You think that article X is [wrong] [incomprehensible] [incomplete]? So fix it yourself.
There's too much on X and not enough on Y? Go on then, write the Y article.
The editors are [self-serving] [elitist] [evil]? Come back and complain after you've done a thankless stint reverting vandalism.
Wikipedia is crazy not to take ads? Would you work for free in order for someone else to get paid?
The Wikipedia criticism industry is a pure product of the me-me-me consumer age. The marvel of Wikipedia is precisely that it is not a consumer product. It is about the producers and their astounding feat of working together, unremunerated, while sorting out their differences, to create an incredible body of written knowledge that didn't exist before.
I'm serious. We know from experiments in Estonia and Switzerland and elsewhere that e-voting is convenient. M-voting will probably be even more so.
We also know that there are fundamental, perhaps irremediable problems with voting electronically and remotely. In particular:
Security: In a complex system, the potential for undetected fraud multiplies exponentially
Transparency: The right of the voter to check how a poll is conducted is somewhat compromised by a need to understand source code (this reached court in Switzerland)
Identity: It's obvious and also applies to postal voting, but how do you know who is really voting on that remote device?
Is democracy like shopping on Amazon, to be judged by its convenience and efficiency? Or is it something more important, and precious, than that?
I think that if people take democracy seriously, they should slow down and ask these questions a bit more. If it means a few more years of voting the boring manual way, perhaps that will be for good reasons.
If the ICE's speedometer said 350km/h, it was lying.
There are only two sections of proper high-speed track in Germany (a section of Köln-Frankfurt and a section of Nürnberg-Munich), and the trains are equipped only to do the standard 300km/h on them. Elsewhere the ICEs go significantly slower.
Only in France do trains travel at more than 300km/h (320km/h on a part of the LGV Sud line, with the newer trains only). And only in France are there literally thousands of kilometers of true high-speed line.
The German trains are slightly plusher and roomier on the inside. But there is no arguing with speed, and here Germany can't compete.
Or, if you want to do away with the "generations" altogether, engrave the digital data into a rock — with suitable instructions on how to decode, of course. That way your data becomes immortal, more or less. On the other hand, you would probably need a mountain-sized rock for the average TIFF.
I implied that few people use them, which is surely the truth. I implied that most people would be better off using a networked WP app, for its other advantages, which I believe is the truth.
And if macros are so great, let's have them online! It's gonna happen, and I doubt OOo with have much to do with it
What am I missing here? The future of word-processing is on the network. Networked documents are accessible anywhere, editable by multiple users anywhere, and generally better protected against data loss.
As for "power features" like macros and mail merge, how many people really need or use them?
Not me, which is why I won't be upgrading my OpenOffice this time round.
Unlimited sand? You probably wouldn't want that. He probably meant: "I will offer a $1 bill to each person who leaves an intelligent reply to this comment, without limit." Which should be affordable, as there is only one intelligent reply so far.
I think the problem is much more serious than you think it is. I hope I'm wrong and you're right. But looking at the balance of evidence, and listening to the experts I trust to interpret it, it certainly doesn't look that way to me. Nice talking.
That's fine if you don't consider it necessary to "curtail even slightly" your air travel. But then if you recycle, or take public transport, or insulate your home, or use low-energy lightbulbs, then you are behaving somewhat incoherently. Because air travel does contribute to global warming in a low, but nonetheless significant and rising way, and it is somewhere that ordinary consumers can make an instant effect.
If the real issue is that you don't believe in global warming, then that is another question. I would just point out again that The Economist, source of this article which is highly relevant to the A380, also started out decidedly sceptical, and continues to apply rigorous cost-benefit analysis to all solutions. Speaking personally, to me the cost of not flying is low - I like trains, and in Europe they're fast. And since the benefits are clear, I choose not to fly.
I fail to see the problem. One plane spews the equivalent emissions of thousands of cars, and for many hours per day. That does matter.
The article (which is very long) does compare carbon emission per passenger-mile, and it seems you are mistaken: planes do not look "pretty damn good". Here we go:
Likewise on greenhouse gases. IATA says an aircraft's fuel consumption is about the same as that of a family car, at 3.5 litres per 100 passenger-kilometres. So CO2 emissions are similar. But that is true only if the aircraft is full and the car's passenger seats are empty. And even then, a jumbo jet flying from London to Sydney would be like nearly 400 Volkswagen Polos each travelling just over 16,000km--the average distance a European drives in a year. In other words, although cars and aircraft discharge roughly the same amount of CO2 for each passenger-kilometre, the aircraft travel an awful lot farther.
