.... but they convert some carbon into methane, which is a much stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. I'd expect they'd still have less of an effect than lawnmowers, but has anyone actually done the math?
You can't take something that someone is already doing, and add "with TV" to it, and expect that "with TV" is magically different from "with a video file on the internet".
There definitely were some major differences between streaming video on the internet and on TV at the time that certainly could have technological implications.
Bandwidth, for one thing -- the TV video stream has a lot more data. Also, the TV stream is being captured, digitized, compressed, and put into the buffer all in real time by the receiving end; whereas the internet stream comes already digitized and compressed. These things alone seem like they would require some special techniques (indeed it required special hardware) to get it working in real-time on the hardware of the time.
Patents don't patent the higher level concept, but the low-level (well, medium-level most likely) methods used to implement that concept. If no one had done or written about their particular methods before, and Dish used very similar methods, then this patent claim is valid.
Oh come on people, you call yourselves engineers? It really isn't that difficult.
You'd be surprised how much of engineering is taking "obvious" ideas and banging your head against them for months/years trying to get all the details to work out right.
Only in some utopian dreamworld. Here in the real world - articles frequently require fixing, either because they are factually incorrect or badly written.
You completely misunderstood my attempt at making a subtle point. Of course articles need fixing and some articles may require constant attention to keep them in a decent state; I'm not denying that at all. My point was, when you fix articles or "babysit" them, you're not doing some unfortunate labor that's sadly necessary to keep wikipedia on its feet -- you're participating in the core activity of wikipedia itself. Wikipedia is based on the idea that enough people will work to fix errors (and more people will do so than those inserting errors) -- so complaining that you always have to fix errors is asinine. It's like complaining about the game Jenga since you don't like the idea of taking blocks out of a tower without toppling it. It's completely missing the point.
That's a very nice handwaving collection of buzzwords
Uhm... one that contained a simple statement and absolutely no buzzwords or handwaving? Read it again: Improving the articles on wikipedia is the primary process of wikipedia itself. Whether you think it works or not is a different issue, but there's no handwaving there. That's what wikipedia is supposed to be about.
It's sad that words like "buzzword" and "handwaving" are themselves becoming buzzwords and handwaving, not requiring any meaning or thought behind them.
Personally, I judge the Wikipedia by observing the process and comparing the claims of it's boosters to objective standards.
Forgive me for being frank, but that's an idiotic way to judge something. Pick some extreme claims by something's most zealous and vocal supporters, and then bash the thing when it doesn't live up to them?
How about judging something for what it is rather than what some people might claim it to be.
the claim that the Wikipedia is self correcting (it isn't)
If wikipedia is not self correcting, then all articles would be stubs or ridiculous crap, and featured articles could not possibly exist. But the fact that they do -- over 1000 of them -- objectively demonstrates that the wiki is self-correcting.
errors rarely stand for more than a few hours or days (they routinely do)
Do you have any actual statistics for how often errors stand for a long time and how often they're corrected quickly? Or are you just blowing hot air?
Without even trying very hard - I can hit 'random page' and find that between 20 and 30 percent of the articles are wrong, or badly written, or incomplete, or in violation of at least one the Wikipedia's policies.
Wow. Wikipedia has over a million articles, and you're claiming that 70-80 percent of them actually are high quality by your standards! That's over 700,000 good articles by your admission -- way more than any traditional encyclopedia -- yet you still think you have cause to complain?
(I should note that even wiki "zealots" wouldn't make the claim that 70% of the articles on the wiki are high quality, so you really should double-check your percentages there).
That percentage has remained stable for over a year now - the process of 'continually improving', so touted by Wikipedia boosters, is visibly failing to take hold.
If that percentage has remained stable then your evidence actually proves the exact opposite of what you're saying. Wikipedia gets thousands (tens of thousands?) of new articles per month. If articles never improved (as you keep re-asserting), then by simple mathematical fact, the percentage of poor articles should be constantly increasing. If that percentage, in
Too bad there's no fucking organization to anything in the article, and the section titled, "Global epidemic" is precisely redundant with the one named, "Current status."
There is neither a section named "Global epidemic" nor one named "Current status" in the AIDS article.
Wikipedia isn't "fixed" or "babysat." Improving the articles on wikipedia is the primary process of wikipedia itself. It's what wiki is all about! Wikipedia is a work-in-progress -- a continually improving entity -- and it's unfortunate that so many people just don't seem to get it, judging it instead by the instantaneous quality of some hand-picked subset of articles.
