Citizens don't get to vote on impeachment. Our congresscritters do. They scare us, too. You elected them. You can not elect them again, or you can shoot them, whatever works. Above all, career politicians are interested in job security (their own, not their voters'). So if a large part of the population openly turns against them, they will follow, because they fear for their re-election.
But - and that's the problem - most americans are too dumb and/or lazy to care.
Not that Europe would be that much better. A little, because in most places we have more than two parties that count for something, and thus more choice and all, but the same party we all hate for their lies and corruption will still get 20%, 30% of the votes again. Maybe they lost 10%, but so what, the top honchos are safe no matter.
The Bush administration has shit all over the Constitution and this country. They have committed treason. That's not what scares me (or any other onlooker from Europe or the rest of the world).
What scares us is that you shitheads let them get away with it. You almost impeached a president for lying about a blowjob, but you don't take down an administration that is actively dismantling everything your ancestors fought and died for.
The numbers of Linux were pulled out of my hat, but they've been in that area for many years no without significant change, so I assume they're fairly on target.
Everyone who intends to take anything with them is probably smart enough to make copies before telling you they're leaving. Likewise, any damage they might do can already be set up.
The only situation where being escorted off is when the company fires someone, or when he resigns surprisingly (including to himself) in a fit of anger. In any other situation, anything you're trying to protect yourself from has either already happened, or won't happen even if you just let him go peacefully.
Or maybe 95%+ computer users who use Windows Wake up, dude. Windos hasn't been 95%+ for several years now. If you focus on the consumer market (let's just assume most people don't watch NBC shows at work) then Apple alone has a market share of around 8-10% (depending on whose statistics you believe). Add 2-3% for Linux and about 1% for everything else.
It's the corporate monoculture that is driving up windos market share values quite a bit beyond what it really is.
That's what you get when you let people write the laws whose understanding of math ends at adding and substracting.
Obviously, a much better formula would be more appropriate, something as simple as a geometric series, but the lawyers wouldn't understand it (and, let's face it, neither would the general public).
There are times when doctors I know who were not on call were called at home because they couldnt reach the doctor on call. What would have happened if they couldn't reach the off doctor? They'd call another one? Like, you know, they already did?
but restricting cell service all over the place surely won't help. "all over the place" wasn't the issue. In some places where it's especially crowded and/or people expect a bit of silence (at least from other people, e.g. movie theatre) is what it's about.
So you are saying that we should allow and accept/ignore every way in which someone can be anti-social, just because there are other ways? Hey, let's ignore all safety rules, too - because there's always one more way to break in. Your bank doesn't really need a vault, because there's some other way to get the money.
Yes, it is and there have been scientific studies as to why. The short is that our brains are hard-wired to attempt to understand the conversation, and when we only get one side, it automatically works hard on constructing a possible second side. The more scientific term for that is "stress". Having to hear a cell phone conversation causes stress.
Plus, of course, lots and lots of cell phone (ab)users are not talking in a normal tone of voice, they are much louder than they'd be with the person standing next to them. You can compare that easily in any train where both cell phone and normal conversations are going on. Very often, you can clearly hear the cell phone conversation over the normal ones, even if it is further away.
The whole problem is that I can't exercise any right to be an aggressive, annoyed, inconsiderate, smashing-his-head-in idiot without facing some consequences.
I'll be happy to accept an alternative to legal cell phone jammers: Make it legal to hit anyone who's holding an obnoxious, loud cell phone conversation in a public place, or has an obnoxious, loud ring tone. Just once, but as hard as you want to. No tools or weapons allowed. I'd have a lot of fun, and the idiots would learn quickly (or die trying).
Imagine that you or your mom or your kid has a problem with their recent surgery and is desperately trying to reach their doctor who went to a movie, but some smug asshole with a jammer is blocking the call. Kinda puts it in a different light, huh? Yeah, I'd ask myself "what the fuck is up with the medical system that they don't have a doctor in, say, the hospital, you know?".
On-call duty is a seperate problem, and having a doctor on call isn't the same as having a doctor available. I've done on-call duty myself, and the understanding with the CEO has always been that "on call" does not mean "100% available". There can always be circumstances that make you out of reach and the call not able to come through. That's why for anything serious, where a company or a life might be at stake - you'd have more than one person on call duty.
