And why don't we slap a consumer chastidy belt on the credit cards of the stupid people everywhere who buy stuff because they saw an image of it somewhere with some unobtainable hottie / stud-muffin posed arrogantly in the background?
I was reading the Globe and Mail yesterday. Corner page ad for some expensive diamond encrusted watch. Danica Patrick's steely gaze in the background, softened with lip gloss and moisture cream just enough so as not to scream out "I'm going to bite your balls off". No fine print to explain to men) "Danica not included" or to women) "You still won't be able to parallel park your Honda Accord".
It sickens me how easy it is to dupe people by visual association. As long as the reflex exists to reach for the credit card, this kind of crap is going to continue invading every media that impinges upon the visual cortex, and then some.
For that matter, why don't we just invent olfactory nanobots so that the messages can be wafted directly into the brain's neural tissue and thus institutionalize the CC reflex arc once and for all? That would be nice. If we consign the emotionally manipulation to another sensory channel, I could at least get my screen back again for useful work.
Very common mantrafesto indeed. Apache, Linux, MySQL, Postgres, Firefox, and too many others to name were all yesterday's "next year's choice"-of-the-year choices, some of them more than once, but it so goes. The perceptual problem is premature nomination. Motto of the premature: try, try, again. Little known fact (IIRC): for the exponential distribution, which has maximum entropy (hence corresponds to the best assumption with no information), your expected waiting time at any point is equal to the length of time you have already waited. Dang, the quality of the Wikipedia article on the exponential distribution is too high and exceeds my ability to parse in under three minutes. Little know fact: quality is inconvenient. Perhaps that explains why its imminence is more celebrated than its arrival. Given your nick, I suspect you knew this already.
Wait a second on this idea that "Canada" signed a WIPO treaty. In actual fact, it was minions of a particular administration who decided to sign this treaty, with the usual avoidance of democratic process that signing international treaties entails these days, much to the disgrace of national governments everywhere. Think about this. As an individual, how often do you personally sign a legal contract, text to be supplied later, to the convenience of other parties? Yet apparently our government feels quite comfortable signing in this manner on our behalf.
There is no possible interpretation of democratic process in which the rights of a nation can be signed away *prior* to disclosing to the citizens of the country the precise implementation in law. Irregardless of any pretense that we, as a nation, have "already signed" this treaty, in fact, every signatory nation understands that you can't sign away fundamental democratic and constitutional rights, which includes the rights of the population to reject faulty implementations of those promises on an indefinite basis, if that needs to happen. Our minions in power seem determined to put this to the test.
In my view, what the signatory process actually promises is that the government will attempt to pass laws, within the constraints of our natiional legislative and constitutional process. In doing this much, our government is upholding its promise.
Now we need to vote this bill as presently written into the sewer, so that our government can continue their efforts to uphold their promise by doing a far better job on the next iteration. If it proves that the nation will not accept any legislative implementation of our treaty promise, then they need to go back to their treaty convention and apologize for misunderstanding the will of the people, suggest somes mean by which the failed treaty itself can be repaird, and perhaps refund in humility some expensive dinners obtained at the expense of the expensive suits of the MPAA.
How about we refer to this device as a "thin crust pizza pocket"? With a thermal metabolism of 27 MW per small number of cubic meters we are looking at the kind of energy density underlying the slab of Mt St Helens that is no longer there. Slap on a trailer hitch and be the first person in your neighborhood to drive one across the border.
I have to agree about the Ewoks. I suspect I'll never watch an episode again, aside from the 1977 original, and I mean the original not the crap enhancement. Over time I began to suspect that the success of the original had a lot to do with Lucas lacking the time and resources to make it worse. The exact moment I said to myself "oh, oh" was discovering that Jabba the Hut had a predilection for scantily-clad human slave girls in neck irons.
From Wikipedia:
Designed by visual effects artist Phil Tippett, Jabba the Hutt was inspired by the anatomy of several animal species. His body structure and reproductive processes were based on annelid worms, hairless animals that have no skeleton and are hermaphroditic.
But no, turns out Jabba is actually polyhermaphroditic: he/she has a slithery, slimey sex organ for every species.
UCT = universal civilian time, which is UTC with epsilon to UT1 increased to a large enough value that it becomes possible to publish the leap second table 20 years in advance. Because this only needs to accommodate future *uncertainty* of the earth's rotational period (taking into account the known decay term), I imagine epsilon wouldn't be much greater than 5s in practice, but it would require some fancy math and quasi-speculative models to determine probable bounds.
There is plenty of reason to keep civilian time on solar terms. I've been reading a lot of research lately on the importance of circadian phase to human health. We need a civilian standard consistent with civilian health.
If this does not work for the mil/aerospace industries, they can decide their own standard in relation, just as long as they don't redefine a known standard under an existing name.
As far as continental drift is concerned, that's a matter of establishing civilian leapzones with respect to the astronomical divisions. Ordinarily, the analemma that determines whether midnight is mid night doesn't take into account tectonic drift.
A while back I had the notice of also establishing season's saving time. Right after Halloween, we roll the calander back to the beginning of October, then after Halloween II, we fast forward to December 1st, leaving only three weeks for xmas shopping.
Apples and oranges could equally well have described matter and energy prior to special relativity. How could Lubos be so clueless as not to recognize that many insights in physics arose precisely because someone dared to add apples to oranges? Lubos has an interesting psychological configuration. He would be an ideal subject in an fMRI imaging protocol on the pathological constriction of rational thought. I'd love to see how his brain glucose dances while I recited out loud the most recent Peter Woit blog post. I suspect his amygdala would be more fired up than the tympanist at an indoor performance of the 1812 Overture.
Lubos should at least feel compelled to explain why the apples of adding fermions to bosons is completely unlike the oranges of adding matter to energy, but he's always lacked that layer of subtly in his expository style.
In more general terms, Peter Woit also suffers some misconceptions concerning the evolution of physics as a discipline. Fifty years ago, the formalisms were less daunting. A good physical intuition could usually be translated to an acceptable formalism. Much progress was made on that basis. Once the standard model was achieved, the balance shifted. These days most of the obstacles to further progress are inherent to the expressive power of the available formalisms. At one end of the spectrum you have people working within formalisms that are far too expressive (string theory) and hence far removed from any specific prediction. At the other end of the spectrum, you have people who take a step back and potter away within formalisms that might ultimately prove to be insufficiently expressive for the physics we actually have.
If the string theorists have managed to demonstrate that the expressive power of string theory exceeds any practical potential for concrete prediction, that actually amounts to good progress. I see the present era of physics as being more about determining the advantages and disadvantages of the available formalisms (on the spectrum of insufficiency to excess sufficiency) quite apart from predicting actual particles, however nice that might be. The cost of each new fundamental particle discovered experimentally has increased exponentially. How could any serious thinker be surprised we ended up at this impasse?
It has always been a problem with the psychology of earthlings that we undervalue negative demonstrations. From what I read (quite a lot, without understanding much of the math at all) it seems as thought Lisi is exploring a coherent mathematical system which at least contains certain essential features of known physics in an unusual combination. I regard that as a useful line of inquiry regardless of whether or not it is doomed with respect to describing the whole of known physics.
