Re:Buying ARM for a leg?
on
Apple To Buy ARM?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Apple has long been more evil than Microsoft, just less successful at it. Microsoft, after all, just controls the operating system; Apple controls (or wants to control) everything from the operating system and the hardware to what kind of software you run and data you are allowed to access.
The real tragedy here would be having ARM -- whose creativity and intrepid exploration of any and all markets are legendary -- come under the control of a company with a vision as narrow as Apple's. Instead of driving the development of thousands of new products, as ARM effectively does now, it would be channeled into solely serving Apple's tiny handful of fashionable, locked-down toys while creating artificial scarcity for countless companies who are doing something more than peddling the digital equivalent of designer handbags.
They have decided to not appeal to fringe geeks and nerds but to instead appeal to the affluent mass market in order to meet their moral responsibility. That moral mass market would prefer if "porn" was not readily available on their consumer electronic devices.
I hate to hit you with this, but the overwhelming majority of the population, both male and female, consume porn to one degree or another, and it is the "moral" minority who consume it more voraciously than normal, healthy people who don't hold fucked up bronze age beliefs that sex is bad. (Amusingly, online porn purchases slightly decrease on Sundays.) The market Apple is appealing to isn't moral, it's just hypocritical, not unlike the stridently anti-gay politicians who frequently turn out to be gay themselves.
The majority may claim to be above porn, but this is the same majority who also claim to be above masturbation, contrary to every reputable study ever conducted, which finds that non-masturbators are a tiny minority, especially among men.
_YOU_ may not like that but Apple's shareholders, to whom Apple answers, likes it quite a bit.
Sounds like you like it. I rather expect that most of Apple's shareholders will like anything that increases their profits. If that happens to be Steve Jobs' messiah complex, so be it. If, on the other hand, they thought there was a good way to monetize the iPhone's use to tap into the multi-billion-dollar porn market without hurting existing iPhone sales, then it would be Apple's moral responsibility -- your words, not mine -- to devote considerable resources to making sure that fisting videos were available with the tap of a finger, now wouldn't it?
But that's how morality goes, isn't it? Any time you hear someone talking loudly about it, you can bet you're dealing with a hypocrite.
My favorite is the guy using a stack of 9 VA rack machines as an end table.
The best part is that if you look past the stack of machines he's using as an end table, you'll see the original wooden end table shoved ignominiously into the corner.
...is to increase the number of targets by several orders of magnitude. No, really, I'm quite serious. If everyone posts or publishes a cartoon simultaneously mocking Mohammed, Jesus, and Moses, there will be no practical way for religious extremists to respond. (Yes, I know there are other religions, but it's the big three monotheist camps that are making most of the trouble.)
Why stop there? Let's require all financial software to be written in Python. It won't prevent another economic collapse, but it'll make damn sure that the next collapse happens much more slowly.
An attacker could theoretically just jam the frequencies that the recorder/transmitter uses, and then attack you, steal or destroy the device, and no one would be the wiser.
Seriously - at this point, just learning the kernel would be akin to a 6- or 8-year PhD project [in something like a Department of Archaeology, studying ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics].
This is totally off-topic, but Egyptian hieroglyphs are actually substantially easier to learn than modern written Japanese or Chinese, at least for Middle Egyptian, which is the version of the language one usually starts with. (Late Egyptian in many ways devolved into a deliberately complex secret code for the priesthood, but still involves knowing fewer signs than the average Japanese office clerk.)
I only mention this in case you're actually interested in learning ancient Egyptian -- I was put off by its complexity for many years until I started to tackle written Japanese and realized that I was attempting something much more difficult than Egyptian, at which point I attacked Egyptian with fresh vigor. That said, fluency in Japanese will get you further in a Shibuya nightclub than fluency in Middle Egyptian will get you anywhere.;)
Could it be that the Linux Kernel isn't state of the art anymore? Linux is boring... it's bloated... it's no wonder that young blood aren't interested in developing it, they want to do something really cool and cutting edge to light their careers on fire!
