Those of us on the "whacky left" are far more interested in facts and reasonable discussion than most of the right wing, which relies on a steady diet of whacky stuff from Limbaugh, Savage and others of their ilk.
What amuses some of us is when right wingers call us liberals when we aren't liberals are are quite critical of liberals.
But hey, when the right wing thinks that anybody to the left of Bill O'Reilly is a liberal, it's pretty pointless to discuss facts with them. You can't even talk to them. Just avoid them and keep them on the other side of the fence.
This sounds like another high tech effort to solve a problem which really isn't a big problem. There are probably many large buildings where a system like this makes sense, but from personal experience I know that this tech sometimes causes more headaches than it solves.
In the late 1990s, I worked at the AAAS building in Washington, DC. AAAS is the publisher of Science magazine, which most of you have heard about. The AAAS headquarters building is this sleek 12-story high tech edifice designed by famous architect I.M. Pei. It was built it the mid-90s and it features a smart elevator system which requires that people select their floor and then the elevator bunches people up for rides.
The elevator system was pretty cool, but the "smart" system wasn't so smart. Over several years of operation it became obvious to the staff that the elevator system was contributing to a dysfunctional organizational culture. People in different departments on different weren't interacting in the same way they would if they had been randomly grouped together for "inefficient" elevator rides. There were two bunches of three floors which had an atrium with an open staircase, but the building also discouraged using the stairs between floors because of security reasons. We were always rescuing people who couldn't get out of the stairways.
The joke became that the only time the staff in the association mingled was at Christmas parties and at the annual meeting. The smart elevator system actually worked against people in the organization getting to know each other through casual and chance elevator encounters. The "smart" elevator did a good job of putting co-workers together for rides to the same floor, but it also worked against social cohesion in the organization.
"The crucial first step is to colonize the ocean surface with floating cities, quadrupling the living space available to the growing population of Earth. This allows us to reverse the degradation of the environment by shifting to the thermal energy of the deep ocean as our primary power source."
Yeah, right. I was into that space colony stuff back when I was a teenager, which was around 25 years ago. The guy pushing these floating ocean cities needs to read John Brunner's "Stand on Zanziber" and then about a thousand books and articles written in the past 35 years.
The problem isn't space--you can fit most of the world's population in a small area. The problem is resource distribution, which is compounded by things such as capitalism, imperialism, and all of those other modern evils. And if you treat your arable land like crap, then you'll have even less food to feed the population.
How about we take care of what we already have instead of spinning poor suckers off to Waterworld colonies or tin cans in space?
"I've yet to see an anarchist project actually work. Or an anarchist come to think of it."
There are plenty of anarchist projects that work. I've visited quite a number of them. Wikipedia could be described as an example of anarchism in action, in that it is a decentralized collaboration of relatively equal volunteers. The free software movement is another example of anarchism in action. Or the Indymedia network, now featuring over 150 websites and a smaller number of newspapers and physical locations.
"Erm, no it's not. Science definitely isn't based on collaborative scholarship. Science is based on expertise, experimental verification and continual testing both theoretical and empirical. Scientific progress is made by tearing down old paradigms with new ones."
Hmmm, having worked for Science magazine at one time I can see some of your points, but you are missing the fact that science relies on collaboration and cooperation between scientists. Look at any research paper and you will see numerous authors listed. These scientists don't work in isolation and they share their work through the scientific literature. There are a growing number of open archiving projects for scientists. These aren't as open as Wikipedia--they have a system of peer review--but the concept is similar.
"It's definitely not the case that 6 billion ignoramuses = 1 Albert Einstein."
Again, Albert Einstein didn't work in a vacuum, although many of his theories relate to behavior of physics in a vacuuum. Einstein built his theories on the work of other scientists, both dead and living. He worked with other scientists (cooperation) and shared his ideas publicly (collaboration which continues to this day).
"I think you've imbibed on the Wikipedia weed rather heavily."
I'm pretty skeptical about Wikipedia and I don't smoke.