But to me it's less important than if I get to pass on second amendment rights to my children or if my tax dollars are used to fund abortions.
I guess we're fundamentally different then. For I'm much more interested in passing my 1st and 4th amendment rights to my children, and am much more concerned about my tax dollars funding murders and torture overseas.
You've said you're against the iraq war. But do you really think that a pro-choice or anti-gun president could have done more damage than it has?? Your worldview is horribly myopic.
Hell, 2nd amendment wasn't even a big campaign issue, yet you're not the first person I've heard who's said they voted for bush because of it.
They exist, but i dunno how common they are these days
That's it. You've done it. I officially feel old now.
Re:The problem of nerve impulse conduction
on
An Alternate Human
·
· Score: 1
Think on the last time you stubbed your toe. You know that "oh shit" moment, the moment between when you know you've stubbed your toe, and the moment when the blinding pain makes you start hopping about and swearing?
How much of this delay is due to nerve conduction, and how much is due to the fact that damaged body parts generally don't start sending pain information right away?
Last time I bumped my head there was a perceivable gap between the bump and the influx of pain. That can't be explained through nerve conduction.
Ever see something like a tree branch or a rock speeding toward your eye, and blinked or ducked to save your vision? The increased delay would make that sort of reaction time impossible, and *pow* you just put your eye out!
But quick reactions like this can be handled somewhere other than the brain. Just like our spinal cord handles fast reactions for our hands and feet, some nerve center could handle involuntary eye blinks or flinches.
But conscious vision processing -- like recognizing a shape as a predator or finding a path through the woods while running -- would definitely suffer due to the increased latency.
First of all, the poster never said that the definition was "meaningless." They said it "expands the meaning SO greatly as to render it mostly useless." And it does. If any time a person decides not to include something in something they control it can be considered "censorship," then censorship is done by everybody, all the time. It no longer becomes something inherently bad or improper. If you use this definition and call out "hey! that's censorship" the appropriate response is "so what?"
This is always the problem when debates get into the realm of definition. People start confusing the concepts with the definitions. Words are just labels for abstractions, and how words map to abstractions differs over time, according to region and person, and most importantly, according to context.
And dictionaries are just references. They don't generally capture exactly what someone means when they say a word. For that, you really need to look at the greater context (or even better, ASK the person).
Words like "censorship" have a lot of baggage. There's a lot of history and context that gets abstracted away to "censorship is bad." But then, people like you turn the thing around backwards and say "hmm... censorship is bad... but what is censorship?" You then crack open a dictionary and proclaim that a certain kind of thing is censorship -- because the dictionary said so -- and consider the case closed. But you've ignored all the history and context that has led to the "bad" connotation and applied a completely irrelevant definition without pointing out (or realizing) that the connotation no longer applies.
When someone calls out "hey! that's censorship!" they do NOT usually mean "hey! that person is exercising their right to control what information is included in things they own!" They mean, "hey! this is like the nazis burning books they don't agree with!" or something similar. Censorship, as a "bad thing" in this context, is much more about an external entity like a government forcing information to be hidden, and removing people's rights to divulge that information.
THAT kind of censhorship is bad. And Wikipedia is NOT doing it. The way you've defined censorship -- sure, wikipedia is doing it. But so what?
Lately, though, it's been just one giant jackassery after another. Illegal wiretaps? Becoming energy independent without radically expanding research? Selling the doors to our house to an outside party? I have no idea who the guy in the White House is anymore, but he certainly doesn't represent me or anyone else I know who voted for him.
See, this is what annoys me. These examples are exactly the kinds of things that I -- and everyone I know who didn't vote for him -- expected out of bush. We were out there waving signs and yelling it at the tops of our lungs! But no one listened... and ok, fine, his approval ratings are going down now, but where was this scrutiny and outrage two years ago??
Also: the US government didn't sell anything. It was a private transaction between two foreign companies. Try reading up on it a bit.
The major problem here is that you seem to overestimate how much "improved' humans are over apes. Our genomes are incredibly similar. When you look at the biological structures involved, humans are really just slight adjustments to what an ape already has DNA to encode -- Larger brains, less hair, different bone alignment.
