My question: can any science-types here list some important uses of helium?
There are lots, but the one that would probably have the most immediately noticeable affect on daily life in the event of a helium shortage is welding, where helium is used as a shielding gas. The impact on industrial manufacturing would be huge. It wouldn't be the end of the world, but the economic effects would be pretty dire.
If you have a security check, then the line to get thorough the check becomes a target. It doesn't matter where you move that check, since it takes time to go through, you have a bunch of people there, and thus a suicide bomber would just blow themselves up there.
That very thought struck me the first time I flew after 9/11. There were upwards of five hundred people piled up behind the security gates, and there were lines with even more people snaking across the area in front of the ticket counters. How much security do you have to pass through to get up to the security check? None, of course. All they did was make planes less desirable as targets and provided an even higher-value target entirely outside of all the new protections.
Honestly, getting off with 30 months and an $80k fine actually seems kind of light considering the hysteria that has surrounded this kind of thing in recent years. He's lucky he didn't end up being convicted under the draconian "terrorism" statutes that can now be applied to computer crimes. And while I have a certain perverse sympathy for revenge tactics, the fact is that these were medical insurance systems, and the loss of data wouldn't have just hurt the company, it would have hurt customers who depended on the company for their medical care. That's just not cool.
WriteRoom is cute, but it reminds me of too many occasions back in the early 90's in the TeX newsgroup when someone would complain that all the buttons and menus were too much of a distraction in Word, ergo they preferred TeX/LaTeX and a text editor, apparently oblivious to the fact that Word has a full-screen mode. Of course, these were the same people who would complain (and probably still are complaining today) that TeX can do such and such that Word can't, usually in reference to some feature Word has had for the last decade.
Mind you, Word has any number of annoying bugs, and I actually do most of my writing on an old amber-screen 386 using an ancient DOS text editor called QEdit before importing it into Word (or, increasingly, OpenOffice) to do formatting. But the moral of the story is that most people don't bother to explore and learn the applications that they use, and as a result, they often needlessly deprive themselves of functionality that they want. (And a small fraction of these go on to pontificate about their ignorance on newsgroups and websites.)
That said, Scrivener certainly looks cool. Too bad it's not available for Linux or Windows.
I was thinking about that very fact while I was on vacation last month. I had stopped at a gas station and noticed a sign in the window, facing outwards. It was a guide to the color coding of the lids on the underground tanks, clearly explaining which ones held gasoline of each grade, and which ones were the easy-to-explode vapor reclamation tanks. I was baffled by its placement. Presumably, the guys who drive gasoline trucks already know this stuff, as do the employees of whichever regulatory agency is responsible for things of this sort. Why advertise that information to every yahoo who pulls into the parking lot?
But of course, it's perfectly safe for the reasons you mention. If you have a high-school understanding of the sciences and just pay attention to your surroundings, you can find endless ways to cause death and mayhem, sometimes on surprisingly large scales. Very few people who want to cause death and mayhem, however, are intelligent, educated, and mentally stable enough to do so. Thankfully.
I think inexpensive is more important to the average non-programmer than unencumbered. That may also be true for developers in most cases: I don't really care to muck around much in the guts of most of the software I use. The availability of source code mainly means I don't have to worry about the developers losing interest, i.e., I can always recompile for a new platform. Obviously, though, the average user doesn't know how to do this.
Sometimes, developers lose sight of the fact that the average user has a computer to do things, and the free-as-in-beer side of FOSS makes it easier for him or her to do just that. You might not be able to afford Photoshop and MS Office, but you can definitely afford the GIMP and OpenOffice. The availability of free-as-in-beer software enables more people to do more things with their computers; the free-as-in-speech aspect ensures that they can continue to do so.
It's not at all clear that unencumbered software helps drive down prices, except in some well-publicized instances, of which OpenOffice, MySQL, and Linux-on-the-server are the most prominent instances. Firefox mainly serves to keep MS from dictating web standards. The GIMP is hardly a replacement for Photoshop except in a few well-defined niches. Inkscape is not a threat to Illustrator or CorelDraw. GnuCash is a long way from eating Quicken's lunch. In time and with luck, that may change, but for now, the ideological considerations that figure so prominently in a Slashdot discussion simply aren't on the radar for the average user, and are really only matter in certain areas for businesses.
