Well, I'm moving to an air gapped computer, hoping this way of doing it won't be too complex, and might keep things kosher: https://medium.com/@russellirv...

Oy veh. The owner can modify the terms - see the specific case law cited by the article.

Correlation isn't causation, and what we now know about our biological clock makes the interpretation stated in the article ridiculous. Similar genetic discoveries often involve dopamine - anything that is more likely to key you to stay up, abuse artificial light and blow your diurnal hormone cycle. But in a generation or two we'll be smart enough to turn out the lights roughly when the sun goes down, experience much better health, and it will turn out that nobody was really a night owl (under even semi-natural conditions) after all. This determinative view of genetics belongs back in nineteen fifties. Genetics are the substrate upon which the environment acts.

Go is a game played on a board with 20 x 20 = 400 intersections. That's where the pieces are placed, not in the center of the 361squares. I suppose I now know why most of my software is so crappy - nobody checks their assumptions. (There were 90 comments already when I wrote this!) Even when the evidence is staring them in the face, visible in every photo of a Go game, ever. What's gonna happen next, Republicans exhibiting climate denial or something crazy like that?

I was in the room long ago hearing Buckminster Fuller advocate this idea. My father, an electrical engineer who designed telecommunication networks for a power company, laughed it off - he said it couldn't work because transmission was too inefficient. He may not have considered the direct current wrinkle. In any case, superconductors would change that, and there are short superconducting transmission cables in use, I believe.

Lots of rock, yes, for shielding and more - but shot up from the lunar surface to the L1 gravitational saddle point with electromagnetic cannons. like rolling a marble up a smooth mountain so it just nicely comes to rest at the top. (How best to balance the station, etc, there is a whole other discussion.) Not using current rail gun designs, though, because those wear out way too quickly. Essentially we need to be able to greatly accelerate a bucket, and then slow it while letting the payload sail away. The lunar poles might be a good location for such guns for a few reasons, including more reliable sunlight for power and the fact that the gun could be horizontal and still aim at at the L1 point. True, a tether (moonthread) elevator could be used coming up from the lunar surface with a counterweight nearer earth. We doubtless have materials strong enough. But very complex Coriolis effects from various climbing payloads and descending containers likely make this impractical for the time being.

Thanks for filling the previous poster in, but that rather highlights a real problem: Because this is where Windows really shines - messages that don't give you a hint about how to proceed, where to find more information, which program even posted the message or wants permission, or posting notices underneath windows, unseen.

And trying for the third time to see what happens in the editor now: Marc Andreessen on Big Breakthrough Ideas and Courageous Entrepreneurs https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Marc Andreessen on Big Breakthrough Ideas and Courageous Entrepreneurs http://slashdot.org/comments.p... (my longer reply was swallowed.)

Having watched inventions wander away from me and become private (first to the patent office with a whole bunch of cash now wins thanks to changes to U.S. law) I know how vital defensive publication is. Now I see that the OIN and linuxdefenders.org related defensive publication service defensivepublications.org has been discontinued. The website still exists, but won't take further submissions if you try to submit them. Without being able to keep open inventions open, we're in a heap of trouble. I'd like to see easy, reliable, court-provable defensive publication come first. I am suppressing several inventions right now that I believe would greatly benefit open source (etc) because such a service doesn't exist; as I wait until it does exist again. That's all I can do on my budget right now.

Everybody's talking about communication, but that's drinking the Kool-Aid, and being a good codependent.

This is the opposite of a communications problem. What the graph shows is disinvestment - it shows a clear policy that's been extremely well communicated right down to the coders. The message is: "it's working well enough, let's stop spending so much money (programmer time) and get something else done, that's now more vital." Without more context, we can't in fact rule out the possibility that this is the best business decision - although my experience is that disinvestment is frequently very premature. Investment can't be infinite, it can't keep expanding just because bug reports continue to come in at nearly the same rates (but, on average, about ever more specific and less economically damaging issues.)

I suspect (more than suspect, I've painfully experienced) that managers are often beyond ignorant about risk, but the truth is that most of their "ignorance" is pretended. Your communication skills are fine, and so are theirs. Many managers will disinvest when code is still quite dangerous because the economic rewards to them personally are large and immediate for doing so. They will build in or lock in technical and risk debt (and legal jeopardy for that matter) that can bring their whole company down to bankruptcy in full knowledge of those risks; as long as they can be reasonably sure that they will have moved on to a still better job by that time, with some bonuses tucked away that were fattened by their cheating the long-term interest of the corporation. Which they don't own. (See the Great Subprime Robbery of 2007/8.) That's corruption, of a kind very common in a "manager's economy." Maybe more common than not. It's not poor communication, and the tech field isn't immune, it attracts these managers because it's where the money is.

