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yet fights tooth and nail to keep people from using it legitimately for their movies where others allow it.

    I think these are the pictures you are looking for. They're well commented, and point out the obvious fact that the "smart" cars in the photos weren't smart cars. The first was probably a mid to full size car. I can't even begin to guess what the car was. Something gray, that had at least 1 wheel, and had 5 lugs on a wheels.

    That is a horrible crash though. They didn't stand a chance, between two loaded rock trucks.

    They do make a point. Bigger vehicles survive wrecks better. I bought a 40' city bus as an RV. In every crash photo I've seen involving vehicles of that type, the bus comes out unscathed, while the passenger vehicles don't do so well. I saw an accident in town a while back. All the traffic signals when you're going North bound change sequentially, so if you hold 40mph, you'll go through without needing to stop. I drove the road enough to know, there are a couple signals that don't always change in sequence with the others. It seems a driver of a small sedan didn't know about the signals that can change out of sequence. He slammed into the side of the bus, hitting it at the rear door. The only damage on the bus was that the door jammed. The passengers all walked off without injuries. The driver of the car was loaded up on a back board to be delivered to the hospital. Judging by the fact the front of his car was 3 feet shorter than it would have started at, I'd say he needed the hospital.

    I don't work in that area any more, but I saw plenty of near misses, where people assumed the light would turn green, but it didn't.

Read the blog---Walsh suspects there's more shenanigans lurking in their code.

When blaming the US for CO2 production, it's also worth considering this lil' thingy I ran into a while ago (googled for it again)

http://johnosullivan.livejournal.com/41060.html

Yes, it is true the US produces a hell of a lot of CO2 per capita. It is also true that the US has the good fortune, climate wise, to be an overall net absorber of CO2.

Actually, the claim is wrong and the article you link to is either incompetent or a lie. The author carefully (or carelessly) picked the net emission map from July 2009. Spring and summer is the main growing season for yearly plants, and for deciduous forests. That's why the plants in the Northern hemisphere pick up a lot of CO2 in the summer. Of course, they release most of it again in fall and winter, when leaves and other plant matter decompose. A meaningful comparison can be only made for a full seasonal cycle. The original report by JAXA shows emission estimate maps for all four seasons (scroll down to near the end, Figure 3), and it also shows the impact of seasonal patterns (Figure 2). Interestingly enough, 3 of the 4 maps show the US as net emitters, and 2 of the 4 show Europe as net emitters.

Of course, we also know that these seasonal fluxes are much larger than human emissions. But they balance out over time, while humans just keep adding CO2. If you check the Keeling Curve of CO2 measured in Hawai, you can see the seasonal effect as small, very regular wiggles in the overall increase. The difference between summer and winter does not balance out, since most land (and hence most seasonal growth) by far is in the Northern hemisphere. The size of the seasonal variation is about comparable to the secular increase of 5-10 years, depending on the point in time you pick. We are releasing CO2 now a lot faster than 1960.

When blaming the US for CO2 production, it's also worth considering this lil' thingy I ran into a while ago (googled for it again)

http://johnosullivan.livejournal.com/41060.html

Yes, it is true the US produces a hell of a lot of CO2 per capita. It is also true that the US has the good fortune, climate wise, to be an overall net absorber of CO2.

You know, if that makes anyone in the US feel better...

This is totally setting aside questions of overall longterm impact and most effective mitigation strategies, and just focusing on the fingerpointing that's been going on lately.

First - I want to see in the license where it requires them to pull it
off systems.

This was followable via the links in the original article.

Oracle has ended the DLJ, the "Distributor License for Java".
http://jdk-distros.java.net/
http://robilad.livejournal.com/90792.html

Second - What the hell are they going to replace it with? Are they saying
you have to download and install Java manually? OpenJDK
supposedly doesn't work with all things.

That's true; there are certain known issues with OpenJDK and basically Oracle is saying "it'll just have to do".

Third - What does this mean for Ubuntu derivatives like Mint? Are they
going to have to pull the jdk as well?

Yes, and that's exactly what's been happening, because there's no other choice.

