Why are people so obtuse about this?

Put yourself in their shoes for a second. The reason they want you to not use an encyclopedia, is so that you learn how to use a library. It's just like not being able to use a calculator on a math test.
The papers you're talking about are being written to develop skills.
Now that we understand the rule, it's okay to break it. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with citing an encyclopedia, Wikipedia or otherwise.

Let me provide an example:
Say I'm writing an article or a paper that mentions Kepler's laws of planetary motion. Say I know what they are. I can either cite the original source, which isn't even in English and thus isn't even what I used, or I can cite the readily available, free source of information that I used to actually obtain the information.
For many (but not all discussions) this is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

It comes down to basic judgment and common sense. One of the things you were supposed to learn in school was how to evaluate a source of information. This means critically evaluating both what is being said on the page as well as what is being said by your professors.

Leno's Baker Electric does run on its original batteries.

Read the link you posted: "we wash them out and refill them regularly", Just as I had predicted, these batteries have been refurbished.

It's a full 10 year, 150,000 mile warranty, as required by California law to meet pzev criteria.

No, it might be that when the car is actually for sale. Right now the warranty does not exist. If you can't buy the car, how do you get the warranty?

Prius today with an 8 year warranty and a near-zero battery failure rate.

Citation need.
Even if the Prius battery MTBF was 20 years, the failure rate would still not be "near zero". This smacks of you making up numbers on the spot to support you argument.

You just don't seem to get it. The poster you were replying to was pointing out that adding one more significantly expensive wear item to a car reduces it's useful design lifetime. It's not rocket science.

Is that reduction is design lifetime and the additional cost to manufacture offset by the savings in in gas? Some of us are not interested in drinking the kool-aid and would rather see actual data.

But if everyone who bought a Prius, Golf, or other efficient new car in the last ten years had instead bought a used car, then the only cars in the used market would be gas guzzlers.

Or... the strong demand for used cars would forces automakers to design cars with more consideration for their resale value. This would then cause them to place more emphasis on reliability and maintainability.

There is no fundamental reason why we can't build a car that lasts as long as a dishwasher.

So if you're going to buy a new car then buying a green one does, in fact, help improve the overall greenness of our vehicle fleet over time.

The problem is that the way we have defined "green" is silly. We're only looking at gas mileage as opposed to a more sensible metric that would factor in:

1. cost to produce
2. cost to operate
3. service lifetime

Next time you fly, look at the litte nameplate inside the door that states when the plane was manufactured.
They are plenty of "old" airplanes still flying every day.

Why is there this huge insistence that EV battery packs are somehow inherently going to die before the rest of the car

Perhaps it's because in our own personal experience, 90% of the time the battery is the first component to fail in consumer devices, and also because the typical manufacturer's battery ratings indicate this to be the truth.

Seriously, GM "hopes" to warranty the battery for 10 years, but one must expect that even if they achieve this aim, it will be a pro-rated warranty. Do you honestly believe you're going to get 100% of the replacement cost for a 9 year old battery?

Jay Leno has one from the early 1900s. It still runs on its original nickel-iron batteries.

Citation please. Common sense tells me you are probably misrepresenting this. Most likely the battery housings are the same and the electrolyte and plates have been replaced, making it a "remanufactured" original battery at best.

Where does this myth that the batteries are fundamentally going to have to be replaced come from?

Actual experience with products availible in the real world, today, as opposed to marketing hype.

GM isn't warrantying their pack for ten years for the fun of it.

To put it bluntly, GM isn't warranting jack shit right now. It's speculation. You get to say that when they actually are selling cars with that warranty. Not now. Tell we where I can go buy one of these cars with the 10 year battery warranty?

I'd be surprised if a Volt pack replacement ten years from now costs any more than a transmission replacement does today.

Perhaps you live in some alternate universe, but here in this one transmission replacements are NOT cheap.

By all standards, the pack will outlive the car for most owners. That's what you get with a sizable, low-DoD, cooled NiMH pack in typical hybrid driving conditions.

Again, you have no citation here. Just because a hybrid vehicle is out there on the road, doesn't mean that that battery pack has the bulk of its storage capacity intact.

I would love to have equipment with battery packs with wonderful lifetimes. The thing is that as of today, I can't even get a battery pack for something as simple as a cordless drill that is warrantied for ten years or 3,000 cycles. If you go look at actual specification sheets for batteries, they do not support your claims. Batteries have wear-out mechanisms just like wheel bearings, transitors and tires.

There's nothing wrong with weldng a gas tank if you know what you're doing.

Fundamentally this is true. The problem is the significant number of people who both:
1) Think they know what they are doing.
2) Get killed anyways.

Sometimes you just have to say "no."

People in all sorts of fields get offered money to comprimise themselves every day.
You need to determine where the line is and stick to it. Doing someting stupid because someone else paid you doesn't automatically restore your reputation or protect you from legal liability.


Try read a welding forum somtimes. Someone will show up and want a hole in their gas tank welded. The welder will say "no". Then every so often you read about the guy who said yes and died.

It all comes down to professional ethics. When that little voice in your head says "I shouldn't be doing it this way." STOP. Sure, there's always someone out there willing to pay you to do the wrong thing, but that's no excuse for your own actions.

Make the case for doing it the right way. If they refuse, look for work elsewhere.

Most universities claim copyright on any work students submit as coursework.

Oh really? Where's your source for this one?

I paid for my classes and I own the work I did.

University funded graduate research is a different story, but that's pretty obviously not what we are talking about.

Her syllabus, which is effectively the contract between her and the student, states that she reserves the right to upload it as she sees fit.

Something tells me that you haven't taken any law courses.

A "contract" presented to me after I've already paid to take the class, that isn't even represented to me as a legally binding contract. My ass.

