
Men's News Daily? World Net Daily? Buh?
From your Washington Post link:
From your Fox News link:
Hmmm. Way to support your own argument there.
So yeah, sure, he had some rotting leftovers, but not the massive "set to attack the US" stockpiles they beat their drums about leading up to our 2003 invasion. Yeah, not everything got dismantled. But, was that malice or incompetence? Looking back at that Washington post article:
Sounds like malice to me. Oh wait, no, that's incompetence.
Mr. Creosote, would like a mint? It is wafer thin.
Ekiga on Linux will talk to Xmeeting on Mac. That's what I currently use for talking with one of my friends.
One thing Ekiga doesn't have (at least in its official releases) is support for anything better than H.261. The video quality is therefore pretty crummy. Can't wait until they catch up with the last decade and get at least H.263 support.
That reminds me: there's a patch I've been meaning to send to the libopal developers. The H.261 decoder crashes (at least on x86-64) if some packets get dropped. What happens is the decoder sees corrupt motion vectors that point outside the image, and doesn't ignore them like it should. When it goes to dereference these, *bam* Segmentation fault.
Coccinella doesn't seem to have video support. Either that, or the website hides it pretty well. I'd say that's a pretty big strike against it in the "cross-platform video chat" department.
Which, unsurprisingly, was the whole point of the article this silly thread is attached to. Gotta love 9/11 truthers.
Thank you for pointing out what should have been obvious fact.
I dunno. They all sound the same to me.
;-)
Whatever happened to Star Search?
That's exactly what they're doing. You're paying them for a system that saves them money. In the old system, if there had been fraud on your account (e.g. someone runs off and charges up thousands on your card), you're on the hook for $50. In their new system, you just pay them $50 up front, regardless of whether your card gets stolen.
I think you mean "made them less responsible." I thought consumers are protected from all charges beyond the first $50 in the case of fraud. (Scroll to bottom.)
So, $50/year is a total ripoff unless you get defrauded more than once a year. It's basically guaranteeing you lose that $50 bucks annually, even if you never experience any fraud. Nice.
Huh? I don't think so. Microwaves sit smack between FM and Infrared. That's why your microwave oven, 802.11b radio and 2.4GHz cordless phone all don't get along so well. They're all in the lower part of the microwave spectrum.
And to folks who say microwaves aren't radio, please explain to me what 802.11a are doing up in that band, or how we do microwave radio relay?
Hmmm.... I don't buy it. Why else would Arbitron ratings matter so much to the commercial radio stations? It wouldn't be because listener share determines how much the station can charge for ads, now would it? And advertisers DO pull out of programs when there's too much controversy. Remember Michael Savage?
Well, about a third of NPR's money comes pledge drives, and those occur only a couple times a year. The rest comes from grants and from corporate underwriting. In those pledge drives, only about 1 in 10 listeners to NPR donates. That's 90% of their audience that underwriters are trying to reach that aren't picking up the phone during the pledge drive. So, I don't think the effect is as stark as you think.
That said, people are going to tune into stations that fit their bias, whether commercial or public. I think NPR tends to shoot down the middle more than it shoots to the left. Compare this to, say, WBAP here in D/FW. You can't tell me that their current lineup is less biased than NPR. Quoting Wikipedia:
Well, if a version for your not-Windows-platform-of-choice is On The Way, getting an advance preview might be interesting to find out whether it's worth waiting for. I, for one, am interested in how well it works so I know whether to rush out and download the Linux version when it's available.
From the sounds of it, it's got some interesting advantages, but I probably won't rush out and download it when a Linux version becomes available. Ad blocking, for instance, is the big hurdle for me.
Sounds like he needs one of these.
I guess you missed the memo? If that article's to be believed, Firefox 3's memory usage is around 50% - 75% of Opera 9.5's. Or am I misreading the graphs?
Why so many characters? Put this in a script, mark it executable and have at it:
$0&$0
I'm pretty happy with #000060 myself. I like a *little* bit of color, but not much.
Now it sounds like we're on the same page. :-)
MagdjTK was referring to the interest banks pay YOU for keeping money with them, either in interest bearing savings/checking accounts, or in money markets, CDs, etc. Interest banks pay you is certainly NOT profit for the bank.
That said, teller fees (automated or human), etc. do certainly add up, and detract from any interest you might earn on your deposits.
Yeah, that sounds a little harsh. I would have first converted the password DB to a one-way hash (salted, naturally) keeping the original passwords, and then set peoples' passwords to expire over the next month or two along with nag screens reminding them to change their password when they log in, until they've actually changed it. Let accounts with expired passwords log in if they change their password immediately, along with verifying some additional information (billing ZIP code or similar), or through a password reset that generates a one-time password sent to the registered email account.
Couple that with a "we're migrating our system. Please log into your account normally to verify the changes" announcement message and I think it would go over much better.
The initial conversion to one-way hash immediately closes up the primary hole (passwords are visible to employees), and it gently nudges everyone into fresh passwords.
But that's just me.
Whereas at mine, they just look at my employee badge. (On site credit union.)
I'm sure the presumed rogue operator isn't scheduled to work for the full set of hours the call center is open. "After hours" just means "outside the operator's normal scheduled hours" in this context. If it weren't for the fact they might be on hold for 20 minutes, this could even occur during one of their twice daily 15 minute breaks.
This sounds an awful lot like the technology behind the "lucky" telescope". The basic idea, at least, is similar: Take the clearest images obtained over several samples and composite it into an image that otherwise couldn't be obtained given the distortion field.
This should work great for relatively stationary things. For moving objects, I imagine the effectiveness would be greatly diminished.
Thoughts?