About a year ago I was looking for something similar to the Radio Shack Armitron I had as a kid. I ended up getting an OWI robotic arm for my kids, which is pretty cheap at $35 on Amazon, also has a USB control board for an extra $15 or so. You assemble it yourself, but it's fairly easy as plastic models go, even relative to Legos, and the build quality is pretty high for the price.

There's even code. to get the USB control stuff working under *nix . I had to make a few minor tweaks to get it to compile on my Linux box, and it's a bit basic, but it worked! Would be fairly trivial to build a web interface to it along with a webcam. The only downside is that it still draws power from D-cells, but that's easy enough to live with.

While I love to bash on Ubuntu on every (reasonable and merited) opportunity available, and they certainly aren't scarce, this isn't one of them. As others have already pointed out, the packages were removed because Oracle will not license updates, and the latest distributable version has important security vulnerabilities. It would be irresponsible to keep the current packages in the distribution and illegal to update them.

More importantly, this move is exactly what Oracle wants done, and no, it's not any sort of evil move. Dalibor Topic explains in his blog the reasons behind this change in licensing: OpenJDK is (the basis of) the reference implementation for Java 7, and the Sun (now Oracle) JDK implementation is now (going to be) based on OpenJDK; the gratis, non-free licensing for the Sun (now Oracle) JDK was a temporary solution that's reached the end of its applicability:

That non-open-source license was introduced by Sun Microsystems back in 2006, when the open-sourcing of Sun's Java SE implementation was announced at JavaOne, as a stop-gap measure until OpenJDK matured. It was a way to enable Linux distributions to take Sun's JDK 5.0 and provide their own 'native packages' based on Sun's non-open-source bits.

It was always intended to be a temporary solution, and the final solution has always been migrating to OpenJDK. Yeah, it sucks, compatibility is far from complete, and things will break as a result of this move, but it's always been the plan, and it's not Canonical fucking it up this time. For reference, as one of the comments in TFA points out, Debian did it too.

In short: nothing to see here; move along. If this makes you lose sleep, maybe you shouldn't have used Java, and maybe you should migrate to something better.

Thanks for the informative comment. Tasty tasty hypocrisy.

Found a nice link: http://bleachness.livejournal.com/446299.html

I have heard several people also end up with a number right around 15%. For example: http://eugenyboger.livejournal.com/4514.html?thread=53410#t53410 Our current number is a lower bound only, we'll try to get a better estimate at some point.

It all comes out of LiveJournal of this guy, which has a wealth of statistical analysis on the subject. This particular graph first appeared here, and I see that it was recently analyzed in more detail here

It all comes out of LiveJournal of this guy, which has a wealth of statistical analysis on the subject. This particular graph first appeared here, and I see that it was recently analyzed in more detail here

It all comes out of LiveJournal of this guy, which has a wealth of statistical analysis on the subject. This particular graph first appeared here, and I see that it was recently analyzed in more detail here

His point is that this percentage doesn't change like that for any other party, just for the one that won the elections. I believe they've also brought in some statistical data from other elections that show that this still holds as a rule.

That said, it's not a single inconsistency. There's a wealth of statistical data to make a clear case for fraud, some of it is pretty subtle. For example, they have made a graph where they have plotted the number of electoral districts reporting a certain percentage of votes for a given party. For United Russia - and only for it - you see clear spikes in the graph at 50%, 60%, 70% etc - which are not there for any other party. In other words, an anomalously high number of electoral districts have reported round numbers for United Russia - as would be the case if they had a certain number they had to match. The most prominent spikes are at 50%, with a steep slope downwards at 49% suddenly inverting at 50% (the slope at 49% likely represents the real downward curve of lognormal distribution), and at 100% - that latter is Chechnya etc, where there was no pretense at free elections at all.

Statisticians have already nicknamed it "Churov's saw" (Churov is the head of the Russian Central Eelectoral Commission).

there's actually a huge amount of internal reports of, well, theater of election.

for you, http://cifidiol.livejournal.com/1600.html?thread=25664 might be interesting - maybe google translate helps for others

FYI, the 40,000 protesters is a sham. Someone has counted the heads, literally, in one rectangular area, then extrapolated it, and got the 20-25,000 number at the very maximum: http://dazor.livejournal.com/105114.html
Someone else used a program to count the protesters: http://politrash-ru.livejournal.com/59110.html, got the same 25,000 number.