I can't speak for the "young blood", being about to turn 40 in a few months and well past the age when I thought "lighting my career on fire" was a worthwhile goal, but I'd certainly agree that the kernel is boring. Part of it is definitely the emphasis on business applications; my interest in free software was always driven by what I wanted to do with it on my own time for my own edification, not to pursue wealth for myself or my employer. An even greater part of it, though, is that operating systems just aren't that damn interesting by themselves as long as they do what they're supposed to do, which is to provide a platform for actual applications. No one owns a computer to run an operating system any more than anyone owns a car to use tires. The OS is incidental to what users (and most programmers) want to use a computer for.
To be perfectly frank -- and to expand the scope beyond the operating system -- the thing that I have found increasingly unattractive about FOSS in general is that it all too often becomes an exercise in cliquishness and faddishness to the exclusion of actually serving users, to say nothing of just plain rudeness. The lkml is notorious for its rudeness (though it's a garden of civility compared to its OpenBSD counterpart). Any number of application projects are focused more on being proving grounds for a particular design methodology and/or programming language of the week than on delivering a good application to end users -- witness the gazillion projects whose name prominently features its implementation language, a detail that only the developers or would-be developers could possibly care about.
The end result is that FOSS projects all too often go out of their way to diminish their value and degree of interest to anyone outside their current circle of developers. Add to this the other common flaws of FOSS -- lack of decent (or any) documentation and poor or eccentric user interfaces -- and it's no wonder that, despite considerable strides over the last twenty years, most FOSS projects, Linux included, remain niche products at best.
Scratching an itch is fine, but when that itch is so narrowly defined as to be your itch and no one else's, no one else can be blamed for not giving a hoot. Follow that with an insistence that it would scratch someone else's itch if only they were hip and smart enough to itch like you, and you have a perfect methodology for achieving irrelevance.
Depends on the cave. Of course, if you're going to build a dam a scant three miles away and vastly raise the water table, well, it's probably going to be a concern with this cave.
I was thinking about this issue the other day in connection with transhumanism. Let's say that, around the same time that sending interstellar signals becomes feasible, intelligent species also develop AI and the ability to transition from biological minds to solid-state minds. Odds are that when it is possible, it will be broadly adopted: despite uneasiness about the idea, everyone is eventually confronted by the choice of dying of old age or having their mind uploaded into a machine. In a relatively short time, you have a machine culture.
You also have one probably unanticipated side-effect: machine "brains" would almost certainly operate several orders of magnitude faster than biological brains. Suddenly, the lag time for signals between star systems goes up -- subjectively -- by a factor of ten thousand, perhaps even a million or more. Actual travel between star systems? Forget it. The aliens could, of course, slow down their clocks and experience time at something more like their original biological rate, but they probably wouldn't, as it would amount to vastly shortening their lives. The change in temporal perspective changes everything.
That just might be because there's no alternative, not because people wouldn't willingly switch if there was.
Come up with something new or work with the crowd.
I've got a better idea. How about everyone uses what works best for them? Not that OS/2 is likely to be what works best for me, but what "the crowd" is doing doesn't concern me much on my own time, and at work, I have to use what they give me, whatever that happens to be.
Besides, the article is actually about NULL pointer dereferences within the kernel, where niceties like language-based exception handling mechanisms are often hard to come by. So the language you write your application code is immaterial.
Exception handling is immaterial anyway. It's not like you need language support for exceptions to check the value of an untrusted pointer against the NULL constant.
And yes, it's nice to have your tools do that for you, but odds are that if you're that sloppy to begin with, it won't take you long to introduce a vulnerability that no language constraint or compiler/interpreter toolchain can catch.
I wish I could rig both your cars with motion sensors and sensors that auto-ticket you at every single rolling right you make.
You wouldn't make a cent from me. I don't do rolling rights, in large part because doing so would give me less time to check for pedestrians about to cross the street on the adjacent corner. It does have a great deal to do with safety, just not very much to do with car-to-car collisions (though motorcycles are another matter). But your statement is a perfect illustration of the danger of deciding which traffic laws you will obey and which you won't: you might not actually know what the fuck you're talking about.
Red light cameras and similar speeding sensors don't have anything to do with safety.