The reason that VCs have learned painfully to keep founders around is that founders aren't susceptible to this particular form of corruption. Founders have their payoff, now the only thing that really matters to them is how the long-term results reflect on their image. Mercenary managers are presented with very different, more perverse incentives and respond to them just as you would expect.

And surely that's the point - the supposed policy that you should use the talk pages to communicate, protest, etc is something never mentioned to those just trying to add something to Wikipedia. Why not? Precisely because it would leave traces. Nor do the editors themselves use the talk pages and then refer their interlocuters to those notes. If the real culture of Wikipedia ACTUALLY wanted the talk pages used, it would be easy to use them, use would be transparent; there would be a form to ease that, say; but in fact it's perhaps the most arcane part of Wikipedia - giving the clear signal that if you don't really, really know what you're doing you should stay away from talk pages. That way of presenting things is no accident, not after decades! The foxes are very securely in control of the henhouse.

De jure doesn't matter when de facto actions are highly effective (in this case at keeping most interactions off the record) and never reversed or punished.

No doubt Mr. Wales meant well when he called for quality just before the great decline; but he didn't distinguish between narcissism: which is to say, not being caught out, and accuracy - which would have to include taking some chances in order to reflect the best and newest information. So incompleteness (in order to ensure verifiability according to some cobbled-together criteria) actually became a desirable means for many editors, and a goal for some, judging by results.

So his speech initiated a self-reinforcing, ever-tightening conservative regime in which - as under Stalin - the only important thing was never to allow a change that might be shown wrong someday; just stick with the previous coffee-table consensus and never mind the facts. Never try for completeness, or unpopular fact.

This process has continued to feed on itself, like an infinite loop or the French Revolution, as the least conservative and anal-retentive editors amongst the remaining bunch get chucked each year. Left to itself, it can only get worse.

Pernicious cultures in any group or business are notoriously difficult to change. So difficult that it's very foolish to try. As a practical matter, you have to clean house entirely and start again. In this case, bar anyone who's been active in Wikipedia during the last five years from anything except bare contributions for the next ten years; then let them back in very gradually, if at all. So much has been lost that there's little downside at this point.

PS - I'm reminded of Dyson's analysis of bomber formation tightness in WWII.

You can look them up if you care to, just a couple of examples, out of many, many I know about personally:

Under Celiac disease, rejection of an accurate prevalence figure because they source "wasn't sufficiently reliable" even though no other figure was being given by the article at the time. The unreliable source? The New York Times.

Under the incident that led to the Movie Black Hawk Down, back when the book that was the source for the movie was the only detailed public account available: any fact in the book, but not in the movie, was deleted. Why? All the editors had seen the movie, none of them had apparently read the book. This re Bin Laden's involvement in shipping arms (RPGs) in, war crimes by insurgents (in the movie but not unmistakeable), and more.

Then look at all the locks - convenient for editors, but the very acme of ossification of error.

I couldn't possibly count my contributions to Wikipedia; not least because they happened a long time ago now. It's been many years since I've attempted to contribute, except the odd time when it's been deleted anyway for absurd reasons; but I'm very frequently tempted since there's a ton left to do, and plenty of new research that will take a generation to find its way into the now uber-reactionary encyclopedia, sadly. It's just insane now, corporate narcissism run amok - so long as they're never embarrassed, ever, they're happy to reflect unmoored consensus ignorance and ignore any amount of empirical research. If that means not reflecting any changes in human knowledge, or very few, well, they're quite happy with that - that is their definition of "quality" - never being caught on except when they're accurately reflecting common prejudice.

2016: Celebrating a decade of utter mismanagement of Wikipedia! May it, the institution not the information it's abusing, die a thousand deaths. Or at least one, soon.

I knew a man like this - a boss of mine at a summer job - who was oblivious to safety concerns whether that meant ancient gas stoves he cavalierly over-rode the safety valves on, canoes, or anything else (he was an avid tinkerer and jerry-rigger, but in his case not truly inventive.) He was more than a bit of a bully in everything, and felt certain he could bully nature, too. I left that summer job glad to still have my skin (after one very close call in one of his boats.) Just a couple years later I read that he had managed to kill both himself and his grown daughter on a ski slope, going where he was clearly warned he shouldn't go (but he knew better.) Believe me, when I read that news story, I didn't say "Gosh, that was a freak accident."

Nature bullied back, in the end.

As for myself, my inventions and clever thoughts have only killed one person, that I know of. (It was years before - looking back - I realized what had caused his death: the incident above happened in between.) One can't always avoid unintended consequences, but one can have more forethought than Midgley, I or my late boss did! Please do. Software kills, too, in many ways - the recent change to Facebook's notification algorithm broke many medical support groups on FB, making it much harder for people to get help quickly or reliably, and hasn't been fixed.