I actually just registered an ID today. My edits come from all different IPs. So no, I have no credibility or history. I can't even prove the edits are mine if I wanted to.
That article is about the editors doing a good job. It's not an example of asshole editors deleting perfectly valid edits, which is what is being claimed by the ACs.
Even if there were no new relevant topics emerging, existing articles still have to be maintained, and there are a lot of errors to fix.
Sure, but the point is that maintaing existing articles is harder and requires more experienced editors. Whereas when it was new, Wikipedia relied on a large number of newcomers. So is this trend a decline, or a demographics shift? So far, nobody seems to be forking Wikipedia, which makes me think that this isn't a groundswell of upset where people really want to edit it but they can't.
Newcomers who try to update and correct articles are quickly scared away by "editors" whose only occupation is to fend off intruders.
*shrugs* I see lots of Slashdot posts saying that, yet it never happens to me, and nobody links to their reverted edits so we can't judge.
Lastly:
You don't know what you're talking about
On Slashdot, it seems like a requirement to make an ad hominem attack in every post. I know the post was an AC, so it is to be expected, but I'm making a habit of pointing this out when it happens.
Let me cancel out the comments like "Heck, just try editing wikipedia! Everything I post is reverted instantly!" by posting my experience.
I edit Wikipedia maybe once every few months. None of my edits have ever been reverted or debated. I've anonymously edited things I know about like the article on sorting algorithms. I've edited things I know nothing about, like the article on depth charges. In the latter cases, I was usually reading the article and misunderstood something, so I read more elsewhere, then went back to reword or clarify the section that was unclear. I've fixed citations and spelling errors randomly. No complaints, reverts, or edit wars.
Given the rather... opinionated... Slashdot culture, I would love to know what articles people are editing that cause flame wars. Because I just don't see it
Is the lack of new contributors to Wikipedia a good thing or a bad thing?
Wikipedia started with 0 pages. Now it has 38 million pages. There are fewer articles to write than their were before, and they have realized that having fandom pages for every character of every new anime series isn't what Wikipedia is for. That restricts the easy-to-write new articles and means new contributors leave because they don't have anything to contribute.
The second linked article points out how stupid it is for cloud services to be integrated into things unnecessarily. How do we educate users to reject these services? When I point out to someone that the flashlight app on their phone requires access to their contact list, they just don't care. When they have to give their email address to their television, they don't care. People are more interested in the consumption and freeness than in the debacle that it causes. They will bemoan their loss of privacy, but seem blissfully unaware that the Windows Operating system doesn't actually require a Microsoft account in order to install it. How do we change user behavior?
Ironically, the geeks complain the most about this, but the geeks are the ones implementing these services! We create the problem, then whine about it!
There is a simple solution to winner-take-all. Create protocols, instead of services.
The sidecar example in the article is a great one. It points out that Uber is winning because more customers and drivers have the Uber app installed. How silly! If instead, there was a ride-sharing protocol, then someone could call for a taxi run by Uber, Lyft, or Sidecar. No vendor lock-in.
Unfortunately, users aren't smart enough to reject these services that offer lock-in. Instead, people seem to really enjoy picking thier "favorite app" or "favorite service." When Joe uses "MySpace" and Bob uses "Facebook" it doesn't seem to occurr to them "Hey, wouldn't it be great if these two systems worked together?" Venture capitalists aren't in the business of creating open protocols since they want lock-in, so they won't help. We don't want the government involved. So how do we get back to the way things used to be? The initial set of internet protocols was created by academics and visionaries.
It looks like you have some valid criticism of Mark Andreessen's article. I recommend posting those in reply to the Slashdot posting, rather than my post.
I am not even sure what "reliable" means in this context.
Just to clarify, you posted a link to an article that claims:
Of 100 studies published in top-ranking journals in 2008, 75% of social psychology experiments and half of cognitive studies failed the replication test.
The Slashdot topic is not a psychology experiment or a cognitive study.
Narcisissm was but one of the many things the study correlated with geekdom. Yet the article by "The Independent" talked about only that one aspect. The study actually doesn't include Star Wars as an example of geekdom since Star Wars is mainstream. The study does consider someone a geek if they mix "Star Wars" with zombies. Yet The Independent started their headline with that "Star Wars" - probably because it is so popular in the news right now and people will have knee jerk emotional reactions to it.
