Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses [1][2] is long-overdue. “There is a current, established format for international addresses” is probably one of them.
Line 1, Line 2, Line 3, Country should cover just about all cases.
Ask yourself if you really need to break out the specific components of the address. In this case you don't. As long as the user knows the correct local format, it's fine.
The txt file isn't just about the user though, it's to aid in indexing useful information from the site, so having some sort of breakdown into nested administrative divisions is something that makes sense (after all, I don't just say "I'm looking for a steakhouse in the USA" when I'm trying to decide where to have dinner). Of course, administrative divisions introduce their own problems and work against the whole human readable / human writeable nature of what they're trying to achieve.
On the flipside, even Line 1, 2, 3, country isn't sufficient for all addresses. If you have an addressee, additional delivery information (eg a department), need to include a rural route identifier (eg for Canada), or need to store/use bilingual addresses (again for Canada) then you need more than 3 lines. If you want to talk edge cases, having a country code means that places like the Haskell Free Library and Opera House (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskell_Free_Library_and_Opera_...) can't be correctly addressed.
Hell, even the Falsehoods programmers believe about time doesn't come close to capturing the intracacies of lunar/lunisolar calendars (eg those with 13 months in a year, or a variable number of months in a year etc).
I guess that my point is that you need to find the balance of utility and complexity. If you need to be able to store every format of everything you wind up with either a hugely complex schema, or a single field that contains everything (and may even not capture everything completely), but that's not useful for anything except end-user display when the user is able to parse (or make a good guess at) the data.
Unfortunately there isn't a single winning approach - so unless you draw an arbitrary line your specification can't encompass every edge case while maintaining simplicity and achieving what it's set out to.
There are so many angles to this story that involve the tension between the forces of conservative thinking, and innovators who are trying to make the world a better place. Ignore the idiotic airport security problem, and you're still left with an amazing, improbable story about the world-changing consequences of an emerging technology that religious luddites keep trying to destroy.
Only a few short years ago, our society was getting its collective panties in a knot over the ethics of stem cell research. The US president made a strong movement to kill that research in the womb (pardon the pun). At the time, nobody could convincingly enumerate the medical benefits of the work...because it was research. Now we're synthesizing body parts. Amazing. How many years of human life will be saved? There's no upper limit. "Pro-life", indeed.
Save this story, and use it the next time you're in an argument with someone who wants to stop pure intellectual exploration in the name of vague, supernatural objections.
(Edit: Yes, these particular organs are being synthesized from adult stem cells, not embryonic stem cells. But it's a distinction without a difference -- we cannot predict what advancements or understanding will come from any given line of research. The argument is greater than the adjective.)
These aren't embryonic stem cells. No one has a problem with adult stem cells (well, I suppose the folks who refuse all forms of medical treatment might).
Untrue. There are/were plenty of groups who object to all stem cell research. Embryonic cells are just the most controversial segment. (Consider this thought experiment: take a fully differentiated human cell, and transform it such that it is capable of generating a embryo. Do you think this won't generate objections on religious grounds?)
The heart of the debate is that our knowledge is pushing relentlessly against the darkness of superstition, and that makes some people uncomfortable -- just as every scientific advancement has made people uncomfortable. We're just in a sad period where these people have greater influence over our society's decisions.
'Richard Doerflinger of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, an expert on bioethics issues, told the Associated Press the research "raises more ethical questions than it answers."..."It is widely believed that one cell of a very early embryo may separate and become a new embryo, an identical twin," Doerflinger told the Associated Press.'
Here's another response to the same experiment, which better captures the root of the objections:
'"Regardless of the speculated benefits, no human being, particularly the most vulnerable, should be treated as raw material which we can manipulate and manufacture," Mr O'Gorman said.'
It has everything to do with them: there's no such thing as an "adult" stem cell. There are only differentiated and undifferentiated cells, and "embryonic" is a useful description only insofar as it describes the source of origin of an established cell line. The techniques that those quotes were concerning don't destroy embryos -- they turn differentiated cells into undifferentiated cells -- but that's enough to trigger the objections.
