That might be OK for you Sophia but in my case it really needs to end with "nah., let's sleep on this. I'll send it for you tomorrow, maybe."
Beer! No wait, that goes the other way. Anti-Beer!
Dark Jaguar
Graduate Poster
- Joined
- Jan 19, 2006
- Messages
- 1,666
Anyone remember V-Chat?
I'd like to see a site like factcheck.org, but massively expanded to cover the issues of the day. Maybe put into a wiki format, but with editors. So say an issue pops up like the Dubai Ports thing. Within a day or two there would be an unbiased look at just the facts of the thing -- what does a port operator do, who does this stuff, how does security play in, maybe some statistics about the big port cities and what they ship in and out, -- and a non-conclusory listing of the issues. There would also be link to a separate page on the UAE (again with just factual stuff and an impartial listing of partisan issues), stuff like that.
Non-political stuff, too. Say the latest probe is approaching Mars. In addition to the stuff on the NASA page, it would have who built the probe, lists of other probes sent to Mars and probes similar to the present one sent to other planets, a better breakdown of the costs (X for the machine, Y for launch, Z for telemetry during the journey, etc.).
Basically a newspaper for people whose curiosity extends well beyond what even the best newspapers have space to report.
Non-political stuff, too. Say the latest probe is approaching Mars. In addition to the stuff on the NASA page, it would have who built the probe, lists of other probes sent to Mars and probes similar to the present one sent to other planets, a better breakdown of the costs (X for the machine, Y for launch, Z for telemetry during the journey, etc.).
Basically a newspaper for people whose curiosity extends well beyond what even the best newspapers have space to report.
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in a wiki everybody is an editor. I assume you mean with subject matter experts? or maybe just language cleanup editing?
That's one HELL of a workload you've described there!
I'd like see a standard feature on blogs causes a blogger's computer to stand up on tripod legs, grab the author by the throat and begin stabbing them in the face whenever s/he:
- Uses "lol" as a kind of pseudo-punctuation (i.e. "my dog just bit me in the eye lol now I'm going to need stitches wtf!?!?!).
- Exceeds more then 3 spelling errors per 5 words.
- Exceeds more than 300 words per punctuation mark.
- Exceeds 15 exclamation points at the end of a sentence.
- Uses "lol" as a kind of pseudo-punctuation (i.e. "my dog just bit me in the eye lol now I'm going to need stitches wtf!?!?!).
- Exceeds more then 3 spelling errors per 5 words.
- Exceeds more than 300 words per punctuation mark.
- Exceeds 15 exclamation points at the end of a sentence.
I think this CAN be organised. I just need some image-processing software that can find "eyes" in a "face" image...
geni
Anti-homeopathy illuminati member
- Joined
- Oct 14, 2003
- Messages
- 28,209
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubai_Ports
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Reconnaissance_Orbiter
Wikipedia comes close although It has slightly different priorities. It also has a slighty odd view of what counts as significant news. Lennart Meri's death was on the main page for quite a while yesterday.
Angus McPresley
Muse
- Joined
- Jan 30, 2006
- Messages
- 641
I have ideas all the time, so I keep a list. Here's what I'd like to see:
1. Gigography.com: An IMDB-like website that keeps a historical record of concerts. The band(s), the lineup, the date, the venue, the set list, trivia. It would of course have to be a wiki. Perhaps not the most life-affecting thing ever, but I think there is a great deal of history here that's just being lost. And it would be a load of fun to browse.
2. The Total Perspective Vortex: A website that's solely concerned with providing visualizations of the size and scale of our planet, solar system, and the cosmos in general.
3. A website that you can type in a fake news article and it would generate a GIF of that text that's browned, tilted, etc. so that it looks like an actual newspaper article that's been scanned in.
4. Similarly, a site that's a fully functional news aggregator with a real newsy-sounding URL, but also has a back door page that lets you enter a fake news story that you can link to in the context of the fully functional news site. Oh, the fun you'd have, until you got your pants sued off by somebody who was fooled.
5. A Google Earth-type thing that not only shows the buildings of, say, NYC, but also has a sliding time scale that lets you see the skyline as it appeared in any year.
6. A companion site to confluence.org where people record visits to geographical extremes (southernmost, easternmost, etc. point of every country and continent, as well as highest and lowest, and other oddities).
7. A site outlining proper feng shui techniques for web pages. One could make a mint, if one were unethical enough to foment this sort of crapola. Just send me a cut, please.
8. UncomfortableFacts.com: Just like the name says, a collection of uncomfortable facts, that makes hamburger out of sacred cows. John Lennon beat his wife. Dolphins commit rape. That sort of thing. Not a site to host if you care about such things as popularity at all.
9. A site like Digg that accepts user-submitted sites, and promotes them based on user voting, and allows comments, but is not just targeted at tech news but at anything that anyone finds interesting, like Blogdex.
