Slashdot Mirror

"What I do is try to focus upon those elements of the press that I think do an effective job and try to be accurate in their portrayal of events. For example, I end up spending a lot of time watching Fox News, because they're more accurate in my experience, in those events that I'm personally involved in, than many of the other outlets."
-Dick Cheney
source

Click here to see the drift towards totalitarianism in Venezuela documented. What say you now?

What does my concern for my fellow man in Venezuela have to do with WMD and Iraq?

I read the article and there's nothing in it detailing why free software was chosen over non-free software. I do assume that the reason has something to do with the software not costing the government any money.

Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez is a power hungry socialist demagogue who believes the United States was behind a rebuffed coup attempt against him and he may be right: US officials made statements in support of the coup in the few days before if collapsed (this coup should not be confused with the failed coup attempt he once led against an earlier Venezuelan government) and US officials and diplomats refused to even use the word "coup" to describe the armed overthrow of Chávez. It's only natural that he would publicly embrace Linux (especially given Richard Stallman's communist-sounding "freedom" and [anti] "piracy" rhetoric) as an alternative to Microsoft -- he can play it both as an anti-capitalist move and an anti-American move.

It wouldn't be entirely bad if, say, PDVSA, the giant government-run petroleum company, were to show that Linux helped its operations and bottom line (Venezuela is a powerful member of OPEC). But I, knowing people who have lived and worked in Venezuela the last few years, and having been there myself, would assume that this decree is rooted in anti-American politics, not economics.

Or maybe el Presidente didn't buy the official explanation of Windows' NSAKEY?

yeah.. like cracking down hard on dissenters. and public/media protests against increasingly antidemocratic authoritarian rule.

We really should be careful who we applaud.

I was just going to post the same thing, Chavez is busting down hard on any dissent or anyone that doesn't meet him on the political scale. So great for open source, but is "OSS: Used by the Chavez Administration" a good thing to have out there?

Microsoft's Improved Media Center Still Falls Short

Wrong, it has been noted before that features of the Mac OS X architecture, such as requiring an admin password for certain types of installations and alerting you to first-time boots of executables, help ensure that if Mac and Windows marketshares were equal, Windows would still be an easier target and have a higher infection rate. It isn't just about the marketshare.

Just because the Iraqi government didn't publicly bomb it's victims does not mean they were not terrorized.

Uday and Qusay were not nice people, and neither was John Gotti as long as we're comparing apples to oranges. However, most of the Iraqi populace weren't on the Olympic track team. I don't have the stats at my fingertips, but I bet the number of Iraqi non-combatants killed in the US invasion is greater than all the Iraqi citizens killed by Uday and Qusay.

[Those objecting to the war in Iraq] would like to maintain the status quo.

Unlikely. The point is the current situation in Iraq is in many ways worse than the old status quo, and if improvement were to be made it would have required a less blunt method.

This isn't just hindsight: George H. W. Bush ("the Elder") chose not to overthrow Saddam because his team anticipated that it would lead to a long, violent occupation. And the conventional wisdom in US foreign policy was that every time the US invades an Arab country it inspires new terrorists -- if Bush's goal was to test that assumption, he should have run the experiment on a smaller lab animal.

The al Qaida apologists for them would like to maintain the status quo.

This is not just a cheap slur, but evidence of some serious ignorance.

Al Qaida are probably much happier this way, as Iraq is now a nursery for their type of people. Prior to the invasion, Al Qaida and Saddam were mutual enemies. It's hard to overstate what a big favor the US inadvertently did al Qaida by invading Iraq.

If anything I'm an apologist for "the Elder" Bush not finishing Saddam off while he had the chance (tho having Norman Schwarzkopf work out the peace treaty was a major bungle).

At least the intentions of the US are for the good, albeit misguided.

Tell that to tens of thousands of victims' families. I'm sure they'll be relieved.

By the way, do you know what those intentions are? They're not to fight terrorism, or to stop WMDs, tho such was implied early on. And the idea that Bush just wanted to liberate Iraq from its cruel dictator seems implausible considering all the other dictators with whom the US does business, not to mention Bush's objections during the 2000 campaign to the Clinton's intervention in the Bosnia-Serbia conflict as "nation building", and the current american indifference toward the situation in Darfur.

Was the intention to show that Bush was a big man, who could be stronger than Clinton or even his own mighty father? If so, that intention isn't very good. Stupid as all getout, really.

Are you just presuming the invasion had good intentions?