Obviously, this places physics on a far different trajectory for the amount of work required relative to the progress achieved than the glory days of the mid 20th century. What I suspect is driving the social turmoil within the discipline is that society has not necessarily agreed to continue funding physics to the same level given this severe softening of trajectory. Funding continues on inertia despite original premises that are no longer true. Woit presses for a return to those original premises (short path from new theory to verifiable predictions), while ignoring that it might no longer be possible to progress on those terms due to vastly more constraints emanating from the formalisms themselves.
I'm pretty sure that if they backdoored one, they backdoored them all. Best to not use any of the new algorithms, period. Here's another explanation: the NSA stuffed an obviously flawed generator into the standard to cast doubt on other candidates within the standard that are too solid for their liking, in the hopes that none of these generators are adopted, and that people will continue to use the flawed generators they already know how to exploit.
Standard MO in the intelligence community: find a moron with power with a predictable kneejerk paranoia, then pull the string whenever the expected response suits your interests. No doubt the NSA holds a special place in their hearts for people who conclude their posts with "period" or "'nuff said".
So basically you're saying that Multics's biggest accomplishments were all instructive mistakes? Not a ringing endorsement. That is so middle-management brain, I'm almost speechless. From the perspective of career-advancement creditology, management oversight of the Multics project might not have been a double plus good on the resume. From the point of view of the technical people wrestling to reduce what was formerly impossible to annoyingly difficult, Multics might have produced some great moments of clarity on which forms of complexity to accept and which forms of complexity to reject and eliminate. Far too many projects fail without having confronted the right question in the first place.
Let's consider the first moment in history where a physicist convinced himself (after many years of effort and for mostly the right reasons) that a classical description of light could not possibly work. Hardly a ringing endorsement of his work so far. What an abject failure. Now he'll never get promoted to middle management after making such an enormous career blunder. A negative result. Not even worth writing a paper.
I couldn't find a Dvorak column concerning Blizzard or WOW. Amazing insight that he managed to spot that something was fishy with the original Itanium aliance. Bonus marks if he had recognized that the Reagan administration succeeded in tipping the Soviet Union into economic disaster by means of the greatly more preposterous Strategic Defense Initiative.
Itanium didn't actually need to work. Intel's process technology is at least half a generation ahead of anyone else's. If the Itanium architecture had merely been on par with the next chip from Sun, Sun was at risk of losing a large chunk of money, and Intel was sitting on a very large stack of chips (aka cash) to play the game of scorched earth. Plus there were too many players in chip design given the massive cost escalation, so I'm sure a few players were looking for a cosmetic excuse to bow out--which Intel would have factored into the Itanium full-court-press from the outset. Furthermore, Intel wasn't that far away from pulling it off. A few brutal design choices, combined with an unbelievably stubborn AMD put the kibosh on their gorilla tactics.
The problem with Itanium was not that it was vapour, but that it was a naked power play. Perhaps the executive suite at Sun did not relish explaining they were going to lose another billion dollars on chip design in the next fiscal year acting soley on the belief/faith that Itanium would face plant, despite Intel's competitive advantage in process technology and market dominance.
There, I'm smarter that Dvorak. What an amazing feat. It's like walking down the sidewalk without tripping over a wad of gum.
I don't understand your point at all. For the most part, all the costs of the existing model already come out the NIH budget, the only question is when: on the publication side (at the expense of the person publishing a new result), or the journal subscription side of the fence (overhead to the institution which supports the research scientist, and probably already comes out of the NIH grant money flagged as overhead).
If all the costs are moved to the publication side, then the finished result can be read by world and dog essentially cost free. Isn't it just an accounting shell game how the money required for quality publication is funneled into that process?
Perhaps the problem is that the supporting institutions will essentially perform a money grab, but not decreasing overhead ratios charged to the scientist in proportion to their decreased cost in journal subscriptions which much eventually follow once the majority of papers have become open access. Am I wrong, or is this not just a short term accounting glitch?
I see no reason why open access should necessarily imply that less is spent on preparing a quality publication in the first place.
I've been hearing this "throat to choke" meme circulate for twenty years, yet I've never managed to form a concrete image of it working out as advertised.
In fact, working mostly for very small companies, I've never seen any throat of upstream vendor take as much as a deep gulp. Even with fairly expensive software products, you still get a junior tech who usually insists for the first week (or more), despite comprehensive technical attachments to the contrary, that somehow you aren't using the expensive product correctly, because a product that expensive made by such a large and powerful corporation with such a long history couldn't possibly be that incredibly broken.
A recent nightmare that comes to mind was the Xilinx ISE Webpack ignoring pin constraints, claiming in most outputs to have satisfied them, but if you dug down deep enough, you could find a report that told you where the pin was actually bound. Of course, Webpack ISE is not an example of an expensive support contract, but even so, Xilinx has a $7B market cap., with a long history, and if they can't get something this basic correct, what exactly has their corporate stature done for you?
By the time the error in our prototype system was detected and fixed with much recriminations and pulling of hair, the damage was done, we had discovered our own work-around tweaking the source code, and what was to be gained by turning the thumb screw on Xilinx? In small companies, I've rarely had the level of support where I could choke a throat without first filling out an application form. Oh, the primal satisfaction.
In the cases where I've seen expensive support prove its worth at an engineering level, the companies involved have a deep enough business relationship to fly engineers back and forth for training, support, and knowledge exchange. Any support contract below this tier, no matter what metalic luster is applied by the marketrons, has good odds to waste more time and talent than it salvages. The exception where it can pay off is for orgs (esp. high-powered revolving-door consulting orgs) that hire at the bottom of the experience pool, people who can't actually use the software correctly, and where the money you save by hiring unqualified workers pays for the expensive support, with the added bonus that your unqualified workers acquire portable skills far more slowly than if they ever solved a problem themselves.
Where I have seen the implied law-of-the-jungle "choke the throat" aggression play out is mid-level a-hats in development meetings insinuate "we are paying tons of support money on this expensive support contract from this powerful company, so how come you can't get it to work?" This only serves to nourish all the standard corporate dysfunctions, drives the wedge between marketing and development ever deeper, mandates CYA behaviour from every quarter, and tilts the landscape in favour of those whose job descriptions are primarily political in nature over those who have technical obligations to complete, and who can't play politics on a full-time basis. What's not to like?
I've heard this meme for twenty years--usually tendered by the fetishists of corporate jargon--and I'm still asking myself "whose neck is actually being choked here?" It has always struck me that the primary function of these contracts is to make it easier for the suits to denigrate the geeks.
Here is a telling observation. When is the last time any bean-counting suit ever asked "did we get our money from that support contract or not?" Of course they got their value: the empowerment to drip condescension toward their technical staff over every snag and delay. "Of course these problems are not a management failure, we bought the gold platinum titanium support package from every vendor we sourced. It must be our own clunkhead engineers who can't get anything right."
