From the standpoint of a company, Google is a single entity - but from the standpoint of the internet infrastructure, it isn't. It's a collection of lots of mirrored servers in seperate locations around the world. It would take a major, major malfunction for all of google to go down - so major that being unable to google wouldn't be the biggest internet problem you'd have.
Google already *does* have the ability to route around the damge of a single site going down.
(And, it's a good thing that Slashdot doesn't let people edit posts. That's called historical accuracy. If you want to double check what you write, use the preview button. Once a statement has been said and responded to, it's unethical to alter it at that point.)
Microsoft will never be a verb. I've heard it used as an expletive
Re:The multi million dollar question...
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In Google We Trust
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The open P2P clients are only popular because they aren't something a company can easily sue for copryight violation - (by which I really mean "daring to disrupt the vertical control of every aspect of the distribution channel".) Napster used to be more popular until it got smacked down in court. Where these non-establishment tools do the best in in places where being 'on the fringe' helps circumvent legal threats.
Re:The multi million dollar question...
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In Google We Trust
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I feel I must have failed as a geek.
Yes. You're using a platform for which IE is available. For most of us the 'browser war' is really just a proxy for the 'os war' IE wouldn't be as annoying if it was JUST an application that existed across many platforms - if that was the case, a lot more slashdotters would probably be okay with using it. But when it's used as a tool to fight OS'es that are also in competition with the same company as made the application, then people who don't want to adopt that OS are going to dislike the software that forces them to use it.
If using IE didn't mean booting into Windows, I'd probably not mind using it so much. And the argument that it's hard to port to unix because it's part of the Windoes OS is bogus - it seems to be pretty effective on Mac OS X, which is unix.
Really impressive is the google cache
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What impresses me more than the search engine is the google cache. Every single hit, as long as it's recent, has a copy sitting in the google cache.
Google is, essentially, performing incremental backups. Incremental backups of what? Oh, not much, just the entire world wide web, that's all.
Their disk storage requirements must be astronomical, and their bandwith pipe must be unbelievably fat.
It boggles the mind to think of every web site, every page, on every server, around the whole world, being archived by one site.
Until quite recently, pretty much *everybody* believed in a god. So pointing out that famous scientists did so means nothing. So did everybody else, including a number of truly terrible people. Their belief in god has nothing to do with their work in science any more than Hitler's belief in god had anything to do with his attrocities.
Einstien's "god" that he believed in was NOTHING like the god described by any major religion. It was pretty much just "Wow, the universe is really neato, that makes me feel full of wonder and excitement." He described this feeling as "his god", in the sense that it filled him with a sense of awe similar to the sense a lot of people get from worshipping a god. Then he lived to regret this statement as he was misquoted and taken out of context from then on.
I am of the opinion that most people decide what they think is ethically right *first*, and then try to connect that to their religion *second*. That's why you can see people with vastly different outlooks on right and wrong claiming to be from the same religion. There's enough wiggle-room for interpretation that knowing what someone's religion is tells me absolutely nothing at all about what thier *actual* thougts on any particular issue are.
The common dogma that it is incorrect to criticize something you don't participate in, is incorrect. Do you have to be a member of a political party to criticize it? No. Do you have to work for Diebold and try to fix their machines before you can criticize their e-voting mechanisms? No. Do you have to participate in a Wiki before criticizing it? No.
The idea behind the Wiki software is awesome. There are areas where open public editing of a site is really great. A site that purports to be a trustable font of knowlege isn't one of them, however.
You're talking about not caring if someone will die in 24 hours from untreated diabetes if he'll only be in charge of a machine gun and will die in 18 hours from combat anyway. Well, unlike something like, say, cancer, which if not treated is serious in the long term but not the short term, diabeties is serious in the SHORT term if not treated. It's only non-serious if the regular treatment regimen can be carried out. IF so, it's no big deal. But if not, then it becomes instantly mentally debilitating - that very same day the treatment stops. I'd sooner put a drunk person in charge of that machine gun trigger than a diabetic who had gone 18 hours without access to his insulin, who had to survive on scant rations and is trying desperately to dole out the rations slowly so as to keep his blood sugar even so he doesn't become stupid, and who isn't entirely succeeding in this effort.
