I lived a few hundred meters from the Berlin wall and even before I entered school I had heard of people who had been shot there. My dad was imprisoned for political reasons when I was four. In first grade, I was threatened into entering the Pioniere ideological youth organization.
These events not only made an impression, they are among my most dramatic, and hence vivid, memories from that age. Whoever thinks little kids don't get oppression doesn't have a fucking clue.
And if that sounds boring to you, various things may be okay to say after your lawyer agrees to them. You don't need to suck down your cheekiness completely, just wait for it a couple hours. And if that pisses you off, try and estimate how many million man-years in sentences have already resulted from unnecessary talking to the police.
Although this ruling is what us IT guys would expect from any reasonable court, the fact of the matter is that judges know shit. The Chaos Computer Club worked their asses off providing expertise to the court, while also mobilizing the German IT scene and putting out pressure on opposing (governmental) parties. This is their success and I salute them. Guess I should get around to finally apply for membership myself...
If so, why isn't anyone at GE Superabrasives defecting and setting up a new corp to exploit this market anomaly, mass-produce all kinds of shiny super-tough stuff and gut the business of two market leaders in the process?
The US received a massive advantage in that all three other historical power centers (Europe, Russia, China) were crippled by massive dictatorships at roughly the same time. Half a century later, it is not surprising the relations should balance out somewhat.
You're right, and not just in the business world but also in pure (university) research. My flatmate is doing biology/genetics research, I do social science, and our advanced IT degrees are hugely helpful in both of these fields as well.
In my experience and opinion, a B.A. or more in IT is now a good start for any knowledge worker career.
We're still in a market economy, except the market is now the planet. Consequently, the value of skills in transferable jobs has been falling for at least a decade. Don't blame the government for your failure to adapt.
Instead, recognize the trend and invest your self-improvement time in areas that are growing in value. I recommend customization, education and/or cost-benefit analysis in any complex field with long-term growth prospects.
Get up to the security checkpoint at an airport, ticket in hand. When you're next in line to go through the various scanners, give a wave to the friendly TSA employee, put your shoes back on, grab your stuff, turn around, and leave. Explain that you decided you did not want to be searched today. You'll be free to leave, right?
For best results, look vaguely Arab. You will never fly again in the US, or out of the US for that matter.
The additional weight in the wheels makes the suspension less effective and means that the effect of going over a bump will be a lot harsher.
Yeah, I go over bumps all the time. They're on every street, particularly on highways, and in the city especially, it would be impossible to drive without strong suspension!
There certainly are some social groups where way more casual sex is going on than in others. Geekdom isn't one of them, in fact geeks are one of the most monogamous groups of people I know. Some of the music scenes tend to make much less of a fuss about casual sex, as do the hard political left, the art scene and the ecologically-bent.
These are just stereotypes of course, I don't know whether there is hard data on this. Would be interesting, though. I am continually amazed at how much sex average-looking people are getting out of being part of certain scenes.
I disagree. The whole ship could be remote controlled by FTL subspace communication, which is available in that universe. But even if you accept the presence of a large number of meat-bodied crew, they wouldn't need to be housed in such an inefficient fashion, let alone to cross those unneccessary distances on foot.
Of course this makes no sense because Star Trek wasn't made with realism in mind. But that is also true of your reasoning about how it is "natural" there would be corridors.
All in all, the corridor is popular simply because it is a single, cheap, permanent set that can easily be turned into any corridor going from anywhere to anywhere on the ship. And that's all.
You know what? The Soviet invaders claimed to bring them exactly that: stability. And progress. And what they claimed was the most successful political system in the world. We call that attempt contemptible and foolhardy because we aren't Soviets or socialists, but to an Afghan, it was very much the same thing the US are attempting now. And the Afghans have rejected non-Afghan ideas of "stability" for over two millenia.
Alexander the Great claimed (and probably honestly believed) to bring peace, progress and prosperity. The Afghans would have none of it. The mongols brought the protection of their divine Khan. The Afghans would have none of it. They drove away the Turk kingdoms, the Arab kaliphates and sultanates and everything that came at them out of India. They humiliated the Red Army, the largest and most feared in the world. Even China, which annexed large parts of central Asia, knew better than to fuck with the Afghans. Now the US are making their attempt, and Afghans are simply chalking one up the list.
Trust me, if they were into buying any "stability", they wouldn't have been fighting this hard for over two thousand years.
Success in school is highly correlated with success in many other areas using a host of different measures. Health, longevity, average income, you name it. Pretty much all of the success indicators are correlated to each other in some fashion. So even if they hadn't measured other forms of success, the current state of biography research would predict it to be there. But they did measure, and it was there.
Gaming journalism has long been dead by any traditional standard of "journalism". I worked in games nearly ten years ago, and even then, reviews were easily influenced by ad revenue, "exclusive" deals and such. Some magazines put on a show claiming they weren't like the others, but everyone knew that was a scam.