In America, land of the gas-guzzler, the Federal Aviation Administration has calculated that the energy used to carry one passenger for one mile is greatest in sport-utility vehicles, pick-up trucks and transit buses. It says cars and commercial aircraft come out roughly equal. But a study for the European Commission reached a different conclusion. Assuming that aircraft are 70-75% full and cars contain 2.5 people (since longer distances usually imply family trips), CE Delft, a Dutch consultancy, came up with a comparison between different forms of travel (see chart 2). Coaches performed best, followed by liquefied-gas and diesel-powered cars or inter-city trains. Long-haul flights of more than 1,500km were 50% worse than petrol cars for each passenger-kilometre. Short-haul flights (where a smaller proportion of the time is spent on energy-efficient cruising and more on profligate climbing and descending) were fully three times worse than petrol cars.
It is clearly also true that the plane creates a demand for ultra-long-distance travel which wouldn't otherwise exist, which you hint at.
A bit of a problem this pay wall at The Economist. You might have learned a few things. I did.
Oh come on. The article was about how amazing the A380 is; I posted well-sourced facts on the less flattering environmental implications of the A380. You would have to be very obtuse to see that as "irrelevant".
The issue was perhaps the subscription wall — I forgot that I was signed in. So here, for your delectation, is a less "carefully framed" sample of what the "dumbed down" Economist has to say on the A380:
THE double-decker A380, the biggest airliner the world has seen, landed at Heathrow last month to test whether London's main airport could handle the new 550-seater, due to enter commercial service at the end of this year. It was a proud moment for Britain's Rolls-Royce, the makers of the aircraft's Trent 900 engines. Rolls-Royce says the four Trents on the A380 are as clean and efficient as any jet engine, and produce "as much power as 3,500 family cars". A simple calculation shows that the equivalent of more than six cars is needed to fly each passenger.
Take the calculation further: flying a fully laden A380 is, in terms of energy, like a 14km (nine-mile) queue of traffic on the road below. And that is just one aircraft. In 20 years, Airbus reckons, 1,500 such planes will be in the air. By then, the total number of airliners is expected to have doubled, to 22,000. The super-jumbos alone would be pumping out carbon dioxide (CO2) at the same rate as 5m cars.
That may not seem much compared with the 60m vehicles that pour off assembly lines every year--or the 1 billion vehicles already on the world's roads. But whereas cars are used roughly for about an hour or so a day, long-haul jet airliners are on the move for at least 10 hours a day. And they burn tax-free, high-octane fuel, which dumps hundreds of millions of tonnes of CO2 into the most sensitive part of the atmosphere.
Aviation is a relatively small source of the emissions blamed for global warming, but its share is growing the fastest. The evidence is strong that emissions from jet engines, including the streaks of cloud (called contrails) they leave behind in the sky, could be especially damaging. As a result, aviation is increasingly attracting the attention of environmentalists and politicians. Amid much controversy, CO2 caps and carbon-trading could soon be used to help curb aircraft emissions.
I detect a problem with Slashdot's ultra-democratic moderation system.
I post highly relevant facts sourced to an article in a hyper-reputable source — and Slashdotters moderate down my post. Stop grinding political axes and try to be reasonable, folks.
[F]lying a fully laden A380 is, in terms of energy, like a 14km (nine-mile) queue of traffic on the road below. And that is just one aircraft. In 20 years, Airbus reckons, 1,500 such planes will be in the air. By then, the total number of airliners is expected to have doubled, to 22,000. The super-jumbos alone would be pumping out carbon dioxide (CO2) at the same rate as 5m cars.
I haven't taken a plane for 3 or 4 years now, mainly because I'm something of a self-righteous treehugger. Then again I just can't help being awed and fascinated and inspired by this one.
That's exactly what my top-brand entry-level laptop came with. Knoppix. I guess it was a ruse to lower the price by 80 bucks.
Suited me fine anyway. I even discovered Debian as a result. Who needs Dell?
This subject shows perfectly the limitations of the left-right dialectic, which dates back to the society of Europe during the French Revolution.
In the 21st century, the immediate question is: Are we talking society or economy? An economic right-winger may have nothing in common with a social rightist. And being a social leftie does not imply a fondness for leftist economics.
For example:
Many European Christian-Democrat parties promote traditional conservative social policies (the family, religion) while advocating corporatist economics (lots of involvement for the state and trade unions).