Your analogy of sopwith camel to F16 is more like the evolution of an anphibian to a human -- many structures are completely revised and the overall complexity is much larger, though some fundamental principles remain the same.
1) There's a big difference between not assuming gravity exists as a general principle and going out and measuring the slight variance in gravity being produced at certain points on the earth.
2) You really aught to provide some evidence of mainstream scientific researchers doing their work with the attitudes you describe, or your post can be safely discarded.
3) Creationists more rational than the parent poster? arguable but irrelevant. More rational than actual scientists? Not even close. It's easy to be skeptical of everything and claim you're being "rational" -- it's much harder to actually understand the theories and evidence at hand in a deep and thorough manner.
No, they aren't. C/C++ is still used for the widest range of applications, but in terms of numbers of commercial applications right now, Java dominates.
An earlier poster commented that the very programmers who have to write the C++ apps are the ones who hate C++.
I would like to add that the very users who have to use the Java apps are the ones who hate Java.
The first thing that would happen is that you'd have been told that a program was trying to execute for the first time. And you'd have to agree to explicitly allow it.
Interesting... I haven't used OSX much, but I have downloaded programs to friends' OSX boxes, and run them, and gotten no such prompt. In which cases does the OS ask you this?
Also, this example doesn't apply to Linux, so the argument isn't quite tired and old yet.
And then, even if you were that foolish, you'd still be forced to give administrative approval when that program tried to modify or install something outside the user space.
User space is all you need for most spyware/malware/worms. This is why sandboxing (the OP) should be more prevalent -- on all operating systems. Don't get too comfortable just because you don't run windows.
Yes, seriously. That old knee-jerk meme of "IIS vs Apache disproves the myth of exploits due to install base" has to die. Yet someone invariably posts it, and they invariably get modded up. I just hope a few rational mods find your post quickly.
Not to mention that the OP seems to have confused the issue of "exploits" with the issue of "user permissions" which is what was actually being talked about.
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The goats are carbon neutral.
.... but they convert some carbon into methane, which is a much stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. I'd expect they'd still have less of an effect than lawnmowers, but has anyone actually done the math?
There definitely were some major differences between streaming video on the internet and on TV at the time that certainly could have technological implications.
Bandwidth, for one thing -- the TV video stream has a lot more data. Also, the TV stream is being captured, digitized, compressed, and put into the buffer all in real time by the receiving end; whereas the internet stream comes already digitized and compressed. These things alone seem like they would require some special techniques (indeed it required special hardware) to get it working in real-time on the hardware of the time.
Patents don't patent the higher level concept, but the low-level (well, medium-level most likely) methods used to implement that concept. If no one had done or written about their particular methods before, and Dish used very similar methods, then this patent claim is valid.
Oh come on people, you call yourselves engineers? It really isn't that difficult.
You'd be surprised how much of engineering is taking "obvious" ideas and banging your head against them for months/years trying to get all the details to work out right.
who said anything about federal? I'm pretty sure the Massachusetts constitution protects free speech as well.
You completely misunderstood my attempt at making a subtle point. Of course articles need fixing and some articles may require constant attention to keep them in a decent state; I'm not denying that at all. My point was, when you fix articles or "babysit" them, you're not doing some unfortunate labor that's sadly necessary to keep wikipedia on its feet -- you're participating in the core activity of wikipedia itself. Wikipedia is based on the idea that enough people will work to fix errors (and more people will do so than those inserting errors) -- so complaining that you always have to fix errors is asinine. It's like complaining about the game Jenga since you don't like the idea of taking blocks out of a tower without toppling it. It's completely missing the point.
Uhm... one that contained a simple statement and absolutely no buzzwords or handwaving? Read it again: Improving the articles on wikipedia is the primary process of wikipedia itself. Whether you think it works or not is a different issue, but there's no handwaving there. That's what wikipedia is supposed to be about.
It's sad that words like "buzzword" and "handwaving" are themselves becoming buzzwords and handwaving, not requiring any meaning or thought behind them.
Forgive me for being frank, but that's an idiotic way to judge something. Pick some extreme claims by something's most zealous and vocal supporters, and then bash the thing when it doesn't live up to them?
How about judging something for what it is rather than what some people might claim it to be.
If wikipedia is not self correcting, then all articles would be stubs or ridiculous crap, and featured articles could not possibly exist. But the fact that they do -- over 1000 of them -- objectively demonstrates that the wiki is self-correcting.