Someone with diabetes who's dying from it is typically *NOT* in a coherent mental state. It's like being drunk, but far, far stronger, and from what I have heard (never experienced it myself but I did witness it happening toa friend on many occasions) it's not at all pleasant like being drunk is. It's like feeling a hangover *during* being drunk instead of after. But basically when blood sugar is too low, the body isn't getting enough fuel. Muscles are weak, heartbeat is slow, coordination is poor, and most notably, the brain is starving for energy and thus the person behaves in a disoriented manner similar to being drunk, but a lot stronger (can't remember his name, doesn't know where he is, doesn't know what day it is, doesn't know what's going on.)
Do you want someone in that state to be at the trigger of a machine gun?
It's a really insidious thing when someone has a low-blood sugar event like that. Because it makes his mind foggy enough that he's not able to tell what's going on, and doesn't see the danger himself. If it's in a social setting, then the first indication that something is wrong is everyone *else* noticing that he's acting really, really out-of-touch with what's going on. It's sometimes really hard to differentiate that fine line between someone just daydreaming and being out of sorts versus someone actually having a medical emergency. In both cases the person himself will assure you that everything is fine.
I was friends for a long time with someone with strong diabetes. It was uncomfortable being in that position of having to decide whether or not to get forceful and heavy-handed about *making* him have to eat something - it's socially unpleasant to make a mistake and get that forceful when it turns out there was nothing wrong, so often I would end up having to wait to see if it got any worse before taking action.
Some people react more emotionally to pictures than to descriptions. That's all there is to it. It's like the difference between *hearing* about over a hundred people being killed in Madrid versus actually seeing the pictures.
Given how large the moon is relative to the earth, you might even say Mars is the *third* nearest planet to earth. The earth/moon system is more like a double-planet than a planet with a subordinate satellite.
Are you sure it was thousands? I thought they didn't really have that much of an effect overall. More died in a single night of conventional bombing during the blitz than the sum total of all V2 victims put together.
Now, if Germany had made progress on their attempts to figure out atom bombs, and combined *that* with the v2 rockets.... that would have been bad.
The insecurity I'm most worried about is the kind that comes from INSIDE the company that provided the machines. When voting, EVERYTHING about the process MUST be open to public scrutiny, and I mean EVERYTHING. Voting is too important to hide the mechanism behind NDAs and patents. If the software counting the votes is secret (and it is), as most corporate software is, then it's not a trustable vote. Companies wanting to keep their methods secret is perfectly acceptable when they are trying to make money off of a trade secret. It's NOT acceptable, however, when they are trying to make money by convincing the government that their system is a safe system that won't disenfranchise any citizenry.
I want to KNOW that my vote is being counted dammit. I want confirmation, and I want an undisputable record that is NOT alterable by the software on the machine. Putting all the trust in one company is BAD, BAD, BAD. There is no other way to put it. There's no way to overstate the danger of allowing the country's vote to be handled by a single company that insists their methods of counting are a trade secret.
If you want electronic voting, fine. But then I insist that we be allowed to see the code, and have a way to guarantee that the code you show me is the same as the code that's on the machine's. This isn't rocket science. It's really quite easy to do. Unfortunately none of the people involved in the decision making process for the adoptation of these machines is actually a computer scientist. The fact that all the complaints are coming FROM the computer science community, and not from any particular party affiliation, should be telling you something.
If weight is such a problem, let's not bother with all that extra camera equipment, or all that extra spectrometer equipment. Everything is a tradeoff. You weigh the benefit against the mass. They didn't bother making a dust-clearing mechanism because they didn't *want* to and instead thought it was more worthwhile to have a shorter mission with more instruments than a longer one with less instruments.
Shove your haughty tone where it belongs. The areodynmaics wasn't about the lander moving through the air. It was about the air moving across the lander. If there is a dust problem, it's because it's being carried by wind.
You are describing a world where people are a lot nicer to each other than what I've seen. "Explain the common misunderstanding" doesn't work if the topic at hand is something where there is a fundamental difference of opinion that cannot be resolved.