I think it's fair to say that there's a lot of pointless repetition in the FOSS world, though I would qualify that by saying that "pointless" repetition is a great way to learn. When I was much younger, I actually reimplemented a substantial chunk of the standard C library, testing my implementations against the GNU version and P.J. Plauger's reference implementation, and I learned a great deal about the various tradeoffs one is obliged to make at every turn. That said, I doubt my version of the library would have been of particular interest to anyone besides myself.
The fundamental weakness of FOSS is essentially its immunity to commercial considerations. Obviously, this is also one of its greatest strengths. Developers can venture into new territory without having to worry about marketability -- presuming they have day jobs -- but on the other hand, they can also pursue rigid personal development ideologies that have no interest to anyone but a small group of equally fanatical and close-minded enthusiasts. (See the nitwit above who refused to even read the original article, lest Jaron Lanier make a penny from the pageview.) Moreoever, FOSS developers are often unconcerned with the wishes of their users. That's certainly true of much commercial software, but user satisfaction is an inescapable force in the marketplace, whereas it has little to no effect on many FOSS developers.
Ignoring for the moment the fact that a career vaporware evangelist like Jaron Lanier is probably not the best messenger for this particular message, I think it's fair to say that much of the FOSS community has been preoccupied with cloning or competing with existing software packages, and a relative minority are concerned with the sort of pure research and experimentation Lanier is talking about. That's not necessarily a bad thing if you view the main function of FOSS as providing inexpensive and unencumbered alternatives to commercial software, and it may even be unavoidable with the maturation of personal computer technology, but if you were present for the explosion of creativity in the 60's, 70's, and 80's, it's hard to deny that he has a valid point, even if it is stated in an overly inflammatory way. Most of what we have been seeing for the last decade or so has been the iterative evolution of existing technologies and not revolutionary new developments, no matter how often the latest minor permutation of last decade's news is trumpeted as the Next Big Thing.
You can elect to get pissed about the message if you want, but it would probably be more constructive to recognize the situation for what it is, and if it bothers you -- and it certainly need not -- then spend some time thinking about the unexplored spaces in the field and start exploring them.
I'd say a 1.5 star rating is actually quite generous, considering the amount of money Linux spends in PC Magazine. It probably wouldn't get a mention at all if not for the huge sums of money Microsoft spends.
Agreed. Server-based applications may or may not make sense within an organization, depending on the needs of the users, but there aren't too many cases where they make sense outsourced to a third party. Technical folks -- and that would certainly be Google's management in a nutshell -- are too often oblivious to the requirements of doing business. Even if Google (or whomever) could magically provide %99.999 uptime and perfect, reliable connectivity, there are so many reasons not to outsource IT that it baffles me every time someone tries to resurrect the idea. The company I work for could never do this because we deal with public school student data and there are extensive confidentiality requirements involved in student data, as there are with medical and financial data. Even if there weren't regulatory considerations, there's the simple matter of liability. Your customers -- and their lawyers -- are not going to go after your ASP when they drop the ball, they're going to come after you. In house IT may not necessarily be any more reliable than a third party, but there's a lot more incentive to get it right when 100% of your business (and your job, as an IT manager) is on the line than when it's just one of many clients who account for some small fraction of one's business.
Whoa, whoa, whoa! Wait a minute here! It's an actual job -- meaning something you can be paid for -- to sit around all day anonymously accusing Fidel Castro of being a transsexual on the Internet?
Wow, I suddenly feel like a sucker for writing software when I could get the Army to pay me for cutting and pasting between bash.org and Wikipedia.
I think that's pretty much right on. Humans are superb at imitation, that is, acquiring knowledge, but we are not very good at figuring out new things. This is, after all, a species that spent at least a few hundred thousand years wandering around before it even figured out that plants could be grown on purpose. Everything since then has been a matter of making very small changes and additions to what has gone before. The rapidity of change in the past couple of centuries is not the product of accelerated human evolution; it is simply that the agonizingly slow progress of communication and transportation technology finally reached a point where it could catalyze the rapid exchange of knowledge. Even if humans were experiencing significant evolutionary change, it's worth bearing in mind that there are some real limits to how quickly a species with a roughly 20-year generational span can evolve.
The Mac is capable of empowering users (even seasoned Linux users) to do far more with much more efficiency, but one must accept the application of its metaphors rather than demanding that it work the way they want and complaining bitterly when it won't.
This was rated +5 Insightful? How is it insightful to say that you can get the most out of an interface by using it the way its designers expected you to?
The rest of the post is just a trollish assertion that if you don't recognize the inherent superiority of the Macintosh, you either have no taste or just don't get it.