I have others that I want to do that I don't want to give away yet...
1. Gigography.com: An IMDB-like website that keeps a historical record of concerts. The band(s), the lineup, the date, the venue, the set list, trivia. It would of course have to be a wiki. Perhaps not the most life-affecting thing ever, but I think there is a great deal of history here that's just being lost. And it would be a load of fun to browse.
2. The Total Perspective Vortex: A website that's solely concerned with providing visualizations of the size and scale of our planet, solar system, and the cosmos in general.
3. A website that you can type in a fake news article and it would generate a GIF of that text that's browned, tilted, etc. so that it looks like an actual newspaper article that's been scanned in.
4. Similarly, a site that's a fully functional news aggregator with a real newsy-sounding URL, but also has a back door page that lets you enter a fake news story that you can link to in the context of the fully functional news site. Oh, the fun you'd have, until you got your pants sued off by somebody who was fooled.
5. A Google Earth-type thing that not only shows the buildings of, say, NYC, but also has a sliding time scale that lets you see the skyline as it appeared in any year.
6. A companion site to confluence.org where people record visits to geographical extremes (southernmost, easternmost, etc. point of every country and continent, as well as highest and lowest, and other oddities).
7. A site outlining proper feng shui techniques for web pages. One could make a mint, if one were unethical enough to foment this sort of crapola. Just send me a cut, please.
8. UncomfortableFacts.com: Just like the name says, a collection of uncomfortable facts, that makes hamburger out of sacred cows. John Lennon beat his wife. Dolphins commit rape. That sort of thing. Not a site to host if you care about such things as popularity at all.
9. A site like Digg that accepts user-submitted sites, and promotes them based on user voting, and allows comments, but is not just targeted at tech news but at anything that anyone finds interesting, like Blogdex.
I have others that I want to do that I don't want to give away yet...
That one would be pretty easy to do, although it might take a little work making the image look authentic.
Just the other day, I was playing with some code that would generate dynamic GIFs and I wrote this script the other day to generate a random FSTDT quote for use in signatures. Example:
The Mars Recon Orbiter article was first-class, as Wiki's hard-science articles tend to be. The Ports article is exactly why I wish my envisioned website existed -- it didn't answer any questions! What does a "ports operator" actually do? How come the industry is consolidating, and how come freight companies like CSX are sellers rather than buyers in an era where customers are allegedly demanding "point-to-point solutions"? How does security at a port work? That thing was a (bad) recapitulation of information which could be gleaned by watching not much more than CNN Headline News.
geni
Anti-homeopathy illuminati member
- Joined
- Oct 14, 2003
- Messages
- 28,209
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_operator
Although the external link gives more info.
That sounds like a PhD theses question. You need quite a high base level of knowlage to even ask that question.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Coast_Guard#Port_and_Waterways_Security
Most wikipedians probably lost interest when they found out it wasn't about network ports
aerosolben
Evil Genius
- Joined
- Aug 10, 2001
- Messages
- 2,269
Chris Haynes
Perfectly Poisonous Person
This is something I was talking about with hubby yesterday. We have a 15 year old son who seems to be very addicted to World of Warcraft online.
On school nights there is no problem with us cutting off his internet access by restricting his MAC from the wireless router... BUT this has a couple of problems:
1) On weekend nights it is okay for him to be up at 1am, but we are tired and in bed. So we agreed, went to bed with a promise from him that he would shut down at 1am... hubby got up at 2am and found the child still playing!
2) While we can restrict him through using the wireless router, he can get a network cable and hook in and play while connected through the hardwire. AARGH.
So this is what we would want: A way to tell our broadband provider to cut off or restrict services to our son's laptop between certain time of the night.
By the way... the WoW group he mostly plays online with has several Aussies. One of which is a young lady, who has heard me yell at my son through the microphone he is attached to. So if you know of any young folks there in Oz who are playing WoW with a young lad on the USA west coast... remind them that even though it may only be 8pm there, it is 1am (or there-abouts) here!
On school nights there is no problem with us cutting off his internet access by restricting his MAC from the wireless router... BUT this has a couple of problems:
1) On weekend nights it is okay for him to be up at 1am, but we are tired and in bed. So we agreed, went to bed with a promise from him that he would shut down at 1am... hubby got up at 2am and found the child still playing!
2) While we can restrict him through using the wireless router, he can get a network cable and hook in and play while connected through the hardwire. AARGH.
So this is what we would want: A way to tell our broadband provider to cut off or restrict services to our son's laptop between certain time of the night.
By the way... the WoW group he mostly plays online with has several Aussies. One of which is a young lady, who has heard me yell at my son through the microphone he is attached to. So if you know of any young folks there in Oz who are playing WoW with a young lad on the USA west coast... remind them that even though it may only be 8pm there, it is 1am (or there-abouts) here!