The advantage of a man page over info is that it's searchable. I can do a '/' over the whole pile of documentation to try and quickly zap to the one part I'm interested in (hmm, how do I make 'find' follow a symbolic link again? man find, then/sym, then n,n,n,n until I see it. That's hard to do in info where there's a hierarchy of organization. Sometimes a flat structure has advanatages.)
I think Info is useful, but it should have had a search-across-all-pages feature. (It also shouldn't have been based on it's own ugly keymappings - I think that held it back more so than anything else. It took a LONG time to convince the maintainers of info that activating the special keys like arrows and pgup/pgdn is kind of important for a tool that is supposed to help newbies.
Other ideas besides a wiper: - A blower. Puffing air to get rid of the dust. - Tip the panel to dump the dust off. - Like the blower, but instead move the panels through the air. (depends on how thin the air is.) - Solve the problem at the root cause - prevent the buildup in the first place by using some areodynamics - shape a shield that will make air carrying the dust blow around the panels and not touch them. - Cover the panel with a see-through plastic sheet on a roller that will roll around to bring some new clean surface around, like the things they used to have on overhead projectors, then the life is just limited by how much extra plastic sheeting you can afford to add to the payload. (Or, make it go circularly around and run through a wiper on the way around and get re-used, like they do for the shield in front of the in-car cameras at auto races. But then you have to weigh the benefit of the washer against the weight of the washer - it might be more effective to just carry more plastic and use it up as you go.)
I didn't say "a year's worth of work" - I said "A year's worth of peer review". There's a difference. An article doesn't have to be a large one for this problem to exist. It can be as small as a single sentence definition of a term, and the change can be as simple as someone inserting the word "not". And I doubt that kind of article will be on someone's watchlist.
And the change isn't necessarily vandalism. It could be made by a misinformed person who believes himself to be genuinely correcting a mistake.
When I'm playing a game I like to talk to the other players. This just sucks a lot on-line, where you have to choose between using your fingers to manipulate the game or using your fingers to 'talk' on the keyboard, and you can't do both at the same time - so talking is detrimental to gameplay. Thus I still prefer boardgames - because the game itself is only *part* of the point of playing. Sitting around a table with other people is the important part of it.
It's the same with roleplaying games. I still prefer doing it pencil-and-paper style because it's more social. (And, the irony is that in RPG's, doing it in-person is actually faster overall. Sure, the combats are slow as molasses, but the GM can respond to changes in the plan on-the-fly instead of needing to go "hold it, wait for me to design a level for that house - I didn't know you were going to want to walk in there next. I should have the level programmed in a couple of weeks." The concept of "winging it" just doesn't work in a computerized game as well, and the plots you encounter reflect this fact. You are presented with options A, B, and C, and you realize that options D and E are actually what your character would want to do, but you can't do that because it's not in the program.
Sometimes I wonder if there would be any market for boardgames designed to be used on a laptop with a lot of people sitting around the computer at a table. The laptop would have to have some kind of a display that everyone could see (that would be the expensive part, but maybe a projector would work for it today, or that display-on-paper technology might do it in the future.). The computer could be used to make the game speedy and more complex than a boardgame, but you'd be in social contact with the other players instead of sitting in seperate rooms. The style of game that this would work well for would be turn-based strategy games like Civilization. (The boardgame was really crude and simple compared to the computer game because it *had* to be to be playable. Run the game on a computer and it could be just as rich and involved as the computer game was, but it would be played like a boardgame.)
One is that you don't see the collective result of *everybody* peer reveiwing the entry - you are only guranteed to get the result of the last person who edited the entry. So if 1000 people agreed with an entry that said "X is true", and one person edited it to say "X is false", if that one person is the most recent person to have touched it, then *his* version of things is all you'll see. You're only guaranteed to see a version which is in agreement with the previous viewer's opinions, not a version that is an average of everyone's opinions that came before him. One person can wipe out an entire years worth of peer review on an entry in a single moment.