Here's an idea that platform partisans will never get: Tastes differ. To each his own.
Frankly, I'm less worried about the nuclear standoff between, say, Pakistan and India, both of which are rational actors, than the possibility that their nuclear technology will slip into the hands of vi and emacs partisans. Once those wild-eyed fanatics have the bomb, we are only one incredibly long and hard-to-remember keystroke sequence from armageddon.
[...] and a positive move by the usually maligned Wal-Mart
You say this as if Wal-Mart was somehow being charitable or virtuous instead of plotting to drown puppies. Wal-Mart just does what its management thinks will be profitable without much regard to ethics one way or another. Plainly, Wal-Mart management thinks they'll make more money with MP3 than WMA. That's all. If they thought they could somehow make money from drowning puppies, they'd do that, too, and if anyone objected, some PR drone would be sent out with a press release declaring that drowned puppies is what Wal-Mart customers really want, and what's more, it's good for America.
Although it may seem so at times, giant corporations like Wal-Mart and Microsoft really aren't out to do harm. It just happens that doing harm to a largely captive audience is often a lot more profitable than charging a fair price for quality goods and services and treating employees well. It's just Adam Smith's invisible hand grabbing you by the short hairs.
Does that mean that if the record companies want to keep making money, they need to produce albums with a bunch of good songs instead of a $16 album with one good song? Oh, the humanity!
Nor is it acceptable that he allows his personality quirks to interfere with the primary purpose of getting code into active circulation.
True, to a point. But it's just as much a "personality quirk" to be concerned with the developer's personality. DJB can be, let us say, rather abrasive. But his software is excellent, particularly djbdns. If I was to choose software on the basis of which developers are and are not assholes, I'd miss out on a lot of good software. There are a surprisingly large number of world-class jerks who also happen to be world-class programmers. I wouldn't want to spend the winter in a cabin with any of them, but I'm happy to use the code and ignore the author.
Eventually, Shirky theorizes, society will have to create a space that's implicitly private even though it's technically public, not unlike a personal conversation held on a public street. Otherwise, our ability to keep our lives private will be forever destroyed....Or you could just refrain from posting the details of your private life to the Internet.
Ever since the increase in "security" after 9/11, I have done everything I can to avoid flying unless it's absolutely necessary. I've gotten pretty good at getting through the security gauntlet without an orifice probe -- playing dumb and cheerful seems to be the ticket -- but even then, most planes make the city bus feel like a luxury limo by comparison and airports seem to have been designed by a retired platform game designer. Add to that the bizarre security rituals, like the TSAA guard in New Jersey who banged my shoes against the floor before declaring, "Nope, no bomb in there," and if I can skip traveling, I will, and if I can't skip it, I'll drive. About the only reason I'll board a plane voluntarily now is to vacation abroad, and even then, I have to ask myself if it's worth the extra-special unlubricated scrutiny you get when returning from abroad.
So now my bags are going to be delayed a few minutes? Who gives a shit? That's like being told that in addition to being worked over for an hour by mafia goons, someone will now call you a sissy at the end of your beating.
I'm sorry, but this is beautiful. For IBM to patent the process of patent abuse raises legal sarcasm to a fine art form. This is a legal hack of the first order.
Whether it ought to be allowed or not is a different question, but it still brings tears to my eyes.;)
That was going to be my second guess. The last time I talked to a person with this problem, the topic under consideration was the Kennedy assassinations. I would expect less trouble with an article on, let's say, the industrial applications of platinum.;)
I confess that I have noticed some remarkably biased content where issues of national pride are concerned. I don't read much in the eastern European area, but there are definitely some suspect statements in articles on Southeast Asian states. Articles on military atrocities are also occasionally cringe-inducing.
I'm not sure what the solution would be here. In a conventional encyclopedia, there would be an editorial board that would prevent a shouting match by simply imposing an official (and hopefully neutral) point-of-view. It may simply be that this is an unavoidable weakness of the wiki model. I don't think this invalidates Wikipedia as a whole, but it does suggest that there are some areas where other reference sources might be more appropriate. It might be a good thing if articles with a lot of churn and reverts were automatically marked as such to alert the reader.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't really matter since you can't focus on something in direct contact with your eye, anyway.
My question: can any science-types here list some important uses of helium?
There are lots, but the one that would probably have the most immediately noticeable affect on daily life in the event of a helium shortage is welding, where helium is used as a shielding gas. The impact on industrial manufacturing would be huge. It wouldn't be the end of the world, but the economic effects would be pretty dire.
