Well, I hope you improved the articles that you are moaning about. YOU are an editor. That is how Wikipedia works. If everyone sat around moaning about WP instead of helping improve it, there wouldn't even be a Wikipedia.
Anyway, WP has little to gain by being "taken seriously by a more mainstream audience". People can use it if they find it useful or they can not use it if they don't. There are now enough people that do care about WP to pay the bills.
It will never be like Encylopedia Britannica - but it has the potential to be so much more. It just takes people like you to improve it.
Leave the companies to make money and the voters to tell the government how to behave
That sounds like a great idea.
Unfortunately, it seems that now some companies have succeeded in making lots of money, they are the ones telling the government how to behave.
Arguably, some power still lies with the people because they are the ones who buy the companies products... but then you remember we are talking about multinational companies with foreign customers. These foreign customers include other governments - meaning that you effectively have foreign governments (i.e. China) wielding power over the US government. Don't you just love capitalism!?
I suggest you read up on solar cells. Efficiency is currently more than 10% even for the standard off the shelf cells and efficiencies of the order 25-30% are possible in the lab. OK, so that is not brilliant, but being able to get 300W from every square meter of roof space would be more than sufficient for most buildings that have a couple of storeys. There is also the possibility of applying solar cells as cladding to a building, so that perhaps even multistorey buildings could make the most of solar power.
Individual armour has also been discarded precisely because of weight considerations: you _could_ make a breastplate that could stop a rifle round, but it was impractically heavy.
This story and video show that American soldiers are currently using body armour that can stop rifle rounds. Although it doesn't say so anywhere, the sniper rifle was almost certainly 7.62mm. Here are some pictures of the aftermath: image 1image 2.
You are correct however that the armour is pretty heavy, but that is less of an issue for vehicle based soldiers rather than pure infantry.
However, the problem with this powered exo-skeleton is that just the act of adding more weight, even if it is "self supporting", makes the soldier slower and less mobile (because of extra inertia). They need to be able to react very quickly and be able to dive to the ground, and jump behind cover, etc. There is a very long way to go before projects like this would actually improve a soldiers chances of survival. A better short term prospect is to continue to improve body armour to make it lighter.
At the end of the day, deliberately attacking civilians is terrorism and it is barbaric, whatever the circumstances.
If you have a gripe against the British government or establishment, then you should target the attack at them (even if there will be collateral damage to civilians).
This is where comparisons between Islamic terrorist attacks and the wars in Iraq/Afghanistan always break down. All the recent terrorist attacks have been aimed at civilians (many of whom protested against the war anyway). That is precisely what makes them "terrorist" in my eyes. [No matter what some people say, the UK/US forces have done everything possible to avoid civilians casualties.]
If they were legitimate "freedom fighters", they would be attacking the British military or government.
Don't get my wrong - I am a firm believer in science and everything it has to offer. But I set the bar pretty high for what should be considered science, especially when it is controversial advice that could effect millions of people. I also hate the way theory is often presented as fact in the press.
Many of the theories in this area (health/diet) can be shot down by remembering correlation is not causation. Some studies seem to take a sample of people and find some correlation between x and y and then leap to saying x causes y, without even giving due thought to a possible mechanism for the causation. Often, the problem is that there are just so many variables, the majority of which cannot be controlled. To counteract this, you obviously need a very large representative sample, which rarely seems to be the case.
Clearly this means that performing reliable research in this area is incredibly difficult, which in turn means the burden of proof should be pretty substantial IMHO. Perhaps in the past the burden was too low, and not all factors were considered before offering advice to the public. Clearly we can't change the past, but we can prevent ourselves making the same mistakes again.
In this case, I think perhaps the new study does have some merit, but that means much of what the public was told before about sun exposure was overblown/misrepresented. I'm sure you'll agree that the media is often pretty irresponsible with its treatment of scientific research. For example, I am pleased to see in the headline on slashdot there is a question mark at the end of the headline. I can guarantee you by the time this story reaches the tabloids, at least one of them will omit the question mark and declare that noone should be bothering with sun cream any more.
This post is a bit rambling and perhaps incoherent, but basically I am saying that I don't object to science in general, I object to bad and/or misrepresented science. I'm also not saying that good science is easy!
Is anyone else tired of all this dietary/health "science" telling you what you should and should not be eating, and what you should or should not be doing?
It seems like you just need to use a modicum of common sense. Too much of anything is bad for you. The less "natural" and more refined a product is the less likely it is to be good for you. It is healthy to get outside and do some exercise every now and then.
