While the so called summary claims that wikipedia is supposed to be this "war zone", the article's fucking summary states that they have concluded that "edit wars are mainly fought by few editors only." The article then proceeds with statements such as:

"Usually, different editors constructively extend each other’s text, correct minor errors and mistakes until a consensual article emerges – this is the most natural, and by far the most common, way for a WP entry to be developed.

and even

As we shall see, in the English WP close to 99% of the articles result from this rather smooth, constructive process.

So, fuck you slashdot for posting a story with such an inflamatory, patently wrong and misleading pile of crap which was supposed to be the summary. If you have to lie to desperately generate page hits then it's a clear sign that you are dead as a communications medium.

This acceptance can easily come to bite you in the ass. If you grant MS the priviledge of implementing this then you can expect OEMs to pump out "windows computers" that, because they are sold only with MS-approved software, do not accept or support other software other than the one signed and approved by MS for that specific product. And why? Because pretexts such as "MS gets a little security on their malware plagued OS".

Once that happens, say goodbye to being able to pop in a Knoppix CD and give linux a try. Why? Because you've purchased a windows computer, and windows computers are only supposed to run windows.

And you can't turn that off because you explicitly have purchased a windows computer, which represents a declaration that you accepted the requirements put in place by MS for only running MS-approved software on your windows computer. Because malware.

But hey, you may expect the free market to kick in and for OEMs to simply sell hardware which isn't castrated with UEFI nonsense. Except that's as likely as being able to purchase a computer which doesn't come with windows reinstalled. And this means that, due to economy of scale, OEMs will actually be pressured to not waste resources on producing and supporting hardware for a niche market, as running slackware.

So, by agreeing with this, you are actually stating that there is a theoretical possibility that everyone else could simply shut it off. But then the real world kicks in and you will never see that happen at all.

I also don't know, but if it supports mongodb then it must be webscale.

A more accurate definition of capitalism consists of two basic things:
- right to private property
- free market

The entire capitalist system is defined by these two aspects alone. If a state grants every citizen the right to own stuff, and also buy and sell to whoever they see fit not only their stuff but also the stuff they make and the services they provide then we have a capitalist system.

Some implementations of a capitalist system may have some limits and restrictions (i.e., only a selected few can sell services as medical doctors, including prescribe drugs) but these two aspects, right to private property and a free market, are the basis of capitalism.

Indeed. Prefab houses are nothing new. Even european architecture giants such as Le Corbusier wrote extensively on mass production housing since around 1920, and pretty much modern construction is deeply influenced by Le Corbusier's work. Even concrete structures had their origin in modular, prefabricated systems, with Hennebique's reinforced concrete system.

So, if the entire industry is based on the use of modular systems, I really don't get it how anyone can make such silly claims such as "North American's, and Europeans partially are not yet used to prefab houses." Not yet used to prefab houses? We live in them for decades now.

I happen to be in structural engineering, and I have to say that you clearly don't know what you are talking about. I'll tell you why.

Nowadays, and for a couple of decades now, there isn't a single european contractor who does not rely on prefabrication. Concrete structures tend to make this a bit harder to pull, but their building cost is so much lower than steel structures that the extra time spent on a project easily offsets costs. Even then, there are quite a number of prefab structural elements and modules, such as pre-slabs and composite slabs with profile steel sheeting, that help out a lot. With steel structures, even with composite slabs, it's quite easy to put up high numbers of floors in a limited number of days. The only limit that affects this is how fast you can hoist the beam and column elements, and how fast your crew is able to set the necessary connections.

I suspect that in the US it's even more widespread. There are companies which even put together factories to assemble entire houses in assembly lines, and steel construction is much more widespread than concrete.

So, your comment on the use of prefab techniques is obviously bullshit.

Then, regarding your conspiracy theory, it is once again bullshit. To start off, as any product on earth, housing prices aren't defined by construction costs, but only on what clients are willing to spend on them. Meanwhile, construction costs, with today's technology, basically depends only on what finishings the client wishes. As a demonstration, you claimed that 86k is such a great deal. Yet, that's the price Ikea asks for a tiny apartment with an area of about 70mÂ. This represents a unit cost of about 1228â/mÂ, and this without accounting for the price of the property and any licenses and services which are needed to build it. Knowing this, do you actually know what's the average unit cost for building a similar house on a property, including the price of the property itself? Between 500â/m and 900â/mÂ.