If you have a security check, then the line to get thorough the check becomes a target. It doesn't matter where you move that check, since it takes time to go through, you have a bunch of people there, and thus a suicide bomber would just blow themselves up there.
That very thought struck me the first time I flew after 9/11. There were upwards of five hundred people piled up behind the security gates, and there were lines with even more people snaking across the area in front of the ticket counters. How much security do you have to pass through to get up to the security check? None, of course. All they did was make planes less desirable as targets and provided an even higher-value target entirely outside of all the new protections.
Honestly, getting off with 30 months and an $80k fine actually seems kind of light considering the hysteria that has surrounded this kind of thing in recent years. He's lucky he didn't end up being convicted under the draconian "terrorism" statutes that can now be applied to computer crimes. And while I have a certain perverse sympathy for revenge tactics, the fact is that these were medical insurance systems, and the loss of data wouldn't have just hurt the company, it would have hurt customers who depended on the company for their medical care. That's just not cool.
WriteRoom is cute, but it reminds me of too many occasions back in the early 90's in the TeX newsgroup when someone would complain that all the buttons and menus were too much of a distraction in Word, ergo they preferred TeX/LaTeX and a text editor, apparently oblivious to the fact that Word has a full-screen mode. Of course, these were the same people who would complain (and probably still are complaining today) that TeX can do such and such that Word can't, usually in reference to some feature Word has had for the last decade.
Mind you, Word has any number of annoying bugs, and I actually do most of my writing on an old amber-screen 386 using an ancient DOS text editor called QEdit before importing it into Word (or, increasingly, OpenOffice) to do formatting. But the moral of the story is that most people don't bother to explore and learn the applications that they use, and as a result, they often needlessly deprive themselves of functionality that they want. (And a small fraction of these go on to pontificate about their ignorance on newsgroups and websites.)
That said, Scrivener certainly looks cool. Too bad it's not available for Linux or Windows.
I was thinking about that very fact while I was on vacation last month. I had stopped at a gas station and noticed a sign in the window, facing outwards. It was a guide to the color coding of the lids on the underground tanks, clearly explaining which ones held gasoline of each grade, and which ones were the easy-to-explode vapor reclamation tanks. I was baffled by its placement. Presumably, the guys who drive gasoline trucks already know this stuff, as do the employees of whichever regulatory agency is responsible for things of this sort. Why advertise that information to every yahoo who pulls into the parking lot?
But of course, it's perfectly safe for the reasons you mention. If you have a high-school understanding of the sciences and just pay attention to your surroundings, you can find endless ways to cause death and mayhem, sometimes on surprisingly large scales. Very few people who want to cause death and mayhem, however, are intelligent, educated, and mentally stable enough to do so. Thankfully.
I think inexpensive is more important to the average non-programmer than unencumbered. That may also be true for developers in most cases: I don't really care to muck around much in the guts of most of the software I use. The availability of source code mainly means I don't have to worry about the developers losing interest, i.e., I can always recompile for a new platform. Obviously, though, the average user doesn't know how to do this.
Sometimes, developers lose sight of the fact that the average user has a computer to do things, and the free-as-in-beer side of FOSS makes it easier for him or her to do just that. You might not be able to afford Photoshop and MS Office, but you can definitely afford the GIMP and OpenOffice. The availability of free-as-in-beer software enables more people to do more things with their computers; the free-as-in-speech aspect ensures that they can continue to do so.
It's not at all clear that unencumbered software helps drive down prices, except in some well-publicized instances, of which OpenOffice, MySQL, and Linux-on-the-server are the most prominent instances. Firefox mainly serves to keep MS from dictating web standards. The GIMP is hardly a replacement for Photoshop except in a few well-defined niches. Inkscape is not a threat to Illustrator or CorelDraw. GnuCash is a long way from eating Quicken's lunch. In time and with luck, that may change, but for now, the ideological considerations that figure so prominently in a Slashdot discussion simply aren't on the radar for the average user, and are really only matter in certain areas for businesses.
I think it's fair to say that there's a lot of pointless repetition in the FOSS world, though I would qualify that by saying that "pointless" repetition is a great way to learn. When I was much younger, I actually reimplemented a substantial chunk of the standard C library, testing my implementations against the GNU version and P.J. Plauger's reference implementation, and I learned a great deal about the various tradeoffs one is obliged to make at every turn. That said, I doubt my version of the library would have been of particular interest to anyone besides myself.