I am sad that Slashdot chose to link to this article, rather than to the study itself which is completely free, reasonably short, and paints a different and more interesting picture. It talks about geek involvement with family, the political process, civic organizations, and long-term life goals. It even explains how the term "narcissism" is used differently in the clinical context and might be misinterpreted when used without the relevant context. Yet that is exactly what The Independent did.
Good ideas are often worth repeating. It is neat to know that in 2015 that Mr. Weiser's ideas are still stirring interest, and perhaps closer to reality. It's too bad he didn't live to see this.
If tables, walls etc. have screens or projectors - why special earpieces or glasses?
It could be lack of vision on Mr. Andreessen's part. Or possibly better sound quality, or so it can more easily identify the speaker. But really he is just speculating, so maybe it will be screens, or maybe it will be glasses. He doesn't know, he is just trying to get people to imagine it and think about it.
If special glasses are ubiquitous - who needs screens in tables and walls? Wouldn't empty and clean flat surfaces be far more useful then?
The glasses may have limited resolutions, bandwidth, or battery life. A screen on the table might be better for children, or for collaboration. Yes, in theory the special glasses could display the same thing to each person, in the same way that 5 people could sit together and watch a movie on their phones, but that may be awkward or inefficient.
Paraphrasing: If we have screens, why do we need glasses? If we have glasses, why do we need screens?
I see what you did there.:-)
And what's the use of a chip in a chair? To tell you that it is occupied or not? Wouldn't a single camera in the room do that and more?
Maybe. Let us assume it tells you if it is occupied. What if someone's big head is in the way? Maybe you need 3 cameras positioned around the table. What if the chair sensors are cheaper than 3 cameras? What if chairs move?
Since I have some industrial automation experience, let me speak about cameras in general:
Cameras are *almost* the ultimate sensor. Ideally, a single camera can tell you a wider variety of information than any other specific sensor. The software can reconfigure them to measure new things. That's cool. (Favorite example: The NASA Deep Space One probe's MICAS camera was reprogrammed to be a star tracker.) However, a single camera can usually not tell you as precisely or efficiently or cheaply or reliably or easily what multiple of dedicated sensors can. Even if the algorithms improve, I'm not sure that balance will ever totally change. Think of the ultimate camera: Your eyes. Can you count the number of people sitting around a table with it? Yes - but sometimes you miss people due to obstacles. So if you needed to know that accurately and instantly, a dedicated sensor might actually be cheaper. Can your eyes tell you someone's temperature? Or weight? Or pressure?
However it is reasonable to assume anyone working on cold fusion research should be prepared to go beyond some simple papers claiming relevant results in one lab.
No! That's the very trap that we are trying to avoid!
If we follow that rule, then 100 independent labs may get "relevant results" and they won't publish, so they won't know about each other. Nobody is going to fund some big effort to try to reproduce this in a bunch of labs. The only way to move forward is for 1 lab at a time to test it, and publish their results - positive or negative. Then, after a time, meta-studies will correlate what the labs did and their results, and patterns may emerge. THAT is how science works. Small steps. If we are afraid to publish those small steps, especially the unsuccessful ones, then we will never move forward.
What the data says is that growing up poor in the US limits your intellectual development in a way it doesn't other countries
Devil's advocate: Or does it say that growing up wealthy in the US gives you intellectual development opportunities in a way it doesn't in other countries?
I'm reading the linked article and it is hard to tell.
...the authors found that the brute force of poverty in the US clearly pushed aside genetic influence on intelligence. But, the same relationship was not seen in any of the other countries.
It does not sound like they are seeing a difference in IQ amongst Americans and non-Americans. Or even amongst impoverished and non-impoverished. It sounds like they are seeing more variation in IQ between siblings in Europe than in America, which leads them to believe that perhaps poverty limits intellectual potential in the US. That is one possible explanation, but that's a pretty indirect correlation. Read the section in the article about "seeds" and "growth" for their analogy on the topic. But it is really hard to know from the limited information the ars article offers.
Most teachers in the other countries are union members too. Thus this can't be the problem.
Do the unions operate the same way though?
The complaint in the US is that unions establish a tenure system where years of service is more important than performance. This "reverse meritocracy" supposedly forces the best teachers out. I don't know anything about teachers' unions in Europe - do they suffer from the same problem?