Cell phone jammers punish the jackasses in theaters that we all love to hate, but they also punish the majority of users who are quiet and responsible. Correct, except that it's the other way around: The majority of cell phone users are obnoxious assholes.
I have a cell phone for work use only (and leave it at work). The very first thing I did was put it on silent/vibrate. I've never missed a call that I wouldn't have also missed if it had been on loud. And yet, I seem to be the only one in the company whose phone doesn't ring on loud.
Why? I don't know. But you and I, we are not the majority.
The Mac gaming market is growing considerably, with all those people switching to Macs. Yes, most of them can dual boot, but know what, we don't want to. I haven't booted windos for weeks, and I refuse to buy windos games. But I will gladly buy a Mac game, one that I can just start up without having to boot and all that.
Same discussion as we've had with playing Linux games vs. dual-booting windos, with one crucial difference: Mac people are people who put their money where their mouth is. The very active shareware community on the Mac is testimony to that.
And for niche games, it is even more important to cover as much of the probable target audience as possible.
Most often seen reply: "But I need it for emergency... I'm a Sysadmin/Nurse/Surgeon/Firefighter".
Yes, you are right. Yes, your use is justified.
And you make up 0.01% of what we're talking about here.
I commute to work just 30 minutes each way. At least once a week there's some idiot on the train with a cellphone conversation so loud and/or obnoxious that I'd like to hit him with something hard. At least once a day there's someone with a ringtone that was certainly carefully engineered after extensive studies as to what the most nerve-wrecking sound imagineable is and at what precise volume (maximum) you have to play it to cause inner-ear bleedings. At least twice as often there are less irritating but still obnoxious and anti-social cases that scream "I'd piss in your front yard and shit in your doorway, too".
And as far as I get the contents, it has not once not ever been something important that couldn't have waited until the asshole got home.
If cell phone jammers were legal, I'd buy one tomorrow.
I have seen many, many "delete" votes with a reason given as "I've never heard about this, and neither has anyone I asked."
I vote for deleting the accounts of anyone who uses that argument more than three times. Some obscure topics just are like that, you know? Sometimes, your ignorance is obvious (an article about some french town that no americans ever heard about - doesn't mean that it's not famous in France, it just could mean americans are ignorant) - however, more often ignorance is not obvious. You may know a lot about computing, but are you sure you've heard about every obscure theorem from some non-mainstream corner of computer science?
And yet, it appears that the "I've never heard about it" argument is a valid reason for deletion. Sorry, fools, you forgot that you're working on an encyclopedia. You know, the book where you look up stuff that you don't know about? This is exactly the kind of stuff that needs to be there. I don't look up "Google" in Wikipedia. I do look up Trygve Reenskaug.
Good point. In this case I'm not sure that the correct solution is a delete at all, but rather that the page shouldn't have been created. A minimum peer-review process, for example, might solve the problem before it gets one.
Deleting crap is a hack, the real solution is to not allow crap into the system.
Really, presentation software is a scourge, so what does it really matter which one is better?
The problem is the usual MS phenomenon - you make something apparently easy, so everyone does it, and everyone does it horribly.
Business letters used to be a lot better in both quality and looks when they were done by secretaries. Today, too many CEOs write them themselves, ignoring that a) their time is too expensive for that and b) they aren't the CEO because they are good at writing letters.
Some problem with most windos servers and networks - they're owned and broken because you can be hired as a "windos admin" with zero real-life experience at age 20. And many corporate networks are run by people you wouldn't trust to drive a bus.
And again, same problem with Powerpoint. Because it's so "easy", people who have no clue about how to build a good presentation are doing so. And, not surprisingly, what they build sucks. I've seen business/sales presentations done by high honchos that I would've hit any of my people over the head for.
So for 99% of the people who use powerpoint, it really doesn't matter. No matter what tool you give them, they'll create crappy presentations with it.
Not all metaphors are useful. As I pointed out in another comment, all those "but it dillutes searches", etc. arguments are bullshit and can easily be solved without deleting potentially useful content.
And the problem with article deletion that I have encountered time and time again is that nobody who commented on an AFD appeared to have the slightest idea of the topic in question, if it was a complicated one. I don't want to know how much good and valuable content has been deleted simply because nobody with a clue was there "in time" to weigh in on the deletion discussion.