The game I worked on became "game of the month" in Germany's largest gaming magazine solely because we threw in a pile of merchandise they could use for a raffle. We didn't come up with the idea, the magazine did.
With this kind of conduct increasingly apparent even ten years ago, the only thing that surprises me about this is how this sham has been shambling on. But there are enough other branches of worthless journalism (i.e. men's and women's magazines which recycle the bulk of their material every two years), so go figure.
What tells you Wolfram isn't logging all searches and archiving them for three months? This would be enough to, say, make it dangerous to feature search results or screenshots in whatever Wolfram doesn't like, say in critical reviews. Unless there's some strict legislation/ruling that limits these perversions, I can easily see how this kind of argument might help intimidate people and blackmail them into license fees.
The Electric Sheep screen saver (awesome, BTW) auto-GPLs all images it produces. Has anyone thought about whether that is enforceable by law?
True, but the most important benefit the first German archive got and that apparently helped convince the second is the captioning of images. They never had the staff to do that, so putting the stuff on the wiki is a smart move.
Those 250,000 are just a fraction of the 3 million that archive has - much of it on microfiche and hard to access. There is more of that coming.
In general web surfing I'd say the religion bashing posts outnumber the Atheist bashing posts by a ratio of about 10,000:1.
That should tell you something. By and large, people get bashed for pissing other people off, and best practice for pissing people off is interfering with their lives. Atheists, agnostics etc. do not have holy rules they believe they have to bugger mankind with, except agreeable basics such as the Golden Rule. They get bashed less because they deserve less bashing - according to those who bash.
Or do you prefer to believe there is some web-wide troll conspiracy going on that limits or directs anyone bashing impulses?
Now will you explain how bashing is an attack on the first amendment, rather than the exercise thereof?
Your mind mercifully fails to grasp the full meaning of this horrific new vista now opened by our misguided science. Clearly, that vile spawn of nuclear Chaos hinted at in the dread Necronomicon of the Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, and gracefully masked behind the name Azathoth, has been located. Worship it with frantic incantations at the Altars of Madness, puny mortals, to make sure you're eaten first and do not suffer for Aeons in the eldritch grasp of material insanity.
My little brother played through all of Monkey Island 1 like that, before he could read, having watched reading folks do it. That doesn't mean adults could do the same. Never underestimate the memory and tenacity of preschool kids.
Those results are outdated as it has been found the pigeons will immediately revert to normal behaviour once they are out of those tiny cages.
However, it has been found that primates occasionally react to thunderstorms as they do to rival members of their species (baring teeth etc.), which implies they personify forces of nature to a degree. Stewart E. Guthrie, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Fordham University, has written about that.
It says in the article they've gone down 9 stones in the last year, so they may likely shed the rest of the handicap in another. That's why Moore's law was mentioned in the summary...
While I agree to you, another consequence is that one might additionally want to join those who lobby for a reform of the voting system. The US two party system, and the comparatively little choice it leaves, is highly unusual among democracies and is really an artifact of the peculiarities of the voting process. Read up on it.
with Knol you can see the author's qualifications.
Sure, but I can't necessarily evaluate them. Say there's an article on "genetic expression" from a professor at an Indian College, which seems reasonable but is outside my area of knowledge. Any of the following could be true:
- his qualifications are bogus, he duped Google's identification process
- he teaches at a diploma mill or other disreputable institution
- he's an expert only on a field that seems related but isn't, say evolutionary studies
- even if he's a geneticist, he may present a fringe theory as factual for personal, religious, etc. reasons
- even if he's a geneticist and unbiased, he may be years behind the curve on current findings
On the Wiki, for all its faults, individual editors cover each other's weaknesses. Knol doesn't have that built-in. Authors do compete with each other, and will presumably react to competing articles by incorporating their ideas, but it will still be harder to evaluate the factual accuracy of the content. Especially because, so far at least, Knol articles have way less references than Wiki ones and rely more on the supposed authority of their authors.
This kind of thing would be way easier to pull off on Knol. There, if someone even smells the garbage, all s/he can do is give you a bad rating. This leaves the site online to mislead more people. And the confirmed identification thing is a hurdle, not a barrier, as most of us here should know. It just requires more effort.
Any system can be compromised given sufficient effort. You have invested quite a lot of effort, and probably in an obscure, little-defended place on the Wiki. I'll wager there are peer-reviewed journals that could be duped by this kind of dedicated effort. As you found out, Wikipedia eventually couldn't.
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I lived a few hundred meters from the Berlin wall and even before I entered school I had heard of people who had been shot there. My dad was imprisoned for political reasons when I was four. In first grade, I was threatened into entering the Pioniere ideological youth organization.