"The basis on which Wikipedia is founded is indistinguishable from the political viewpoint of Anarchism, the idea that without leadership and expertise, a collection of people can be collectively wiser than any individual."
Wikipedia is modeled on anarchist ideas, which do work, as Wikipedia and many other Internet projects demonstrate. Collaborative scholarship does work, in fact I believe that science is based on the idea of collaborative scholarship.
Wikipedia has some serious problems which need to be fixed. Several comments in this thread describe those problems. Wikipedia needs to be more proactive in making changes that reflect the spirit of open collaboration. Yes, there are many articles and stubs that need help. This could be addressed by Wikipedia or some other group paying people to expand and improve those articles.
As a former Wikipedia editor I'd like to warn scientists about the culture of Wikipedia, which will quickly frustrate their efforts to contribute. If you as a scientist find a glaring problem that is extensive, then decided to delete it or change it totally, other Wikipedians will "revert" your changes as "vandalism." And the odds are high that they know nothing about the subject you've tried to change or edit. Once Wikipedia reigns in this behavior of its more rabid participants, then the project will become one where more people can contribute equally.
I like Christmas. But keep the "Christ" out of Christmas please! Christians are annoying and dumb already, but now they are going to ruin a fun holiday. If they persist in their little crusade to "save" Christmas, then perhaps the rest of us should abandon Christmas and reclaim the solstice.
Seeing how "IQ" is a score related to how well a person does on a *specific* test created by humans, are they really saying that this gene relates to intelligence in general? I find it hard to believe that a gene would code for something as specific as an IQ test, or, for that matter, a Slashdot poll.
That was an interesting post until you spouted that nonsense about being an anarcho-capitalists. Anarcho-capitalism is an oxymoron. Anarchism opposes the state and capitalism requires the state in order to survive.
Perhaps you are a Libertarian, but saying you are an "anarcho-capitalist" just make you look incredibly ignorant.
Abolish the FBI! A free society has no place for a secret government organization which spies on its citizens.
Re:The children will ask themselves
on
The Prodigy Puzzle
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Well some of us are smart enough to understand that IQ tests are only good for measuring somebody's ability to take a specific type of test. Throwing around your IQ on Slashdot is pretty funny. So you are good at taking tests. Some of us understand that intelligence is something more complicated than a test score.
Actually, a better description would be to say that the Internet is a functioning example of anarchism. Communism would run everything top-down. Anarchism is about organizing things through cooperation and decentralization. This is how the Internet more or less works. Anarchism in action.
I've been a Civ player for years. However, as an anarchist, I continue to be annoyed at how the game slanders anarchism and anarchist players. The game should use "chaos" to describe to the periods during government change. Anarchy and anarchism describe societies that rely on a decentralized system of freedom and economic cooperation. You would think that in an era of anarchistic free software and open source movements, that our games would be more savvy about political systems.
On an unrelated note, given the recent spate of nautral disasters, has anything been built into the new version which throws problems like disasters at a civilization? That would spice up gameplay. How about revolutions?
Spunk Library and Etext.org
on
IMDb Turns 15
·
· Score: 1
A bunch of anaarchists started up Spunk Press (www.spunk.org) in 1992, which was a simple FTP site available through Etext.org. It later was available via Gopher and then the web. Both Spunk and Etext are still running today, although Spunk hasn't been updated in years.
One of the first digital libraries and online political projects.
That's because Fox News doesn't have a policy of having news.
This was vividly illustrated after the Asian Tsunami of last year. CNN and MSNBC quickly had reporters reporting from the scene. Fox News, which doesn't have an international network of news bureaus, was reduced to pontificating from their American studios. If I remember correctly, Fox compensated for the sudden drop in their ratings by focusing on that missing woman in Aruba.
Yes, Wikipedia is vulnerable to vandalism. But from my experience, Wikipedia also has a growing problem with hardcore zealots who patrol pages and prevent factual information from being added by newer people or casual users. In other words, some of the anti-vandal users are actually vandalizing content because they are more interested in playing Wikipedia cops instead of being Wikipedia writers, editors, and cybrarians.