The other problem is that even if it does reflect accurately the opnions of all the 'peers' who reviewed it, the entry will then only be accurate in those areas where public opinion reflects the truth. This is often not the case when the public is poorly informed. I'd much rather read an encyclopedia article on nuclear power that was edited and approved by nuclear scientists than one that was edited and approved by a collection of J. Random Users. Science is one area where this can be a problem, and any area where stereotyping by the public is common is another. (For example, let's say I (an atheist) got invited to witness someone's pagan summer solstice celebrations. Before I decide if I want to do that, I'd like to read up on what those celebrations entail. I'd trust a source that I kenw was written by actual pagans on the matter before I'd trust a source that was written by the public at large, given that such a source is likely to contain incorrect stereotypes.)
Some friends of mine recently had a whole shelf of DVD's stolen from their apartment (some of which were expensive imports from Japan). They contacted the police, filed the report, and were told that they should first call around to all the local used disc stores, starting with whichever ones were physically closest to their apartment. If the used disc store is on the up-and-up and wants to avoid legal troubles, they should be able to give them the goods back for free, and then it's *their* job to push things through the legal system to try to get reimbursed by the thief. Thus the legal hassles are offloaded from the original victim of theft to the store that bought the stolen goods, and the original victim walks away from the whole affair and doesn't need to be involved (except perhaps to give testimony as a witness in the event).
The preferred method was to have the victim of the theft do all the 'legwork' and only involve the police if there is some difficulty in getting cooperation.
Well, it worked. They found someone had just sold an alottment of DVD's that exactly matched the list of stolen goods (minus one that the thief apparently kept or lost). The store was cooperative and returned the goods. They had the name of the thief on record (and he'd stupidly used his real ID and real name when selling the goods), and were going to deal with the court case themselves.
That was the last we'd heard of the incident.
It would be a happy ending if it wasn't for the fact that the thief (remember he used his real name) turned out to be a friend we all knew. He knew about the DVD's because he'd been invited over on occasion to watch them. Obviously, this incident was the end of friendly relations with the guy. When my friend called him on the phone, he claimed "Oh, yeah, those DVD's, uhm yeah, some homeless black guy said he just found them and he gave a bunch of them to me. I didn't realize they were yours or I would have given them to you, dude." (Yeah, right - some of those DVD's were really obscure rare items, so there's no way he could fail to notice that that exact combination of DVD's was the same as the ones at his friend's house.)
Some people can be real scum.
But anyway, the point of the story is that this incident is an example of how pawn shops are supposed to work when everything is being done legally and with good intentions, unlike what EB games did.
Well, that may be true. I have to admit that I don't know the facts. It's just that when it comes to arguments of the form "This form of transport is safe because of this and that safety measure", I get skeptical because that is dependant on human willingness to keep spending money on those safety measures. (To keep that in perspective, look at the Chernobyl accident - Nuclear power is safe - sure, until human beings start making design decisions and being stupid about it, followed by the operators also being stupid in their decisions to disable the few safety measures they did have.)
Any form of safety that depends on humans being permanently vigilant will eventually fail.
(As a side topic, an interesting problem the US government is facing is how to label a waste storage site in a way that effectively communicates the message "danger, this will kill you, stay away, even if you are curious" - to future generations ten thousand years down the road, who might not have the same level of technology anymore. They can't assume language will remain unchanged. They can't assume people will understand pictures and symbols either. One clever solution is to just make the place undesirable by buring the waste in the desert, then putting up a grid of large solid black blocks on the surface, that you would have to walk between if you wanted to pass through the area. These black blocks would absorb sun's rays and become very hot, thus making the air temperature around them too hot to breathe. The theory is that if people have the technology to make survival suits that could withstand those high temperatures, they will by that point also have the technology to detect radiation and recognize the site for what it is.)
It's not the temperature that matters, it's the amount of light. The reason the sun appears dimmer is that your eye is only recieving a very tiny fraction of the light that emits from it - due to the fact that your pupil covers a puny area in comparasin to the area of a sphere of one astronomical unit in radius. Being closer means your eye receives a greater percent of the light because it hasn't spread across as large a sphere yet.
I think the most poignant part was the abandoned amusement rides, and how she said that was the part of that town where the radiation doses were strongest. That Ferris wheel standing still and silent, still painted red and yellow, was just... wow. I have no words.