FYI, the 40,000 protesters is a sham. Someone has counted the heads, literally, in one rectangular area, then extrapolated it, and got the 20-25,000 number at the very maximum: http://dazor.livejournal.com/105114.html
Someone else used a program to count the protesters: http://politrash-ru.livejournal.com/59110.html, got the same 25,000 number.

Fucking amateurs

Seriously. You do NOT DO THAT. How hard is this to understand?

Here you can see a nice statistical graph that clearly demonstrates election fraud (in Russian; the blue curve is for United Russia):

http://podmoskovnik.livejournal.com/129632.html

Plotted here is the number of votes cast for each party as a function of voter turnout. There is only one party whose peak is abnormally widened to the right with a huge second near 100% - and this is the United Russia.

... having read your LJ, I see that my guess was spot on. Such a whiner. It sounds like you liked your life the USSR a great deal - what the hell are you even doing in United States?

Good job! Too bad we don't have an ending to the song yet. :-/

You're not the first to write something like that btw:
http://nimitzbrood.livejournal.com/184178.html

Mine was a little more hopeful at the end...foolish me...

I like my brakes reliable. I know as a BMXer when the current trend is to go brakless I sound like a heretic. I'm old. I'm an old-school BMXer, I think the trend is stupider than these brakes, but at least someone who follows the trend knows they're riding without brakes unlike the people with these wireless ones.

I would be worried about other problems. When I ride my dork bike I have a pair of Cy-Fi Bluetooth speakers on my handlebars blaring AC/DC and Beastie Boys at people I pass. Every time I stop at a stoplight something happens. My music get interrupted. I'm not sure exactly what goes on with stoplights, but there's very definitely something going on wirelessly that interferes with my Bluetooth speakers. When I got caught at the train tracks the speakers were out for more than just the little blips stop-lights create. This isn't metal from the train blocking my signal, the phone that the music is getting streamed from is in the leg pocket on my carpenter pants. I would be worried about this phenomenon not only engaging my brakes when I don't want them engaged, but also preventing them from working as well. This isn't just failure after poor maintenance and abuse, this is every single stoplight in the Houston area and I'm sure other places as well.

I'm glad they aren't looking to deploy these yet, and I hope they don't. It's hard to beat the simplicity of a simple wire. It's also the same reason Soviets in MIGs could pull off maneuvers our pilots in F-whatever planes couldn't because the electronics wouldn't allow them to.

I like my brakes reliable. I know as a BMXer when the current trend is to go brakless I sound like a heretic. I'm old. I'm an old-school BMXer, I think the trend is stupider than these brakes, but at least someone who follows the trend knows they're riding without brakes unlike the people with these wireless ones.

I would be worried about other problems. When I ride my dork bike I have a pair of Cy-Fi Bluetooth speakers on my handlebars blaring AC/DC and Beastie Boys at people I pass. Every time I stop at a stoplight something happens. My music get interrupted. I'm not sure exactly what goes on with stoplights, but there's very definitely something going on wirelessly that interferes with my Bluetooth speakers. When I got caught at the train tracks the speakers were out for more than just the little blips stop-lights create. This isn't metal from the train blocking my signal, the phone that the music is getting streamed from is in the leg pocket on my carpenter pants. I would be worried about this phenomenon not only engaging my brakes when I don't want them engaged, but also preventing them from working as well. This isn't just failure after poor maintenance and abuse, this is every single stoplight in the Houston area and I'm sure other places as well.

I'm glad they aren't looking to deploy these yet, and I hope they don't. It's hard to beat the simplicity of a simple wire. It's also the same reason Soviets in MIGs could pull off maneuvers our pilots in F-whatever planes couldn't because the electronics wouldn't allow them to.

Amen, someone posted an infographic for just you what said
http://pics.livejournal.com/ivan_gandhi/pic/0003e1gb

> Your analysis seems to assume no other promotional efforts other than casting the ebook upon the waters and waiting.

