<a href="example.com">...</a>
<a href="http://example.com">...</a>
See the difference?

Are you complaining because /. lacks a <DWIM> tag, along with the strong AI that implies?
Or because someone failed to teach you about absolute and relative URLs?

Either way, it seems a little unreasonable to blame /. for it.

(Now the tablet UI, I'm with you all the way blaming /. for that abomination. If you have the ability, changing to a desktop user-agent string will get around it -- but there's NO reason we should have to do that.)

This is a terrible idea! You just read an article about PR firms editing articles about science & history. Facts are the least democratic things of all!

Do you want people to vote on science? How many people think Relativity is just E=mc^2? They ignore all the import aspects about it. If there wasn't a maximum speed (speed of light), then kinetic energy (KE=mv^2) would go to infinity and create unlimited energy.

Do you want people to vote on History? Well, they did, and the Holocaust only killed Jews. The other 5 million killed for handicaps, homosexuality, and others don't count. There were even 3 more genocides in the 20th century alone: Pol Pot's Cambodia (the educated), Serbia (muslims), & Rwanda.

I don't want popular opinion to warp reality anymore!

Because like fundamentalist Christians, atheists are butthurt when people question their conclusions. That attitude influences their thinking on most subjects, and as a result, they are impossible to have a conversation with.

That asshole-ish "I'm right and you're not" attitude is one of the reasons the Internet is so fucked up right now. You don't listen. You just shove your neckbeard in everyone's face.

The fact that you seized on the word 'atheist' (and only that word) out of all the words in my post is proof.

Now you will post a reactionary shitriver telling me how I'm wrong, which will prove me right twice.

Since the Internet has failed to realize its goal of making it possible for the little guy to be on an even playing field with the large companies, I would say that it's par for the course that the rich people will take over.

The promise of open standards and democratic information have been destroyed with the enthusiastic participation of the very people who told us open standards were the way forward. E-mail has been abandoned for Twitter. The web has been abandoned for Facebook and the PC has been abandoned for the iPhone. And you love it.

This all happened after the U.S. high tech industry was strangled and dumped in a drainage ditch naked in 2000 and the space program was raped and left for dead somewhere in northern Asia.

It's too late to cry about it now. You got exactly what you wanted, and every step of the way when people pointed out we were on the wrong path you shouted them down with your smartass memes and your neckbearded atheist-habit self-assurance you are the smartest people in the world.

In ten years the Internet will be destroyed completely, and since there is nobody left under the age of 50 with an attention span longer than ten seconds the people who lose it won't have any idea what the hell happened.

And it will be your fault.

I've come to the conclusion that the best way (as an individual) to handle this sort of thing is to create personas for different contexts. You'll need fake ids, but you won't be using them for anything technically illegal (no fraud, no underage drinking). You just show them to people/systems that want the info to track you - like loyalty cards (that you then only use with cash).

That way you end up with a handful of distinct personas that all have data trails but only have data trails in specific contexts so that cross-referencing is impossible.

On the other hand, an institution that is regularly criticized by folks like Dr. Ben Goldacre of http://www.badscience.net/ and Prof. Mark Liberman of Language Log for the incredibly poor quality of their science reporting may not be the source you really want to trust on this or any other topic.

- Bad Science's BBC category
- Enhance Breast Size by 80%
- Parrot Telepathy at the BBC
- More Junk Science from the BBC
- It's Always Silly Season in the BBC Science Section

Granted, few general-purpose new sources are particularly good when it comes to their coverage of science, but the BBC does have a bit of a reputation for being above average--a reputation which seems to be rather undeserved, as far as I can tell.

Weapons research always trickles down into practical applications.