I recall the 5MB hard drive in an early generation IBM PC. Took something like four hours to run a format cycle, which even then seemed outrageous compared to 360KB floppy disk write speeds. Hated that machine. By the time you installed a compiler or two, no room left to do any work. On the 10MB machine, you could compile a program, *and* generate some listings to help debug the compiler (errors in the compilers of that era were almost as frequent as errors in my own code). One I recall from a C compiler: initialize a global variable with a pointer to another global variable? Not today, apparently.
For some reason, for all these years since, the storage curve has remained largely constant, with the exception of the jump forward when IBM release pixie dust and PRML technology at about the same time. The rule of thumb is that by the time the kinks are worked out of a new approach, the cost or performance is no different that what was on the curve already, and the technology either finds a specialized niche, or dies completely.
Given the psychology of the driver (young, reckless, and probably resenting his GPS nanny) it is equally plausible that he had figured out exactly how much he could game the system. For every small delay, he would then apply a burst of speed to make up the lost seconds, while maintaining his "average". Given that you have a short sampling window, you need to make up the lost seconds as fast as possible, because you can't necessarily carry them over to the next sampling window.
An office sending out emails of this sensitivity shouldn't even *have* the option of listing multiple recipients on a single mail item, no matter what client software they install. The MTA should be splitting all outside recipients into separate mails addressed to one person alone. If necessary, one could set up an artificial reply address associated with an auto-reflector, so that the group could discuss without releaving any direct information, but for this matter, still far too risky.
The whole notion of multiple recipients on a single mail dates back to the use of email as a form of bulletin board. These days, if you want to put out a "hey, everyone" there are better ways to do it, such as a web discussion board or a wiki.
Orlowski also maintains a minor vendetta against Wikipedia, or more specifically, Wikipedians, and slams the unreliable nature of Wikipedia while writing for The Inquirer, the great mothership of all things unsourced.
The Inquirer seems to hold a grudge over the persistent deletion from Wikipedia of the Everywhere Girl, an exercise from the outset in fanning nothing into nothing very much, and then congratulating themselves for this amazing and notable feat, in much the way that Paris is famous for being famous. Sorry, but as far as the fiddlers of Wikipedia are concerned, without the sex tape, the Everywhere Girl will have to ply her stock photography on a different street corner.
I think what truly peeves Orlowski about Wikipedia is that he himself has to check there before writing his scurrilous articles to find out whether his cat is already out of the bag before he loads his wet innuendo into his muzzle-loaded pistol and fires off his first smokey salvo.
Of the regulars there, Charlie Demerjian sometimes writes highly technical articles, but his sanity also takes fairly sizable holidays on a regular basis. For the pure sporting value of deciding what to believe and what is complete crap, for my money I prefer the Wikipedia.
Actually caused by strong feelings of insecurity. The secure don't need to attack to try to constantly prove their superiority. As I commented in another post already, I was reading the tedious John P. Kotter's Leading Change the other day. I was also reading the much superior Who does what and why in book publishing by Clarkson N. Potter, from 1990. It's surprising how much overlap I discovered, the main difference being that Potter seems to have managed to thrive in a long and interesting career without discovering the use of Powerpoint. Where Potter manages to tell vivid stories with discretion and humour, Kotter explains "I once knew a guy named Manny (exhibit on facing page)". I might point out for this crowd that Potter was Martin Gardiner's editor for The Annotated Alice. If you liked that book, you might enjoy reading words of wisdom from the editor who dared to publish it.
What does Potter have to say about this? Here are the bookends of his section on natural talent.
Here we must consider five talents that some people have in abundance and some not at all, but which are crucial to success in life as well as in business and which are not taught, not measured, but gained largely out of the awareness of most people most of the time. ... These various talents are distributed most unevenly, and for anyone to have even one of them in abundance is rare. Potter's five talents are politics, diplomacy, leadership, teaching, and salesmanship. In particular he makes some interesting statements about talent for politics.
[It has been said] a good politician can go through a room full of people, shaking hands and talking to each person in turn and exchanging a few sentences and at the end have a clear and accurate idea of who each person is and what his capabilities and ambitions are. This ability to size people up very quickly, to judge their potential for usefulness and for loyalty with almost no mistake, is a rare and precious talent. It often goes with deep underlying insecurities (emph. mine), and appears to be entirely instinctive.
His other interesting remark concerns diplomacy. Potter states "More than the others, it appears to be teachable." Apparently that lesson was lost on Theo.
From his perspective, mediocrity is having an equal (and equally negligible) dab of all five. OpenBSD does not aspire to mediocrity. You can even make a strong argument that Theo's lack of conventional diplomacy is a bonus to his score in all four of the other categories. Security is brittle and not for the timid. You need to get the losers out of your kitchen if anything much is to be accomplished at all. It's not a popularity contest. As any major league professional coach might say, "It's a results driven business".
Wow, bold all-caps. Point taken. Anyone spotted the Itanic lately? Long ago I dug into the theory of TTA (transport triggered architectures) that originally motivated the Itanic. Right from the outset, I thought they went about eliminating the wrong problems. Many featues of x86 have been citicised over the years, but the elimination of these problems has rarely lead anyone straight to the promised land.
x86 was born into the world with a deformed leg. It walks with a limp. Always has. And yet, it's won every knife fight it has ever been in. And still the cry goes out, "kill the gimp!". Perhaps the hobbled leg is not the liability it has been made out to be. I think some people are excessively fixated on the superhero looking good in neon tights.
x86 has been criticised for its irregular instruction set encoding for as long as I can remember. And what did every design do that bought into this myth? Fixed-width 32-bit instructions. How did that work out? I don't have time to relate twenty years of CPU design, so I'll just point out Thumb-2: the code density of a 16-bit instruction set, with the expressive power of a 32-bit instruction set.
From a code density and expressive power perspective, Thumb-2 is now roughly in the same place as x86 began. This is not to say that Thumb-2 hasn't made some key improvements, they just don't happen to be the improvements that were originally tagged as the problem. The main difference is that the Thumb-2 instruction decoder uses less power and die space for a comparable level of performance. The parallel decoders required for modern x86 are terribly tricky and large and hot. However, you get some of that back with the improved density of your L1 instruction cache. Even with all this complexity, the decoders do not dwarf the other functional elements (cache, execution units, memory interface) so the percentage die cost is marginal. And until recently, total thermal dissipation did not constrain the performance envelope. A bigger heatsink solved the problem.
Going back to the original 8086/8088, there was no icache. Instruction fetch bandwidth directly subtracted from data access bandwidth. Pin counts were a fairly large term in the final cost structure. A $10,000 PC? I recall how well that worked out when Apple first tried it. Sweet ISA. Pity about the price.
With a small register set, there is an enormous design pressure to have single-byte instructions for stack management. With a medium sized register set, you have the option to move toward ARM-style stack management, which is dense and fast, but not nearly as flexible (witness the fantastic Watcom C/C++ compiler), and I'm not certain the compilers were quite ready for it back in 1982.