No, for a self-published author with no name recognition, I assume a huge amount of promotion in order to get into the two and low three digit range. Unfortunately, the iron rule holds, there's only a miniscule chance that a self-published author that you have no information upon (like reviews elsewhere) is going to be readable. Readers know this, and for those who value their time, the net value of such a book is *negative*. Readers also know that the amount of promotion, be it blogs or tweets is unrelated to the quality of a book. So, almost everyone I know runs screaming from promotion for self-published books. It's not that they're evil or universally awful, it's simply that the statistics are against it, and there just isn't enough time to even glance at all the self-published titles in a genre in a given month.

So, no, I assume that self-published authors work their backside off trying to promote their books (as can be seen by the fact that walking the SF con dealers rooms can become quite a gauntlet). I just assume (from my experience) that it mostly doesn't work. (As I said, just enough lightning strikes to allow one to believe, but not the thousands of authors a year "making it" necessary to keep the industry healthy.)

Now, if an author is already famous (for some value of famous), then sure, they might pick the book up. In the SF realm, John Scalzi is an example of someone who parlayed 10 years of effort in cultivating a truly interesting and funny web site into a *chance* at success. People were willing to *try* the books because of what they knew of him, but it was the books themselves that allowed him to become successful. Likewise, being friends with reviewers at a big name review site will help - won't get you a good review, but will give you a *chance* at a review. And that's several orders of magnitude better. But again, without personal connections or fame outside the industry, you need really, really, really good luck.

(The only way out of this vicious cycle I can see is if you could pay a site to review your books and they did a good enough review that it was taken seriously by readers. But how long would that last as a business when you rated 95% of the books that paid a few hundred dollars for a review an 'F'?)

Wow. I just got through a wild ride visiting very strange places. Thanks for that.

http://msevior.livejournal.com/30816.html

Back in 2008 a commenter on Matthew Garrett's blog proposed what sounds like this idea and called it "Rebootinate"

http://airlied.livejournal.com/71734.html

The security gain comes from the fact that it is feasible to perform a side-channel attack on RAM but infeasible to perform a side-channel attack on CPU registers. The data to recreate the keys is scrubbed from RAM; the keys never leave RAM. I have done work on a similar project to TRESOR, called Loop-Amnesia, which uses MSRs instead of the debug registers to perform the same task and does not require AES-NI support.

---linuxrocks123

Now this is going to be interesting to observe the heads of evangelical Christians explode, that even the scientists who are themselves Christians no longer can maintain that those biblical stories have anything there but a fairy tale.

On a lighter note, here is some NSFW but still quite political material that may cheer some of those Christians up. On the other hand there are naked boobs there, so what do Christians say about naked boobs?

"Do-no-evil magic"? Citation bloody needed. Those days are past. Look at the Google+ names fuckery - stuff like blocking Hong Kong users from their email because they don't think their names sound American enough. Even their own employees!

You are not the customer, you are the product. Eric Schmidt stated it clearly last year. Make no mistake: Google has decided it's finally time to cash in.

This has abolished their goodwill in an instant. I'm seeing people seriously question Google for collaborative documents, for email, even for search. How much bad will do you have to be running up for people to think Bing might be a better idea?

When the article is not vague, it is plain wrong.

Recently I made teo rather trollishly titled posts on the same subject, on my Livejournal:

http://abelits.livejournal.com/41968.html
http://abelits.livejournal.com/42052.html

Seeing how even supposedly knowledgeable developers post unreadable, vague opinion pieces, I think, I will have to add more to those.

When the article is not vague, it is plain wrong.

Recently I made teo rather trollishly titled posts on the same subject, on my Livejournal:

http://abelits.livejournal.com/41968.html
http://abelits.livejournal.com/42052.html

Seeing how even supposedly knowledgeable developers post unreadable, vague opinion pieces, I think, I will have to add more to those.

"We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time".

But be sure to remember and apply them aggressively the other INT PI % of the time:

http://heavenly-dorks.livejournal.com/845375.html

They were warned about this years ago. Former wikipedia administrator Kelly Martin wrote whole treatises on it. in her blog. A former admin under the pseudonym of "Parker Peters" wrote up apt descriptions of why it happened - power-mad individuals abusing their "buttons", individuals who gamed the system, gangs who formed to "control" articles - on his blog too.