The Economist magazine is a loud cheerleader for free markets, but loves to defend gay marriage and drug legalisation. (It would claim that both are "liberal", but 19th-century economic liberalism is conservative, relatively speaking.)
Free and open-source software is clearly a progressive phenomenon on both axes. In social terms, the emphasis is on the freedom of the individual from the authority of the collective. And in economic terms, FOSS puts a premium on cooperation at the expense of competition.
Perhaps the novelty is this: FOSS's economic leftiness is of a new kind. It is a cooperative phenomenon which uses technology to link citizens to each other directly. For the first time, the agency of the state is not needed.
In River Out of Eden Richard Dawkins traces the data explosion of the information age right back to the big bang.
"The genetic code is not a binary code as in computers, nor an eight-level code as in some telephone systems, but a quaternary code with four symbols. The machine code of the genes is uncannily computerlike."
"PBS with a police force"? There would be an uprising if Brits had to pay 11 pounds a month and all they got was PBS. (And that's the point: you get what you pay for.)
Psychologically speaking, this is indeed a bit of a conundrum. Motorola first made clamshell ergonomics a selling point years ago (remember the ads with the guy's mouth revolving round his face?
But the reality is that a bent phone improves the user experience for only one person - the person receiving the call. Motorola clearly has an optimistic view of human nature if it thinks this can sell phones.
...Comes courtesy of John Naughton's column about Google Docs: "The problem is that the platform has been reduced in status to a life-support system for a web browser."
That's too slow for me. I use the ConQuery Firefox extension. Double-click on a word, right-click to load the Wikipedia article. Knowledge in a twitch of the fingers.
Slashdot Mirror
You think that article X is [wrong] [incomprehensible] [incomplete]? So fix it yourself.
There's too much on X and not enough on Y? Go on then, write the Y article.
The editors are [self-serving] [elitist] [evil]? Come back and complain after you've done a thankless stint reverting vandalism.
Wikipedia is crazy not to take ads? Would you work for free in order for someone else to get paid?
The Wikipedia criticism industry is a pure product of the me-me-me consumer age. The marvel of Wikipedia is precisely that it is not a consumer product. It is about the producers and their astounding feat of working together, unremunerated, while sorting out their differences, to create an incredible body of written knowledge that didn't exist before.
The Economist's esteemed style guide doesn't agree.
There can be no real ambiguity here. It's a question of style. I say: why be complicated when you can be simple?
The moderators needed a button for "Uncomfortable But Damn Witty" here.
I'm serious. We know from experiments in Estonia and Switzerland and elsewhere that e-voting is convenient. M-voting will probably be even more so.
We also know that there are fundamental, perhaps irremediable problems with voting electronically and remotely. In particular:
Is democracy like shopping on Amazon, to be judged by its convenience and efficiency? Or is it something more important, and precious, than that?
I think that if people take democracy seriously, they should slow down and ask these questions a bit more. If it means a few more years of voting the boring manual way, perhaps that will be for good reasons.
It's GARRY Kasparov.
This would seem a good case for using fastidious grammar.
When a compound noun may cause ambiguity in a sentence, hyphenate it ("term-paper"). Or move the words around.
I would guess that a good 20% of readers misunderstood this title. Starting with all us non-Americans who don't know what a term paper is, exactly.
If the ICE's speedometer said 350km/h, it was lying.
There are only two sections of proper high-speed track in Germany (a section of Köln-Frankfurt and a section of Nürnberg-Munich), and the trains are equipped only to do the standard 300km/h on them. Elsewhere the ICEs go significantly slower.
Only in France do trains travel at more than 300km/h (320km/h on a part of the LGV Sud line, with the newer trains only). And only in France are there literally thousands of kilometers of true high-speed line.
The German trains are slightly plusher and roomier on the inside. But there is no arguing with speed, and here Germany can't compete.
Or, if you want to do away with the "generations" altogether, engrave the digital data into a rock — with suitable instructions on how to decode, of course. That way your data becomes immortal, more or less. On the other hand, you would probably need a mountain-sized rock for the average TIFF.
I implied that few people use them, which is surely the truth. I implied that most people would be better off using a networked WP app, for its other advantages, which I believe is the truth.
And if macros are so great, let's have them online! It's gonna happen, and I doubt OOo with have much to do with it
What am I missing here? The future of word-processing is on the network. Networked documents are accessible anywhere, editable by multiple users anywhere, and generally better protected against data loss.
As for "power features" like macros and mail merge, how many people really need or use them?