A larger register set is not the obvious win most people think it is. It slows down context switches, occupies more die area, bloats instruction set encoding, and necessitates more stack management at call boundaries. AMD64 doubles register set size for roughly a 10% performance win.
In the case of x86, the small register set was leveraged by RMW addressing modes, long the anathema of RISC designs. A small register set and dense instruction set encoding, combined with RMW addressing modes means that the battle is won or lost on core to L1 cache integration. It has always struck me as batty that for RISC to increment a memory based counter, the core has to present the same address to the L1 cache interface *twice*, once for read and again for write-back. Surely the L1 cache interface has better things to do than repeat virtual memory translation on the same address twice, and dirty a named register for the EA calculation in the process, which is now a burden to calls/context switches. x86 presents the EA once, and doesn't dirty a named register.
This design troika means that as performance pressure increased, x86 implementations were forced to invest relatively more effort into core to cache integration. The Pentium Pro broke the back of the RISC presumption. Wha
Sarcasm aside, it can indeed hurt their stock price, causing problems for its millions of owners (through mutual funds in 401Ks, etc). If the stock price goes down because some shareholders sell off their shares as a result of a Greenpeace press release, then that's what the remaining shareholders deserve for purchasing shares in a company whose departing shareholders were complete idiots.
The underlying value of the company (as opposed to the daily price ripple) is not damaged unless the negative PR convinces consumers not to buy Apple's products. There are many concerned organizations out there that would be happy to see the consumeristic lifestyle taken down a peg or two. It strikes me that the people opposed to this lifestyle are in no way beholden to the shareholders of the companies that exist to promote this lifestyle.
If the negative PR is unlawful, Apple can sue. As far as I'm aware, there is no law which states that if I claim company A sells a destructive product, and company B sells the same destructive product, that I'm obliged to dish out my criticism in precise proportions to their relative market caps.
Apple's being punished for being well-liked. Of course, you're right. Let's go back to the classroom model where everyone decided to hate the same fat girl (or pock-faced sniveller), whom we all targetted because we all hated her, therefore she deserved it.
That's not fair or justifiable in any society I'd care to be a part of. No, Apple is actually being targetted because the company aims to position itself as the world's most powerful brand communicating the value system of silky-smooth candy-lickable instant gratification.
That's entirely fair and justifiable in any society I'd care to be a part of. I believe the world would be a far better place with less cool and more critical thinking.
A casino with a bad reputation gets spotted, gets talked about, and goes out of business. The online gambling world's potential playerbase is relatively small, and there's a LOT of businesses who want a piece of their action. Screw up once, and every single player has five hundred other places they can go to.
Most of the stupidity in the world does not originate from stupid people. There is something about certain topics that causes the brain to down-regulate critical thinking, esp. topics on the axis of fear, greed, and making a quick buck.
You hear the same mantra with respect to the stock market and mutual funds. We all know how that game plays out. First ploy, the semi-annual "going out of business sale". How many of these 500 options are the same crooks in business again? Investment firms do this all the time. If a mutual fund underperforms, it gets terminated, and its slot is replaced on next year's slate with a new and improved detergent. A mutual fund that consistently outperforms and establishes a long term track record, by luck or good management (one of those is in shorter supply than the other), will be steered toward lower risk levels to make good on its blue chip credentials. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the fund itself. It has to do with the rule that if you start enough funds, eventually you'll get a few that work out that way.
Likewise, the established track record of the poker sites not yet busted doesn't necessarily mean much. At any point in time the principals could decide to wind down their reputation capital. That also works great. It wasn't long ago that was the scam of the day on eBay: build up a flawless reputation on the basis of few hundred dime-store transactions, then auction off ten luxury vehicles and balk on all of them. Absolutely, word got around. But not nearly as fast as the windfall was shunted to Swiss bank accounts.
That covers the finance and technology sections of the newspaper. It also appears OP hasn't read the sports lately. If everyone involved knows the detection threshhold, then the competitors play interstate "rule of ten" with their urine samples, where the objective is to be as dirty as possible without being the first to get caught. On each instance where someone is caught, everyone updates their detection model simultaneously.
Speaking of detection models, how about we head over to the crime reporting section. Recently there was the story about Interpol putting out the unswirled face of the sexual preditor (from Thailand IIRC). There was a lot of discussion about whether putting out this photo and making it possible for the legions of small-time perps to update their detection models was worth catching this one particularly slimy fish.
Here is how it typically boils down: of the other 500 choices, P.T. Barnum owns 400 at any given time. Figure it out. Everyone in the market is chasing "above average" returns. I'd estimate of the people beating average, about 3 cases out of 4 is a function of chance. Only ten to twenty percent of any competitive population can consistently beat average on skill alone. Twice that many if you include the political skill required to found a successful pyramid scheme.
What's the typical story when corruption represents the bulk of the profits in an industry? What do you suppose happens when an ethical "waste management" firm sets up shop in New Jersey and cuts into the business of the established families? Is our ethical CEO really that safe in his gated abode in the Swiss Alps. Surely the long arm of the "families" could not reach that far.
If you really want to make money in this racket, what you need are Susan, Judit, Zsófia and a couple of University of Alberta game theorists. With enough computer assistance, each of the girls could probably play 100 tables concurrently (even better if pooled), at just below the cheater cheater detection threshhold. Very important: software interlock on winn
Some twat sent a bot to delete stuff without bothering to check what it was, and ignored my attempts to discuss it with him.
The one comment I will make in your defense is that anyone running an active bot ought to monitor their talk page fairly aggressively. Nevertheless, sometimes life intrudes on even the most dedicated Wikipedian. I'm not sure on what basis you escalated "didn't reply in a short period of time" to "ignored me". Has the person been actively responding to others? Did you repeat the request in case the person simply overlooked your first attempt? Did you seek out any established user as a third party in seeking resolution?
I think you suffer from some serious misconceptions about the Wikipedia process offers. There is no contract that every constructive edit will stick the first time. There is no contract that the most constructive edit ever made won't degrade into a state of bit rot in the absence of continued maintenance. The permanance offered by the Wikipedia has more to do with the long term edit history than the surface state of any article at any time. I disagree with how much they delete. I think many of the article deleted fall short of article status at the time of their deletion. My opinion is that this material should be quarrantined not deleted so that people have reference to the material judged not yet acceptable for prime time. Quarrantined material would be excluded from the Google index, from the default Wikipedia search results, and would not be linkable from the regular article space. The create new article screen would warn about titles already in quarrantine, and the search function available from that screen would include the quarrantined material.
I didn't give much credit to your definition of liar. You criticized a person for authoring a bot as a "twat". That person's contributions, as well as the bot's edit history are there for all to see. In fact, I would say bots have the highest scrutiny level of any edit source. Bots tend to make a large number of edits, and hit a wide variety of pages, including many pages with a watch list that a state dept. would envy.
Does the author make the source code of the bot available? Did you check out the release history for the bot? Is it actively maintained? How many other people have complained?
You provide none of this detail, but manage to conclude that the bot author is a "twat" and hit the "liar accusuation" button on the people here with enough experience not to take your story at face value.