In other words, your example costs at least twice as much to build than a regular house.

So, at least take your tinfoil hat off once in a while. The world isn't set out to get you.

The cost of construction work, nowadays, is defined by labour wages, not the cost of building materials. Hence, obviously it is more expensive to build something in Australia, resorting to australian labour, than it is to build something in China, resorting to chinese labour.

And let's not even go into the issue of costs introduced by adhering to building and safety regulations.

If you pre-fab everything on the ground then its not really "building", more like "assembling".

If you believe that nonsense then I have news for you: the entire construction industry has been "kinda cheating" for decades now. With steel structures, every single structural element is prefabricated somewhere and only assembled in situ. This is even the case with large projects, such as concrete bridges. Nowadays, there are a hand full of different building techniques which rely on the prefabrication of structural modules somewhere, and bring them on site just to assemble it. Take this for example.

Graphics cards are, nowadays, a bit more than 3D gaming. Nowadays there are a number of markets that companies such as NVidia may cater and are of fundamental importance, such as smartphones/tablets (remember Tegra?) and HPC (remember CUDA/OpenCL?).

What these markets have in common is that linux is the only reason they exist and are relevant. Windows is,at the very best, a "also ran" in mobile devices. In the HPC world linux is essentially the only game in town. In fact, there is currently only a single entry proprietary OS entry in the Top500 list.

Do you expect NVidia to abandon any of those markets in protest of Linus Torvalds pointing out that NVidia sucks at supporting linux? Think again.

Why should Nvidia subscribe to the projects "goals and visions"? Thats the projects concern, not theirs.

NVidia isn't required to, as you put it, "subscribe to the projects goals and visions".

But Linus Torvalds is also not required to enjoy or approve of NVidia's policies, particularly when they generate bad publicity for Linus Torvalds' project and also cause a number of people to complain to Linus Torvalds about a problem which he didn't caused nor can he do anything at all about it. Hence, a very appropriate and sorely required "Fuck you, NVidia".

I've had problems with a NVidia card that I have, and the last time it gave me problems was with the latest upgrade to Kubuntu 12.04. With this upgrade, NVidia's very own proprietary driver either rendered 3D scenes excruciatingly slow or never rendered them at all, instead presenting only a black window. Strangely enough, 2D rendering worked without any noticeable hitch.

The fix came only about a month ago, with an upgrade to NVidia's proprietary driver.

I'm no Knuth biographer, but every single interview and presentation given by Knuth that I ever saw, he always spoke like that.

Going back to basketball, some people talk tons of shit about players such as Derrick Rose for not being very articulate, accusing him of being a moron, a retard and even autistic. Yet, people such as Knuth are also not very articulate, and no one in their right mind would accuse Knuth of being a moron. That says something about being prejudiced.

There's another way to fix the shortfall: simply raise the price of peak hour electricity until

...until industrial production is affected by the skyrocketing costs and the whole economy of Japan faces a recession caused by the increased production costs and lack of ability to compete in the economic field.

In alternative, they can simply turn on a couple of the 50 power generators they have just sitting there, that never exhibit a single problem in their entire existence.

I wonder what's the best option.

It's basketball. Really, does anybody with a working brain really give a screw about this game?

I had a sarcastic reply but instead I'm going to simply say this: Donald Knuth was a basketball coach. See him talk about his baskeball coaching experience here.

There is no doubt that "everything will correct itself". This isn't up for debate.

What's up for debate is how will the correction happen. The whole point of this is in whose terms will this correction happen: will this be in humanity's good terms, by limiting growth and guaranteeing access to limited resources, will it be in humanity's bad terms, with wars for stuff such as access to food and drinking water and the accompanying indiscriminate killing of very large numbers of people, or will it be in nature's terms, with everyone simply dying off due to lack of subsistence.

It is in everyone's best interests that this adjustment is made on humanity's terms, to preserve quality of living and avoiding large scale deaths. Hence, reports such as the one reported here.