Get rid of the "watch this page" feature (except for admins). This feature gives the zealots the idea that they "own" certain pages.
I'm another librarian who has contributed to Wikipedia and been burned by the mess that is has descended into. I think that librarians should be more receptive to Wikipedia, but I think everybody should be more critical of the project. I really enjoy much of the content and use Wikipedia to look up information. It's really great because it is democractic, anarchistic, and open, which all contributes to a reference tool that is pretty useful.
At the same time, Wikipedia has some serious problems, most of which involve its zealous users, anonymity, and the lack of any system of accountability and authority. As much as I dislike using the word "authority"-- or advocating that a project needs more of it--Wikipedia could use a system whereby "experts" could freeze certain entries when they get to a fleshed out point. These volunteers would also restore some sanity to some entires, especially the ones where a few nuts with time on their hands persistently pass of misinformation as factual information. The other big problem is the zealous users. I've made factual changes to subjects I know something about--some of which involve substantial rewrites--only to have one of these zealous users change an entry back to the inaccurate version. If you try to correct these changes and do it too often, these zealots accuse you of violating some "rule" about "reverts." One thing that Wikipedia could do is to get rid of the "watch this page" feature, which would discourage zealots from thinking that they own a page. This change, and other changes, would discourage other zealots from becoming a new form of "expert class," which is ironic given that Wikipedia is supposed to be an open, democratic project.
Wikipedia has lots of great content and has lots of potential, but this librarian will not contribute until the social problems in the Wikipedia community are resolved.
Then why don't they go after libraries? Libraries have been sharing materials for centuries.
We are moving to a world where information will be free. The RIAA is fighting a losing battle and they've known that for years. The RIAA staff concluded several years back that they had lost the file-sharing war and had to do something to make their recording industry members think they were doing something. So they resorted to the last thing available to them: petty lawsuits.
Let's hope that this woman wins and the recording industry will grow up and figure better ways to make money than gouging consumers for bad products.
"The policy promises to burden taxpayers with new costs and to disrupt how state agencies interact with citizens, businesses and organizations."
What about all of the costs that some of us have to deal with to keep closed source Microsoft products on our computers? Having an open source standard available would allow people to use whatever programs they wanted. I'm more productive in OpenOffice than in MS Word, because the latter keeps insisting on doing things for me.
This list is a joke designed to get people to eyeball ads on Boston.com.
I like the new Battlestar Galactica, but there is now way that it is in the same leagues as Babylon 5 and the original Trek.
The top five should read: 1) Star Trek: Original Series 2) Babylon 5 3) Star Trek: The Next Generation 4) Farscape 5) The X Files
Deep Space Nine belong in the top 15--it really got better toward the end when they started using story arcs. If Buffy counts as SF, it should be moved up, along with Futurama. It's downright bizarre that The Prisoner is left off the list. It belongs in the top ten too.
People will always come up with different lists, but the folks who created this list have a shallow familiarity with science fiction.
Bulletin: The RIAA announced today a series of lawsuits targeting a technology that facilitates copyright piracy. The RIAA warned that this new technology called "libraries" allows people to share intellectual property with the only entrance requirement being an easy to procure "library card."
All seriousness aside, anything we hear about "laziness", "loss productivity" and time wastage is just hot air coming from management. In fact, in every workplace I've been part of, lower echelon workers often do more work than managers. Throw out the time that managers waste in meetings, what exactly do they contribute?
Workers waste two hours a day at work? Businesses look at this as lost money? Billions of dollars in lost profit? Look here, Mr. Boss Man, if you are going to whine about a few hours I spend taking a piss or making personal calls, how about if we talk about the uncompensated time that all of us "waste" getting to and from work? How about the personal time that workers "waste" on work-related activities like buying work clothes, ironing dress shirts, and kvetching about management's stupidity to the neighbors.
In the big picture, it looks like it all evens out to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Those of us on the "whacky left" are far more interested in facts and reasonable discussion than most of the right wing, which relies on a steady diet of whacky stuff from Limbaugh, Savage and others of their ilk.