I think most of the horror stories about Wikipedia originate from a group of people who go there expecting one kind of experience, and then when it turns out to work quite differently, go on the warpath with theories of incompetence, malice, and pettiness, rather than making an investment in the culture to learn what works and what doesn't. It's the same thing with travellers. Some people go abroad and never make the effort to fit in, they come back complaining that the destination country is full of bigots and xenophobes. Probably true, but not more so than their country of origin.
In my view, the Wikipedia is the most imperfect social forum that has ever succeeded. Often the greatest innovations are the ones that survive despite the overwhelming deficits or their original incarnation. The original TRS-80 had the same DIN plug for the power as for the tape deck. If you plugged the power into the tape interface, you soon smelled a resistor vaporising from the main board. After the first three months, half the keys on the keyboad had a Poisson distribution for the number of letters produced by each keystroke. It had a lower-case font on board, but they decided to shave off a 1024x1 memory chip (bits) from the video memory, so the lower case font could not be displayed. The tape deck only worked if adjusted to within 5% of the ideal volume level. By any reasonable standard, the TRS-80 should have ended the PC era before it bega
the "contributions" of an anonymous person on wikipedia these days, no matter how good they are, are instantly reverted by any number of so-called "anti-vandalism" bots and tools
If you put that comment in a Wikipedia article, I might consider reverting it. I have personally reverted half a dozen IP edits recently, several of which were nearly a week old. What bot is this? It seems to be a rather lazy bot if it can't find a first-ever IP-based edit s/U.S./poopers in under a week.
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And why don't we slap a consumer chastidy belt on the credit cards of the stupid people everywhere who buy stuff because they saw an image of it somewhere with some unobtainable hottie / stud-muffin posed arrogantly in the background?
I was reading the Globe and Mail yesterday. Corner page ad for some expensive diamond encrusted watch. Danica Patrick's steely gaze in the background, softened with lip gloss and moisture cream just enough so as not to scream out "I'm going to bite your balls off". No fine print to explain to men) "Danica not included" or to women) "You still won't be able to parallel park your Honda Accord".
It sickens me how easy it is to dupe people by visual association. As long as the reflex exists to reach for the credit card, this kind of crap is going to continue invading every media that impinges upon the visual cortex, and then some.
For that matter, why don't we just invent olfactory nanobots so that the messages can be wafted directly into the brain's neural tissue and thus institutionalize the CC reflex arc once and for all? That would be nice. If we consign the emotionally manipulation to another sensory channel, I could at least get my screen back again for useful work.
Very common mantrafesto indeed. Apache, Linux, MySQL, Postgres, Firefox, and too many others to name were all yesterday's "next year's choice"-of-the-year choices, some of them more than once, but it so goes. The perceptual problem is premature nomination. Motto of the premature: try, try, again. Little known fact (IIRC): for the exponential distribution, which has maximum entropy (hence corresponds to the best assumption with no information), your expected waiting time at any point is equal to the length of time you have already waited. Dang, the quality of the Wikipedia article on the exponential distribution is too high and exceeds my ability to parse in under three minutes. Little know fact: quality is inconvenient. Perhaps that explains why its imminence is more celebrated than its arrival. Given your nick, I suspect you knew this already.
Wait a second on this idea that "Canada" signed a WIPO treaty. In actual fact, it was minions of a particular administration who decided to sign this treaty, with the usual avoidance of democratic process that signing international treaties entails these days, much to the disgrace of national governments everywhere. Think about this. As an individual, how often do you personally sign a legal contract, text to be supplied later, to the convenience of other parties? Yet apparently our government feels quite comfortable signing in this manner on our behalf.
There is no possible interpretation of democratic process in which the rights of a nation can be signed away *prior* to disclosing to the citizens of the country the precise implementation in law. Irregardless of any pretense that we, as a nation, have "already signed" this treaty, in fact, every signatory nation understands that you can't sign away fundamental democratic and constitutional rights, which includes the rights of the population to reject faulty implementations of those promises on an indefinite basis, if that needs to happen. Our minions in power seem determined to put this to the test.
In my view, what the signatory process actually promises is that the government will attempt to pass laws, within the constraints of our natiional legislative and constitutional process. In doing this much, our government is upholding its promise.
Now we need to vote this bill as presently written into the sewer, so that our government can continue their efforts to uphold their promise by doing a far better job on the next iteration. If it proves that the nation will not accept any legislative implementation of our treaty promise, then they need to go back to their treaty convention and apologize for misunderstanding the will of the people, suggest somes mean by which the failed treaty itself can be repaird, and perhaps refund in humility some expensive dinners obtained at the expense of the expensive suits of the MPAA.
How about we refer to this device as a "thin crust pizza pocket"? With a thermal metabolism of 27 MW per small number of cubic meters we are looking at the kind of energy density underlying the slab of Mt St Helens that is no longer there. Slap on a trailer hitch and be the first person in your neighborhood to drive one across the border.
I was thinking about patenting stupidity, but it turns out the patent office contains prior art, and they didn't even have to do a literature search.
Obviously, in my previous post, I missed a closing /
From Wikipedia:
UCT = universal civilian time, which is UTC with epsilon to UT1 increased to a large enough value that it becomes possible to publish the leap second table 20 years in advance. Because this only needs to accommodate future *uncertainty* of the earth's rotational period (taking into account the known decay term), I imagine epsilon wouldn't be much greater than 5s in practice, but it would require some fancy math and quasi-speculative models to determine probable bounds.
There is plenty of reason to keep civilian time on solar terms. I've been reading a lot of research lately on the importance of circadian phase to human health. We need a civilian standard consistent with civilian health.
If this does not work for the mil/aerospace industries, they can decide their own standard in relation, just as long as they don't redefine a known standard under an existing name.
As far as continental drift is concerned, that's a matter of establishing civilian leapzones with respect to the astronomical divisions. Ordinarily, the analemma that determines whether midnight is mid night doesn't take into account tectonic drift.
A while back I had the notice of also establishing season's saving time. Right after Halloween, we roll the calander back to the beginning of October, then after Halloween II, we fast forward to December 1st, leaving only three weeks for xmas shopping.
If any true geeks remain here, rather than geek-wannabees (how pathetic is that?) or apron-string apers, this is actually a good read:
http://www.math.nus.edu.sg/aslaksen/projects/tsy.pdf
Apples and oranges could equally well have described matter and energy prior to special relativity. How could Lubos be so clueless as not to recognize that many insights in physics arose precisely because someone dared to add apples to oranges? Lubos has an interesting psychological configuration. He would be an ideal subject in an fMRI imaging protocol on the pathological constriction of rational thought. I'd love to see how his brain glucose dances while I recited out loud the most recent Peter Woit blog post. I suspect his amygdala would be more fired up than the tympanist at an indoor performance of the 1812 Overture.
Lubos should at least feel compelled to explain why the apples of adding fermions to bosons is completely unlike the oranges of adding matter to energy, but he's always lacked that layer of subtly in his expository style.