I've found this discussion to be particularly apt, a discussion of precisely how Wikipedia fails to retain newcomers because most newcomers who actually make an edit are quickly shooed out the door by either the POV pushing gangs or the edit-count-aholic "recent changes patrol"; adding in to this is the fact that the trigger-happy admins remaining no longer stay remotely within policy, as the average "visitor vandalism" punishment is not a block of one day, but one month or sometimes more directed at DHCP addresses, and generally these power-mad fools compound the problem by instantly locking down the talkpage so that if someone else were to get that address, they can't even ask for an unblock... not that the unblock process ever actually works any more, since the same trigger-happy gestapo types patrol the Unblock Requests page.

The underlying problem, the thing that drives people away from Wikipedia, is that it's impossible to get started in. The admins are, just about uniformly, complete dickholes. The "regulars" who remain are either edit-count-itis freaks who will play revert-war with automated tools just to get their edit count up, or are shameless sycophants who play hanger-on to those admins deemed "in power" - the goal of both groups being to boost their chances of someday getting the "extra buttons."

To paraphrase Douglas Adams, the first problem of Wikipedia admins is that nobody should be allowed to do it who ever actually WANTS the job.

The secondary problem is that those sections that really need fixing, are the domain of power-mad admins or control-freak groups who maintain them and drive people away as quickly as they come in order to WP:OWN the content.

The third part is that you can't even talk about Wikipedia without having to reference byzantine, contradictory, fucked-up rules. You can't participate in Wikipedia without memorizing most of them, and the moment you cross one of the power-mad fools they call admins or some of the POV groups, you're going to get hammered over the head with those same "rules", and before you know it you're going to be on the end of a longstanding block with a talkpage lock if you dare try to file an unblock request that says, in essence, "please unzip so I can suck your cock o powerful sir."

If you think I'm joking, try reading their own guide. Explaining why you believe the block was out of policy? ZZZTTT! WRONG! Pointing out that you're being targeted by people with WP:OWN issues or that you're responding to a major problem involving some other Wikipedia policy violation? ZZZTTT! WRONG! The only way you get an unblock requested is to (a) know a corrupt admin who happens to be your friend or (b) play the "mea culpa mea culpa" game.

Oh, and as for using CheckUser to show that you are NOT a sockpuppet after the favorite tactic of dickhole admins and POV warrior alike, the false sockpuppetry accusation? Sorry. CheckUser is Sooper Sekrit Kangaroo Court Data that can ONLY get you sent to the gulag.

They were warned about this years ago. Former wikipedia administrator Kelly Martin wrote whole treatises on it. in her blog. A former admin under the pseudonym of "Parker Peters" wrote up apt descriptions of why it happened - power-mad individuals abusing their "buttons", individuals who gamed the system, gangs who formed to "control" articles - on his blog too.

I've found this discussion to be particularly apt, a discussion of precisely how Wikipedia fails to retain newcomers because most newcomers who actually make an edit are quickly shooed out the door by either the POV pushing gangs or the edit-count-aholic "recent changes patrol"; adding in to this is the fact that the trigger-happy admins remaining no longer stay remotely within policy, as the average "visitor vandalism" punishment is not a block of one day, but one month or sometimes more directed at DHCP addresses, and generally these power-mad fools compound the problem by instantly locking down the talkpage so that if someone else were to get that address, they can't even ask for an unblock... not that the unblock process ever actually works any more, since the same trigger-happy gestapo types patrol the Unblock Requests page.

The underlying problem, the thing that drives people away from Wikipedia, is that it's impossible to get started in. The admins are, just about uniformly, complete dickholes. The "regulars" who remain are either edit-count-itis freaks who will play revert-war with automated tools just to get their edit count up, or are shameless sycophants who play hanger-on to those admins deemed "in power" - the goal of both groups being to boost their chances of someday getting the "extra buttons."

To paraphrase Douglas Adams, the first problem of Wikipedia admins is that nobody should be allowed to do it who ever actually WANTS the job.

