Hmm...

> Butterflies. What the OP needs are butterflies.
> http://xkcd.com/378/

XKCD doesn't seem to know emacs key chords very well. C-x M-c doesn't do anything useful....

Curiously enough
  M-x butterfly
does amazing physics.

;;;###autoload
(defun butterfly ()
  "Use butterflies to flip the desired bit on the drive platter.
Open hands and let the delicate wings flap once.  The disturbance
ripples outward, changing the flow of the eddy currents in the
upper atmosphere.  These cause momentary pockets of higher-pressure
air to form, which act as lenses that deflect incoming cosmic rays,
focusing them to strike the drive platter and flip the desired bit.
You can type `M-x butterfly C-M-c' to run it.  This is a permuted
variation of `C-x M-c M-butterfly' from url `http://xkcd.com/378/'."
  (interactive)
  (if (yes-or-no-p "Do you really want to unleash the powers of the butterfly? ")
      (progn
    (switch-to-buffer (get-buffer-create "*butterfly*"))
    (erase-buffer)
    (sit-for 0)
    (setq indent-tabs-mode nil)
    (animate-string "Amazing physics going on..."
            (/ (window-height) 2) (- (/ (window-width) 2) 12))
    (sit-for (* 5 (/ (abs (random)) (float most-positive-fixnum))))
    (message "Successfully flipped one bit!"))
    (message "Well, then go to xkcd.com!")
    (browse-url "http://xkcd.com/378/")))

Almost more, ahh, umm, curious is the existence of...

M-x animate-birthday-present

I'm using a fairly recent "bleeding edge" version of emacs, so your mileage may vary substantially.

...is going to work for a bunch of self-declared viciously stupid assholes and risk jail time for doing their job right?

If you read /. at 0, you get everything that any two mods shat on. Now suppose you're a Pez dispenser nut, and suppose you had previously rated a comment on Pez heads as Important and user X had rated it as Unimportant and user Y had rated it as Important. Then the next article to go by that had the signature of X says it's unimportant AND Y says it's unimportant... then probably it is and should be low ranked. Then the next article to go by that had the signature of X says it's unimportant AND Y says it's Important... then it should be ranked as Important level 2 (one for Y and one for -X who has an opposite bias to you) Now scale this up to many users and you need some serious vector maths plus some fuzzy stuff to cope with edit wars. To cope with edit wars I suggest this. Basically each edit would create a new page (old one still exists) with a slightly higher rank * the vector of bias for the editor than previous... So an edit war will merely result in a fork... with the branches essentially invisible to those of other biases.

According to my set of biases you have proved that crowd sourcing really works and improves accuracy and completeness. :-)

I hope they understood that a crowd sourced "source" does not reflect their Professors biases and hence shouldn't be used to extract approval from crusty old bastards.

<i>Do you never go anywhere without the Internet?</i>

As often as possible.

However the set of places that don't have my desk is even larger.

Got an actual criticism there?

Depends on your view of what an encyclopedia is.

If your view is that an Encyclopedia is compendium of all human knowledge... then Wikipedia is a dead failure.

If your view is that an Encyclopedia is a summary of somehow blessed, purified and sanctified knowledge... Yup. It works sorta for a remarkable and, umm, curious set of values for "blessed", "purified", "sanctified" and "knowledge".

There was an exciting and all too brief a period in the history of the Wikipedia when it wasn't spammed with ugly tags disputing the relevance, citation, neutrality, copyright, and importance.

There was that brief exciting time if somebody somewhere thought it important enough to write it, it was in.

And that was the joy of it. It was the compendium of things someone, somewhere, anybody, anywhere thought exciting and interesting and important.

Then they took all the fun out of it.

So this /. article is merely about the next step in the long established agenda of "remove the fun and interest"... hey, it's no news. They robbed it of it's soul years ago.

I have evil plans afoot to devise a competitor to Wikipedia that deletes nothing, sneers at the very existence of a Neutral Point of View, denies the possibility of Truth, but....

• allows you to rank the veracity and importance of every article...
• thus exposing your biases and interests...(relative to other users biases)
• and with a bit of vector mathematics jiggery pokery (which I can rant on about in the unlikely event that you're interested)
• allow the engine to rank articles based on your biases and interests as inferred from rankings made by other people with similar (or antithetical) biases.