Not me, which is why I won't be upgrading my OpenOffice this time round.
Unlimited sand? You probably wouldn't want that. He probably meant: "I will offer a $1 bill to each person who leaves an intelligent reply to this comment, without limit." Which should be affordable, as there is only one intelligent reply so far.
I think the problem is much more serious than you think it is. I hope I'm wrong and you're right. But looking at the balance of evidence, and listening to the experts I trust to interpret it, it certainly doesn't look that way to me. Nice talking.
That's fine if you don't consider it necessary to "curtail even slightly" your air travel. But then if you recycle, or take public transport, or insulate your home, or use low-energy lightbulbs, then you are behaving somewhat incoherently. Because air travel does contribute to global warming in a low, but nonetheless significant and rising way, and it is somewhere that ordinary consumers can make an instant effect.
If the real issue is that you don't believe in global warming, then that is another question. I would just point out again that The Economist, source of this article which is highly relevant to the A380, also started out decidedly sceptical, and continues to apply rigorous cost-benefit analysis to all solutions. Speaking personally, to me the cost of not flying is low - I like trains, and in Europe they're fast. And since the benefits are clear, I choose not to fly.
I fail to see the problem. One plane spews the equivalent emissions of thousands of cars, and for many hours per day. That does matter.
The article (which is very long) does compare carbon emission per passenger-mile, and it seems you are mistaken: planes do not look "pretty damn good". Here we go:
It is clearly also true that the plane creates a demand for ultra-long-distance travel which wouldn't otherwise exist, which you hint at.
A bit of a problem this pay wall at The Economist. You might have learned a few things. I did.
Oh come on. The article was about how amazing the A380 is; I posted well-sourced facts on the less flattering environmental implications of the A380. You would have to be very obtuse to see that as "irrelevant".
The issue was perhaps the subscription wall — I forgot that I was signed in. So here, for your delectation, is a less "carefully framed" sample of what the "dumbed down" Economist has to say on the A380:
I detect a problem with Slashdot's ultra-democratic moderation system.
I post highly relevant facts sourced to an article in a hyper-reputable source — and Slashdotters moderate down my post. Stop grinding political axes and try to be reasonable, folks.
From an article in The Economist:
I haven't taken a plane for 3 or 4 years now, mainly because I'm something of a self-righteous treehugger. Then again I just can't help being awed and fascinated and inspired by this one.
That's exactly what my top-brand entry-level laptop came with. Knoppix. I guess it was a ruse to lower the price by 80 bucks. Suited me fine anyway. I even discovered Debian as a result. Who needs Dell?
This subject shows perfectly the limitations of the left-right dialectic, which dates back to the society of Europe during the French Revolution.
In the 21st century, the immediate question is: Are we talking society or economy? An economic right-winger may have nothing in common with a social rightist. And being a social leftie does not imply a fondness for leftist economics.
For example:
Free and open-source software is clearly a progressive phenomenon on both axes. In social terms, the emphasis is on the freedom of the individual from the authority of the collective. And in economic terms, FOSS puts a premium on cooperation at the expense of competition.
Perhaps the novelty is this: FOSS's economic leftiness is of a new kind. It is a cooperative phenomenon which uses technology to link citizens to each other directly. For the first time, the agency of the state is not needed.
In River Out of Eden Richard Dawkins traces the data explosion of the information age right back to the big bang.
The cyclist Miguel Indurain sustained a power output of 477W for one hour when setting the world hour record in 1994 (riding 53.040km). His peak output during the Tour de France (which he won five times in the 1990s) was 550W. http://www.active.com/story.cfm?story_id=11139&sid ebar=569&category=century_challenge
http://www.bikecult.com/bikecultbook/sports_record sHour.html
"PBS with a police force"? There would be an uprising if Brits had to pay 11 pounds a month and all they got was PBS. (And that's the point: you get what you pay for.)
Psychologically speaking, this is indeed a bit of a conundrum. Motorola first made clamshell ergonomics a selling point years ago (remember the ads with the guy's mouth revolving round his face?
But the reality is that a bent phone improves the user experience for only one person - the person receiving the call. Motorola clearly has an optimistic view of human nature if it thinks this can sell phones.
...Comes courtesy of John Naughton's column about Google Docs: "The problem is that the platform has been reduced in status to a life-support system for a web browser."
That's too slow for me. I use the ConQuery Firefox extension. Double-click on a word, right-click to load the Wikipedia article. Knowledge in a twitch of the fingers.