Hmmm... True. But consider this: Freakonomics was talking about overall IQ, where genetics dominates. But this article is saying that, taking into account the genetics, poverty puts them at the low-end of the IQ window. So taking into account the genetics, within that IQ window, perhaps family emphasis on scholastics does outweight anything else. To know this, we would need to correlate family emphasis on scholastics, poverty, and IQ while controlling for for genetics.
Your experience is the opposite of mine: I live in a major metropolitan area, and the only place I've seen that does not suppor chip+pin in the last 6 months is on the vending machines at my office. I think every other store supports chip+pin. That includes: McDonalds, Target, Kohls, Home Depot, Giant Food, and the little cafeteria at our office. Maybe not the chocolatier around the corner.
The Shuttle program showed that it is impractical.
What precisely did the shuttle show is impractical? I think comparing this to the shuttle seems like an apples to oranges comparison.
Imagine you drive to work, arrive safely, but your car is completely destroyed during the trip. But the seat is reusable! That's kinda how the space shuttle worked. With Falcon 9, the entire car is re-usable.
When I was a kid, I thought the "shuttle" launched into space and the "shuttle" landed. So it was re-usable right? Not really. The space shuttle was mostly the passenger compartment. The part that got it up into space was a pair of solid rocket boosters. Those were essentially destroyed each time a shuttle was sent up. They did parachute down into the ocean, and parts of them were salvaged, but it sounds more like re-using the wood from a sunken boat to build a new boat, than really being re-used.
Because now we have thousands of engineers and decades of experience
With every new discovery, someone can ask "how come we couldn't have done that before?" And the answer will always be the same. It is because that was yesterday, and this is today. Tomorrow, we may yet do something else that we have never done before.
Could we use this when my local corporate firewall blocks a page? It would be great if apps recognized that. Sometimes, an application goes to download a file or register something, and instead of getting a file with the expected result, it gets back HTML with something like "This page was blocked... click OK to accept and continue" which obviously the application doesn't know to do. But if it got a 451, I can at least know what happened and possibly do something about it.
Slashdot Mirror
I actually just registered an ID today. My edits come from all different IPs. So no, I have no credibility or history. I can't even prove the edits are mine if I wanted to.
That article is about the editors doing a good job. It's not an example of asshole editors deleting perfectly valid edits, which is what is being claimed by the ACs.
Yo do what they tell you (within the law) and you get paid.
That's probably what the Sony rootkit authors said. And it is the cause of the problem.
Even if there were no new relevant topics emerging, existing articles still have to be maintained, and there are a lot of errors to fix.
Sure, but the point is that maintaing existing articles is harder and requires more experienced editors. Whereas when it was new, Wikipedia relied on a large number of newcomers. So is this trend a decline, or a demographics shift? So far, nobody seems to be forking Wikipedia, which makes me think that this isn't a groundswell of upset where people really want to edit it but they can't.
Newcomers who try to update and correct articles are quickly scared away by "editors" whose only occupation is to fend off intruders.
*shrugs* I see lots of Slashdot posts saying that, yet it never happens to me, and nobody links to their reverted edits so we can't judge.
Lastly:
You don't know what you're talking about
On Slashdot, it seems like a requirement to make an ad hominem attack in every post. I know the post was an AC, so it is to be expected, but I'm making a habit of pointing this out when it happens.
Let me cancel out the comments like "Heck, just try editing wikipedia! Everything I post is reverted instantly!" by posting my experience.
I edit Wikipedia maybe once every few months. None of my edits have ever been reverted or debated. I've anonymously edited things I know about like the article on sorting algorithms. I've edited things I know nothing about, like the article on depth charges. In the latter cases, I was usually reading the article and misunderstood something, so I read more elsewhere, then went back to reword or clarify the section that was unclear. I've fixed citations and spelling errors randomly. No complaints, reverts, or edit wars.
Given the rather... opinionated... Slashdot culture, I would love to know what articles people are editing that cause flame wars. Because I just don't see it
Is the lack of new contributors to Wikipedia a good thing or a bad thing?
Wikipedia started with 0 pages. Now it has 38 million pages. There are fewer articles to write than their were before, and they have realized that having fandom pages for every character of every new anime series isn't what Wikipedia is for. That restricts the easy-to-write new articles and means new contributors leave because they don't have anything to contribute.
The second linked article points out how stupid it is for cloud services to be integrated into things unnecessarily. How do we educate users to reject these services? When I point out to someone that the flashlight app on their phone requires access to their contact list, they just don't care. When they have to give their email address to their television, they don't care. People are more interested in the consumption and freeness than in the debacle that it causes. They will bemoan their loss of privacy, but seem blissfully unaware that the Windows Operating system doesn't actually require a Microsoft account in order to install it. How do we change user behavior?