The fundamental weakness of FOSS is essentially its immunity to commercial considerations. Obviously, this is also one of its greatest strengths. Developers can venture into new territory without having to worry about marketability -- presuming they have day jobs -- but on the other hand, they can also pursue rigid personal development ideologies that have no interest to anyone but a small group of equally fanatical and close-minded enthusiasts. (See the nitwit above who refused to even read the original article, lest Jaron Lanier make a penny from the pageview.) Moreoever, FOSS developers are often unconcerned with the wishes of their users. That's certainly true of much commercial software, but user satisfaction is an inescapable force in the marketplace, whereas it has little to no effect on many FOSS developers.
Ignoring for the moment the fact that a career vaporware evangelist like Jaron Lanier is probably not the best messenger for this particular message, I think it's fair to say that much of the FOSS community has been preoccupied with cloning or competing with existing software packages, and a relative minority are concerned with the sort of pure research and experimentation Lanier is talking about. That's not necessarily a bad thing if you view the main function of FOSS as providing inexpensive and unencumbered alternatives to commercial software, and it may even be unavoidable with the maturation of personal computer technology, but if you were present for the explosion of creativity in the 60's, 70's, and 80's, it's hard to deny that he has a valid point, even if it is stated in an overly inflammatory way. Most of what we have been seeing for the last decade or so has been the iterative evolution of existing technologies and not revolutionary new developments, no matter how often the latest minor permutation of last decade's news is trumpeted as the Next Big Thing.
You can elect to get pissed about the message if you want, but it would probably be more constructive to recognize the situation for what it is, and if it bothers you -- and it certainly need not -- then spend some time thinking about the unexplored spaces in the field and start exploring them.
I'd say a 1.5 star rating is actually quite generous, considering the amount of money Linux spends in PC Magazine. It probably wouldn't get a mention at all if not for the huge sums of money Microsoft spends.
In other words: move along, nothing to see here.
Agreed. Server-based applications may or may not make sense within an organization, depending on the needs of the users, but there aren't too many cases where they make sense outsourced to a third party. Technical folks -- and that would certainly be Google's management in a nutshell -- are too often oblivious to the requirements of doing business. Even if Google (or whomever) could magically provide %99.999 uptime and perfect, reliable connectivity, there are so many reasons not to outsource IT that it baffles me every time someone tries to resurrect the idea. The company I work for could never do this because we deal with public school student data and there are extensive confidentiality requirements involved in student data, as there are with medical and financial data. Even if there weren't regulatory considerations, there's the simple matter of liability. Your customers -- and their lawyers -- are not going to go after your ASP when they drop the ball, they're going to come after you. In house IT may not necessarily be any more reliable than a third party, but there's a lot more incentive to get it right when 100% of your business (and your job, as an IT manager) is on the line than when it's just one of many clients who account for some small fraction of one's business.
Whoa, whoa, whoa! Wait a minute here! It's an actual job -- meaning something you can be paid for -- to sit around all day anonymously accusing Fidel Castro of being a transsexual on the Internet?
Wow, I suddenly feel like a sucker for writing software when I could get the Army to pay me for cutting and pasting between bash.org and Wikipedia.
I think that's pretty much right on. Humans are superb at imitation, that is, acquiring knowledge, but we are not very good at figuring out new things. This is, after all, a species that spent at least a few hundred thousand years wandering around before it even figured out that plants could be grown on purpose. Everything since then has been a matter of making very small changes and additions to what has gone before. The rapidity of change in the past couple of centuries is not the product of accelerated human evolution; it is simply that the agonizingly slow progress of communication and transportation technology finally reached a point where it could catalyze the rapid exchange of knowledge. Even if humans were experiencing significant evolutionary change, it's worth bearing in mind that there are some real limits to how quickly a species with a roughly 20-year generational span can evolve.
The Mac is capable of empowering users (even seasoned Linux users) to do far more with much more efficiency, but one must accept the application of its metaphors rather than demanding that it work the way they want and complaining bitterly when it won't.
This was rated +5 Insightful? How is it insightful to say that you can get the most out of an interface by using it the way its designers expected you to?
The rest of the post is just a trollish assertion that if you don't recognize the inherent superiority of the Macintosh, you either have no taste or just don't get it.
Here's an idea that platform partisans will never get: Tastes differ. To each his own.
Yeah, techies are not at all prone to fanaticism.