And likewise, your comparison with high school writing is deeply flawed. When you write a story, a book, an article then yes, you trim it and focus on the essentials, etc. - but Wikipedia isn't a book. The rules of writing apply to its individual articles, but not the it as a whole, because it's an entity of a higher order of abstraction. Don't they teach General Semantics anymore?
Totally. Speedy deletion is massively abused. The only (and I mean only) case where it should ever be used is if a deleted article is restored without agreement. (e.g. AfD says delete, article is deleted, someone puts it up again five minutes later. That's a speedy delete, because the discussion about it has already happened).
That's the whole point. If half of the effort that some people put into finding articles to mark for deletion, deliberating and discussing deletion, checking, verifying and then finally deleting the article - if half of the effort people put into destroying content were instead put into creating or improving content, Wikipedia would be so much better.
And the second problem is also very much true. I've seen articles marked for deletion where the decision was made (either way) based on 3-4 "votes". Hello? You are deciding to keep or delete an article for millions of visitors based on a random sample of 0.00001% of them? That is not democracy. Democracy is having everyone vote (or at least have the opportunity). Democracy is not running your country (or website) by the opinion of the first three people you meet on the train that morning.
I really couldn't agree more. The notability rule is stupid, pointless and overzealously applied. It needs massive toning down.
For example, in a world that's going more and more online, the requirement for a website, online game, etc. to be "notable" is that it must be mentioned in at least one offline source (magazine, newspaper, etc).
Now, Wikipedia might not have noticed, but magazines and newspapers are going online. There are already online editions of many noteable, respected magazines that never make (in whole) it to print, where the online edition contains more content.
Plus, of course, the simple fact that it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever to delete content from Wikipedia. What, really, is the point? All the arguments I've heard so far about search relevance, etc. are easily addressed (mark a page as "minor interest" and make the search reduce the relevance of such pages so they show late in the search, for example).
I, personally, think it's fear of some wiki admins who can't cope with the sheer scope that "their" project has reached, most importantly with the fact that it isn't "their" project anymore, it's ours (as in "all of us").
You are doing the usual mistake of judging from your perspective.
Apple is the one company on the market who I trust to actually do user tests. I'm also fairly sure they found out that Joe Average clicks on "block incoming connections" and still expects stuff to work. Which is why they made it behave that way, put the info into the help file for those of us who RTFM and give you commandline access and ipfw if you really know what you're doing.
If anyone has a good picture of that ad, I'll send you ten bucks (PayPal, or buy something from Amazon or whatever). I'm serious. That's one hell of an image.
One of the primary criteria of terrorist success is to "succeed in spreading fear into the population". By that criteria the terrorists have clearly won against our governments on every single count. Wrong.
By that criteria, the government is the terrorists.
It most definitely isn't working against them. Rather the opposite.
Slashdot Mirror
But - and that's the problem - most americans are too dumb and/or lazy to care.
Not that Europe would be that much better. A little, because in most places we have more than two parties that count for something, and thus more choice and all, but the same party we all hate for their lies and corruption will still get 20%, 30% of the votes again. Maybe they lost 10%, but so what, the top honchos are safe no matter.
What scares us is that you shitheads let them get away with it. You almost impeached a president for lying about a blowjob, but you don't take down an administration that is actively dismantling everything your ancestors fought and died for.
The numbers of Linux were pulled out of my hat, but they've been in that area for many years no without significant change, so I assume they're fairly on target.
No, it isn't.
Everyone who intends to take anything with them is probably smart enough to make copies before telling you they're leaving. Likewise, any damage they might do can already be set up.
The only situation where being escorted off is when the company fires someone, or when he resigns surprisingly (including to himself) in a fit of anger. In any other situation, anything you're trying to protect yourself from has either already happened, or won't happen even if you just let him go peacefully.
It's the corporate monoculture that is driving up windos market share values quite a bit beyond what it really is.
That's what you get when you let people write the laws whose understanding of math ends at adding and substracting.
Obviously, a much better formula would be more appropriate, something as simple as a geometric series, but the lawyers wouldn't understand it (and, let's face it, neither would the general public).