These events not only made an impression, they are among my most dramatic, and hence vivid, memories from that age. Whoever thinks little kids don't get oppression doesn't have a fucking clue.
And if that sounds boring to you, various things may be okay to say after your lawyer agrees to them. You don't need to suck down your cheekiness completely, just wait for it a couple hours. And if that pisses you off, try and estimate how many million man-years in sentences have already resulted from unnecessary talking to the police.
Although this ruling is what us IT guys would expect from any reasonable court, the fact of the matter is that judges know shit. The Chaos Computer Club worked their asses off providing expertise to the court, while also mobilizing the German IT scene and putting out pressure on opposing (governmental) parties. This is their success and I salute them. Guess I should get around to finally apply for membership myself...
If so, why isn't anyone at GE Superabrasives defecting and setting up a new corp to exploit this market anomaly, mass-produce all kinds of shiny super-tough stuff and gut the business of two market leaders in the process?
The US received a massive advantage in that all three other historical power centers (Europe, Russia, China) were crippled by massive dictatorships at roughly the same time. Half a century later, it is not surprising the relations should balance out somewhat.
You're right, and not just in the business world but also in pure (university) research. My flatmate is doing biology/genetics research, I do social science, and our advanced IT degrees are hugely helpful in both of these fields as well.
In my experience and opinion, a B.A. or more in IT is now a good start for any knowledge worker career.
We're still in a market economy, except the market is now the planet. Consequently, the value of skills in transferable jobs has been falling for at least a decade. Don't blame the government for your failure to adapt.
Instead, recognize the trend and invest your self-improvement time in areas that are growing in value. I recommend customization, education and/or cost-benefit analysis in any complex field with long-term growth prospects.
Get up to the security checkpoint at an airport, ticket in hand. When you're next in line to go through the various scanners, give a wave to the friendly TSA employee, put your shoes back on, grab your stuff, turn around, and leave. Explain that you decided you did not want to be searched today. You'll be free to leave, right?
For best results, look vaguely Arab. You will never fly again in the US, or out of the US for that matter.
The additional weight in the wheels makes the suspension less effective and means that the effect of going over a bump will be a lot harsher.
Yeah, I go over bumps all the time. They're on every street, particularly on highways, and in the city especially, it would be impossible to drive without strong suspension!
Where's my sarcasm tag?
2 percent in Germany might not be correct. Pirate party votes have been lost in at least one voting district and it only came out because the result said no votes were cast for them, while at least three voters report voting for them. The official preliminary results for Berlin do not show pirate party votes either, although this is probably just a glitch as 3,5% were reported for Berlin before.
Investigations are ongoing.
There certainly are some social groups where way more casual sex is going on than in others. Geekdom isn't one of them, in fact geeks are one of the most monogamous groups of people I know. Some of the music scenes tend to make much less of a fuss about casual sex, as do the hard political left, the art scene and the ecologically-bent.
These are just stereotypes of course, I don't know whether there is hard data on this. Would be interesting, though. I am continually amazed at how much sex average-looking people are getting out of being part of certain scenes.
I disagree. The whole ship could be remote controlled by FTL subspace communication, which is available in that universe. But even if you accept the presence of a large number of meat-bodied crew, they wouldn't need to be housed in such an inefficient fashion, let alone to cross those unneccessary distances on foot.
Of course this makes no sense because Star Trek wasn't made with realism in mind. But that is also true of your reasoning about how it is "natural" there would be corridors.
All in all, the corridor is popular simply because it is a single, cheap, permanent set that can easily be turned into any corridor going from anywhere to anywhere on the ship. And that's all.
You know what? The Soviet invaders claimed to bring them exactly that: stability. And progress. And what they claimed was the most successful political system in the world. We call that attempt contemptible and foolhardy because we aren't Soviets or socialists, but to an Afghan, it was very much the same thing the US are attempting now. And the Afghans have rejected non-Afghan ideas of "stability" for over two millenia.
Alexander the Great claimed (and probably honestly believed) to bring peace, progress and prosperity. The Afghans would have none of it. The mongols brought the protection of their divine Khan. The Afghans would have none of it. They drove away the Turk kingdoms, the Arab kaliphates and sultanates and everything that came at them out of India. They humiliated the Red Army, the largest and most feared in the world. Even China, which annexed large parts of central Asia, knew better than to fuck with the Afghans. Now the US are making their attempt, and Afghans are simply chalking one up the list.
Trust me, if they were into buying any "stability", they wouldn't have been fighting this hard for over two thousand years.
Success in school is highly correlated with success in many other areas using a host of different measures. Health, longevity, average income, you name it. Pretty much all of the success indicators are correlated to each other in some fashion. So even if they hadn't measured other forms of success, the current state of biography research would predict it to be there. But they did measure, and it was there.
