This. Too many times i've tried to look up something on wikipedia, either because it's a subject i care about or a subject i want to find out about, and discover there _was_ a page on it, but it was deleted for lack of notability. In the second case it's annoying because it's entirely defeating the purpose of a reference work, trying to look up things i don't already know about. If it was more notable i probably would have heard of whatever it was before and wouldn't need to look it up. In the first case, it just feels like a snub.

Then there's the bit where they keep deleting lists of things inside articles, particularly lists of trivia. Trivia lists are one of the quickest and most rewarding things to skim through. (This is why every site on the internet these days frequently posts articles in the form of lists. They get a lot of hits.)

Which is why for any kind of fictional thing i often head to TVTropes before checking out Wikipedia. It's sometimes less informative but it's usually more fun, and i don't get the feeling there's a band of people running around deleting the stuff i'm interested in.

"(with a tip of the hat to another state, whose stupidity created similarily named labels). And now, moderators who live in those two states... fire up the 'overrated' and 'troll' buttons, and I apologize I kept you waiting so long."

Wait, do you honestly think you're going to find anyone from California who's eager to defend the Prop 65 signs? At least i presume that's what you're talking about. I started saying a long time ago that they should just start posting signs at every border crossing, airport and port: "This State contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects, and other reproductive harm." It would cover all the bases and save us a lot of trouble.

I sometimes wonder if the creation of that proposition was actually a very clever black op by the people most liable to lawsuits from _actual_ contamination. Now they can put up signs to get out from the legal liability without anyone paying any attention to them because everyone else has the same sign out front.

Will this allow them to predict what compounds will make the best super-high-temperature superconductors, like Leland Hobart's periodic table of superconducting compounds?

Well as someone who already owned those things because he had a GameCube that seems backwards compatible to me. Admittedly it's a slightly fuzzy area, but you wouldn't have to buy anything to play the game on the Wii that you wouldn't already have had to buy to play on the GameCube.

I don't use the screen controls on my Nexus 7. I've got a PS3 controller synched to it via the Sixaxis Controller app. I have no idea what a Kazzo or a Retrode are, and i seem able to play the games on my PC and tablet just fine, though i'm not sure why you're making a big deal out of that. It's not like i was claiming they were somehow backwards compatible with consoles in the first place =P

Community developed code is insecure! Community developed code is inferior! Open source must be exterminated! Exterminate! Exterminate!

Of course in the show the Daleks are supposed to be a huge threat, but they're also kind of laughable. Slow, clumsy, thrown together using whatever crap happened to by lying around at the time.

So i guess that kind of fits Oracle and its software as well.

I didn't know that about the Atari 7800. We went from the 2600 to the ColecoVision, which could actually play 2600 games with the use of a special adapter, but having to buy an extra piece of hardware doesn't really count as real backwards comaptibility in my book. I had a Sega Master system but never got any other Sega systems until the Dreamcast, so i wasn't aware of that backwards compatibiltiy either, though as previously mentioned i wouldn't personally count them as being truly backwards compatible because of the required adapter. Maybe i'm just easily impressed that they included all the "adapter" bits inside the PS2, but i felt like it was a big deal at the time.

There are definitely genres that work better on consoles, or at least are designed with that in mind. However i don't play a lot of sports or fighting or party games, so that's not a huge appeal to me. Most of what i play these days is JRPGs, tactics, strategy, tower defense, roguelikes, and Minecraft, all of which are well covered by the PC. Oh yeah, and replaying old NES and SNES games. Also well handled by both the PC and my Nexus 7 :)

So? I never said it wasn't going to sell. I just said i'm not inclined to buy one right away. I was eager to get an SNES right away because A: i'd already played all my NES games (being a kid at the time i had a lot more free time for games) and B: the SNES offered a dramatic improvement over the NES. The PS4 just doesn't offer those advantages over the PS3.

And note that we expect new generations of consoles to do more than the previous generations. The PS2 playing PSX games was an incredibly awesome new feature. The fact that no other console had ever done that before was one of the selling points and part of why i got a PS2 on day one.

When the PS3 came out it had PS2 backwards compatibility but the price was extremely high. By the time the price got down to something i was starting to consider they dropped the backwards compatibility, which reduced the value to me and made the new lower price still not worth it, so i waited still longer. Meanwhile i was busy playing all the old PS2 games i still hadn't gotten around to and kept discovering i didn't really _need_ the PS3. Eventually there was a good enough deal on a PS3 that it was worth it even without the backwards compatibility, and i really don't feel like i suffered from waiting.