The student agrees to the contract by remaining in the class (this is the view of the university's lawyers).

I hope their legal argument is a little more nuanced than this. Presenting me with a "contact" that:

• I do not sign
• That is presented after money changes hands
• Whose delivery is structured in such a way that refusing to enter into it incurrs a significant hardship. (So now on the first day of class I need to find another class. A class where the professor can actually be bothered to work hard enough to determine whether the students in her class are competent in the subject matter.)

Your wife should worry less about turnitin and more about doing her job. A decent professor does not need a search engine to figure out who's cheating. The problem is that it requires doing your job:
Actually interacting with students face to face, and gauging their understanding of a topic.
Use TAs to help if you need to, but don't steal copies of your honest student's papers just because you're too lazy to ask a student about the paper they just turned in, and too lazy to have a few tests.

I never gave copies of my papers to students too lazy to do their jobs, why should I give them to lazy professors?

The thing you're missing is that thesse people don't just own a portion of our current pop culture, they own a significant portion of our collective cultural history.

Opting out would be like refusing to read history books because they are copyrighted. The cost to you as an individual is much too high. It is unreasonable to expect a person to simply not listen to music currently owned by major record labels.

If you do have shielded cable, don't ground both ends!!! Bring all cables at one end to a common ground, and let the other end float. Otherwise, you will create a ground loop and actually make the noise worse.

There are generally two schools of thought on grounding:

1. ground everything in a nice "tree", with no possiblity for loops
2. ground the @#$% out of everything

The problem with choice 1 is that the length of the return path can become long enough to become significant when compared to the frequency of the signals of interest. When this happens, your ground isn't really ground anymore.

If you want proof of this try probing a 1 GHz signal on an o-scope using a 6" ground lead, instead of the very short ground pin provided with the probe. (You'll need a multi-GHz o-scope and high frequency probe for this experiment obviously.)

A "tree" style grounding is more practical for low frequency signals, or special situations.

If you want to learn more about all of this, I recommend MIL-HDBK-217.
See sections 5.4.1 and 5.4.2 to start.

And that fuckload of money allows you to attend the class. Just because you pay to attend does not entitle you to an A, or even a passing grade.

Where in the FUCK did I ever imply that anyone was entitled to anything other than the grade they earned?
Try responding to what I actually wrote rather than silly straw-man arguments.

No paper, no grade. Not hard to understand, I trust?

Another straw-man. I give you a paper, you can grade it. The point of this thread is no whether or not I give YOU a paper, but who else you can give this paper to.

get that people want to protect their creative works, but if you're in a college class, you are getting something in return: a passing grade, provided you didn't plagiarize someone else's material.

And you are also paying a metric FUCKLOAD of money. It not too much to ask that the people you are paying upwards of $20,000 per year, not violate federal copyright law.

If you want to distribute my work get my permission.

Something tells me that attitudes would be quite different if this database stored the full text of academic journal papers they never bough the rights to have a copy of.

All Universities I know of require students to allow them to claim IP rights to all student generated works, invention or otherwise.

Citation please!

We're talking about undergrad papers from student who are PAYING the university.
(Work for hire doesn't come into play.)

I know I NEVER signed anything giving my alma mater rights to my work.
As the original author of the work, I provided one copy to my professors.
Creating an additional copy and providing it to a third party who will use it for commercial gain was never authorized, and would need to be. It's obviously not fair use, and as a result I expect that this ruling will not stand.

No, the statement means "the GFDL is not necessarily a free license by the definitions of OSI, Debian, etc."

This is exactly what I meant about being less than forthright.
The OPEN SOURCE INITIATIVE would be a group that determines whether a license meets their criteria as being "open source", not free. The FREE SOFTWARE FOUNDATION would be a group that determines whether a license meets their criteria as being "free", not open.

The OSI has published criteria to determine "openness" and the FSF has published criteria to determine "freeness".
These are two similar concepts, but there are very important differenences. (The most important of these differences, in my mind, is ideology.)

I find it had to believe that either you or the OP are not familiar with these differences.

If you or the OP want to make the argument that the license is not "free", then that argument needs to be made against a clearly defined definition of what it is to be "free". To point out that group OSI doesn't like the license, does not actually mean it's not free, since the OSI does not attempt to define what is "free software".

I'll quote Stallman here:
The Free Software movement, which I founded in 1983 focuses on freedom and community, on human rights for software users. "Open source" was founded in 1998 as a way to stop talking about those things. To hush them up, to bury them, put them out of people's sight. So they talk about practical advantages that come from using the software. Well, I also talk about practical advantages in my speeches. So here's what I say [Stallman outlines a large circle with his hands], and here's what they say [Stallman outlines a smaller circle within the first circle] - except that they go into more depth on it, and that is useful, y'know. Making the case to businesses that they will get some practical advantage out of releasing their software under, usually, a Free Software licence, that's useful, but the point is it's still a more superficial part of the issue.

Go to the OSI site and search on "freedom". You won't find a defintion of "free" there and you will find a bunch of blog postings which illustrate exactly what RMS is saying.

It's got a windbaggy ideological preamble; people shouldn't be forced to put their support behind a particular politically loaded credo just because they want to contribute to WP.

It's sad how people don't understand how important ideology is.

Although GFDL can be a free license, it can also be a non-free license if you choose to use it with some of the optional parts like invariant subsections.

This statement deliberately confuses what it means to be "free". Free doesn't mean "I can do anything I want." Free means "I have all the basic freedoms required to take advantage of this data, while at the same time it is guaranteed that others will have these freedoms as well."

People really don't give the free software foundation enough credit.
If Linux was released under the BSD license it would be nothing.

It is percisely because of all those annoying restricions and windbag idealists that the project has endured.