Slashdot Mirror
From the standpoint of a company, Google is a single entity - but from the standpoint of the internet infrastructure, it isn't. It's a collection of lots of mirrored servers in seperate locations around the world. It would take a major, major malfunction for all of google to go down - so major that being unable to google wouldn't be the biggest internet problem you'd have.
Google already *does* have the ability to route around the damge of a single site going down.
(And, it's a good thing that Slashdot doesn't let people edit posts. That's called historical accuracy. If you want to double check what you write, use the preview button. Once a statement has been said and responded to, it's unethical to alter it at that point.)
Microsoft will never be a verb.
I've heard it used as an expletive
The open P2P clients are only popular because they aren't something a company can easily sue for copryight violation - (by which I really mean "daring to disrupt the vertical control of every aspect of the distribution channel".) Napster used to be more popular until it got smacked down in court. Where these non-establishment tools do the best in in places where being 'on the fringe' helps circumvent legal threats.
I feel I must have failed as a geek.
Yes. You're using a platform for which IE is available. For most of us the 'browser war' is really just a proxy for the 'os war' IE wouldn't be as annoying if it was JUST an application that existed across many platforms - if that was the case, a lot more slashdotters would probably be okay with using it. But when it's used as a tool to fight OS'es that are also in competition with the same company as made the application, then people who don't want to adopt that OS are going to dislike the software that forces them to use it.
If using IE didn't mean booting into Windows, I'd probably not mind using it so much. And the argument that it's hard to port to unix because it's part of the Windoes OS is bogus - it seems to be pretty effective on Mac OS X, which is unix.
What impresses me more than the search engine is the google cache. Every single hit, as long as it's recent, has a copy sitting in the google cache.
Google is, essentially, performing incremental backups. Incremental backups of what? Oh, not much, just the entire world wide web, that's all.
Their disk storage requirements must be astronomical, and their bandwith pipe must be unbelievably fat.
It boggles the mind to think of every web site, every page, on every server, around the whole world, being archived by one site.
Nah, I'll respond with an actual post.
Until quite recently, pretty much *everybody* believed in a god. So pointing out that famous scientists did so means nothing. So did everybody else, including a number of truly terrible people. Their belief in god has nothing to do with their work in science any more than Hitler's belief in god had anything to do with his attrocities.
Einstien's "god" that he believed in was NOTHING like the god described by any major religion. It was pretty much just "Wow, the universe is really neato, that makes me feel full of wonder and excitement." He described this feeling as "his god", in the sense that it filled him with a sense of awe similar to the sense a lot of people get from worshipping a god. Then he lived to regret this statement as he was misquoted and taken out of context from then on.
I am of the opinion that most people decide what they think is ethically right *first*, and then try to connect that to their religion *second*. That's why you can see people with vastly different outlooks on right and wrong claiming to be from the same religion. There's enough wiggle-room for interpretation that knowing what someone's religion is tells me absolutely nothing at all about what thier *actual* thougts on any particular issue are.
The common dogma that it is incorrect to criticize something you don't participate in, is incorrect. Do you have to be a member of a political party to criticize it? No. Do you have to work for Diebold and try to fix their machines before you can criticize their e-voting mechanisms? No. Do you have to participate in a Wiki before criticizing it? No.
The idea behind the Wiki software is awesome. There are areas where open public editing of a site is really great. A site that purports to be a trustable font of knowlege isn't one of them, however.
You're talking about not caring if someone will die in 24 hours from untreated diabetes if he'll only be in charge of a machine gun and will die in 18 hours from combat anyway. Well, unlike something like, say, cancer, which if not treated is serious in the long term but not the short term, diabeties is serious in the SHORT term if not treated. It's only non-serious if the regular treatment regimen can be carried out. IF so, it's no big deal. But if not, then it becomes instantly mentally debilitating - that very same day the treatment stops. I'd sooner put a drunk person in charge of that machine gun trigger than a diabetic who had gone 18 hours without access to his insulin, who had to survive on scant rations and is trying desperately to dole out the rations slowly so as to keep his blood sugar even so he doesn't become stupid, and who isn't entirely succeeding in this effort.