All this research seems to contradict itself every few years anyway. I suspect a lot of scientists misuse/misunderstand their own data, either to match their own preconceptions, or to make a headline grabbing story like this one.
When the plane is cruising at 50,000+ feet, I don't think the sonic boom would be very strong (air less dense) and I am fairly sure it would not reach the ground.
all the newest apps would be stupid not to support it
Clearly Adobe are stupid then! Certain Adobe apps don't support Windows 2000. For example, I know Premiere Pro and Encore DVD require XP because I was caught out by this. I can't understand why this is the case, but there must be some over-riding technical reason for it, because otherwise it is just marketing suicide.
I hate it when people lie with statistics. Even the BBC did it recently when they were trying to justify 1 million GBP on their new weather program. They said 7/10 people either liked the new system the same as the old one or preferred the new one. Perhaps they could also have said 9/10 liked the new system the same as the old one or preferred the old one? Who knows when you lump categories together like that without providing the raw data?
Maybe he just got tired of fucking around with Linux. He got bored of having to trawl through "help" documents, fiddlying with config files and generally wasting time to achieve a second best result. He probably decided his time was worth the cost of buying a professional operating system that works. OK, so maybe he can't now reconfigure the colour of the drop shadow on the mouse pointer, but he clearly doesn't care about that.
Also, he doesn't really care what the Linux crowd thinks, which is why he posted the remark about Slashdot.
I can't believe this got funding...
on
The Evil in E-Mail
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It seems like he is just using Bayesian filtering (the bit about how he doesn't know how it works gives it away), and using Enron emails for the training.
Personally, I can't see how this would ever work. It is typical of the attitude that "all terrorists are bad, they are all the same and we just have to deal with them all in the same way".
Isn't it obvious that different terrorists will have different styles, different levels of literacy, different levels of security awareness, different languages, different aims, different approaches - the list goes on and on. Normal emails all have these traits too. I can't imagine there is any way of applying Bayesian filtering to help with this task.
They are not being installed by the city council and they are not being widely deployed. It is an art display at The Junction, which is not really in the centre of the city anyway.
Apparently, this is just what constitues "art" today. This article is straight from the horses mouth about it.
Wikipedia contains the critisms I would make about the pledge (mainly that children are too young to understand and that it is "under God")
I'm not saying the constitution is bad - it has served well. I am saying that it has problems and should not be viewed as infallible by the people. I accept that, almost by definition, it has to be viewed as infallible by the state.
And the rich and powerful always, ALWAYS have a say in how the government is run. In any country. At any time. That's the nature of reality man, and not liking it is normal. Having the tools to fight it varies from country to country.
(You did get me started.) Yes I agree, and many of the rich and powerful people are rich and powerful because of being in government. I was talking about companies, which are not citizens and therefore should be kept out of the Senate. I gather in America you have companies "sponsoring" bills - something seems very wrong with that.
What about one bill piggybacking in on another? Remember everyone, you are unpatriotic if you object to an increase in pensions for war veterans (never mind the bit about the government being able to put spy cameras in your home).
Brainwashing (from dictionary.com):
The application of a concentrated means of persuasion, such as an advertising campaign or repeated suggestion, in order to develop a specific belief or motivation.
Sounds pretty close to what is happening to me. As the tobacco companies say "You get 'em young and you got 'em for life".
But considering the US is one of the oldest governments of the world, that Consitution is pretty impressive.
Having the same government system for a long time doesn't make the constitution impressive to me. It means one of 3 things:
That your government has so much control over the people that they could never challenge it
That the people have been brainwashed into never challenging it
That people fully understand and appreciate it what it stands for and chose to keep it
Clearly you think number 3. I personally think it is a bit of all three.
Don't get me wrong, i'm not anti-America, I just think you, the people, need to ask serious questions about how your country is run. [Don't even get me started on how the big companies have more say in the laws of the country than the average citizen]
That's because the majority of Americans are brainwashed from a young age.
I'm not trolling here and perhaps I'm not totally informed, but don't children chant their allegiance to the flag in primary school every day? Isn't it drummed into to everyone to love the constitution? Even though parts of it are hideously outdated and you could argue that every day it is being corrupted further.
Everyone thinks it teaches children patriotism and respect for the authority in place in the country. But it breeds the worst kind of patriotism where people will unquestioningly do whatever their leaders want and will rarely protest against them. True patriots love the landscape, the people and the values they stand for, not some petty symbols and words written on a piece of paper.