Nope, never been a mod, never been banned in anyway.

Closest I came was when some damn yanks were gaming the system by swamping the article on Waterboarding. Of course the could find thousands of references to Bushshite apparatchiks stating categorically that waterboarding isn't torture and the mods clamped the page at a revision stating it wasn't torture. (I'm please to see the article is now fairly good.)

But the incident made me take the fundamental problem with Wikipedia seriously enough to sit up and look out for it. Once I started to look out for that problem, I noticed it enough other places for me to now instinctively lower the ranking of wikipedia hits.

Of course, if you are an American WASP... you can look and look and look at the wikipedia all day and not see the problem with NPOV. :-))

Yes you can, the same way it always worked before the 'net came along.

Fuckwad + Audience = Total Fuckwad.

I have been ignoring the Wikipedia for awhile now... true everyone can edit it... so long as you reference and summarise something somewhere else.

ie. You can't contribute knowledge to the Wikipedia... only regurgitated leavings from other websites. It's just a dreary collection of the web predigested by a wasp hivemind mindset hiding behind the mask of NPOV.

So they have just added another layer to enforce that fundamental limitation further. So what. Try everything2 instead.

Or just about any place.

I never write anything down anymore... I just lose the paper on my desk anyway. When I find out something I want to remember, I write it on the web somewhere anywhere and let google index it for me.

Note to self: portablexdr is the name of the lgpl xdr library I want to use.

Nah! BULL SHIT! Not competitive advantage... totally obviously Lehman didn't have any. Haven't you been reading the news?

So if it wasn't competitive advantage they were hiding, then what? Let's guess....

Ooh... I can guess, they were frantically trying to prevent any evidence of, ahh, umm, shall we be kind and call it, ah, losses and umm, where they were lost to.

I would not have thought that machine names could arouse such a passion.
Why Should I Care What Color the Bikeshed Is?
From http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/misc.html#BIKESHED-PAINTING:
"The really, really short answer is that you should not. The somewhat longer answer is that just because you are capable of building a bikeshed does not mean you should stop others from building one just because you do not like the color they plan to paint it. This is a metaphor indicating that you need not argue about every little feature just because you know enough to do so. Some people have commented that the amount of noise generated by a change is inversely proportional to the complexity of the change."

I have a long running argument with some of my coworkers about names for software deliverables.

I insist on something you can pronounce and preferably something that makes sense and gives a strong indication what it is. If you are really desperate, call it something cutesy that people will at least remember.

They want to use incomprehensible, unpronouncable, random strings of characters One True Official Company Blessed "product codes".

I asked them for where the One True dictionary of product codes is. There isn't one.

Ok says I. I'll call the software deliverable that if I can look at the back of the hardware device and see that string of characters.

Nope. Can't.

So the three of them overrule me and I left them to it.

Much though I detest the army... ye olde british army storemans habit of general to specific naming is Good. "Trousers - Mens - Battle dress - Khaki - Large" at least allows a dumb troopie to search through a pile of trousers and sort them on to the right shelf.

(Hint: if you can't think of a good meaningful sentence describing what you are building... you probably shouldn't be. You are building a hodgepodge and a mess.)

Two hours later I came back and they were _still_ arguing about _which_ was the The One True Company Blessed Product Code.

Hokay says I. You have convinced me. You have convinced me that if you want to change the names of the software deliverables to these garbled bits of line noise that you guys can't even agree on... you'll have to do it yourself. I won't.

Last I looked my readable / understandable names still held.

...your machine was called "Duchess".

...after all the boring low power beige posters who think your question sucks.

You can use my name for the zooty new multi-core with the blue leds.

Back in the Bad Old pre-internet days, there was a thing called Ham Radio.

Quite cool actually, scream so loud in the RF spectrum that some proto-geek on the far side of the planet can hear you.

Anyhoo, in those distant days hams confirmed radio contact by exchanging postcards. Called them CQ cards if I remember correctly. Sort of a touch of something physical to go with the ethereal.

Well, my dad was one of those 1950'60's era radio hams.... but he died when I was young.

Strangely enough, about a year after he died, we received a CQ card confirming a contact made after his death...