Said another way, there's no fundamental reason that "adult" stem can't be converted to an "embryonic" state. And the quotes above illustrate that once you do that, you run afoul of the opponents. The religious groups don't want to prohibit "embryonic" stem cell research; they want to prevent anyone from doing any sort of science that they perceive to be in violation of their notion of human-being-ness. Science doesn't support the distinctions that they're making, and therefore, the conflict is unresolvable.
I am 99% sure the distinction, as it matters to the Catholic Church or anyone else using the term, is that “embryonic” refers to having been harvested from an embryo.
You completely misread his question. He wasn't referring to embryonic stem cells at all. I think hardly anyone has a problem with using something like mesenchymal stem cells for cartilage regeneration (well, the FDA maybe, but that's a different story).
The same blog post in Chinese is provided as a 10 MB PDF [1]. My PDF reader simply gives up while loading it and prints insane amounts of error messages. I'm guessing they converted all the text to curves to avoid being censored?
A case of poor timing, I think. TNW posts a non-attributed version of the article [1]. Author complains on twitter. Meanwhile, TNW notices the error and ninja-edits the post with proper attribution [2]. You check the updated post. Drama ensues on twitter.
Edit. Oi, I'm not saying TNW is in the right, people. Just pointing out something that their CEO seems to have missed.
To me, it's not about the Twitter drama; it's about the way The Next Web poorly cited this piece and revised it without fixing the issue people had with it in the first place.
Certainly. In my opinion an explicit quote of part of the original article would have been better than paraphrasing. Quoting reinforces the value of the source (“we couldn't write it any better”), paraphrasing does the opposite.
More like: TNW posts a non-attributed version of the article. Author complains on twitter. TNW sees this shits their pants and ninja-edits the post with poor attribution. People still complain. TNW ninja-edits the post one more time, now with proper attribution. The CEO (who looks like a total asshole in his pictures btw) posts an obvious PR Google Docs (??) letter to try and talk plagiarism good, which uses this post that tries to insinuate some kind of seconds -later-it-would-have-been-fixed-even-if-the-author-never-would-have-said-anything BS.
funnily enough...that is actually exactly what just happened and I literally (only seconds ago) discovered it. Will be putting a piece up about it soon.
yes I appreciate many of you agree a quote should have been included rather than an attempted rewrite.
I agree, that would have been better.
However, calling us out for plagiarism does feel far too extreme when the updated piece clearly states the source of the facts. The original piece only included links without a name and that I agree is 100% wrong. I hadn't seen that original piece before we were called out on twitter and my reactions were clearly based on immediate emotions...never a good time to reply.
They are calling you out for plagiarism because your company is a plagiarist. It's just as clear as seeing a person who is burning and telling them that they are on fire, or a person who is dead and calling them deceased. You do not have the right to lift entire articles from other's sites, even if you DO give attribution.
If you as CEO have so little common sense that you don't even know what plagiarism is, then you need to step down quickly before you open your company up to lawsuits against people who actuallY DO have the money and the time to pursue a suit.
Citing sources does not protect you from plagiarism. That is what I mean by the second version is not okay. If the lesson you're learning here is "I just need to make sure we link to the original" then you're learning the wrong lesson.
Yes, you attributed. But you very deliberately copied the article and posted it as your own work. You can't even say that you forgot to add quote marks as the text was slightly altered - evidently to give you an "out" if anyone accused you of direct copying.
Your threats afterward made things worse - much worse. Not understanding plagiarism (go look up the dictionary, or Wikipedia already!) whilst being an edito of a publication just makes this bad thing horrendous.
Zee, I think it's pretty ridiculous that you're even getting the slightest bit annoyed about this. Needless to say, we'll be saying well clear of anything your are involved with in future. http://notes.unwieldy.net/post/23049725899/plagiarism