Do you have any actual statistics for how often errors stand for a long time and how often they're corrected quickly? Or are you just blowing hot air?
Wow. Wikipedia has over a million articles, and you're claiming that 70-80 percent of them actually are high quality by your standards! That's over 700,000 good articles by your admission -- way more than any traditional encyclopedia -- yet you still think you have cause to complain?
(I should note that even wiki "zealots" wouldn't make the claim that 70% of the articles on the wiki are high quality, so you really should double-check your percentages there).
If that percentage has remained stable then your evidence actually proves the exact opposite of what you're saying. Wikipedia gets thousands (tens of thousands?) of new articles per month. If articles never improved (as you keep re-asserting), then by simple mathematical fact, the percentage of poor articles should be constantly increasing. If that percentage, in
Too bad there's no fucking organization to anything in the article, and the section titled, "Global epidemic" is precisely redundant with the one named, "Current status."
There is neither a section named "Global epidemic" nor one named "Current status" in the AIDS article.
Wikipedia isn't "fixed" or "babysat." Improving the articles on wikipedia is the primary process of wikipedia itself. It's what wiki is all about! Wikipedia is a work-in-progress -- a continually improving entity -- and it's unfortunate that so many people just don't seem to get it, judging it instead by the instantaneous quality of some hand-picked subset of articles.
That's the conditional, not the subjunctive.
If it were the subjunctive, it would sound more like this sentence.
Also, it doesn't make the sentence sound any more "sarcastic."
But to me it's less important than if I get to pass on second amendment rights to my children or if my tax dollars are used to fund abortions.
I guess we're fundamentally different then. For I'm much more interested in passing my 1st and 4th amendment rights to my children, and am much more concerned about my tax dollars funding murders and torture overseas.
You've said you're against the iraq war. But do you really think that a pro-choice or anti-gun president could have done more damage than it has?? Your worldview is horribly myopic.
Hell, 2nd amendment wasn't even a big campaign issue, yet you're not the first person I've heard who's said they voted for bush because of it.
Even after the brain shuts down, your body can still be kept alive through life-support.
Also, it's possible to be permanently "a lump of flesh incapable of doing anything" even before your brain has totally shut down.
The line is blurry.
They exist, but i dunno how common they are these days
That's it. You've done it. I officially feel old now.
Think on the last time you stubbed your toe. You know that "oh shit" moment, the moment between when you know you've stubbed your toe, and the moment when the blinding pain makes you start hopping about and swearing?
How much of this delay is due to nerve conduction, and how much is due to the fact that damaged body parts generally don't start sending pain information right away?
Last time I bumped my head there was a perceivable gap between the bump and the influx of pain. That can't be explained through nerve conduction.
Ever see something like a tree branch or a rock speeding toward your eye, and blinked or ducked to save your vision? The increased delay would make that sort of reaction time impossible, and *pow* you just put your eye out!
But quick reactions like this can be handled somewhere other than the brain. Just like our spinal cord handles fast reactions for our hands and feet, some nerve center could handle involuntary eye blinks or flinches.
But conscious vision processing -- like recognizing a shape as a predator or finding a path through the woods while running -- would definitely suffer due to the increased latency.
Have you ever heard of self-censorship? Your definition of censorship seems to be dangerously narrow.
English is not a programming language. "Self-censorship" does not need to literally mean "censoring yourself."
First of all, the poster never said that the definition was "meaningless." They said it "expands the meaning SO greatly as to render it mostly useless." And it does. If any time a person decides not to include something in something they control it can be considered "censorship," then censorship is done by everybody, all the time. It no longer becomes something inherently bad or improper. If you use this definition and call out "hey! that's censorship" the appropriate response is "so what?"
This is always the problem when debates get into the realm of definition. People start confusing the concepts with the definitions. Words are just labels for abstractions, and how words map to abstractions differs over time, according to region and person, and most importantly, according to context.
And dictionaries are just references. They don't generally capture exactly what someone means when they say a word. For that, you really need to look at the greater context (or even better, ASK the person).
Words like "censorship" have a lot of baggage. There's a lot of history and context that gets abstracted away to "censorship is bad." But then, people like you turn the thing around backwards and say "hmm... censorship is bad... but what is censorship?" You then crack open a dictionary and proclaim that a certain kind of thing is censorship -- because the dictionary said so -- and consider the case closed. But you've ignored all the history and context that has led to the "bad" connotation and applied a completely irrelevant definition without pointing out (or realizing) that the connotation no longer applies.