In more general terms, Peter Woit also suffers some misconceptions concerning the evolution of physics as a discipline. Fifty years ago, the formalisms were less daunting. A good physical intuition could usually be translated to an acceptable formalism. Much progress was made on that basis. Once the standard model was achieved, the balance shifted. These days most of the obstacles to further progress are inherent to the expressive power of the available formalisms. At one end of the spectrum you have people working within formalisms that are far too expressive (string theory) and hence far removed from any specific prediction. At the other end of the spectrum, you have people who take a step back and potter away within formalisms that might ultimately prove to be insufficiently expressive for the physics we actually have.
If the string theorists have managed to demonstrate that the expressive power of string theory exceeds any practical potential for concrete prediction, that actually amounts to good progress. I see the present era of physics as being more about determining the advantages and disadvantages of the available formalisms (on the spectrum of insufficiency to excess sufficiency) quite apart from predicting actual particles, however nice that might be. The cost of each new fundamental particle discovered experimentally has increased exponentially. How could any serious thinker be surprised we ended up at this impasse?
It has always been a problem with the psychology of earthlings that we undervalue negative demonstrations. From what I read (quite a lot, without understanding much of the math at all) it seems as thought Lisi is exploring a coherent mathematical system which at least contains certain essential features of known physics in an unusual combination. I regard that as a useful line of inquiry regardless of whether or not it is doomed with respect to describing the whole of known physics.
Obviously, this places physics on a far different trajectory for the amount of work required relative to the progress achieved than the glory days of the mid 20th century. What I suspect is driving the social turmoil within the discipline is that society has not necessarily agreed to continue funding physics to the same level given this severe softening of trajectory. Funding continues on inertia despite original premises that are no longer true. Woit presses for a return to those original premises (short path from new theory to verifiable predictions), while ignoring that it might no longer be possible to progress on those terms due to vastly more constraints emanating from the formalisms themselves.
Standard MO in the intelligence community: find a moron with power with a predictable kneejerk paranoia, then pull the string whenever the expected response suits your interests. No doubt the NSA holds a special place in their hearts for people who conclude their posts with "period" or "'nuff said".
Let's consider the first moment in history where a physicist convinced himself (after many years of effort and for mostly the right reasons) that a classical description of light could not possibly work. Hardly a ringing endorsement of his work so far. What an abject failure. Now he'll never get promoted to middle management after making such an enormous career blunder. A negative result. Not even worth writing a paper.
I couldn't find a Dvorak column concerning Blizzard or WOW. Amazing insight that he managed to spot that something was fishy with the original Itanium aliance. Bonus marks if he had recognized that the Reagan administration succeeded in tipping the Soviet Union into economic disaster by means of the greatly more preposterous Strategic Defense Initiative.
Itanium didn't actually need to work. Intel's process technology is at least half a generation ahead of anyone else's. If the Itanium architecture had merely been on par with the next chip from Sun, Sun was at risk of losing a large chunk of money, and Intel was sitting on a very large stack of chips (aka cash) to play the game of scorched earth. Plus there were too many players in chip design given the massive cost escalation, so I'm sure a few players were looking for a cosmetic excuse to bow out--which Intel would have factored into the Itanium full-court-press from the outset. Furthermore, Intel wasn't that far away from pulling it off. A few brutal design choices, combined with an unbelievably stubborn AMD put the kibosh on their gorilla tactics.
The problem with Itanium was not that it was vapour, but that it was a naked power play. Perhaps the executive suite at Sun did not relish explaining they were going to lose another billion dollars on chip design in the next fiscal year acting soley on the belief/faith that Itanium would face plant, despite Intel's competitive advantage in process technology and market dominance.
There, I'm smarter that Dvorak. What an amazing feat. It's like walking down the sidewalk without tripping over a wad of gum.
I don't understand your point at all. For the most part, all the costs of the existing model already come out the NIH budget, the only question is when: on the publication side (at the expense of the person publishing a new result), or the journal subscription side of the fence (overhead to the institution which supports the research scientist, and probably already comes out of the NIH grant money flagged as overhead).
If all the costs are moved to the publication side, then the finished result can be read by world and dog essentially cost free. Isn't it just an accounting shell game how the money required for quality publication is funneled into that process?
Perhaps the problem is that the supporting institutions will essentially perform a money grab, but not decreasing overhead ratios charged to the scientist in proportion to their decreased cost in journal subscriptions which much eventually follow once the majority of papers have become open access. Am I wrong, or is this not just a short term accounting glitch?
I see no reason why open access should necessarily imply that less is spent on preparing a quality publication in the first place.
J.S. Bach had twenty children with two wives, half survived to adulthood. Any way you look at it, that's a lot of organ music.
I've been hearing this "throat to choke" meme circulate for twenty years, yet I've never managed to form a concrete image of it working out as advertised.
In fact, working mostly for very small companies, I've never seen any throat of upstream vendor take as much as a deep gulp. Even with fairly expensive software products, you still get a junior tech who usually insists for the first week (or more), despite comprehensive technical attachments to the contrary, that somehow you aren't using the expensive product correctly, because a product that expensive made by such a large and powerful corporation with such a long history couldn't possibly be that incredibly broken.
A recent nightmare that comes to mind was the Xilinx ISE Webpack ignoring pin constraints, claiming in most outputs to have satisfied them, but if you dug down deep enough, you could find a report that told you where the pin was actually bound. Of course, Webpack ISE is not an example of an expensive support contract, but even so, Xilinx has a $7B market cap., with a long history, and if they can't get something this basic correct, what exactly has their corporate stature done for you?
By the time the error in our prototype system was detected and fixed with much recriminations and pulling of hair, the damage was done, we had discovered our own work-around tweaking the source code, and what was to be gained by turning the thumb screw on Xilinx? In small companies, I've rarely had the level of support where I could choke a throat without first filling out an application form. Oh, the primal satisfaction.
In the cases where I've seen expensive support prove its worth at an engineering level, the companies involved have a deep enough business relationship to fly engineers back and forth for training, support, and knowledge exchange. Any support contract below this tier, no matter what metalic luster is applied by the marketrons, has good odds to waste more time and talent than it salvages. The exception where it can pay off is for orgs (esp. high-powered revolving-door consulting orgs) that hire at the bottom of the experience pool, people who can't actually use the software correctly, and where the money you save by hiring unqualified workers pays for the expensive support, with the added bonus that your unqualified workers acquire portable skills far more slowly than if they ever solved a problem themselves.
Where I have seen the implied law-of-the-jungle "choke the throat" aggression play out is mid-level a-hats in development meetings insinuate "we are paying tons of support money on this expensive support contract from this powerful company, so how come you can't get it to work?" This only serves to nourish all the standard corporate dysfunctions, drives the wedge between marketing and development ever deeper, mandates CYA behaviour from every quarter, and tilts the landscape in favour of those whose job descriptions are primarily political in nature over those who have technical obligations to complete, and who can't play politics on a full-time basis. What's not to like?
I've heard this meme for twenty years--usually tendered by the fetishists of corporate jargon--and I'm still asking myself "whose neck is actually being choked here?" It has always struck me that the primary function of these contracts is to make it easier for the suits to denigrate the geeks.