Frankly, I'm less worried about the nuclear standoff between, say, Pakistan and India, both of which are rational actors, than the possibility that their nuclear technology will slip into the hands of vi and emacs partisans. Once those wild-eyed fanatics have the bomb, we are only one incredibly long and hard-to-remember keystroke sequence from armageddon.
Being able to withstand being shoved by bullies may be as useful to robots as it is to engineering students!
[...] and a positive move by the usually maligned Wal-Mart
You say this as if Wal-Mart was somehow being charitable or virtuous instead of plotting to drown puppies. Wal-Mart just does what its management thinks will be profitable without much regard to ethics one way or another. Plainly, Wal-Mart management thinks they'll make more money with MP3 than WMA. That's all. If they thought they could somehow make money from drowning puppies, they'd do that, too, and if anyone objected, some PR drone would be sent out with a press release declaring that drowned puppies is what Wal-Mart customers really want, and what's more, it's good for America.
Although it may seem so at times, giant corporations like Wal-Mart and Microsoft really aren't out to do harm. It just happens that doing harm to a largely captive audience is often a lot more profitable than charging a fair price for quality goods and services and treating employees well. It's just Adam Smith's invisible hand grabbing you by the short hairs.
Isn't that basically the point of a linkable library?
Does that mean that if the record companies want to keep making money, they need to produce albums with a bunch of good songs instead of a $16 album with one good song? Oh, the humanity!
Nor is it acceptable that he allows his personality quirks to interfere with the primary purpose of getting code into active circulation.
True, to a point. But it's just as much a "personality quirk" to be concerned with the developer's personality. DJB can be, let us say, rather abrasive. But his software is excellent, particularly djbdns. If I was to choose software on the basis of which developers are and are not assholes, I'd miss out on a lot of good software. There are a surprisingly large number of world-class jerks who also happen to be world-class programmers. I wouldn't want to spend the winter in a cabin with any of them, but I'm happy to use the code and ignore the author.
Eventually, Shirky theorizes, society will have to create a space that's implicitly private even though it's technically public, not unlike a personal conversation held on a public street. Otherwise, our ability to keep our lives private will be forever destroyed. ...Or you could just refrain from posting the details of your private life to the Internet.
The patent office says the new rules would speed up the patent process, but critics say they hurt inventors.
Inventors? Or just multi-billion-dollar transnational conglomerates?
I wasn't complaining that airplanes are not luxury limos; I was saying that compared to airplanes, city buses are like luxury limos.
Ever since the increase in "security" after 9/11, I have done everything I can to avoid flying unless it's absolutely necessary. I've gotten pretty good at getting through the security gauntlet without an orifice probe -- playing dumb and cheerful seems to be the ticket -- but even then, most planes make the city bus feel like a luxury limo by comparison and airports seem to have been designed by a retired platform game designer. Add to that the bizarre security rituals, like the TSAA guard in New Jersey who banged my shoes against the floor before declaring, "Nope, no bomb in there," and if I can skip traveling, I will, and if I can't skip it, I'll drive. About the only reason I'll board a plane voluntarily now is to vacation abroad, and even then, I have to ask myself if it's worth the extra-special unlubricated scrutiny you get when returning from abroad.
So now my bags are going to be delayed a few minutes? Who gives a shit? That's like being told that in addition to being worked over for an hour by mafia goons, someone will now call you a sissy at the end of your beating.
I'm sorry, but this is beautiful. For IBM to patent the process of patent abuse raises legal sarcasm to a fine art form. This is a legal hack of the first order.
;)
Whether it ought to be allowed or not is a different question, but it still brings tears to my eyes.
That was going to be my second guess. The last time I talked to a person with this problem, the topic under consideration was the Kennedy assassinations. I would expect less trouble with an article on, let's say, the industrial applications of platinum. ;)
I confess that I have noticed some remarkably biased content where issues of national pride are concerned. I don't read much in the eastern European area, but there are definitely some suspect statements in articles on Southeast Asian states. Articles on military atrocities are also occasionally cringe-inducing.
I'm not sure what the solution would be here. In a conventional encyclopedia, there would be an editorial board that would prevent a shouting match by simply imposing an official (and hopefully neutral) point-of-view. It may simply be that this is an unavoidable weakness of the wiki model. I don't think this invalidates Wikipedia as a whole, but it does suggest that there are some areas where other reference sources might be more appropriate. It might be a good thing if articles with a lot of churn and reverts were automatically marked as such to alert the reader.