So you are saying that we should allow and accept/ignore every way in which someone can be anti-social, just because there are other ways? Hey, let's ignore all safety rules, too - because there's always one more way to break in. Your bank doesn't really need a vault, because there's some other way to get the money.
Sorry, your argument fails the "silly" test.
Yes, it is and there have been scientific studies as to why. The short is that our brains are hard-wired to attempt to understand the conversation, and when we only get one side, it automatically works hard on constructing a possible second side. The more scientific term for that is "stress". Having to hear a cell phone conversation causes stress.
Plus, of course, lots and lots of cell phone (ab)users are not talking in a normal tone of voice, they are much louder than they'd be with the person standing next to them. You can compare that easily in any train where both cell phone and normal conversations are going on. Very often, you can clearly hear the cell phone conversation over the normal ones, even if it is further away.
The whole problem is that I can't exercise any right to be an aggressive, annoyed, inconsiderate, smashing-his-head-in idiot without facing some consequences.
I'll be happy to accept an alternative to legal cell phone jammers: Make it legal to hit anyone who's holding an obnoxious, loud cell phone conversation in a public place, or has an obnoxious, loud ring tone. Just once, but as hard as you want to. No tools or weapons allowed. I'd have a lot of fun, and the idiots would learn quickly (or die trying).
On-call duty is a seperate problem, and having a doctor on call isn't the same as having a doctor available. I've done on-call duty myself, and the understanding with the CEO has always been that "on call" does not mean "100% available". There can always be circumstances that make you out of reach and the call not able to come through. That's why for anything serious, where a company or a life might be at stake - you'd have more than one person on call duty.
I have a cell phone for work use only (and leave it at work). The very first thing I did was put it on silent/vibrate. I've never missed a call that I wouldn't have also missed if it had been on loud. And yet, I seem to be the only one in the company whose phone doesn't ring on loud.
Why? I don't know. But you and I, we are not the majority.
You are majorly deluding yourself.
The Mac gaming market is growing considerably, with all those people switching to Macs. Yes, most of them can dual boot, but know what, we don't want to. I haven't booted windos for weeks, and I refuse to buy windos games. But I will gladly buy a Mac game, one that I can just start up without having to boot and all that.
Same discussion as we've had with playing Linux games vs. dual-booting windos, with one crucial difference: Mac people are people who put their money where their mouth is. The very active shareware community on the Mac is testimony to that.
And for niche games, it is even more important to cover as much of the probable target audience as possible.
Most often seen reply: "But I need it for emergency... I'm a Sysadmin/Nurse/Surgeon/Firefighter".
Yes, you are right.
Yes, your use is justified.
And you make up 0.01% of what we're talking about here.
I commute to work just 30 minutes each way. At least once a week there's some idiot on the train with a cellphone conversation so loud and/or obnoxious that I'd like to hit him with something hard. At least once a day there's someone with a ringtone that was certainly carefully engineered after extensive studies as to what the most nerve-wrecking sound imagineable is and at what precise volume (maximum) you have to play it to cause inner-ear bleedings. At least twice as often there are less irritating but still obnoxious and anti-social cases that scream "I'd piss in your front yard and shit in your doorway, too".
And as far as I get the contents, it has not once not ever been something important that couldn't have waited until the asshole got home.
If cell phone jammers were legal, I'd buy one tomorrow.
One more on this:
I have seen many, many "delete" votes with a reason given as "I've never heard about this, and neither has anyone I asked."
I vote for deleting the accounts of anyone who uses that argument more than three times. Some obscure topics just are like that, you know? Sometimes, your ignorance is obvious (an article about some french town that no americans ever heard about - doesn't mean that it's not famous in France, it just could mean americans are ignorant) - however, more often ignorance is not obvious. You may know a lot about computing, but are you sure you've heard about every obscure theorem from some non-mainstream corner of computer science?
And yet, it appears that the "I've never heard about it" argument is a valid reason for deletion. Sorry, fools, you forgot that you're working on an encyclopedia. You know, the book where you look up stuff that you don't know about? This is exactly the kind of stuff that needs to be there. I don't look up "Google" in Wikipedia. I do look up Trygve Reenskaug.
Good point. In this case I'm not sure that the correct solution is a delete at all, but rather that the page shouldn't have been created. A minimum peer-review process, for example, might solve the problem before it gets one.