Here is a telling observation. When is the last time any bean-counting suit ever asked "did we get our money from that support contract or not?" Of course they got their value: the empowerment to drip condescension toward their technical staff over every snag and delay. "Of course these problems are not a management failure, we bought the gold platinum titanium support package from every vendor we sourced. It must be our own clunkhead engineers who can't get anything right."
I recall the 5MB hard drive in an early generation IBM PC. Took something like four hours to run a format cycle, which even then seemed outrageous compared to 360KB floppy disk write speeds. Hated that machine. By the time you installed a compiler or two, no room left to do any work. On the 10MB machine, you could compile a program, *and* generate some listings to help debug the compiler (errors in the compilers of that era were almost as frequent as errors in my own code). One I recall from a C compiler: initialize a global variable with a pointer to another global variable? Not today, apparently.
For some reason, for all these years since, the storage curve has remained largely constant, with the exception of the jump forward when IBM release pixie dust and PRML technology at about the same time. The rule of thumb is that by the time the kinks are worked out of a new approach, the cost or performance is no different that what was on the curve already, and the technology either finds a specialized niche, or dies completely.
Bubble memory, anyone?
Given the psychology of the driver (young, reckless, and probably resenting his GPS nanny) it is equally plausible that he had figured out exactly how much he could game the system. For every small delay, he would then apply a burst of speed to make up the lost seconds, while maintaining his "average". Given that you have a short sampling window, you need to make up the lost seconds as fast as possible, because you can't necessarily carry them over to the next sampling window.
An office sending out emails of this sensitivity shouldn't even *have* the option of listing multiple recipients on a single mail item, no matter what client software they install. The MTA should be splitting all outside recipients into separate mails addressed to one person alone. If necessary, one could set up an artificial reply address associated with an auto-reflector, so that the group could discuss without releaving any direct information, but for this matter, still far too risky.
The whole notion of multiple recipients on a single mail dates back to the use of email as a form of bulletin board. These days, if you want to put out a "hey, everyone" there are better ways to do it, such as a web discussion board or a wiki.
Orlowski also maintains a minor vendetta against Wikipedia, or more specifically, Wikipedians, and slams the unreliable nature of Wikipedia while writing for The Inquirer, the great mothership of all things unsourced.
The Inquirer seems to hold a grudge over the persistent deletion from Wikipedia of the Everywhere Girl, an exercise from the outset in fanning nothing into nothing very much, and then congratulating themselves for this amazing and notable feat, in much the way that Paris is famous for being famous. Sorry, but as far as the fiddlers of Wikipedia are concerned, without the sex tape, the Everywhere Girl will have to ply her stock photography on a different street corner.
I think what truly peeves Orlowski about Wikipedia is that he himself has to check there before writing his scurrilous articles to find out whether his cat is already out of the bag before he loads his wet innuendo into his muzzle-loaded pistol and fires off his first smokey salvo.
Of the regulars there, Charlie Demerjian sometimes writes highly technical articles, but his sanity also takes fairly sizable holidays on a regular basis. For the pure sporting value of deciding what to believe and what is complete crap, for my money I prefer the Wikipedia.
What does Potter have to say about this? Here are the bookends of his section on natural talent. Here we must consider five talents that some people have in abundance and some not at all, but which are crucial to success in life as well as in business and which are not taught, not measured, but gained largely out of the awareness of most people most of the time.
...
These various talents are distributed most unevenly, and for anyone to have even one of them in abundance is rare. Potter's five talents are politics, diplomacy, leadership, teaching, and salesmanship. In particular he makes some interesting statements about talent for politics.
His other interesting remark concerns diplomacy. Potter states "More than the others, it appears to be teachable." Apparently that lesson was lost on Theo.
From his perspective, mediocrity is having an equal (and equally negligible) dab of all five. OpenBSD does not aspire to mediocrity. You can even make a strong argument that Theo's lack of conventional diplomacy is a bonus to his score in all four of the other categories. Security is brittle and not for the timid. You need to get the losers out of your kitchen if anything much is to be accomplished at all. It's not a popularity contest. As any major league professional coach might say, "It's a results driven business".
Wow, bold all-caps. Point taken. Anyone spotted the Itanic lately? Long ago I dug into the theory of TTA (transport triggered architectures) that originally motivated the Itanic. Right from the outset, I thought they went about eliminating the wrong problems. Many featues of x86 have been citicised over the years, but the elimination of these problems has rarely lead anyone straight to the promised land.
x86 was born into the world with a deformed leg. It walks with a limp. Always has. And yet, it's won every knife fight it has ever been in. And still the cry goes out, "kill the gimp!". Perhaps the hobbled leg is not the liability it has been made out to be. I think some people are excessively fixated on the superhero looking good in neon tights.
x86 has been criticised for its irregular instruction set encoding for as long as I can remember. And what did every design do that bought into this myth? Fixed-width 32-bit instructions. How did that work out? I don't have time to relate twenty years of CPU design, so I'll just point out Thumb-2: the code density of a 16-bit instruction set, with the expressive power of a 32-bit instruction set.
From a code density and expressive power perspective, Thumb-2 is now roughly in the same place as x86 began. This is not to say that Thumb-2 hasn't made some key improvements, they just don't happen to be the improvements that were originally tagged as the problem. The main difference is that the Thumb-2 instruction decoder uses less power and die space for a comparable level of performance. The parallel decoders required for modern x86 are terribly tricky and large and hot. However, you get some of that back with the improved density of your L1 instruction cache. Even with all this complexity, the decoders do not dwarf the other functional elements (cache, execution units, memory interface) so the percentage die cost is marginal. And until recently, total thermal dissipation did not constrain the performance envelope. A bigger heatsink solved the problem.
Going back to the original 8086/8088, there was no icache. Instruction fetch bandwidth directly subtracted from data access bandwidth. Pin counts were a fairly large term in the final cost structure. A $10,000 PC? I recall how well that worked out when Apple first tried it. Sweet ISA. Pity about the price.
With a small register set, there is an enormous design pressure to have single-byte instructions for stack management. With a medium sized register set, you have the option to move toward ARM-style stack management, which is dense and fast, but not nearly as flexible (witness the fantastic Watcom C/C++ compiler), and I'm not certain the compilers were quite ready for it back in 1982.
A larger register set is not the obvious win most people think it is. It slows down context switches, occupies more die area, bloats instruction set encoding, and necessitates more stack management at call boundaries. AMD64 doubles register set size for roughly a 10% performance win.
In the case of x86, the small register set was leveraged by RMW addressing modes, long the anathema of RISC designs. A small register set and dense instruction set encoding, combined with RMW addressing modes means that the battle is won or lost on core to L1 cache integration. It has always struck me as batty that for RISC to increment a memory based counter, the core has to present the same address to the L1 cache interface *twice*, once for read and again for write-back. Surely the L1 cache interface has better things to do than repeat virtual memory translation on the same address twice, and dirty a named register for the EA calculation in the process, which is now a burden to calls/context switches. x86 presents the EA once, and doesn't dirty a named register.