Running red lights has a definite, measurable effect on the rate of collisions in intersections, though whether red light cameras reduce the frequency of collisions is a separate question. And higher speeds reduce reaction time and increase impact energy, so again, you're full of it.
Again, people who pick and choose which safety regulations they intend to obey often lack the knowledge and maturity of judgment to make good choices. If they only eliminated themselves from the gene pool, that would be okay, but they all too often remove sensible bystanders from the gene pool at the same time.
"Most things work fine" people tell me, which is true. The trouble is that the chances of you owning something that doesn't work is relatively high. (There's probably something from my statistics course that explains why that is, but I have so far managed to suppress that memory.)
It's simple probability. If (let's say) 95% of all current devices are supported under Linux, that means there's a 5% chance -- 1 in 20 -- that any randomly selected device won't work under Linux. Now, how many devices -- i.e., components requiring drivers -- are there in or attached to your computer? Odds are that it's at least twenty, and on many plain vanilla boxes, probably more. Linux works amazingly well considering the odds. Most of the problems I've had have been with graphics cards whose manufacturers are disinclined to care about their non-Windows-using customers, which is a far cry from the situation in the late 90's when hardware support for Linux was much worse.
That said, it's been a very long time since I had any hardware problems with Windows other than getting post-XP hardware to work with XP, as all or nearly all hardware manufacturers have a very strong incentive to make sure their hardware plays nice with the overwhelming majority of machines. But getting back to the original post, if there was a situation where I expected problems with hardware under Windows (or anything else), it would be with unsupported engineering samples. And in such a case, I wouldn't shout and wave my arms around and generalize from the worst-case scenario that the sky was falling.
But in this case you are just using the legal system in the worst possible way: To screw someone out of a legitimate outcome.
New to the legal system, are we?
But yeah, he should pay the ticket. It's not like he got snared by a rigged light, as happens to a lot of people. He made an illegal right turn. End of story.
Despite the self-limiting nature of the technique they describe, whether it ends up working in production or not, I guarantee you that, in a matter of days, someone is going to be flogging a script around Hollywood studios about a runaway virus destroying all the water on earth and the team of hot, young scientists who save the day at the last possible minute by using something compounded from randomly selected Greek and Latin roots.
Already the site has better coverage of some areas than Wikipedia, leading to the question of whether more such small Wikis should be created for certain verticals.
Wikipedia aims to be a general encyclopedia, larger and more thorough than any print encyclopedia to be sure, but it's still a general reference. Of course more specific references should be created. It's not like this is a new idea: search Amazon for books titled Encyclopedia of... and you'll find thousands, many (though probably not most) of which are serious scholarly works.
Excepting mathematics and the sciences, which are arguably applicable to the whole of human experience in one way or another, practically every other area of human knowledge has a highly specialized audience to one degree or another. Every last possible detail about pre-1947 aircraft engines, for example, might be of great interest to aerospace historians and engineers, but it's probably not of much interest to anyone else. Or an encyclopedic reference to every last town in Ohio might be hugely interesting to Ohioans and genealogists, and at least occasionally significant to broader research, but again, of limited interest to the general public. Unless Wikipedia (and its donors) are prepared to maintain a comprehensive reference to the entire body of human knowledge, specialist references are unavoidable.
Finally, the quality of the articles in those specialist references might be higher than in Wikipedia. Every field has sloppy researchers and trolls, of course, but a relatively specialized field probably has a smaller proportion of both than would be attracted to a general reference, within certain limits, e.g., one could reasonably expect a wiki devoted to quaternions to have better writers and fewer trolls than AbortionPedia.
I don't know how people get the idea that the web should be a safe place where you can click on any link and go to any site and never have the chance to be offended.
...which is, in the end, why things like the proposed.xxx TLD are fundamentally flawed. What the censors consider objectionable is a constantly moving target: once they've successfully banned or contained x, then they'll go after x-1. A better alternative would be a.beige TLD, where the censors can put content they consider acceptable, and people who don't care for freedom of speech can limit their browsers to that domain.