So now the PS4 seems to offer even less advantage over the PS3 than the PS3 offered over the PS2. The graphical leap isn't nearly as large and there's absolutely no backwards compatibility. The price is a bit more reasonable so i'll probably have a shorter wait until it gets down to something i consider worthwhile. I _just_ picked up Kingdom Hearts HD for the PS3 so i've got to finish that before i even think of getting a new console. And maybe by the time i'm done with that the Wii U will have gotten another price drop and i'll pick up one of those first. It could easily be over a year before i get around to getting a PS4. I might not get a PS4 until FF15 or Disgaea 5 come out. Or maybe those will suck (that's certainly the way FF15 looks to be heading) and i'll wait even longer.

And of course a confounding factor in all of this is the resurgence in PC games, mainly due to availability via Steam, which reduces the relative utility of all the consoles.

"Until now Sony has done a pretty good job of keeping future Playstation 4 owners happy."

Except for that little bit where there's zero backwards compatibility with PS3 games, beside which the lack of backwards compatibility for headsets is a pretty minor thing. It's certainly the #1 reason i'm not going to be getting a PS4 at launch. #2 of course being the wait until any initial hardware issues are resolved and #3 being that if i wait long enough there will be a price cut. I've got too many PS3 games i need to finish up and having to keep both the PS3 and PS4 hooked up at the same time seems like an annoyance.

He's right that, on average, the people in poor countries aren't the immediate problem. He's also right that we should be doing something about the immediate problem.

However focusing _solely_ on quick fixes to the immediate problem is exactly how we got into this problem in the first place. If we focus only on reducing the carbon output of the rich, then by the time we've got that under control we'll find that those poorer nations have developed the same kind of ecologically unfriendly economies that the rich nations have now, and we'll have to go through the whole fight against the same entrenched interests all over again.

Unless of course he's proposing that the poor nations should not or can not become economically developed, which i just don't believe to be the case. (If we want any kind of long term peace and stability on this planet we're going to have to bring everyone up to about the same economic level, but that's an argument for another post.)

He's making the same mistake that many a slashdotter does when a story comes up about someone spending time and money on the "wrong" thing. (Most frequently "on space" rather than "fixing stuff here on Earth.") We are not in some giant 4x game where we have to focus all our research and all our industry on a single project at a time. We can invest on improving the efficiency of developed nations while at the same time improving the capacity of poor nations in an ecologically friendly way.

After reading the wikipedia article, it's apparent that your example does not really demonstrate comparative advantage. "In economics, comparative advantage refers to the ability of a party to produce a particular good or service at a lower marginal and opportunity cost over another. Even if one country is more efficient in the production of all goods (absolute advantage in all goods) than the other, both countries will still gain by trading with each other, as long as they have different relative efficiencies."

From a bit further down in the article, " In Portugal it is possible to produce both wine and cloth with less labor than it would take to produce the same quantities in England. However the relative costs of producing those two goods are different in the two countries. In England it is very hard to produce wine, and only moderately difficult to produce cloth. In Portugal both are easy to produce. Therefore while it is cheaper to produce cloth in Portugal than England, it is cheaper still for Portugal to produce excess wine, and trade that for English cloth. Conversely England benefits from this trade because its cost for producing cloth has not changed but it can now get wine at a lower price, closer to the cost of cloth. The conclusion drawn is that each country can gain by specializing in the good where it has comparative advantage, and trading that good for the other."

Which is true, but it does mean that most of the wine producers in England and most of the cloth producers in Portugal are going to be out of a job and will have to learn how to do something else.

In your example the factory has an absolute advantage over both the basket weaver and the cobbler, but neither of them has a comparative advantage over the factory. Thus they have no incentive to trade with the factory whatsoever. The cobbler and basket weaver can ignore the output of the factory and keep trading their goods back and forth. However if the factory drives down the price of baskets and shoes in relation to food and housing then they'll have a hard time paying their rent and feeding themselves.

If _everything_ is automated, well you just argued that in order to keep their relative advantage the cobbler and basket weaver need to trade with each other rather than the factory. Which means they need to do all their trading with other people who are not taking advantage of the automation. Instead of buying food from the automated food factory they need to trade their non-automated shoes and baskets to the non-automated farmer for non-automated food. So now there's an entire second class of people doing everything by hand and ignoring the automation.