Someone with diabetes who's dying from it is typically *NOT* in a coherent mental state. It's like being drunk, but far, far stronger, and from what I have heard (never experienced it myself but I did witness it happening toa friend on many occasions) it's not at all pleasant like being drunk is. It's like feeling a hangover *during* being drunk instead of after. But basically when blood sugar is too low, the body isn't getting enough fuel. Muscles are weak, heartbeat is slow, coordination is poor, and most notably, the brain is starving for energy and thus the person behaves in a disoriented manner similar to being drunk, but a lot stronger (can't remember his name, doesn't know where he is, doesn't know what day it is, doesn't know what's going on.)
Do you want someone in that state to be at the trigger of a machine gun?
It's a really insidious thing when someone has a low-blood sugar event like that. Because it makes his mind foggy enough that he's not able to tell what's going on, and doesn't see the danger himself. If it's in a social setting, then the first indication that something is wrong is everyone *else* noticing that he's acting really, really out-of-touch with what's going on. It's sometimes really hard to differentiate that fine line between someone just daydreaming and being out of sorts versus someone actually having a medical emergency. In both cases the person himself will assure you that everything is fine.
I was friends for a long time with someone with strong diabetes. It was uncomfortable being in that position of having to decide whether or not to get forceful and heavy-handed about *making* him have to eat something - it's socially unpleasant to make a mistake and get that forceful when it turns out there was nothing wrong, so often I would end up having to wait to see if it got any worse before taking action.
Some people react more emotionally to pictures than to descriptions. That's all there is to it. It's like the difference between *hearing* about over a hundred people being killed in Madrid versus actually seeing the pictures.
Given how large the moon is relative to the earth, you might even say Mars is the *third* nearest planet to earth. The earth/moon system is more like a double-planet than a planet with a subordinate satellite.
whose V2 killed thousands of British
Are you sure it was thousands? I thought they didn't really have that much of an effect overall. More died in a single night of conventional bombing during the blitz than the sum total of all V2 victims put together.
Now, if Germany had made progress on their attempts to figure out atom bombs, and combined *that* with the v2 rockets.... that would have been bad.
The insecurity I'm most worried about is the kind that comes from INSIDE the company that provided the machines. When voting, EVERYTHING about the process MUST be open to public scrutiny, and I mean EVERYTHING. Voting is too important to hide the mechanism behind NDAs and patents. If the software counting the votes is secret (and it is), as most corporate software is, then it's not a trustable vote. Companies wanting to keep their methods secret is perfectly acceptable when they are trying to make money off of a trade secret. It's NOT acceptable, however, when they are trying to make money by convincing the government that their system is a safe system that won't disenfranchise any citizenry.
I want to KNOW that my vote is being counted dammit. I want confirmation, and I want an undisputable record that is NOT alterable by the software on the machine. Putting all the trust in one company is BAD, BAD, BAD. There is no other way to put it. There's no way to overstate the danger of allowing the country's vote to be handled by a single company that insists their methods of counting are a trade secret.
If you want electronic voting, fine. But then I insist that we be allowed to see the code, and have a way to guarantee that the code you show me is the same as the code that's on the machine's. This isn't rocket science. It's really quite easy to do. Unfortunately none of the people involved in the decision making process for the adoptation of these machines is actually a computer scientist. The fact that all the complaints are coming FROM the computer science community, and not from any particular party affiliation, should be telling you something.
If weight is such a problem, let's not bother with all that extra camera equipment, or all that extra spectrometer equipment. Everything is a tradeoff. You weigh the benefit against the mass. They didn't bother making a dust-clearing mechanism because they didn't *want* to and instead thought it was more worthwhile to have a shorter mission with more instruments than a longer one with less instruments.
Shove your haughty tone where it belongs.
Shove your haughty tone where it belongs. The areodynmaics wasn't about the lander moving through the air. It was about the air moving across the lander. If there is a dust problem, it's because it's being carried by wind.
You are describing a world where people are a lot nicer to each other than what I've seen. "Explain the common misunderstanding" doesn't work if the topic at hand is something where there is a fundamental difference of opinion that cannot be resolved.