This design troika means that as performance pressure increased, x86 implementations were forced to invest relatively more effort into core to cache integration. The Pentium Pro broke the back of the RISC presumption. Wha
The underlying value of the company (as opposed to the daily price ripple) is not damaged unless the negative PR convinces consumers not to buy Apple's products. There are many concerned organizations out there that would be happy to see the consumeristic lifestyle taken down a peg or two. It strikes me that the people opposed to this lifestyle are in no way beholden to the shareholders of the companies that exist to promote this lifestyle.
If the negative PR is unlawful, Apple can sue. As far as I'm aware, there is no law which states that if I claim company A sells a destructive product, and company B sells the same destructive product, that I'm obliged to dish out my criticism in precise proportions to their relative market caps. Apple's being punished for being well-liked. Of course, you're right. Let's go back to the classroom model where everyone decided to hate the same fat girl (or pock-faced sniveller), whom we all targetted because we all hated her, therefore she deserved it. That's not fair or justifiable in any society I'd care to be a part of. No, Apple is actually being targetted because the company aims to position itself as the world's most powerful brand communicating the value system of silky-smooth candy-lickable instant gratification.
That's entirely fair and justifiable in any society I'd care to be a part of. I believe the world would be a far better place with less cool and more critical thinking.
Most of the stupidity in the world does not originate from stupid people. There is something about certain topics that causes the brain to down-regulate critical thinking, esp. topics on the axis of fear, greed, and making a quick buck.
You hear the same mantra with respect to the stock market and mutual funds. We all know how that game plays out. First ploy, the semi-annual "going out of business sale". How many of these 500 options are the same crooks in business again? Investment firms do this all the time. If a mutual fund underperforms, it gets terminated, and its slot is replaced on next year's slate with a new and improved detergent. A mutual fund that consistently outperforms and establishes a long term track record, by luck or good management (one of those is in shorter supply than the other), will be steered toward lower risk levels to make good on its blue chip credentials. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the fund itself. It has to do with the rule that if you start enough funds, eventually you'll get a few that work out that way.
Likewise, the established track record of the poker sites not yet busted doesn't necessarily mean much. At any point in time the principals could decide to wind down their reputation capital. That also works great. It wasn't long ago that was the scam of the day on eBay: build up a flawless reputation on the basis of few hundred dime-store transactions, then auction off ten luxury vehicles and balk on all of them. Absolutely, word got around. But not nearly as fast as the windfall was shunted to Swiss bank accounts.
That covers the finance and technology sections of the newspaper. It also appears OP hasn't read the sports lately. If everyone involved knows the detection threshhold, then the competitors play interstate "rule of ten" with their urine samples, where the objective is to be as dirty as possible without being the first to get caught. On each instance where someone is caught, everyone updates their detection model simultaneously.
Speaking of detection models, how about we head over to the crime reporting section. Recently there was the story about Interpol putting out the unswirled face of the sexual preditor (from Thailand IIRC). There was a lot of discussion about whether putting out this photo and making it possible for the legions of small-time perps to update their detection models was worth catching this one particularly slimy fish.
Here is how it typically boils down: of the other 500 choices, P.T. Barnum owns 400 at any given time. Figure it out. Everyone in the market is chasing "above average" returns. I'd estimate of the people beating average, about 3 cases out of 4 is a function of chance. Only ten to twenty percent of any competitive population can consistently beat average on skill alone. Twice that many if you include the political skill required to found a successful pyramid scheme.
What's the typical story when corruption represents the bulk of the profits in an industry? What do you suppose happens when an ethical "waste management" firm sets up shop in New Jersey and cuts into the business of the established families? Is our ethical CEO really that safe in his gated abode in the Swiss Alps. Surely the long arm of the "families" could not reach that far.
If you really want to make money in this racket, what you need are Susan, Judit, Zsófia and a couple of University of Alberta game theorists. With enough computer assistance, each of the girls could probably play 100 tables concurrently (even better if pooled), at just below the cheater cheater detection threshhold. Very important: software interlock on winn
The one comment I will make in your defense is that anyone running an active bot ought to monitor their talk page fairly aggressively. Nevertheless, sometimes life intrudes on even the most dedicated Wikipedian. I'm not sure on what basis you escalated "didn't reply in a short period of time" to "ignored me". Has the person been actively responding to others? Did you repeat the request in case the person simply overlooked your first attempt? Did you seek out any established user as a third party in seeking resolution?
I think you suffer from some serious misconceptions about the Wikipedia process offers. There is no contract that every constructive edit will stick the first time. There is no contract that the most constructive edit ever made won't degrade into a state of bit rot in the absence of continued maintenance. The permanance offered by the Wikipedia has more to do with the long term edit history than the surface state of any article at any time. I disagree with how much they delete. I think many of the article deleted fall short of article status at the time of their deletion. My opinion is that this material should be quarrantined not deleted so that people have reference to the material judged not yet acceptable for prime time. Quarrantined material would be excluded from the Google index, from the default Wikipedia search results, and would not be linkable from the regular article space. The create new article screen would warn about titles already in quarrantine, and the search function available from that screen would include the quarrantined material.
I didn't give much credit to your definition of liar. You criticized a person for authoring a bot as a "twat". That person's contributions, as well as the bot's edit history are there for all to see. In fact, I would say bots have the highest scrutiny level of any edit source. Bots tend to make a large number of edits, and hit a wide variety of pages, including many pages with a watch list that a state dept. would envy.
Does the author make the source code of the bot available? Did you check out the release history for the bot? Is it actively maintained? How many other people have complained?
You provide none of this detail, but manage to conclude that the bot author is a "twat" and hit the "liar accusuation" button on the people here with enough experience not to take your story at face value.
I think most of the horror stories about Wikipedia originate from a group of people who go there expecting one kind of experience, and then when it turns out to work quite differently, go on the warpath with theories of incompetence, malice, and pettiness, rather than making an investment in the culture to learn what works and what doesn't. It's the same thing with travellers. Some people go abroad and never make the effort to fit in, they come back complaining that the destination country is full of bigots and xenophobes. Probably true, but not more so than their country of origin.
In my view, the Wikipedia is the most imperfect social forum that has ever succeeded. Often the greatest innovations are the ones that survive despite the overwhelming deficits or their original incarnation. The original TRS-80 had the same DIN plug for the power as for the tape deck. If you plugged the power into the tape interface, you soon smelled a resistor vaporising from the main board. After the first three months, half the keys on the keyboad had a Poisson distribution for the number of letters produced by each keystroke. It had a lower-case font on board, but they decided to shave off a 1024x1 memory chip (bits) from the video memory, so the lower case font could not be displayed. The tape deck only worked if adjusted to within 5% of the ideal volume level. By any reasonable standard, the TRS-80 should have ended the PC era before it bega
If you put that comment in a Wikipedia article, I might consider reverting it. I have personally reverted half a dozen IP edits recently, several of which were nearly a week old. What bot is this? It seems to be a rather lazy bot if it can't find a first-ever IP-based edit s/U.S./poopers in under a week.