What amuses some of us is when right wingers call us liberals when we aren't liberals are are quite critical of liberals.
But hey, when the right wing thinks that anybody to the left of Bill O'Reilly is a liberal, it's pretty pointless to discuss facts with them. You can't even talk to them. Just avoid them and keep them on the other side of the fence.
This sounds like another high tech effort to solve a problem which really isn't a big problem. There are probably many large buildings where a system like this makes sense, but from personal experience I know that this tech sometimes causes more headaches than it solves.
In the late 1990s, I worked at the AAAS building in Washington, DC. AAAS is the publisher of Science magazine, which most of you have heard about. The AAAS headquarters building is this sleek 12-story high tech edifice designed by famous architect I.M. Pei. It was built it the mid-90s and it features a smart elevator system which requires that people select their floor and then the elevator bunches people up for rides.
The elevator system was pretty cool, but the "smart" system wasn't so smart. Over several years of operation it became obvious to the staff that the elevator system was contributing to a dysfunctional organizational culture. People in different departments on different weren't interacting in the same way they would if they had been randomly grouped together for "inefficient" elevator rides. There were two bunches of three floors which had an atrium with an open staircase, but the building also discouraged using the stairs between floors because of security reasons. We were always rescuing people who couldn't get out of the stairways.
The joke became that the only time the staff in the association mingled was at Christmas parties and at the annual meeting. The smart elevator system actually worked against people in the organization getting to know each other through casual and chance elevator encounters. The "smart" elevator did a good job of putting co-workers together for rides to the same floor, but it also worked against social cohesion in the organization.
"The crucial first step is to colonize the ocean surface with floating cities, quadrupling the living space available to the growing population of Earth. This allows us to reverse the degradation of the environment by shifting to the thermal energy of the deep ocean as our primary power source."
Yeah, right. I was into that space colony stuff back when I was a teenager, which was around 25 years ago. The guy pushing these floating ocean cities needs to read John Brunner's "Stand on Zanziber" and then about a thousand books and articles written in the past 35 years.
The problem isn't space--you can fit most of the world's population in a small area. The problem is resource distribution, which is compounded by things such as capitalism, imperialism, and all of those other modern evils. And if you treat your arable land like crap, then you'll have even less food to feed the population.
How about we take care of what we already have instead of spinning poor suckers off to Waterworld colonies or tin cans in space?
"I've yet to see an anarchist project actually work. Or an anarchist come to think of it."
There are plenty of anarchist projects that work. I've visited quite a number of them. Wikipedia could be described as an example of anarchism in action, in that it is a decentralized collaboration of relatively equal volunteers. The free software movement is another example of anarchism in action. Or the Indymedia network, now featuring over 150 websites and a smaller number of newspapers and physical locations.
"Erm, no it's not. Science definitely isn't based on collaborative scholarship. Science is based on expertise, experimental verification and continual testing both theoretical and empirical. Scientific progress is made by tearing down old paradigms with new ones."
Hmmm, having worked for Science magazine at one time I can see some of your points, but you are missing the fact that science relies on collaboration and cooperation between scientists. Look at any research paper and you will see numerous authors listed. These scientists don't work in isolation and they share their work through the scientific literature. There are a growing number of open archiving projects for scientists. These aren't as open as Wikipedia--they have a system of peer review--but the concept is similar.
"It's definitely not the case that 6 billion ignoramuses = 1 Albert Einstein."
Again, Albert Einstein didn't work in a vacuum, although many of his theories relate to behavior of physics in a vacuuum. Einstein built his theories on the work of other scientists, both dead and living. He worked with other scientists (cooperation) and shared his ideas publicly (collaboration which continues to this day).
"I think you've imbibed on the Wikipedia weed rather heavily."
I'm pretty skeptical about Wikipedia and I don't smoke.
What's the difference between these buzzwords and what librarians have been doing for the last 100 years?
"The basis on which Wikipedia is founded is indistinguishable from the political viewpoint of Anarchism, the idea that without leadership and expertise, a collection of people can be collectively wiser than any individual."
