response to Morgan Clendaniel's post Water In The Fuel
same old h2ype
Commented on June 25, 2008 by - vfrickey
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response to Morgan Clendaniel's post Obligatory Resignation Post
WHICH smart and powerful people?
I seem to have missed it when SMART people were demanding Alberto Gonzalez's resignation (for doing many fewer unethical things than Janet Reno managed to do during her tenure as AG).
Commented on August 27, 2007 by - vfrickey
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Technology
response to Office of CC and GOOD magazine's post The Expanding Universe of Wikipedia
Controversy? Please explain.
I hate it when people throw the term "controversy" around - it's like "notorious," a term so loaded with negative connotation, yet free of specific meaning, that it has become a simple epithet to describe something the speaker dislikes without being able to justify the negative description.
In the case of wikipedia, its creators succeeded in creating a resource which is both sui generis (or was until the concept attracted imitators) and which is a brave stab at the problem of creating a reference work which draws on the knowledge of its users.
If by "controversy," one means that wikipedia articles are not always reliable - why, this can be said of any work of reference.
Any compendium of knowledge is agenda-driven in one way or another; otherwise, no one would bother with all the work involved in compiling and publishing them. The best we can hope for when consulting references of any sort is to acquire a skill for assessing the truth of information resources, or at least accounting for their source's reliability.
Wikipedia isn't perfect, but it is impressive. What I find most impressive about it is how well the open editorial process works in winnowing out the informational chaff.
It also increasingly provides information that it's difficult to locate elsewhere on the Internet without some skill in constructing search engine queries. Caveat emptor, however, is as applicable to what you read there as it would be in more conventional references (which also harbor misinformation, with the added problem that they are often pseudovalidated by appearing in print, or stamped with some falsely reassuring imprimatur of authority).
I have to agree with that the transparency in this article lacks visual impact and fails to use graphics to communicate its points effectively. In the language of business presentation, the graphic transparency on wikipedia is a "duck."
Commented on July 22, 2007 by - vfrickey
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Technology
response to eastandwest's post Are you kidding? Have you ever even been to China or done business there??
McKinnon did well...
Eastandwest's criticism of Ms McKinnon's article was ill-founded.
Nowhere does McKinnon presume to lecture the Chinese government on their abuse of their citizens' human rights, except by her well-taken criticism of Microsoft, Google and Yahoo for taking part in these human rights abuses.
It's appalling that censorship and imprisonment of people for their political speech has found such rabid and thoughtless defense. By eastandwest's logic, we were right to blind ourselves to the murders committed by Hitler and Stalin during their heyday, to say nothing of the mountain of corpses piled up by Mao. After all, none of those dictators were "swayed one bit by what American companies/citizens" thought they should do (i.e., stop persecuting and murdering their own people for political dissent).
And anticipating the inevitable retort, one doesn't have to defend the stupidities and outright tortures committed by a handful of poorly-supervised troops in Iraq to recognize and detest even worse and much more systematic human rights abuses which are being abetted by American firms. Abu Ghraib was an aberration; the suppression of domestic dissent and jailing of dissidents is characteristic of Beijing.
Commented on July 22, 2007 by - vfrickey
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Technology
response to Rebecca MacKinnon and Josh Cochran's post Internet Intervention
BRAVO!`
I think you've done a great service to the world, and to the people of China in particular, by exposing the collusion between the totalitarian regime there and three companies which have engaged in no little self-congratulation about their services to democracy. It's high time that Google, Yahoo and Microsoft were better known for their moonlighting job as narks for the People's Republic of China.
Commented on July 22, 2007 by - vfrickey
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We see this every time there's a sharp increase at the pump price of gasoline - someone ELSE "discovers" that you can hydrolyze water into its component parts, nydrogen and oxygen (in a reaction which anyone with a battery can re-create), which can then be used to run an automobile. They can call it "Brown's Gas" or "HHO gas" but what it is, is an intimate mixture of hydrogen and oxygen from electrolysis of water. Nothing new or usable here.
The problem is that you use more energy to separate the water into its component parts, collect the oxygen and hydrogen, then burn them in a car engine than it takes simply to run your car on gasoline. The technology is as old as the hills and requires plenty of outside energy to work - too much to even remotely resemble an "energy-saving technology."
John McCain has a good point - battery technology is the key to replacing crude oil. As the price of crude oil goes up and up, it'll pay us to be able to charge our cars overnight from house current IF we can put efficient enough batteries in our cars.