But then: they sell songs for $0.99 on iTMS. I can quite easily go and buy a single song on there (or rather, I would if I had a US postage address, which I don't, so I would pay £0.79 instead...). So why not pass it through the same system as iTMS, and charge the price of a song?
Have you tried Latex? It does essentially the same thing - it separates out the formatting from the content, and lets you get on with writing the content quickly and easily. I recently switched to it from Word, and found that although it didn't have the nice graphical interface, once I'd got a style set up it actually sped my work up. If you're on a Mac, try MacTex from http://tug.org/mactex/ .
"During the space race back in the 1960's, NASA was faced with a major problem. The astronaut needed a pen that would write in the vacuum of space. NASA went to work. At a cost of $1.5 million they developed the "Astronaut Pen". Some of you may remember. It enjoyed minor success on the commercial market.
From what I understand, they aren't actually deleted - they're hidden from non-admins. So you can request to view a deleted page if you wish, although you might not always be given access to it. For example, if a page contained personal information about someone that they didn't want available, then you shouldn't get access to it. If a historian in the future wanted access to it, then they'd probably get a copy of it. See this page for more information.
From the sibling posters, it seems that the Citizendium people are out in force at Slashdot at the moment.
I think the biggest strengths of Wikipedia are that it's continually updated - meaning that it's (hopefully) fairly up to date - and that it serves as a starting point to more in-depth research into a topic. I'd agree that it should never be cited, except possibly as "A good introduction to the subject can be found at Wikipedia", using a full reference to a static non-vandalized version.
I'm pretty worried by your last comment, though. I tend to view the discussion pages as a forum for talking to people about the content (or form) of the article, similar to talking to people in real life about that topic. I don't tend to view it as a "social software scene" - it's nothing like MySpace or Facebook, it's a place to discuss work on the article, not to meet new people. Would you care to elaborate on this?
First off, note that I completely oppose his actions and comments. However, hasn't this guy got some right to free speech? Yes, what he has said is extremely distateful, but that shouldn't be anywhere near enough to put him in jail - many hours of compulsory talking to a psychologist, yes, but not jail.
Also, note that he got 6 months for having 33 child pornography images on his computer. I would personally count that as a more serious crime than racism, but he got much less time for it?
erm... and? My site, KickRSS, has been doing something similar for over a year now. It's far from alone - there's at least a dozen that I've come across (although none did quite what I wanted - merging multiple feeds, and outputting them as both an aggregated RSS feed and as a webpage that doesn't need a login).
Thank you for your suggestion! When you feel an article needs improvement, please feel free to make those changes. Wikipedia is a wiki, so anyone can edit almost any article by simply following the Edit this page link at the top. You don't even need to log in (although there are many reasons why you might want to). The Wikipedia community encourages you to be bold in updating pages. Don't worry too much about making honest mistakes -- they're likely to be found and corrected quickly. If you're not sure how editing works, check out how to edit a page, or use the sandbox to try out your editing skills. New contributors are always welcome.
In reply to "there's no value proposition in correcting sloppily written articles when you know that some "administrator" with a fifth-grade reading level is going to revert the article as soon as you've cleaned it up", can you back that up with diffs from when this has happened to you? Or are you just quoting hearsay?
It sounds interesting; I've added it to my to read list. Not having read it, I obviously can't give a thorough response to your comment - but I'd say that calling something a demon has a lot of metaphysical meaning, i.e. they are inherently evil spirits, summonable, etc., rather than just describing the physical characteristics of something. It's also then a easy step to ghosts and the ilk. In other words, you get a whole lot of preconceptions about aspects of the creature that you're not sure about. Were it just based on the physical attributes, though, then I would imagine the name "demon" would be applied (if we're actually sure what physical attributes a demon has - I couldn't find anything conclusive by a quick google).
"And this is different from believing in God... how, exactly?"
We look for explanations of what's going on, not just saying "it's God. Don't go there." Think of dark matter as a placeholder, not the end product. Over time, we should find a reasonable explanation of what's causing the discrepancy, at which point it will just become part of the "normal" physics.
I came here looking for comments on the moral aspects of the game - is it right to let people practice war on real-life maps, with points based on how much of civilization you flatten? - or otherwise decent, interesting comments. Instead, I read a series of "The site is already slashdotted." Not quite what I was after...