And to take this post squarely back on topic, yes, Larry Sanger is a vindictive little asshole, selfishly attacking what is, for all its flaws, one of our most valuable public resources because no one gives a wet crap about his pathetic little walled garden. I frankly wouldn't be surprised if he posted the content he subsequently reported to the FBI, and I certainly hope that WP's admins look very closely at the history of the articles involved.
Actually, that makes me wonder if Verizon would be liable for false advertising based on that...
When was the last time you heard of a major company taking a hit in court for false advertising -- other than when they're being sued by another major company? If the laws against false and misleading advertising were actually enforced, there would scarcely be any advertising left. It's practically a dead letter at this point, in a class with the laws still on the books in some major cities requiring watering trough for horses every so many blocks.
I foresee people getting rear-ended because the idiot behind them was tailgating to get a better signal off their unsecured AP. It'll give "wardriving" a whole new meaning.
Stuff like this erodes my faith in humanity. No, not that companies make these little placement deals. It's that these little placement deals actually matter because the overwhelming majority of users are too dumb or apathetic to figure out that the search engines and their ordering are easily configurable -- using a handy, point-and-drool GUI interface, no less.
I can't say I didn't see it coming. Around 1996, when I had AOL users complaining that the articles on my website were "cut off at the bottom of the screen", and I had to explain scrollbars to them, I should have found another career, preferably one that involved frequent use of explosives and heavy earthmoving equipment.
For two, why is money such a big deal? If you love what you do and can provide for yourself with it, why whore yourselves out? It's not about being filthy rich, but doing what you love, right?
We live in a culture where profit is the ultimate good, transcending all other considerations, including individual and even species survival. For someone to refuse profit -- or, as is more likely in this case, to defer profit now in hopes of greater profits later -- is literally beyond comprehension for most people. And then they get angry because they're envious of all that money. To be fair, people spend their entire lives bombarded daily with the message that wealth and possessions are the only things that matter, so it's not surprising they end up with deeply conditioned tunnel vision.
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Apple has long been more evil than Microsoft, just less successful at it. Microsoft, after all, just controls the operating system; Apple controls (or wants to control) everything from the operating system and the hardware to what kind of software you run and data you are allowed to access.
The real tragedy here would be having ARM -- whose creativity and intrepid exploration of any and all markets are legendary -- come under the control of a company with a vision as narrow as Apple's. Instead of driving the development of thousands of new products, as ARM effectively does now, it would be channeled into solely serving Apple's tiny handful of fashionable, locked-down toys while creating artificial scarcity for countless companies who are doing something more than peddling the digital equivalent of designer handbags.
They have decided to not appeal to fringe geeks and nerds but to instead appeal to the affluent mass market in order to meet their moral responsibility. That moral mass market would prefer if "porn" was not readily available on their consumer electronic devices.
I hate to hit you with this, but the overwhelming majority of the population, both male and female, consume porn to one degree or another, and it is the "moral" minority who consume it more voraciously than normal, healthy people who don't hold fucked up bronze age beliefs that sex is bad. (Amusingly, online porn purchases slightly decrease on Sundays.) The market Apple is appealing to isn't moral, it's just hypocritical, not unlike the stridently anti-gay politicians who frequently turn out to be gay themselves.
The majority may claim to be above porn, but this is the same majority who also claim to be above masturbation, contrary to every reputable study ever conducted, which finds that non-masturbators are a tiny minority, especially among men.
_YOU_ may not like that but Apple's shareholders, to whom Apple answers, likes it quite a bit.
Sounds like you like it. I rather expect that most of Apple's shareholders will like anything that increases their profits. If that happens to be Steve Jobs' messiah complex, so be it. If, on the other hand, they thought there was a good way to monetize the iPhone's use to tap into the multi-billion-dollar porn market without hurting existing iPhone sales, then it would be Apple's moral responsibility -- your words, not mine -- to devote considerable resources to making sure that fisting videos were available with the tap of a finger, now wouldn't it?
But that's how morality goes, isn't it? Any time you hear someone talking loudly about it, you can bet you're dealing with a hypocrite.
My favorite is the guy using a stack of 9 VA rack machines as an end table.