Wikipedia is modeled on anarchist ideas, which do work, as Wikipedia and many other Internet projects demonstrate. Collaborative scholarship does work, in fact I believe that science is based on the idea of collaborative scholarship.
Wikipedia has some serious problems which need to be fixed. Several comments in this thread describe those problems. Wikipedia needs to be more proactive in making changes that reflect the spirit of open collaboration. Yes, there are many articles and stubs that need help. This could be addressed by Wikipedia or some other group paying people to expand and improve those articles.
The big recording labels had developed software to determine the quality of song.
Yes, it's called Payola Magic 2.0.
As a former Wikipedia editor I'd like to warn scientists about the culture of Wikipedia, which will quickly frustrate their efforts to contribute. If you as a scientist find a glaring problem that is extensive, then decided to delete it or change it totally, other Wikipedians will "revert" your changes as "vandalism." And the odds are high that they know nothing about the subject you've tried to change or edit. Once Wikipedia reigns in this behavior of its more rabid participants, then the project will become one where more people can contribute equally.
I like Christmas. But keep the "Christ" out of Christmas please! Christians are annoying and dumb already, but now they are going to ruin a fun holiday. If they persist in their little crusade to "save" Christmas, then perhaps the rest of us should abandon Christmas and reclaim the solstice.
Seeing how "IQ" is a score related to how well a person does on a *specific* test created by humans, are they really saying that this gene relates to intelligence in general? I find it hard to believe that a gene would code for something as specific as an IQ test, or, for that matter, a Slashdot poll.
That was an interesting post until you spouted that nonsense about being an anarcho-capitalists. Anarcho-capitalism is an oxymoron. Anarchism opposes the state and capitalism requires the state in order to survive.
Perhaps you are a Libertarian, but saying you are an "anarcho-capitalist" just make you look incredibly ignorant.
For the real scoop on anarchism, check out: http://www.infoshop.org/
The MySpace kids are laughing at your faux pas about anarchism.
Abolish the FBI! A free society has no place for a secret government organization which spies on its citizens.
Well some of us are smart enough to understand that IQ tests are only good for measuring somebody's ability to take a specific type of test. Throwing around your IQ on Slashdot is pretty funny. So you are good at taking tests. Some of us understand that intelligence is something more complicated than a test score.
"The internet is an extreme communist network."
Actually, a better description would be to say that the Internet is a functioning example of anarchism. Communism would run everything top-down. Anarchism is about organizing things through cooperation and decentralization. This is how the Internet more or less works. Anarchism in action.
I've been a Civ player for years. However, as an anarchist, I continue to be annoyed at how the game slanders anarchism and anarchist players. The game should use "chaos" to describe to the periods during government change. Anarchy and anarchism describe societies that rely on a decentralized system of freedom and economic cooperation. You would think that in an era of anarchistic free software and open source movements, that our games would be more savvy about political systems.
On an unrelated note, given the recent spate of nautral disasters, has anything been built into the new version which throws problems like disasters at a civilization? That would spice up gameplay. How about revolutions?
A bunch of anaarchists started up Spunk Press (www.spunk.org) in 1992, which was a simple FTP site available through Etext.org. It later was available via Gopher and then the web. Both Spunk and Etext are still running today, although Spunk hasn't been updated in years.
One of the first digital libraries and online political projects.
That's because Fox News doesn't have a policy of having news.
This was vividly illustrated after the Asian Tsunami of last year. CNN and MSNBC quickly had reporters reporting from the scene. Fox News, which doesn't have an international network of news bureaus, was reduced to pontificating from their American studios. If I remember correctly, Fox compensated for the sudden drop in their ratings by focusing on that missing woman in Aruba.
Were these guys Germans who drive scooters and brandish weasels?
I just want my rug back.
Yes, Wikipedia is vulnerable to vandalism. But from my experience, Wikipedia also has a growing problem with hardcore zealots who patrol pages and prevent factual information from being added by newer people or casual users. In other words, some of the anti-vandal users are actually vandalizing content because they are more interested in playing Wikipedia cops instead of being Wikipedia writers, editors, and cybrarians.