I think some chump is getting confused about millions and billions. He probably thought the US million was a UK billion or something like that. It is now generally accepted everywhere that a billion is a 1,000 million, not a 1,000,000 million.
Why do governments feel the need to continually prop up the record industry? Its primary business model is clearly doomed in the long run, so why delay the inevitable?
Let's face it, unless the indsutry starts embracing the future and changing the way they do business, it's only a matter of time before they are rendered obsolete by self-publication and internet distribution by artists themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway, WP has little to gain by being "taken seriously by a more mainstream audience". People can use it if they find it useful or they can not use it if they don't. There are now enough people that do care about WP to pay the bills.
It will never be like Encylopedia Britannica - but it has the potential to be so much more. It just takes people like you to improve it.
That sounds like a great idea.
Unfortunately, it seems that now some companies have succeeded in making lots of money, they are the ones telling the government how to behave.
Arguably, some power still lies with the people because they are the ones who buy the companies products... but then you remember we are talking about multinational companies with foreign customers. These foreign customers include other governments - meaning that you effectively have foreign governments (i.e. China) wielding power over the US government. Don't you just love capitalism!?
I suggest you read up on solar cells. Efficiency is currently more than 10% even for the standard off the shelf cells and efficiencies of the order 25-30% are possible in the lab. OK, so that is not brilliant, but being able to get 300W from every square meter of roof space would be more than sufficient for most buildings that have a couple of storeys. There is also the possibility of applying solar cells as cladding to a building, so that perhaps even multistorey buildings could make the most of solar power.
I'm not sure whether the law would reflect this, because as we all know, the law doesn't always reflect justice.
This story and video show that American soldiers are currently using body armour that can stop rifle rounds. Although it doesn't say so anywhere, the sniper rifle was almost certainly 7.62mm. Here are some pictures of the aftermath: image 1 image 2.
You are correct however that the armour is pretty heavy, but that is less of an issue for vehicle based soldiers rather than pure infantry.
However, the problem with this powered exo-skeleton is that just the act of adding more weight, even if it is "self supporting", makes the soldier slower and less mobile (because of extra inertia). They need to be able to react very quickly and be able to dive to the ground, and jump behind cover, etc. There is a very long way to go before projects like this would actually improve a soldiers chances of survival. A better short term prospect is to continue to improve body armour to make it lighter.
If you have a gripe against the British government or establishment, then you should target the attack at them (even if there will be collateral damage to civilians).
This is where comparisons between Islamic terrorist attacks and the wars in Iraq/Afghanistan always break down. All the recent terrorist attacks have been aimed at civilians (many of whom protested against the war anyway). That is precisely what makes them "terrorist" in my eyes. [No matter what some people say, the UK/US forces have done everything possible to avoid civilians casualties.]
If they were legitimate "freedom fighters", they would be attacking the British military or government.
The mobile network gives priority to specially enabled phones for use by the emergency services in circumstances such as this.
I think I can speak for everyone when i say
FUCK THE TERRORISTS
Many of the theories in this area (health/diet) can be shot down by remembering correlation is not causation. Some studies seem to take a sample of people and find some correlation between x and y and then leap to saying x causes y, without even giving due thought to a possible mechanism for the causation. Often, the problem is that there are just so many variables, the majority of which cannot be controlled. To counteract this, you obviously need a very large representative sample, which rarely seems to be the case.
Clearly this means that performing reliable research in this area is incredibly difficult, which in turn means the burden of proof should be pretty substantial IMHO. Perhaps in the past the burden was too low, and not all factors were considered before offering advice to the public. Clearly we can't change the past, but we can prevent ourselves making the same mistakes again.
In this case, I think perhaps the new study does have some merit, but that means much of what the public was told before about sun exposure was overblown/misrepresented. I'm sure you'll agree that the media is often pretty irresponsible with its treatment of scientific research. For example, I am pleased to see in the headline on slashdot there is a question mark at the end of the headline. I can guarantee you by the time this story reaches the tabloids, at least one of them will omit the question mark and declare that noone should be bothering with sun cream any more.
This post is a bit rambling and perhaps incoherent, but basically I am saying that I don't object to science in general, I object to bad and/or misrepresented science. I'm also not saying that good science is easy!
It seems like you just need to use a modicum of common sense. Too much of anything is bad for you. The less "natural" and more refined a product is the less likely it is to be good for you. It is healthy to get outside and do some exercise every now and then.