Unless you're saying that the cobbler will be selling their shoes for 49.9% of the original, to undercut the price of the factory, while the basket weaver is selling their baskets for 49.9% of the original price, and the farmer is selling their food for 49.9% of the original price, etc. But that works out to pretty much the same thing, there's a large class of people selling stuff for 49.9% of the original price and buying stuff for 49.9% or 50% of the original price, and none of them are getting any advantage from the factory.

Either the factories drive down the prices of some things disproportionately, and the people who originally make those goods suffer unless they can find a new job, or they drive down the price of everything equally, in which case you end up with two classes of people, those who can get new, more valuable jobs, and those who keep trading the same old goods around at a fraction of the original cost.

"We recently posted a contrary analysis arguing that the Luddites are wrong."

No, you said "The Luddites Are Almost Always Wrong", and then in the blurb you said, "Mike Masnick of Techdirt argues that we can all put down our wooden shoes and take a chill pill: technology 'rarely destroys jobs.'"

"This has never happened in the past, therefore it won't happen in the future" is a poor argument to begin with. (After all, i've never died in the past, therefore i shall live forever!) However saying "this rarely happened in the past, therefore we don't need to worry about it in the future" is an even worse argument.

Just to throw in a random car analogy, there are certainly intersections on smaller roads where you could say "crossing the road without looking both ways first is almost always safe." The fact that 99 out of 100 times it's perfectly safe won't help you much the 100th time you cross the street without looking and get creamed by an oncoming car.

I'm sure it won't last, nothing this good ever does, but let's enjoy it while we can.

You're right that sexism is involved, but you're entirely wrong about where it's occuring. Women almost never do this because our society is sexist about nudity. No one cares about male nudity unless the male in question is running for office. A nude picture of a man generally get a "boys will be boys" response and everyone forgetting about it shortly thereafter. A nude picture of a woman generally results in A: lots of males wanting to view it and B: lots of people calling the woman a slut or whore or something similar.

So even if both people in the relationship have nude pictures of each other the male is still in a position of strength. He can damage her reputation significantly by publishing them while she can't do the same to him.

"I'm sure the officers of many companies that make products I regularly use and enjoy are utter bastards, but there's no organized hate of THEM"

Uh, did you miss the whole thing with Chick-Fila last year? And i guess you weren't in California when the list of companies supporting Prop 8 was going around? (And i know the same kind of thing goes on with conservative groups on the other side of the aisle, but i try not to pay too much attention to that for the sake of my blood pressure.)

No one really cared that Chick-Fila was anti-gay until they actually started sponsoring the Pennsylvania Family Institute and similar groups, and even that wasn't enough to really get the ball rolling until the COO decided to get on the radio and start making public addresses about the issue.

And that's the key point. I'm sure there are plenty of authors i like who hold views i disagree with, but as long as they're not publically campaigning for those issues i'm not going to make an issue of it. The reason there is organized hate for OSC is that A: he decided to use his public blog to loudly espouse his political views, B: he donates money to and takes leadership positions in political organizations that promote those views, and C: the views he puts forth and supports are homophobic, racist, and in some cases just bat-shit insane.

Everyone is entitled to their beliefs, but you can't expect to _intentionally_ put yourself in the spotlight to cheerlead for those beliefs and not get any kind of reaction. He has the right to think whatever he wants, and he has the right to speak out about what he thinks. However the right of free speech doesn't give him some kind of magic immunity from responsibility for the things he chooses to say. If he cared more about selling books than promoting poltiical views he should have focused more on writing books rather than publishing editorials.

It's also notable that many people consider his early work to be his best and his current output to rather sub-par. One has to wonder what kind of correlation or causation there is between the two events (decrease in fictional writing quality and increase in political diatribes) but at least it means that those of us who choose not to buy his newer works aren't missing out on much.

And here's a counter-example. I happen to know that Terry Goodkind is an Objectivism loon. I know this because the later books in the Sword of Truth series turn into an Objectivist screed at certain points. I don't agree with his views, but aside from letting those views influence his writing i'm not aware of him doing any significant political campaigning. As such if the subject comes up i tell friends that the first couple books in that series are very good, but that later books suffer from sequlitis and political rants. I don't encourage people to boycott his books even though i disagree with his views and if they want to go buy the first book or two bassed on my assessment that's fine with me.

For those who care about such things, the story for Firefall was at least partially written by Orson Scott Card. For the record, i am planning on going to see Ender's Game because i want to encourage the production of more serious SF movies, but i'll be donating some amount of money to a pro-LGBT group to assuage my sense of guilt. However Firefall isn't really doing anything unique in the video game arena that would cause me to overcome my distaste for supporting projects OSC is involved with.