More likely is that we'll see updated powermacs and xserves, such that apple completes the intel changeover (promised a year ago), and Leopard. Maybe a "one more thing", say 64-bit support. It's a/developer/ conference, not a consumer show, so expect new stuff that will directly impact developers rather than consumers.
Of course, things like a tablet and iPhone would be nice, but I really doubt it (at least, not yet).
But 'Linux' is just 'Unix' mixed around, and with an 'L' added on front. As 'L' could stand for 'Linus', I thought the direct translation was 'Linus's rearranged Unix'?;)
The change doesn't really need to be biological - I think it will need to be much more psychological, which is what I think the grandparent post was talking about. It's psychological changes that will let us deal with drastic changes to the way the economy works, the way that humanity and technology interact, etc.
Also, at this stage of the techological development of weapons, we probably need to change our psychological viewpoint to be much less aggressive - otherwise we will end up dropping nuclear bombs (or more powerful weapons) on each other. That needs to be a world-wide change to every single person, not just people in a few countries.
Having said that, if the question were "How can I survive the next hundred years", then we would need many medical improvements (some of which are given in the grandparent post, although most of them there are just frivolous - I doubt that the ability to transplant hair will be that crucial to the human race, unless we enter another ice age). Still not really evolution, though, but technological development.
(Yes, I know, I've slightly mis-interpreted the parent post, and twisted the grandparent post a bit. It's early in the morning still, and I haven't had a cup of coffee yet...)
Dude I was with your till you said the sun is unmoving. Not only is the sun moving about the galactic center, the galaxy is moving too with the sun. But you are many-body problems are a bitch.
True. Hence the '(pretty much) unmoving' bit. Yes, the sun is moving with the galaxy (at something like 220km/s, as I recall), and this will have an effect on the Earth's orbit, but:
a) that's pretty slow (cf. speed of light/gravity),
b) The gravitational forces from the other stars are fairly small, due to their distance. There's much closer objects with a bigger influence (e.g. the moon).
c) I didn't want to make the explanation too complex - and, as you say, many-body problems are a bitch.:)
Yet, oddly the planets, moons, comets, and asteroids all seem to know what they are doing in this cosmic system.
Well, they don't have to do the complicated math/algorithms/etc. - they just 'feel' their way around the universe. Or, I guess a very slashdot-ian view of the universe could be that it's the ultimate computer - and the only one capable of doing such a huge, complicated sets of calculations.
The picture I have of gravity is that of a field, not a connection between the Sun and the Earth. So when the Earth is moving, it's changing its position in the sun's gravitational field. That field is spherically symmetric - so as long as you're at the same distance from the sun, you experience the same force - hence no matter where the Earth is, it's experiencing a force pulling it towards the present position of the sun.
Only when the gravitational field is not spherically symmetric, or if it is time-dependent, do complicated things start to occur.
Note that it doesn't matter if you're thinking in an Earth-centric way, or a Sun-centric way - they're equivalent, although the Earth-centric view is more complex.
That tends to make me think that we do in fact, have a pretty good grasp of the laws of physics. IMO, the only thing we're missing is the "gravity to the rest of it" connection, confounded by the inconvienient fact that gravity appears to be the only force in the universe which is apparently instantainious over galactic distances.
We haven't thought that gravity is instantaneous for about 90 years now - General Relativity shows that the force of gravity moves at the speed of light. Have a read about gravitational radiation sometime.
Go work any celestial orbital mechanics problem, including the orbit of the earth around the sun, and try and make it work if the gravitational attraction vector is assumed to be toward where the sun appears to be now (as opposed to where it is right now instead where it was 8 minutes ago when that light left the suns position then). By adding any delay, the orbit falls apart, and our earth would have spiraled into the sun many billions of years ago.
I'm confused here. The sun is (pretty much) unmoving, and emits a (pretty much) spherically symmetrical gravitational field. So wherever the Earth is, the 'gravitational attraction vector' is going to be pointing to the sun - as that's the direction of the gravitational field. As the mass of the sun is (pretty much) unchanging, there will be no changes to the gravitational field over time, and things continue just as in newtonian physics.