All this research seems to contradict itself every few years anyway. I suspect a lot of scientists misuse/misunderstand their own data, either to match their own preconceptions, or to make a headline grabbing story like this one.
You are correct, I have just checked my facts. Ignore my previous post!
When the plane is cruising at 50,000+ feet, I don't think the sonic boom would be very strong (air less dense) and I am fairly sure it would not reach the ground.
Clearly Adobe are stupid then! Certain Adobe apps don't support Windows 2000. For example, I know Premiere Pro and Encore DVD require XP because I was caught out by this. I can't understand why this is the case, but there must be some over-riding technical reason for it, because otherwise it is just marketing suicide.
They seem to run quite a few special offers too. For example, I once got 60 5x7" prints for about 9 pounds including delivery.
I hate it when people lie with statistics. Even the BBC did it recently when they were trying to justify 1 million GBP on their new weather program. They said 7/10 people either liked the new system the same as the old one or preferred the new one. Perhaps they could also have said 9/10 liked the new system the same as the old one or preferred the old one? Who knows when you lump categories together like that without providing the raw data?
Did you really think that Taco (or any of the other editors) actually bother to read the articles?
Also, he doesn't really care what the Linux crowd thinks, which is why he posted the remark about Slashdot.
Personally, I can't see how this would ever work. It is typical of the attitude that "all terrorists are bad, they are all the same and we just have to deal with them all in the same way".
Isn't it obvious that different terrorists will have different styles, different levels of literacy, different levels of security awareness, different languages, different aims, different approaches - the list goes on and on. Normal emails all have these traits too. I can't imagine there is any way of applying Bayesian filtering to help with this task.
Apparently, this is just what constitues "art" today. This article is straight from the horses mouth about it.
Isn't your electoral system laid down in the constitution? You know, the bits where the votes of some people matter more than others?
I'm not saying the constitution is bad - it has served well. I am saying that it has problems and should not be viewed as infallible by the people. I accept that, almost by definition, it has to be viewed as infallible by the state.
And the rich and powerful always, ALWAYS have a say in how the government is run. In any country. At any time. That's the nature of reality man, and not liking it is normal. Having the tools to fight it varies from country to country.
(You did get me started.) Yes I agree, and many of the rich and powerful people are rich and powerful because of being in government. I was talking about companies, which are not citizens and therefore should be kept out of the Senate. I gather in America you have companies "sponsoring" bills - something seems very wrong with that.
What about one bill piggybacking in on another? Remember everyone, you are unpatriotic if you object to an increase in pensions for war veterans (never mind the bit about the government being able to put spy cameras in your home).
The application of a concentrated means of persuasion, such as an advertising campaign or repeated suggestion, in order to develop a specific belief or motivation.
Sounds pretty close to what is happening to me. As the tobacco companies say "You get 'em young and you got 'em for life".
But considering the US is one of the oldest governments of the world, that Consitution is pretty impressive.
Having the same government system for a long time doesn't make the constitution impressive to me. It means one of 3 things:
- That your government has so much control over the people that they could never challenge it
- That the people have been brainwashed into never challenging it
- That people fully understand and appreciate it what it stands for and chose to keep it
Clearly you think number 3. I personally think it is a bit of all three.Don't get me wrong, i'm not anti-America, I just think you, the people, need to ask serious questions about how your country is run. [Don't even get me started on how the big companies have more say in the laws of the country than the average citizen]
I'm not trolling here and perhaps I'm not totally informed, but don't children chant their allegiance to the flag in primary school every day? Isn't it drummed into to everyone to love the constitution? Even though parts of it are hideously outdated and you could argue that every day it is being corrupted further.
Everyone thinks it teaches children patriotism and respect for the authority in place in the country. But it breeds the worst kind of patriotism where people will unquestioningly do whatever their leaders want and will rarely protest against them. True patriots love the landscape, the people and the values they stand for, not some petty symbols and words written on a piece of paper.
OK, so I should have said everywhere in the English speaking world.
I think some chump is getting confused about millions and billions. He probably thought the US million was a UK billion or something like that. It is now generally accepted everywhere that a billion is a 1,000 million, not a 1,000,000 million.
The wikipedia article clarifies
Let's face it, unless the indsutry starts embracing the future and changing the way they do business, it's only a matter of time before they are rendered obsolete by self-publication and internet distribution by artists themselves.