Gaming journalism has long been dead by any traditional standard of "journalism". I worked in games nearly ten years ago, and even then, reviews were easily influenced by ad revenue, "exclusive" deals and such. Some magazines put on a show claiming they weren't like the others, but everyone knew that was a scam.
The game I worked on became "game of the month" in Germany's largest gaming magazine solely because we threw in a pile of merchandise they could use for a raffle. We didn't come up with the idea, the magazine did.
With this kind of conduct increasingly apparent even ten years ago, the only thing that surprises me about this is how this sham has been shambling on. But there are enough other branches of worthless journalism (i.e. men's and women's magazines which recycle the bulk of their material every two years), so go figure.
What tells you Wolfram isn't logging all searches and archiving them for three months? This would be enough to, say, make it dangerous to feature search results or screenshots in whatever Wolfram doesn't like, say in critical reviews. Unless there's some strict legislation/ruling that limits these perversions, I can easily see how this kind of argument might help intimidate people and blackmail them into license fees.
The Electric Sheep screen saver (awesome, BTW) auto-GPLs all images it produces. Has anyone thought about whether that is enforceable by law?
This is scary shit and requires attention.
True, but the most important benefit the first German archive got and that apparently helped convince the second is the captioning of images. They never had the staff to do that, so putting the stuff on the wiki is a smart move.
Those 250,000 are just a fraction of the 3 million that archive has - much of it on microfiche and hard to access. There is more of that coming.
In general web surfing I'd say the religion bashing posts outnumber the Atheist bashing posts by a ratio of about 10,000:1.
That should tell you something. By and large, people get bashed for pissing other people off, and best practice for pissing people off is interfering with their lives. Atheists, agnostics etc. do not have holy rules they believe they have to bugger mankind with, except agreeable basics such as the Golden Rule. They get bashed less because they deserve less bashing - according to those who bash.
Or do you prefer to believe there is some web-wide troll conspiracy going on that limits or directs anyone bashing impulses?
Now will you explain how bashing is an attack on the first amendment, rather than the exercise thereof?
Your mind mercifully fails to grasp the full meaning of this horrific new vista now opened by our misguided science. Clearly, that vile spawn of nuclear Chaos hinted at in the dread Necronomicon of the Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, and gracefully masked behind the name Azathoth, has been located. Worship it with frantic incantations at the Altars of Madness, puny mortals, to make sure you're eaten first and do not suffer for Aeons in the eldritch grasp of material insanity.
Phn'glui mglw'nafh Cthulhu Rlyeh wgahnagl fhtagn!
My little brother played through all of Monkey Island 1 like that, before he could read, having watched reading folks do it. That doesn't mean adults could do the same. Never underestimate the memory and tenacity of preschool kids.
Those results are outdated as it has been found the pigeons will immediately revert to normal behaviour once they are out of those tiny cages.
However, it has been found that primates occasionally react to thunderstorms as they do to rival members of their species (baring teeth etc.), which implies they personify forces of nature to a degree. Stewart E. Guthrie, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Fordham University, has written about that.
It says in the article they've gone down 9 stones in the last year, so they may likely shed the rest of the handicap in another. That's why Moore's law was mentioned in the summary...
While I agree to you, another consequence is that one might additionally want to join those who lobby for a reform of the voting system. The US two party system, and the comparatively little choice it leaves, is highly unusual among democracies and is really an artifact of the peculiarities of the voting process. Read up on it.
with Knol you can see the author's qualifications.
Sure, but I can't necessarily evaluate them. Say there's an article on "genetic expression" from a professor at an Indian College, which seems reasonable but is outside my area of knowledge. Any of the following could be true:
- his qualifications are bogus, he duped Google's identification process
- he teaches at a diploma mill or other disreputable institution
- he's an expert only on a field that seems related but isn't, say evolutionary studies
- even if he's a geneticist, he may present a fringe theory as factual for personal, religious, etc. reasons
- even if he's a geneticist and unbiased, he may be years behind the curve on current findings
On the Wiki, for all its faults, individual editors cover each other's weaknesses. Knol doesn't have that built-in. Authors do compete with each other, and will presumably react to competing articles by incorporating their ideas, but it will still be harder to evaluate the factual accuracy of the content. Especially because, so far at least, Knol articles have way less references than Wiki ones and rely more on the supposed authority of their authors.
This kind of thing would be way easier to pull off on Knol. There, if someone even smells the garbage, all s/he can do is give you a bad rating. This leaves the site online to mislead more people. And the confirmed identification thing is a hurdle, not a barrier, as most of us here should know. It just requires more effort.
Any system can be compromised given sufficient effort. You have invested quite a lot of effort, and probably in an obscure, little-defended place on the Wiki. I'll wager there are peer-reviewed journals that could be duped by this kind of dedicated effort. As you found out, Wikipedia eventually couldn't.