The secondary problem is that those sections that really need fixing, are the domain of power-mad admins or control-freak groups who maintain them and drive people away as quickly as they come in order to WP:OWN the content.

The third part is that you can't even talk about Wikipedia without having to reference byzantine, contradictory, fucked-up rules. You can't participate in Wikipedia without memorizing most of them, and the moment you cross one of the power-mad fools they call admins or some of the POV groups, you're going to get hammered over the head with those same "rules", and before you know it you're going to be on the end of a longstanding block with a talkpage lock if you dare try to file an unblock request that says, in essence, "please unzip so I can suck your cock o powerful sir."

If you think I'm joking, try reading their own guide. Explaining why you believe the block was out of policy? ZZZTTT! WRONG! Pointing out that you're being targeted by people with WP:OWN issues or that you're responding to a major problem involving some other Wikipedia policy violation? ZZZTTT! WRONG! The only way you get an unblock requested is to (a) know a corrupt admin who happens to be your friend or (b) play the "mea culpa mea culpa" game.

Oh, and as for using CheckUser to show that you are NOT a sockpuppet after the favorite tactic of dickhole admins and POV warrior alike, the false sockpuppetry accusation? Sorry. CheckUser is Sooper Sekrit Kangaroo Court Data that can ONLY get you sent to the gulag.

i have to wonder...is this how Rome fell?

It's definitely what happened in France.

On-topic: http://pics.livejournal.com/spaz_own_joo/pic/0000h5ew

I liked this

http://www.strategypage.com/humor/articles/military_jokes_20057151.asp

Hitler[AoE]: u guys are fockin gay
Hitler[AoE]: ur never getting in my city
*Hitler[AoE] has been eliminated.*
benny~tow: OMG u noob you killed yourself
Eisenhower: ROFLOLOLOL
Stalin: OMG LMAO!
Hitler[AoE]: WTF i didnt click there omg this game blows
*Hitler[AoE] has left the game*
paTTon: hahahhah
T0J0: WTF my teammates are n00bs
benny~tow: shut up noob
Roosevelt: haha wut a moron
paTTon: wtf am i gunna do now?
Eisenhower: yah me too
T0J0: why dont u attack me o thats right u dont got no ships lololol
Eisenhower: fock u
paTTon: lemme go thru ur base commie
Stalin: go to hell lol
paTTon: fock this sh1t im goin afk
Eisenhower: yah this is gay
*Roosevelt has left the game.*
Hitler[AoE]: wtf?
Eisenhower: sh1t now we need some1 to join
*tru_m4n has joined the game.*
tru_m4n: hi all
T0J0: hey
Stalin: sup
Churchill: hi
tru_m4n: OMG OMG OMG i got all his stuff!
tru_m4n: NUKES! HOLY **** I GOT NUKES
Stalin: d00d gimmie some plz
tru_m4n: no way i only got like a couple
Stalin: omg dont be gay gimmie nuculer secrets
T0J0: wtf is nukes?
T0J0: holy ****holy****hoyl****!
*T0J0 has been eliminated.*
*The Allied team has won the game!*

Also this

http://users.livejournal.com/kim_jong_il__/

"And Iran, Iran's so far awaaay."

Videos and music do it the same way anything else does. A simple malformed data packet, buffer overflow, and you're compromised. Most players do a good job santiy-checking buffers, but the iPod was compromised.

http://bilb02.livejournal.com/373.html
http://www.dslreports.com/faq/823

Also, the old trick of having an executable with the filename "Bandname Songname.mp3.exe" and the icon set to WMP's MP3 icon would fool most folks. Drag-and-drop would give just an error message, but double-clicking would get you the UAC "Are you sure you want to run this?" to which people say yes (or turn it off) and it runs. That's more likely what GP was talking about. Download something that looks promising, and you can see it's suspicious so you delete it, annoyed and sick of it.

"Go download the codec is popular", as well as the WMA popups about needing to unlock the DRM, although I think WMA DRM hole has been fixed for a while.