Ironically, the geeks complain the most about this, but the geeks are the ones implementing these services! We create the problem, then whine about it!
There is a simple solution to winner-take-all. Create protocols, instead of services.
The sidecar example in the article is a great one. It points out that Uber is winning because more customers and drivers have the Uber app installed. How silly! If instead, there was a ride-sharing protocol, then someone could call for a taxi run by Uber, Lyft, or Sidecar. No vendor lock-in.
Unfortunately, users aren't smart enough to reject these services that offer lock-in. Instead, people seem to really enjoy picking thier "favorite app" or "favorite service." When Joe uses "MySpace" and Bob uses "Facebook" it doesn't seem to occurr to them "Hey, wouldn't it be great if these two systems worked together?" Venture capitalists aren't in the business of creating open protocols since they want lock-in, so they won't help. We don't want the government involved. So how do we get back to the way things used to be? The initial set of internet protocols was created by academics and visionaries.
It looks like you have some valid criticism of Mark Andreessen's article. I recommend posting those in reply to the Slashdot posting, rather than my post.
I am not even sure what "reliable" means in this context.
Just to clarify, you posted a link to an article that claims:
Of 100 studies published in top-ranking journals in 2008, 75% of social psychology experiments and half of cognitive studies failed the replication test.
The Slashdot topic is not a psychology experiment or a cognitive study.
This was not a psychology experiment. It was a meta study, using information from anonymous surveys. So your criticism does not apply.
This article is horrible.
Narcisissm was but one of the many things the study correlated with geekdom. Yet the article by "The Independent" talked about only that one aspect. The study actually doesn't include Star Wars as an example of geekdom since Star Wars is mainstream. The study does consider someone a geek if they mix "Star Wars" with zombies. Yet The Independent started their headline with that "Star Wars" - probably because it is so popular in the news right now and people will have knee jerk emotional reactions to it.
I am sad that Slashdot chose to link to this article, rather than to the study itself which is completely free, reasonably short, and paints a different and more interesting picture. It talks about geek involvement with family, the political process, civic organizations, and long-term life goals. It even explains how the term "narcissism" is used differently in the clinical context and might be misinterpreted when used without the relevant context. Yet that is exactly what The Independent did.
Good ideas are often worth repeating. It is neat to know that in 2015 that Mr. Weiser's ideas are still stirring interest, and perhaps closer to reality. It's too bad he didn't live to see this.
I may be able to answer some of your questions:
If tables, walls etc. have screens or projectors - why special earpieces or glasses?
It could be lack of vision on Mr. Andreessen's part. Or possibly better sound quality, or so it can more easily identify the speaker. But really he is just speculating, so maybe it will be screens, or maybe it will be glasses. He doesn't know, he is just trying to get people to imagine it and think about it.
If special glasses are ubiquitous - who needs screens in tables and walls? Wouldn't empty and clean flat surfaces be far more useful then?
The glasses may have limited resolutions, bandwidth, or battery life. A screen on the table might be better for children, or for collaboration. Yes, in theory the special glasses could display the same thing to each person, in the same way that 5 people could sit together and watch a movie on their phones, but that may be awkward or inefficient.
Paraphrasing: If we have screens, why do we need glasses? If we have glasses, why do we need screens?
I see what you did there. :-)
And what's the use of a chip in a chair? To tell you that it is occupied or not? Wouldn't a single camera in the room do that and more?
Maybe. Let us assume it tells you if it is occupied. What if someone's big head is in the way? Maybe you need 3 cameras positioned around the table. What if the chair sensors are cheaper than 3 cameras? What if chairs move?
Since I have some industrial automation experience, let me speak about cameras in general:
Cameras are *almost* the ultimate sensor. Ideally, a single camera can tell you a wider variety of information than any other specific sensor. The software can reconfigure them to measure new things. That's cool. (Favorite example: The NASA Deep Space One probe's MICAS camera was reprogrammed to be a star tracker.) However, a single camera can usually not tell you as precisely or efficiently or cheaply or reliably or easily what multiple of dedicated sensors can. Even if the algorithms improve, I'm not sure that balance will ever totally change. Think of the ultimate camera: Your eyes. Can you count the number of people sitting around a table with it? Yes - but sometimes you miss people due to obstacles. So if you needed to know that accurately and instantly, a dedicated sensor might actually be cheaper. Can your eyes tell you someone's temperature? Or weight? Or pressure?