The best part is that if you look past the stack of machines he's using as an end table, you'll see the original wooden end table shoved ignominiously into the corner.
...is to increase the number of targets by several orders of magnitude. No, really, I'm quite serious. If everyone posts or publishes a cartoon simultaneously mocking Mohammed, Jesus, and Moses, there will be no practical way for religious extremists to respond. (Yes, I know there are other religions, but it's the big three monotheist camps that are making most of the trouble.)
Why stop there? Let's require all financial software to be written in Python. It won't prevent another economic collapse, but it'll make damn sure that the next collapse happens much more slowly.
An attacker could theoretically just jam the frequencies that the recorder/transmitter uses, and then attack you, steal or destroy the device, and no one would be the wiser.
Or wear a mask.
Seriously - at this point, just learning the kernel would be akin to a 6- or 8-year PhD project [in something like a Department of Archaeology, studying ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics].
This is totally off-topic, but Egyptian hieroglyphs are actually substantially easier to learn than modern written Japanese or Chinese, at least for Middle Egyptian, which is the version of the language one usually starts with. (Late Egyptian in many ways devolved into a deliberately complex secret code for the priesthood, but still involves knowing fewer signs than the average Japanese office clerk.)
I only mention this in case you're actually interested in learning ancient Egyptian -- I was put off by its complexity for many years until I started to tackle written Japanese and realized that I was attempting something much more difficult than Egyptian, at which point I attacked Egyptian with fresh vigor. That said, fluency in Japanese will get you further in a Shibuya nightclub than fluency in Middle Egyptian will get you anywhere. ;)
Could it be that the Linux Kernel isn't state of the art anymore? Linux is boring... it's bloated... it's no wonder that young blood aren't interested in developing it, they want to do something really cool and cutting edge to light their careers on fire!
I can't speak for the "young blood", being about to turn 40 in a few months and well past the age when I thought "lighting my career on fire" was a worthwhile goal, but I'd certainly agree that the kernel is boring. Part of it is definitely the emphasis on business applications; my interest in free software was always driven by what I wanted to do with it on my own time for my own edification, not to pursue wealth for myself or my employer. An even greater part of it, though, is that operating systems just aren't that damn interesting by themselves as long as they do what they're supposed to do, which is to provide a platform for actual applications. No one owns a computer to run an operating system any more than anyone owns a car to use tires. The OS is incidental to what users (and most programmers) want to use a computer for.
To be perfectly frank -- and to expand the scope beyond the operating system -- the thing that I have found increasingly unattractive about FOSS in general is that it all too often becomes an exercise in cliquishness and faddishness to the exclusion of actually serving users, to say nothing of just plain rudeness. The lkml is notorious for its rudeness (though it's a garden of civility compared to its OpenBSD counterpart). Any number of application projects are focused more on being proving grounds for a particular design methodology and/or programming language of the week than on delivering a good application to end users -- witness the gazillion projects whose name prominently features its implementation language, a detail that only the developers or would-be developers could possibly care about.
The end result is that FOSS projects all too often go out of their way to diminish their value and degree of interest to anyone outside their current circle of developers. Add to this the other common flaws of FOSS -- lack of decent (or any) documentation and poor or eccentric user interfaces -- and it's no wonder that, despite considerable strides over the last twenty years, most FOSS projects, Linux included, remain niche products at best.
Scratching an itch is fine, but when that itch is so narrowly defined as to be your itch and no one else's, no one else can be blamed for not giving a hoot. Follow that with an insistence that it would scratch someone else's itch if only they were hip and smart enough to itch like you, and you have a perfect methodology for achieving irrelevance.
3. they flood
Depends on the cave. Of course, if you're going to build a dam a scant three miles away and vastly raise the water table, well, it's probably going to be a concern with this cave.
I was thinking about this issue the other day in connection with transhumanism. Let's say that, around the same time that sending interstellar signals becomes feasible, intelligent species also develop AI and the ability to transition from biological minds to solid-state minds. Odds are that when it is possible, it will be broadly adopted: despite uneasiness about the idea, everyone is eventually confronted by the choice of dying of old age or having their mind uploaded into a machine. In a relatively short time, you have a machine culture.