BT viruses do work on the honor system - you download piles of stuff, make one mistake, and you have virus. But people continue to fall for it. There are viruses still circulating 5 years after being discovered. People have not updated their signatures, or disabled antivirus completely. These people can figure out hulu, the same way they get infected - click everything you can find and say OK.

Their methodology was atrocious, their so-called university affiliation was denied by the college, and they used unethical research practices. this is NOT science; it is GARBAGE.

Check these out, yo:
A thorough summary of the fail
Another roundup

Haven't made up my mind yet, but I often find Matthew Garrett's blog posts insightful, and he doesn't like it: http://mjg59.livejournal.com/136274.html

However unlike free riders on the train, it doesn't actually add any drag or cost. In most cases it's just free advertising.

I disagree -- it does create extra cost; just not monetary cost. You're right, having free-riders doesn't make a work more expensive (in terms of money or time) to create. But it does create negative emotion for the person creating the work -- especially if they feel like they're working really hard to make ends meet (as so many artists are) and so many people are just "stealing" their stuff. (Take this blog for example.) Since emotional rewards are a major factor in people becoming artists in the first place (because let's face it, most people never become rock stars), this has a large negative impact on the number of artists who continue making work. Furthermore, there's a network effect. There are many people who, if no one else was "free-riding", would pay for the work; but if they see other people getting it for free, they too will take it without paying. So a few free-rider "initiators" can cause a whole bunch of other free riders -- and those "contingent free-riders" actually do represent a lost sale.

Trolling acts as a sort of Internet Eugenics to keep the numbers of freaks and furries down.

As Weev put it

http://conuly.livejournal.com/1445545.html

I first met Weev in an online chat room that I visited while staying at Fortuny's house. "I hack, I ruin, I make piles of money," he boasted. "I make people afraid for their lives." On the phone that night, Weev displayed a misanthropy far harsher than Fortuny's. "Trolling is basically Internet eugenics," he said, his voice pitching up like a jet engine on the runway. "I want everyone off the Internet. Bloggers are filth. They need to be destroyed. Blogging gives the illusion of participation to a bunch of retards. We need to put these people in the oven!"

I listened for a few more minutes as Weev held forth on the Federal Reserve and about Jews. Unlike Fortuny, he made no attempt to reconcile his trolling with conventional social norms. Two days later, I flew to Los Angeles and met Weev at a train station in Fullerton, a sleepy bungalow town folded into the vast Orange County grid. He is in his early 20s with full lips, darting eyes and a nest of hair falling back from his temples. He has a way of leaning in as he makes a point, inviting you to share what might or might not be a joke.

As we walked through Fullerton's downtown, Weev told me about his day - he'd lost $10,000 on the commodities market, he claimed - and summarized his philosophy of "global ruin." "We are headed for a Malthusian crisis," he said, with professorial confidence. "Plankton levels are dropping. Bees are dying. There are tortilla riots in Mexico, the highest wheat prices in 30-odd years." He paused. "The question we have to answer is: How do we kill four of the world's six billion people in the most just way possible?" He seemed excited to have said this aloud.

Seems reasonable to me.

Well, here's a great case study from the former wikipedia admin I referred you to earlier.

Most interesting is the old "Enviroknot" case, where an editor whose edit contribution list was nothing but positive got lumped in with two trolls via "secret evidence" and banned... mostly because he crossed an editor named "Yuber", who was a protectionate of the abusive bitch SlimVirgin at the time. They had fun for the next two years accusing dozens of editors of being "Enviroknot" and banning them without any evidence or proof. At one point, an editor named "Dreamguy" who has major [[WP:OWN]] issues concerning fantasy creature subjects (vampires, werewolves, etc) started accusing all his opposition of being "enviroknot"... simply to gain an advantage. As you can see looking at the history of some of the bans (Devilbat, Pukachu, CountPointercount) shows no editing pattern to corroborate, but simply a pattern of abusive users and admins using the accusation as a tool because it was an easy way to get that hair-trigger douchebag David Gerard, one of the worst "editors" ever to disgrace the encyclopedia, to issue a ban.

You nailed it.

Here's how wikipedia really works. I've found this to be an incredibly helpful resource in understanding the mentality of the behavior of people on Wikipedia.