Deleting crap is a hack, the real solution is to not allow crap into the system.
Really, presentation software is a scourge, so what does it really matter which one is better?
The problem is the usual MS phenomenon - you make something apparently easy, so everyone does it, and everyone does it horribly.
Business letters used to be a lot better in both quality and looks when they were done by secretaries. Today, too many CEOs write them themselves, ignoring that a) their time is too expensive for that and b) they aren't the CEO because they are good at writing letters.
Some problem with most windos servers and networks - they're owned and broken because you can be hired as a "windos admin" with zero real-life experience at age 20. And many corporate networks are run by people you wouldn't trust to drive a bus.
And again, same problem with Powerpoint. Because it's so "easy", people who have no clue about how to build a good presentation are doing so. And, not surprisingly, what they build sucks. I've seen business/sales presentations done by high honchos that I would've hit any of my people over the head for.
So for 99% of the people who use powerpoint, it really doesn't matter. No matter what tool you give them, they'll create crappy presentations with it.
And the other 1% don't use powerpoint anyways.
Not all metaphors are useful. As I pointed out in another comment, all those "but it dillutes searches", etc. arguments are bullshit and can easily be solved without deleting potentially useful content.
And the problem with article deletion that I have encountered time and time again is that nobody who commented on an AFD appeared to have the slightest idea of the topic in question, if it was a complicated one. I don't want to know how much good and valuable content has been deleted simply because nobody with a clue was there "in time" to weigh in on the deletion discussion.
And likewise, your comparison with high school writing is deeply flawed. When you write a story, a book, an article then yes, you trim it and focus on the essentials, etc. - but Wikipedia isn't a book. The rules of writing apply to its individual articles, but not the it as a whole, because it's an entity of a higher order of abstraction. Don't they teach General Semantics anymore?
Totally. Speedy deletion is massively abused. The only (and I mean only) case where it should ever be used is if a deleted article is restored without agreement. (e.g. AfD says delete, article is deleted, someone puts it up again five minutes later. That's a speedy delete, because the discussion about it has already happened).
Mod parent to +10
That's the whole point. If half of the effort that some people put into finding articles to mark for deletion, deliberating and discussing deletion, checking, verifying and then finally deleting the article - if half of the effort people put into destroying content were instead put into creating or improving content, Wikipedia would be so much better.
And the second problem is also very much true. I've seen articles marked for deletion where the decision was made (either way) based on 3-4 "votes". Hello? You are deciding to keep or delete an article for millions of visitors based on a random sample of 0.00001% of them? That is not democracy. Democracy is having everyone vote (or at least have the opportunity). Democracy is not running your country (or website) by the opinion of the first three people you meet on the train that morning.
I really couldn't agree more. The notability rule is stupid, pointless and overzealously applied. It needs massive toning down.
For example, in a world that's going more and more online, the requirement for a website, online game, etc. to be "notable" is that it must be mentioned in at least one offline source (magazine, newspaper, etc).
Now, Wikipedia might not have noticed, but magazines and newspapers are going online. There are already online editions of many noteable, respected magazines that never make (in whole) it to print, where the online edition contains more content.
Plus, of course, the simple fact that it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever to delete content from Wikipedia. What, really, is the point? All the arguments I've heard so far about search relevance, etc. are easily addressed (mark a page as "minor interest" and make the search reduce the relevance of such pages so they show late in the search, for example).
I, personally, think it's fear of some wiki admins who can't cope with the sheer scope that "their" project has reached, most importantly with the fact that it isn't "their" project anymore, it's ours (as in "all of us").
You are doing the usual mistake of judging from your perspective.
Apple is the one company on the market who I trust to actually do user tests. I'm also fairly sure they found out that Joe Average clicks on "block incoming connections" and still expects stuff to work. Which is why they made it behave that way, put the info into the help file for those of us who RTFM and give you commandline access and ipfw if you really know what you're doing.
You forgot the signature: "I am not a troll - I just play one on /." :-)
If anyone has a good picture of that ad, I'll send you ten bucks (PayPal, or buy something from Amazon or whatever). I'm serious. That's one hell of an image.
By that criteria, the government is the terrorists.
It most definitely isn't working against them. Rather the opposite.