When someone calls out "hey! that's censorship!" they do NOT usually mean "hey! that person is exercising their right to control what information is included in things they own!" They mean, "hey! this is like the nazis burning books they don't agree with!" or something similar. Censorship, as a "bad thing" in this context, is much more about an external entity like a government forcing information to be hidden, and removing people's rights to divulge that information.
THAT kind of censhorship is bad. And Wikipedia is NOT doing it. The way you've defined censorship -- sure, wikipedia is doing it. But so what?
but there is no place for censorship simply to protect people from "ridicule," if that ridicule stems from truth.
Sure there is, if that ridicule is non-encyclopedic, and the content is being considered for inclusion in an encyclopedia.
Geez people, what you're allowed to say in a higher sense and what should be put in Wikipedia ARE NOT THE SAME CONCEPT.
How is the double-slit experiment "antilight"?
And more generally, even if one admits for argument's sake that they've been done, the original point is that they are not easy.
Lately, though, it's been just one giant jackassery after another. Illegal wiretaps? Becoming energy independent without radically expanding research? Selling the doors to our house to an outside party? I have no idea who the guy in the White House is anymore, but he certainly doesn't represent me or anyone else I know who voted for him.
See, this is what annoys me. These examples are exactly the kinds of things that I -- and everyone I know who didn't vote for him -- expected out of bush. We were out there waving signs and yelling it at the tops of our lungs! But no one listened... and ok, fine, his approval ratings are going down now, but where was this scrutiny and outrage two years ago??
Also: the US government didn't sell anything. It was a private transaction between two foreign companies. Try reading up on it a bit.
The parties are the same, huh?
Does the democrats trying to filibuster republican SCOTUS nominees who might overturn roe v wade ring a bell?
The differences are few... but they're important. If you ignore them, you're putting yourself into a state of willful ignorance.
The major problem here is that you seem to overestimate how much "improved' humans are over apes. Our genomes are incredibly similar. When you look at the biological structures involved, humans are really just slight adjustments to what an ape already has DNA to encode -- Larger brains, less hair, different bone alignment.
Your analogy of sopwith camel to F16 is more like the evolution of an anphibian to a human -- many structures are completely revised and the overall complexity is much larger, though some fundamental principles remain the same.
1) There's a big difference between not assuming gravity exists as a general principle and going out and measuring the slight variance in gravity being produced at certain points on the earth.
2) You really aught to provide some evidence of mainstream scientific researchers doing their work with the attitudes you describe, or your post can be safely discarded.
3) Creationists more rational than the parent poster? arguable but irrelevant. More rational than actual scientists? Not even close. It's easy to be skeptical of everything and claim you're being "rational" -- it's much harder to actually understand the theories and evidence at hand in a deep and thorough manner.
No, they aren't. C/C++ is still used for the widest range of applications, but in terms of numbers of commercial applications right now, Java dominates.
An earlier poster commented that the very programmers who have to write the C++ apps are the ones who hate C++.
I would like to add that the very users who have to use the Java apps are the ones who hate Java.
Actually, thousands of people are stepping forward and providing the funds necessary to keep it running. They've been doing so for the last 6 years.
It sounds like you want wikipedia to, well, stop being wikipedia.
Boy that's a tired old argument.
That doesn't make it false.
The first thing that would happen is that you'd have been told that a program was trying to execute for the first time. And you'd have to agree to explicitly allow it.
Interesting... I haven't used OSX much, but I have downloaded programs to friends' OSX boxes, and run them, and gotten no such prompt. In which cases does the OS ask you this?
Also, this example doesn't apply to Linux, so the argument isn't quite tired and old yet.
And then, even if you were that foolish, you'd still be forced to give administrative approval when that program tried to modify or install something outside the user space.
User space is all you need for most spyware/malware/worms. This is why sandboxing (the OP) should be more prevalent -- on all operating systems. Don't get too comfortable just because you don't run windows.
Yes, seriously. That old knee-jerk meme of "IIS vs Apache disproves the myth of exploits due to install base" has to die. Yet someone invariably posts it, and they invariably get modded up. I just hope a few rational mods find your post quickly.
Not to mention that the OP seems to have confused the issue of "exploits" with the issue of "user permissions" which is what was actually being talked about.