Complications to this probably arise when you've got more bodies in the system, though - so if you include the other major planets, you'll get effects such as you're talking about, but they're on a far smaller scale than you think as the sun's so big in comparison.
(Note that the same does not apply to pulsars, black holes and the like - where there's a lot more mass, and things are a lot more extreme.)
Slashdot Mirror
erm... the Jodcast is the _podcast_ from Jodrell Bank, not the website. Try http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/ for the actual website for Jodrell Bank.
But the Jodcast is well worth a listen to anyway.
But then: they sell songs for $0.99 on iTMS. I can quite easily go and buy a single song on there (or rather, I would if I had a US postage address, which I don't, so I would pay £0.79 instead...). So why not pass it through the same system as iTMS, and charge the price of a song?
Have you tried Latex? It does essentially the same thing - it separates out the formatting from the content, and lets you get on with writing the content quickly and easily. I recently switched to it from Word, and found that although it didn't have the nice graphical interface, once I'd got a style set up it actually sped my work up. If you're on a Mac, try MacTex from http://tug.org/mactex/ .
For those of you who don't get the joke:
p
"During the space race back in the 1960's, NASA was faced with a major problem. The astronaut needed a pen that would write in the vacuum of space. NASA went to work. At a cost of $1.5 million they developed the "Astronaut Pen". Some of you may remember. It enjoyed minor success on the commercial market.
The Russians were faced with the same dilemma.
They used a pencil. "
Although it's apparently an urban legend - see http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.as
Or alternatively: When do you want to go today?
From what I understand, they aren't actually deleted - they're hidden from non-admins. So you can request to view a deleted page if you wish, although you might not always be given access to it. For example, if a page contained personal information about someone that they didn't want available, then you shouldn't get access to it. If a historian in the future wanted access to it, then they'd probably get a copy of it. See this page for more information.
From the sibling posters, it seems that the Citizendium people are out in force at Slashdot at the moment.
I think the biggest strengths of Wikipedia are that it's continually updated - meaning that it's (hopefully) fairly up to date - and that it serves as a starting point to more in-depth research into a topic. I'd agree that it should never be cited, except possibly as "A good introduction to the subject can be found at Wikipedia", using a full reference to a static non-vandalized version.
I'm pretty worried by your last comment, though. I tend to view the discussion pages as a forum for talking to people about the content (or form) of the article, similar to talking to people in real life about that topic. I don't tend to view it as a "social software scene" - it's nothing like MySpace or Facebook, it's a place to discuss work on the article, not to meet new people. Would you care to elaborate on this?
Odds are that more people read it than would have read a READ.ME file in the same folder.
First off, note that I completely oppose his actions and comments. However, hasn't this guy got some right to free speech? Yes, what he has said is extremely distateful, but that shouldn't be anywhere near enough to put him in jail - many hours of compulsory talking to a psychologist, yes, but not jail.
Also, note that he got 6 months for having 33 child pornography images on his computer. I would personally count that as a more serious crime than racism, but he got much less time for it?
You think that's bad? I got half of the story nearly a year back, and posted it here. From my "recent submissions" list:
Google creates $1bn charity fund Wednesday October 12, @01:58PM Rejected
But hey, that's Slashdot for you.
erm... and? My site, KickRSS, has been doing something similar for over a year now. It's far from alone - there's at least a dozen that I've come across (although none did quite what I wanted - merging multiple feeds, and outputting them as both an aggregated RSS feed and as a webpage that doesn't need a login).
This would be a perfect place for a {{Sofixit}}.
In reply to "there's no value proposition in correcting sloppily written articles when you know that some "administrator" with a fifth-grade reading level is going to revert the article as soon as you've cleaned it up", can you back that up with diffs from when this has happened to you? Or are you just quoting hearsay?
For more information, take a look at Apple's report (courtesy of AppleInsider), and AppleInsider's analysis.
It sounds interesting; I've added it to my to read list. Not having read it, I obviously can't give a thorough response to your comment - but I'd say that calling something a demon has a lot of metaphysical meaning, i.e. they are inherently evil spirits, summonable, etc., rather than just describing the physical characteristics of something. It's also then a easy step to ghosts and the ilk. In other words, you get a whole lot of preconceptions about aspects of the creature that you're not sure about. Were it just based on the physical attributes, though, then I would imagine the name "demon" would be applied (if we're actually sure what physical attributes a demon has - I couldn't find anything conclusive by a quick google).