You also have one probably unanticipated side-effect: machine "brains" would almost certainly operate several orders of magnitude faster than biological brains. Suddenly, the lag time for signals between star systems goes up -- subjectively -- by a factor of ten thousand, perhaps even a million or more. Actual travel between star systems? Forget it. The aliens could, of course, slow down their clocks and experience time at something more like their original biological rate, but they probably wouldn't, as it would amount to vastly shortening their lives. The change in temporal perspective changes everything.
It is a well written, well reasoned article.
As breathless cheerleading goes, I suppose.
Everybody nowadays either uses Unix or Windows.
That just might be because there's no alternative, not because people wouldn't willingly switch if there was.
Come up with something new or work with the crowd.
I've got a better idea. How about everyone uses what works best for them? Not that OS/2 is likely to be what works best for me, but what "the crowd" is doing doesn't concern me much on my own time, and at work, I have to use what they give me, whatever that happens to be.
Besides, the article is actually about NULL pointer dereferences within the kernel, where niceties like language-based exception handling mechanisms are often hard to come by. So the language you write your application code is immaterial.
Exception handling is immaterial anyway. It's not like you need language support for exceptions to check the value of an untrusted pointer against the NULL constant.
And yes, it's nice to have your tools do that for you, but odds are that if you're that sloppy to begin with, it won't take you long to introduce a vulnerability that no language constraint or compiler/interpreter toolchain can catch.
If you can't trust gigantic corporations that make their money off of producing artificial scarcity from imaginary property, who can you trust?
I wish I could rig both your cars with motion sensors and sensors that auto-ticket you at every single rolling right you make.
You wouldn't make a cent from me. I don't do rolling rights, in large part because doing so would give me less time to check for pedestrians about to cross the street on the adjacent corner. It does have a great deal to do with safety, just not very much to do with car-to-car collisions (though motorcycles are another matter). But your statement is a perfect illustration of the danger of deciding which traffic laws you will obey and which you won't: you might not actually know what the fuck you're talking about.
Red light cameras and similar speeding sensors don't have anything to do with safety.
Running red lights has a definite, measurable effect on the rate of collisions in intersections, though whether red light cameras reduce the frequency of collisions is a separate question. And higher speeds reduce reaction time and increase impact energy, so again, you're full of it.
Again, people who pick and choose which safety regulations they intend to obey often lack the knowledge and maturity of judgment to make good choices. If they only eliminated themselves from the gene pool, that would be okay, but they all too often remove sensible bystanders from the gene pool at the same time.
"Most things work fine" people tell me, which is true. The trouble is that the chances of you owning something that doesn't work is relatively high. (There's probably something from my statistics course that explains why that is, but I have so far managed to suppress that memory.)
It's simple probability. If (let's say) 95% of all current devices are supported under Linux, that means there's a 5% chance -- 1 in 20 -- that any randomly selected device won't work under Linux. Now, how many devices -- i.e., components requiring drivers -- are there in or attached to your computer? Odds are that it's at least twenty, and on many plain vanilla boxes, probably more. Linux works amazingly well considering the odds. Most of the problems I've had have been with graphics cards whose manufacturers are disinclined to care about their non-Windows-using customers, which is a far cry from the situation in the late 90's when hardware support for Linux was much worse.
That said, it's been a very long time since I had any hardware problems with Windows other than getting post-XP hardware to work with XP, as all or nearly all hardware manufacturers have a very strong incentive to make sure their hardware plays nice with the overwhelming majority of machines. But getting back to the original post, if there was a situation where I expected problems with hardware under Windows (or anything else), it would be with unsupported engineering samples. And in such a case, I wouldn't shout and wave my arms around and generalize from the worst-case scenario that the sky was falling.
But in this case you are just using the legal system in the worst possible way: To screw someone out of a legitimate outcome.
New to the legal system, are we?
But yeah, he should pay the ticket. It's not like he got snared by a rigged light, as happens to a lot of people. He made an illegal right turn. End of story.
Hey, at least it's not Ice-Nine!