The advantage of a man page over info is that it's searchable. I can do a '/' over the whole pile of documentation to try and quickly zap to the one part I'm interested in (hmm, how do I make 'find' follow a symbolic link again? man find, then /sym, then n,n,n,n until I see it. That's hard to do in info where there's a hierarchy of organization. Sometimes a flat structure has advanatages.)
I think Info is useful, but it should have had a search-across-all-pages feature. (It also shouldn't have been based on it's own ugly keymappings - I think that held it back more so than anything else. It took a LONG time to convince the maintainers of info that activating the special keys like arrows and pgup/pgdn is kind of important for a tool that is supposed to help newbies.
Other ideas besides a wiper:
- A blower. Puffing air to get rid of the dust.
- Tip the panel to dump the dust off.
- Like the blower, but instead move the panels through the air. (depends on how thin the air is.)
- Solve the problem at the root cause - prevent the buildup in the first place by using some areodynamics - shape a shield that will make air carrying the dust blow around the panels and not touch them.
- Cover the panel with a see-through plastic sheet on a roller that will roll around to bring some new clean surface around, like the things they used to have on overhead projectors, then the life is just limited by how much extra plastic sheeting you can afford to add to the payload. (Or, make it go circularly around and run through a wiper on the way around and get re-used, like they do for the shield in front of the in-car cameras at auto races. But then you have to weigh the benefit of the washer against the weight of the washer - it might be more effective to just carry more plastic and use it up as you go.)
I didn't say "a year's worth of work" - I said "A year's worth of peer review". There's a difference. An article doesn't have to be a large one for this problem to exist. It can be as small as a single sentence definition of a term, and the change can be as simple as someone inserting the word "not". And I doubt that kind of article will be on someone's watchlist.
And the change isn't necessarily vandalism. It could be made by a misinformed person who believes himself to be genuinely correcting a mistake.
When I'm playing a game I like to talk to the other players. This just sucks a lot on-line, where you have to choose between using your fingers to manipulate the game or using your fingers to 'talk' on the keyboard, and you can't do both at the same time - so talking is detrimental to gameplay. Thus I still prefer boardgames - because the game itself is only *part* of the point of playing. Sitting around a table with other people is the important part of it.
It's the same with roleplaying games. I still prefer doing it pencil-and-paper style because it's more social. (And, the irony is that in RPG's, doing it in-person is actually faster overall. Sure, the combats are slow as molasses, but the GM can respond to changes in the plan on-the-fly instead of needing to go "hold it, wait for me to design a level for that house - I didn't know you were going to want to walk in there next. I should have the level programmed in a couple of weeks." The concept of "winging it" just doesn't work in a computerized game as well, and the plots you encounter reflect this fact. You are presented with options A, B, and C, and you realize that options D and E are actually what your character would want to do, but you can't do that because it's not in the program.
Sometimes I wonder if there would be any market for boardgames designed to be used on a laptop with a lot of people sitting around the computer at a table. The laptop would have to have some kind of a display that everyone could see (that would be the expensive part, but maybe a projector would work for it today, or that display-on-paper technology might do it in the future.). The computer could be used to make the game speedy and more complex than a boardgame, but you'd be in social contact with the other players instead of sitting in seperate rooms. The style of game that this would work well for would be turn-based strategy games like Civilization. (The boardgame was really crude and simple compared to the computer game because it *had* to be to be playable. Run the game on a computer and it could be just as rich and involved as the computer game was, but it would be played like a boardgame.)
There are two problems with that:
One is that you don't see the collective result of *everybody* peer reveiwing the entry - you are only guranteed to get the result of the last person who edited the entry. So if 1000 people agreed with an entry that said "X is true", and one person edited it to say "X is false", if that one person is the most recent person to have touched it, then *his* version of things is all you'll see. You're only guaranteed to see a version which is in agreement with the previous viewer's opinions, not a version that is an average of everyone's opinions that came before him. One person can wipe out an entire years worth of peer review on an entry in a single moment.