Remember: Wikipedia is about keeping people away to most wikipedians. They see their site as always "under attack." If consensus is changing on an article, they want to STOP that - so they need to get the newcomers to either leave on their own, or ban them. If 10 new editors show on the article over time and all stay, that could cause consensus to change. Run them off or ban them one by one as they arrive, and you can completely control the article.

since any edit by anyone who isn't a 60000+ contributor will automatically be reverted.

This one just about sums it up. Make an edit that looks "too experienced"? Be booted out as a "suspected sockpuppet" of whatever the abusive admin of the day's pet target is. Make an edit otherwise? A thousand and one neckbeards wanking off thinking they are "editing" will compete to see who's faster on the button with the automated fucking tools that make it so they don't even have to bother reading and assessing an edit before they zap it.

You nailed it.

Here's how wikipedia really works. I've found this to be an incredibly helpful resource in understanding the mentality of the behavior of people on Wikipedia.

Remember: Wikipedia is about keeping people away to most wikipedians. They see their site as always "under attack." If consensus is changing on an article, they want to STOP that - so they need to get the newcomers to either leave on their own, or ban them. If 10 new editors show on the article over time and all stay, that could cause consensus to change. Run them off or ban them one by one as they arrive, and you can completely control the article.

since any edit by anyone who isn't a 60000+ contributor will automatically be reverted.

This one just about sums it up. Make an edit that looks "too experienced"? Be booted out as a "suspected sockpuppet" of whatever the abusive admin of the day's pet target is. Make an edit otherwise? A thousand and one neckbeards wanking off thinking they are "editing" will compete to see who's faster on the button with the automated fucking tools that make it so they don't even have to bother reading and assessing an edit before they zap it.

Don't worry. It's pretty much just like you imagine it. I haven't seen any changes in years of checking in even after reading what I link you to - and he's pretty much 100% accurate on how Wikipedia really works.

For some reason, that reminds me of this:

AINULINDALE:

ILUVATAR: Ahem.
AINUR: Wow! Existence!
ILUVATAR: *blows pitch pipe* LA!
AINUR: LA LA LA!
ILUVATAR: LA LA!
AINUR: LA LA!
MELKOR: This sucks. BUM BUM BA DUM!
AINUR: Um. . . la?
ILUVATAR: Ahem. LA!
MELKOR: Boop bop-a-doo-bop!
ILUVATAR: LA, dammit.
MELKOR: Bwam bardle ningle boom.
AINUR: . . .
ILUVATAR: Right, you're out of the band.
MELKOR: Fine, I was leaving anyway.
AINUR: . . .
ILUVATAR: What are you waiting for?
AINUR: Oh. Right. Newly created world. Sorry. Great jam session, big guy!
ILUVATAR: Yeesh.

Google is Iluvatar (that should make Google fanbois happy), but who's Melkor? Apple? Microsoft?

The list of highly questionable if not outright illegal activities is very long:

You can start here with "A History of Anticompetitive Behavior and Consumer Harm"
http://www.ecis.eu/documents/Finalversion_Consumerchoicepaper.pdf

and then move on to a catalog of their attacks on standards:
http://www.grokdoc.net/index.php/Dirty_Tricks_history

and then any of these:
Illegal tying: http://www.ecis.eu/documents/ECISPressStatementonOperaSO1.pdf
Unethical marketing: http://www.nearsoft.com/blog/MS-test.html
Antitrust: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/600488.stm

Or these:
http://slashdot.org/story/00/05/02/158204/Kerberos-PACs-And-Microsofts-Dirty-Tricks
http://www.technologyevangelist.com/2007/02/microsoft_dirty_tric_1.html
http://techrights.org/2008/12/01/leaked-oem-vista-ad-incentives/
http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/57261/index.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/368660.stm
http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=2005010107100653
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/06/08/23/1251210/Microsoft-Admonished-by-US-District-Court-Judge
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-tried-to-muck-with-anti-linux-facts/235
http://www.zdnet.com/news/fact-and-fiction-in-the-microsoft-sco-relationship/139743
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/10/23/13219/110
http://lproven.livejournal.com/102128.html
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7654