"And this is different from believing in God... how, exactly?"
We look for explanations of what's going on, not just saying "it's God. Don't go there." Think of dark matter as a placeholder, not the end product. Over time, we should find a reasonable explanation of what's causing the discrepancy, at which point it will just become part of the "normal" physics.
I came here looking for comments on the moral aspects of the game - is it right to let people practice war on real-life maps, with points based on how much of civilization you flatten? - or otherwise decent, interesting comments. Instead, I read a series of "The site is already slashdotted." Not quite what I was after...
I guess I must be new here.
More likely is that we'll see updated powermacs and xserves, such that apple completes the intel changeover (promised a year ago), and Leopard. Maybe a "one more thing", say 64-bit support. It's a /developer/ conference, not a consumer show, so expect new stuff that will directly impact developers rather than consumers.
Of course, things like a tablet and iPhone would be nice, but I really doubt it (at least, not yet).
Either that, or: ... oh, wait. There's only 8 cores. So much for the user.
Core 1: Windows
Core 2-8: Spyware
Core 9: User
But 'Linux' is just 'Unix' mixed around, and with an 'L' added on front. As 'L' could stand for 'Linus', I thought the direct translation was 'Linus's rearranged Unix'? ;)
The change doesn't really need to be biological - I think it will need to be much more psychological, which is what I think the grandparent post was talking about. It's psychological changes that will let us deal with drastic changes to the way the economy works, the way that humanity and technology interact, etc.
Also, at this stage of the techological development of weapons, we probably need to change our psychological viewpoint to be much less aggressive - otherwise we will end up dropping nuclear bombs (or more powerful weapons) on each other. That needs to be a world-wide change to every single person, not just people in a few countries.
Having said that, if the question were "How can I survive the next hundred years", then we would need many medical improvements (some of which are given in the grandparent post, although most of them there are just frivolous - I doubt that the ability to transplant hair will be that crucial to the human race, unless we enter another ice age). Still not really evolution, though, but technological development.
(Yes, I know, I've slightly mis-interpreted the parent post, and twisted the grandparent post a bit. It's early in the morning still, and I haven't had a cup of coffee yet...)
... but when they did have a shuttle (the Buran), it launched (once) in poor weather conditions (going off Wikipedia).
True. Hence the '(pretty much) unmoving' bit. Yes, the sun is moving with the galaxy (at something like 220km/s, as I recall), and this will have an effect on the Earth's orbit, but:
a) that's pretty slow (cf. speed of light/gravity),
b) The gravitational forces from the other stars are fairly small, due to their distance. There's much closer objects with a bigger influence (e.g. the moon).
c) I didn't want to make the explanation too complex - and, as you say, many-body problems are a bitch.
Well, they don't have to do the complicated math/algorithms/etc. - they just 'feel' their way around the universe. Or, I guess a very slashdot-ian view of the universe could be that it's the ultimate computer - and the only one capable of doing such a huge, complicated sets of calculations.
The picture I have of gravity is that of a field, not a connection between the Sun and the Earth. So when the Earth is moving, it's changing its position in the sun's gravitational field. That field is spherically symmetric - so as long as you're at the same distance from the sun, you experience the same force - hence no matter where the Earth is, it's experiencing a force pulling it towards the present position of the sun.
Only when the gravitational field is not spherically symmetric, or if it is time-dependent, do complicated things start to occur.
Note that it doesn't matter if you're thinking in an Earth-centric way, or a Sun-centric way - they're equivalent, although the Earth-centric view is more complex.
I'm confused here. The sun is (pretty much) unmoving, and emits a (pretty much) spherically symmetrical gravitational field. So wherever the Earth is, the 'gravitational attraction vector' is going to be pointing to the sun - as that's the direction of the gravitational field. As the mass of the sun is (pretty much) unchanging, there will be no changes to the gravitational field over time, and things continue just as in newtonian physics.
Complications to this probably arise when you've got more bodies in the system, though - so if you include the other major planets, you'll get effects such as you're talking about, but they're on a far smaller scale than you think as the sun's so big in comparison.
(Note that the same does not apply to pulsars, black holes and the like - where there's a lot more mass, and things are a lot more extreme.)