The other problem is that even if it does reflect accurately the opnions of all the 'peers' who reviewed it, the entry will then only be accurate in those areas where public opinion reflects the truth. This is often not the case when the public is poorly informed. I'd much rather read an encyclopedia article on nuclear power that was edited and approved by nuclear scientists than one that was edited and approved by a collection of J. Random Users. Science is one area where this can be a problem, and any area where stereotyping by the public is common is another. (For example, let's say I (an atheist) got invited to witness someone's pagan summer solstice celebrations. Before I decide if I want to do that, I'd like to read up on what those celebrations entail. I'd trust a source that I kenw was written by actual pagans on the matter before I'd trust a source that was written by the public at large, given that such a source is likely to contain incorrect stereotypes.)
Some friends of mine recently had a whole shelf of DVD's stolen from their apartment (some of which were expensive imports from Japan). They contacted the police, filed the report, and were told that they should first call around to all the local used disc stores, starting with whichever ones were physically closest to their apartment. If the used disc store is on the up-and-up and wants to avoid legal troubles, they should be able to give them the goods back for free, and then it's *their* job to push things through the legal system to try to get reimbursed by the thief. Thus the legal hassles are offloaded from the original victim of theft to the store that bought the stolen goods, and the original victim walks away from the whole affair and doesn't need to be involved (except perhaps to give testimony as a witness in the event).
The preferred method was to have the victim of the theft do all the 'legwork' and only involve the police if there is some difficulty in getting cooperation.
Well, it worked. They found someone had just sold an alottment of DVD's that exactly matched the list of stolen goods (minus one that the thief apparently kept or lost). The store was cooperative and returned the goods. They had the name of the thief on record (and he'd stupidly used his real ID and real name when selling the goods), and were going to deal with the court case themselves.
That was the last we'd heard of the incident.
It would be a happy ending if it wasn't for the fact that the thief (remember he used his real name) turned out to be a friend we all knew. He knew about the DVD's because he'd been invited over on occasion to watch them. Obviously, this incident was the end of friendly relations with the guy. When my friend called him on the phone, he claimed "Oh, yeah, those DVD's, uhm yeah, some homeless black guy said he just found them and he gave a bunch of them to me. I didn't realize they were yours or I would have given them to you, dude." (Yeah, right - some of those DVD's were really obscure rare items, so there's no way he could fail to notice that that exact combination of DVD's was the same as the ones at his friend's house.)
Some people can be real scum.
But anyway, the point of the story is that this incident is an example of how pawn shops are supposed to work when everything is being done legally and with good intentions, unlike what EB games did.
Well, that may be true. I have to admit that I don't know the facts. It's just that when it comes to arguments of the form "This form of transport is safe because of this and that safety measure", I get skeptical because that is dependant on human willingness to keep spending money on those safety measures. (To keep that in perspective, look at the Chernobyl accident - Nuclear power is safe - sure, until human beings start making design decisions and being stupid about it, followed by the operators also being stupid in their decisions to disable the few safety measures they did have.)
Any form of safety that depends on humans being permanently vigilant will eventually fail.
(As a side topic, an interesting problem the US government is facing is how to label a waste storage site in a way that effectively communicates the message "danger, this will kill you, stay away, even if you are curious" - to future generations ten thousand years down the road, who might not have the same level of technology anymore. They can't assume language will remain unchanged. They can't assume people will understand pictures and symbols either. One clever solution is to just make the place undesirable by buring the waste in the desert, then putting up a grid of large solid black blocks on the surface, that you would have to walk between if you wanted to pass through the area. These black blocks would absorb sun's rays and become very hot, thus making the air temperature around them too hot to breathe. The theory is that if people have the technology to make survival suits that could withstand those high temperatures, they will by that point also have the technology to detect radiation and recognize the site for what it is.)
It's not the temperature that matters, it's the amount of light. The reason the sun appears dimmer is that your eye is only recieving a very tiny fraction of the light that emits from it - due to the fact that your pupil covers a puny area in comparasin to the area of a sphere of one astronomical unit in radius. Being closer means your eye receives a greater percent of the light because it hasn't spread across as large a sphere yet.
I think the most poignant part was the abandoned amusement rides, and how she said that was the part of that town where the radiation doses were strongest. That Ferris wheel standing still and silent, still painted red and yellow, was just... wow. I have no words.