Slashdot Mirror

It'll never happen because the entire concept is so outrageously horrid: you expect me to pay you to stop invading my personal environment with advertising. Fuck. Right. Off.

http://www.artsjournal.com/riley/2013/05/banksy-coke-bottle/

I can tell the difference between my crappy violin and nicer ones in the store. Do you know how much a top quality modern violin costs?

Perhaps a few multiples of $10,000; I've never heard of new instruments going for significantly more than this.

Then perhaps you should read a bit about these studies... http://www.artsjournal.com/slippeddisc/2012/01/exclusive-how-i-blind-tested-old-violins-against-new.html

but they're never, ever going to be able to afford a Strad either.

Violins from that era are designed for music that no one plays anymore. I don't know how anyone can really say much about this without first discussing whether the violins are tuned for 440 or not.

Well, maybe we *are* headed toward fascism, but in *this* case it seems more likely we have an incompetent customs inspector.

The rules actually state that it is permissible to import manufactured items without a permit as long as the plant material in them is thoroughly dead and incapable of propagating. Items made of certain materials like bamboo are subject to inspection and possible fumigation if they are found to be infested. The only exception is bamboo garden stakes, which are low value items that are intended for an application with a very high risk of transmitting agricultural pests. It makes no economic sense to spend money to fumigate a garden stake when a traveler can purchase a replacement at a garden store for $0.25.

This is in fact quite sensible policy. Had the NYC customs inspectors followed it, Mr. Razgui's instruments would have been inspected then released. The question is, why didn't the inspector do his job properly?

Now for a fact that hasn't been widely reported. Mr. Razgui was also transporting new, green reeds for making flutes along with his finished flutes. There are not allowed into the country without a permit, and *should* have been destroyed. So my guess is that the customs inspectors found bag full of reeds, and noting some of them were green just destroyed the whole thing. This wasn't proper, in fact it was careless and lazy; but it wasn't quite the act of incomprehensible cultural vandalism depicted in the media.

Yea, here we got one where when searching a Cello case they closed it improperly and snapped a 19th century bow.

http://www.artsjournal.com/slippeddisc/2013/02/exclusive-how-us-security-agents-broke-my-cello-bow-by-alban-gerhardt.html

> I finally received the cello, fifteen minutes after the suitcase. My fatigue disappeared at once after opening my cello case: the cello seemed alright, but my beloved Heinrich-Knopf-bow stuck half in its mounting

> The TSA (Transportation Security Agency) in Washington, DC, not trusting the X-Ray-image felt the need to open the case. They took the cello out in my absence, put it back in, carelessly detaching the bow partly from its mounting and finally slamming the case shut, in the process breaking the bow

http://www.artsjournal.com/slippeddisc/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/266x198xboujemaa-neys-300x224.jpg.pagespeed.ic.0cUyxS4qkI.jpg
A picture of what the finished flutes (nays) looked like, and a list of what else was in the case

Boujemaa adds some specifics of the case:

What was in the case? they called Bamboo case
1) 11 nays (flutes) made by me some of them in Canada some in US
2) material to make new nays in the case
3) flight AA 0095 Madrid to JFK
4) time : 12/22/2013 (notice : on 12/23/2013)
5) Reason : nays from plants which is agricultural items (so l can’t play nay)

I've been told that theft and wilful damage to luggage is not a rare thing in that industry.

I personally know 9 professional musicians who have had musical instruments smashed or seriously damaged by Qantas, and here's another one that happened just a few days ago.

I am wondering more if this is in fact an attempt to get the term "Copy Left" redefined in public perception to mean "The Pirate Party". One of the letter writers in this page:

http://www.artsjournal.com/gap/2010/06/the-right-balance-on-copying.html#
(search for Sarah Baird Knight)

Seems to be actively trying to redefine the two sides in the argument as the terms "Copy Right" and "Copy Left" to be what I think most people would call "The RIAA,etc" and "The Pirate Party". This is despite many responses from musicians that they never heard the term "Copy Left" used in this way, she repeatedly states that she thinks these are the correct terms.

First, take a look at this discussion by an expert. (We now pause for the know-nothing kooks to ridicule Kyle Gann, claiming he's not an expert: Gann has of course written scholarly books on the subject of his expertise published by major academic institutions. Finished with the crackpot character assassination yet? Good, let's continue.)

Now take a look at the Wikipedia article on the Chicago School of Economics. Does it contain any hint that the Chicago School's prescriptions were put into practice in Chile and failed so spectacularly that the country went into a major recession?

Now take a look at the article on Alexander Hamilton. What birth date is cited? is there more than one? Do they differ? Does the Wikipedia article contain any discussion of a problem Hamilton's birth date? Do any of the Wikipedia contribution even give an evidence of realizing there's a problem with Hamilton's birth date?

Lastly, ask yourself how knowledge gets amassed in the real world via real scholarship. In real scholarship, there is no one single source of knowledge: instead, many different scholars publish different books and different articles, each providing alternative viewpoints. Eventually these differing viewpoints tend to converge on a single interpretation, as demonstrated by the overwhelming number of citations of scholarly books and articles by one particular group of authors and many fewer by all other authors (the familiar power law distribution observed in the long tail et al).

Exit question: does Wikipedia show any sign of recognizing this basic reality of the way scholarship gets done in the real world? (We now return you to your regularly scheduled insults and personal attacks and shower of acid contempt by people who can't even spell or use punctuation properly.)

Where you look - well there's that blog, there's Holkins' commentary, there's Wikitruth, Wikipedia Review, WCityMike's leaving message.

There was Ikkyu's classic discussion - unfortunately, overly censorious admins much like yourself wiped and locked it - again to hide their own abuses.

You have admins like SlimVirgin, who run around abusing the admin tools to hide things (she's also one of the most prolific liars and frauds when it comes to banning anyone she disagrees with for any reason).

There's another classic by Professor Gann, an academic who gave up on wikipedia here: again, someone who was abused by the system and sees the system for what it is.

You refuse to see that Wikipedia has a major problem - therefore, you are part of the problem. Can I give you a precise number of times the system has been abused? No. Can I point you to key cases, key cases in which to this day the reigning clique of Wikipedia refuse to admit they were wrong and that people were, in fact, abused? PLENTY.

Look at the evidence, rather than the lies and deception the clique and abusers throw around. You'll see quite clearly what Wikipedia is really about.

Wikipedia can have great value when it's a first stop. But now that it invades half of my trips to google.com I can't help but resent its borg-like other half. It seems to be spidering across the internet like a turbo-charged DMOZ that thinks it's more destination than launch-pad.

is how many false charges of "sockpuppet" or "troll" are put in by the abusive administrators that run the place.

Whoops. Did I say something less then complimentary about the quantum fucking encyclopedia, where info may or may not be correct based on which second of the day it is, and where you can be assured that the moment someone tries to fix it, they'll be beat down by an army of socially inept retards who have nothing better to do than accumulate hundreds/thousands of edits per day in hopes that they, too, can become administrators and ban anyone they disagree with?