Not sure how 305 is relevant. 305 instructs the browser to use the proxy. In my scenario, the browser is already using the proxy.
You'll note that there is nothing in there about requiring ISPs to disconnect anyone, short of a court order
Yes there is. That was the crux of the case actually. Either read my notes, or read the court order.
However it is reasonable to assume anyone working on cold fusion research should be prepared to go beyond some simple papers claiming relevant results in one lab.
No! That's the very trap that we are trying to avoid!
If we follow that rule, then 100 independent labs may get "relevant results" and they won't publish, so they won't know about each other. Nobody is going to fund some big effort to try to reproduce this in a bunch of labs. The only way to move forward is for 1 lab at a time to test it, and publish their results - positive or negative. Then, after a time, meta-studies will correlate what the labs did and their results, and patterns may emerge. THAT is how science works. Small steps. If we are afraid to publish those small steps, especially the unsuccessful ones, then we will never move forward.
What the data says is that growing up poor in the US limits your intellectual development in a way it doesn't other countries
Devil's advocate: Or does it say that growing up wealthy in the US gives you intellectual development opportunities in a way it doesn't in other countries?
I'm reading the linked article and it is hard to tell.
...the authors found that the brute force of poverty in the US clearly pushed aside genetic influence on intelligence. But, the same relationship was not seen in any of the other countries.
It does not sound like they are seeing a difference in IQ amongst Americans and non-Americans. Or even amongst impoverished and non-impoverished. It sounds like they are seeing more variation in IQ between siblings in Europe than in America, which leads them to believe that perhaps poverty limits intellectual potential in the US. That is one possible explanation, but that's a pretty indirect correlation. Read the section in the article about "seeds" and "growth" for their analogy on the topic. But it is really hard to know from the limited information the ars article offers.
Most teachers in the other countries are union members too. Thus this can't be the problem.
Do the unions operate the same way though?
The complaint in the US is that unions establish a tenure system where years of service is more important than performance. This "reverse meritocracy" supposedly forces the best teachers out. I don't know anything about teachers' unions in Europe - do they suffer from the same problem?
Hmmm... True. But consider this: Freakonomics was talking about overall IQ, where genetics dominates. But this article is saying that, taking into account the genetics, poverty puts them at the low-end of the IQ window. So taking into account the genetics, within that IQ window, perhaps family emphasis on scholastics does outweight anything else. To know this, we would need to correlate family emphasis on scholastics, poverty, and IQ while controlling for for genetics.
So I just need to put a gun on my quadcopter?
Your experience is the opposite of mine: I live in a major metropolitan area, and the only place I've seen that does not suppor chip+pin in the last 6 months is on the vending machines at my office. I think every other store supports chip+pin. That includes: McDonalds, Target, Kohls, Home Depot, Giant Food, and the little cafeteria at our office. Maybe not the chocolatier around the corner.
The Shuttle program showed that it is impractical.
What precisely did the shuttle show is impractical? I think comparing this to the shuttle seems like an apples to oranges comparison.
Imagine you drive to work, arrive safely, but your car is completely destroyed during the trip. But the seat is reusable! That's kinda how the space shuttle worked. With Falcon 9, the entire car is re-usable.
When I was a kid, I thought the "shuttle" launched into space and the "shuttle" landed. So it was re-usable right? Not really. The space shuttle was mostly the passenger compartment. The part that got it up into space was a pair of solid rocket boosters. Those were essentially destroyed each time a shuttle was sent up. They did parachute down into the ocean, and parts of them were salvaged, but it sounds more like re-using the wood from a sunken boat to build a new boat, than really being re-used.
Because now we have thousands of engineers and decades of experience
With every new discovery, someone can ask "how come we couldn't have done that before?" And the answer will always be the same. It is because that was yesterday, and this is today. Tomorrow, we may yet do something else that we have never done before.
Could we use this when my local corporate firewall blocks a page? It would be great if apps recognized that. Sometimes, an application goes to download a file or register something, and instead of getting a file with the expected result, it gets back HTML with something like "This page was blocked... click OK to accept and continue" which obviously the application doesn't know to do. But if it got a 451, I can at least know what happened and possibly do something about it.