Despite the self-limiting nature of the technique they describe, whether it ends up working in production or not, I guarantee you that, in a matter of days, someone is going to be flogging a script around Hollywood studios about a runaway virus destroying all the water on earth and the team of hot, young scientists who save the day at the last possible minute by using something compounded from randomly selected Greek and Latin roots.
Already the site has better coverage of some areas than Wikipedia, leading to the question of whether more such small Wikis should be created for certain verticals.
Wikipedia aims to be a general encyclopedia, larger and more thorough than any print encyclopedia to be sure, but it's still a general reference. Of course more specific references should be created. It's not like this is a new idea: search Amazon for books titled Encyclopedia of... and you'll find thousands, many (though probably not most) of which are serious scholarly works.
Excepting mathematics and the sciences, which are arguably applicable to the whole of human experience in one way or another, practically every other area of human knowledge has a highly specialized audience to one degree or another. Every last possible detail about pre-1947 aircraft engines, for example, might be of great interest to aerospace historians and engineers, but it's probably not of much interest to anyone else. Or an encyclopedic reference to every last town in Ohio might be hugely interesting to Ohioans and genealogists, and at least occasionally significant to broader research, but again, of limited interest to the general public. Unless Wikipedia (and its donors) are prepared to maintain a comprehensive reference to the entire body of human knowledge, specialist references are unavoidable.
Finally, the quality of the articles in those specialist references might be higher than in Wikipedia. Every field has sloppy researchers and trolls, of course, but a relatively specialized field probably has a smaller proportion of both than would be attracted to a general reference, within certain limits, e.g., one could reasonably expect a wiki devoted to quaternions to have better writers and fewer trolls than AbortionPedia.
I don't know how people get the idea that the web should be a safe place where you can click on any link and go to any site and never have the chance to be offended.
...which is, in the end, why things like the proposed .xxx TLD are fundamentally flawed. What the censors consider objectionable is a constantly moving target: once they've successfully banned or contained x, then they'll go after x-1. A better alternative would be a .beige TLD, where the censors can put content they consider acceptable, and people who don't care for freedom of speech can limit their browsers to that domain.
And to take this post squarely back on topic, yes, Larry Sanger is a vindictive little asshole, selfishly attacking what is, for all its flaws, one of our most valuable public resources because no one gives a wet crap about his pathetic little walled garden. I frankly wouldn't be surprised if he posted the content he subsequently reported to the FBI, and I certainly hope that WP's admins look very closely at the history of the articles involved.
Actually, that makes me wonder if Verizon would be liable for false advertising based on that...
When was the last time you heard of a major company taking a hit in court for false advertising -- other than when they're being sued by another major company? If the laws against false and misleading advertising were actually enforced, there would scarcely be any advertising left. It's practically a dead letter at this point, in a class with the laws still on the books in some major cities requiring watering trough for horses every so many blocks.
I foresee people getting rear-ended because the idiot behind them was tailgating to get a better signal off their unsecured AP. It'll give "wardriving" a whole new meaning.
Stuff like this erodes my faith in humanity. No, not that companies make these little placement deals. It's that these little placement deals actually matter because the overwhelming majority of users are too dumb or apathetic to figure out that the search engines and their ordering are easily configurable -- using a handy, point-and-drool GUI interface, no less.
I can't say I didn't see it coming. Around 1996, when I had AOL users complaining that the articles on my website were "cut off at the bottom of the screen", and I had to explain scrollbars to them, I should have found another career, preferably one that involved frequent use of explosives and heavy earthmoving equipment.
For two, why is money such a big deal? If you love what you do and can provide for yourself with it, why whore yourselves out? It's not about being filthy rich, but doing what you love, right?
We live in a culture where profit is the ultimate good, transcending all other considerations, including individual and even species survival. For someone to refuse profit -- or, as is more likely in this case, to defer profit now in hopes of greater profits later -- is literally beyond comprehension for most people. And then they get angry because they're envious of all that money. To be fair, people spend their entire lives bombarded daily with the message that wealth and possessions are the only things that matter, so it's not surprising they end up with deeply conditioned tunnel vision.