Get rid of the "watch this page" feature (except for admins). This feature gives the zealots the idea that they "own" certain pages.
I'm another librarian who has contributed to Wikipedia and been burned by the mess that is has descended into. I think that librarians should be more receptive to Wikipedia, but I think everybody should be more critical of the project. I really enjoy much of the content and use Wikipedia to look up information. It's really great because it is democractic, anarchistic, and open, which all contributes to a reference tool that is pretty useful.
At the same time, Wikipedia has some serious problems, most of which involve its zealous users, anonymity, and the lack of any system of accountability and authority. As much as I dislike using the word "authority"-- or advocating that a project needs more of it--Wikipedia could use a system whereby "experts" could freeze certain entries when they get to a fleshed out point. These volunteers would also restore some sanity to some entires, especially the ones where a few nuts with time on their hands persistently pass of misinformation as factual information. The other big problem is the zealous users. I've made factual changes to subjects I know something about--some of which involve substantial rewrites--only to have one of these zealous users change an entry back to the inaccurate version. If you try to correct these changes and do it too often, these zealots accuse you of violating some "rule" about "reverts." One thing that Wikipedia could do is to get rid of the "watch this page" feature, which would discourage zealots from thinking that they own a page. This change, and other changes, would discourage other zealots from becoming a new form of "expert class," which is ironic given that Wikipedia is supposed to be an open, democratic project.
Wikipedia has lots of great content and has lots of potential, but this librarian will not contribute until the social problems in the Wikipedia community are resolved.
Then why don't they go after libraries? Libraries have been sharing materials for centuries.
We are moving to a world where information will be free. The RIAA is fighting a losing battle and they've known that for years. The RIAA staff concluded several years back that they had lost the file-sharing war and had to do something to make their recording industry members think they were doing something. So they resorted to the last thing available to them: petty lawsuits.
Let's hope that this woman wins and the recording industry will grow up and figure better ways to make money than gouging consumers for bad products.
"The policy promises to burden taxpayers with new costs and to disrupt how state agencies interact with citizens, businesses and organizations."
What about all of the costs that some of us have to deal with to keep closed source Microsoft products on our computers? Having an open source standard available would allow people to use whatever programs they wanted. I'm more productive in OpenOffice than in MS Word, because the latter keeps insisting on doing things for me.
This list is a joke designed to get people to eyeball ads on Boston.com.
I like the new Battlestar Galactica, but there is now way that it is in the same leagues as Babylon 5 and the original Trek.
The top five should read:
1) Star Trek: Original Series
2) Babylon 5
3) Star Trek: The Next Generation
4) Farscape
5) The X Files
Deep Space Nine belong in the top 15--it really got better toward the end when they started using story arcs. If Buffy counts as SF, it should be moved up, along with Futurama. It's downright bizarre that The Prisoner is left off the list. It belongs in the top ten too.
People will always come up with different lists, but the folks who created this list have a shallow familiarity with science fiction.
Bulletin: The RIAA announced today a series of lawsuits targeting a technology that facilitates copyright piracy. The RIAA warned that this new technology called "libraries" allows people to share intellectual property with the only entrance requirement being an easy to procure "library card."
Hooray for lazy workers! Abolish work!
All seriousness aside, anything we hear about "laziness", "loss productivity" and time wastage is just hot air coming from management. In fact, in every workplace I've been part of, lower echelon workers often do more work than managers. Throw out the time that managers waste in meetings, what exactly do they contribute?
Workers waste two hours a day at work? Businesses look at this as lost money? Billions of dollars in lost profit? Look here, Mr. Boss Man, if you are going to whine about a few hours I spend taking a piss or making personal calls, how about if we talk about the uncompensated time that all of us "waste" getting to and from work? How about the personal time that workers "waste" on work-related activities like buying work clothes, ironing dress shirts, and kvetching about management's stupidity to the neighbors.
In the big picture, it looks like it all evens out to me.