If you think those prisoners at abu Graib were tortured, you demean those who have truly been tortured. Humiliation is NOT torture. Where is your indignation over the beheadings of innocents?

What a conservative stock retort. It compares the actions of a gang of thugs on one side to the US government on the other. Gee the US comes out better? Pats on the back all around.

Do you remember the first wave of beheadings? They were justified as being revenge for the US treatment of Iraqi prisoners. Prior to that no one would have gone public with such a brutal act because it would have destroyed all Arab sympathy for the terrorists. In effect, the US did regional advance PR for the beheaders.

Also, when you characterize the prisoner treatment at Abu Ghraib as "humiliation", "NOT torture", I have to presume it means you look at the pictures but don't read the text.

"... an Iraqi prisoner under the control of what the Abu Ghraib guards called "O.G.A.," or other government agencies--that is, the C.I.A. and i

and the US government has even outsourced Iraq. If something as important as "national security" can be outsourced, where, in the importance of things (according to gov't anyway), do the development jobs rank?

With libraries, you don't retain a permanent copy of the original work. There is a convenience factor as well.

How many people read a book more than once? Same thing with a DVD - you watch it once and then 99.9% of the time it sits on the shelf doing nothing. In other words, retaining a permanent copy is of trifling little value to the vast majority of consumers. The value is in the first watching or reading of it. Sure there are technical books, but you walk into any public library and you'll find that the books meant for "entertainment" outnumber the reference manuals by at least 100 to 1.

Thus, libraries do definitely "hurt" the market for books (and increasingly for DVDs) which is why you get things like Pat Schroeder attacking librarians.

<RANT>

The US government is supposed to be representative of the people, not corporations.

</RANT>

How about the people actually living in Iraq?

the WAS no health care

false, although at the end of 10 year sanction cycle little remained.

Saddam was siphoning all the money away

False, he was siphoning some of the money away. Evil tyrant as he was, he considered himself an avenging Arab hero and was a patriot (notice that he didnt run away to a safe country like virtually any other 2-bit dictator in history?). His deluded ideas on how to go about making Iraq better are another discussion.

As far as foreign ownership of oil, that's total BS, Iraq's own president has said as much.

What? What? The who said that? Oh you mean the US-installed ex-CIA henchman whose speeches are written by White House staffers? Right.

Notice the policy says ALLOW, not WILL. Iraqi's can buy Iraqi companies, and many ex-pat Iraqis are working on doing just that.

This is a downward spiral of complete nuttiness. Yes in theory Iraqis can own Iraqi companies but when it comes to a bidding proces between Ahmed the Fallafel-Stand-Man and an ex-patriot Texaco front-man I do truly wonder which one will win. No other country had these sort of rules implemented ever. All require significant portion of local ownership and all require that a major share of profits is reinvested locally. Bremer's rules are the apex of neo-con insanity and make Iraq an exception in the history of the planet as well as the very reason we are there in the first place: to perform an experiment in unrestricted capitalism. All that other hogwash about "freedom" is just that. Too bad children had to lose their limbs over it.

The Taliban, who ruled Afghanistan with little tolerance for deviation from its strict interpretation of the Koran, appears to have given bin Laden's loyalists complete freedom. "They wanted protection and power for themselves," said Naqeeb, a Jalalabad doctor who said he came to know many members of al Qaeda through his private medical clinic. "They wanted to work in Afghanistan and not be disturbed."

Brain Surgery cannot be emailed to America from Taiwan. Completed computer programs can.

If such surgery costs $80,000 in the US, then a $1,000 plane ticket is not the bottleneck. Besides, it is already happening. Sure, one would rather have surgery in their home country, but not if they have no other choice or if the cost difference is huge.

How about the TSA's no-fly lists? People would get their names on a secret list and wouldn't be allowed on airplanes, with no reason given how they got on the list, and no appeal to get off the list. And there are plenty of allegations that people got put on the list for their political views. A law allowing people to appeal passed only a few days ago, and the system isn't in place yet.

here is the full story

And here is the first bit of the article:

A new study of traffic accidents conducted on Virginia roads has found, unsurprisingly, that many car crashes are the result of driver distraction. But while cell phones are increasingly fingered as dangerous in-car distractions, the study, conducted by the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) and Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), found that old-fashioned rubbernecking was the biggest single cause, accounting for 16 percent of distraction-related crashes.

Alright, this'll probably go 1000 comments. Everyone will comment on the fact that money is an unsatisfactory remedy for voting fraud. Then it'll die. The media won't pick it up, 2.6 million is not an impressive number. The average person won't care, and all will proceed as usual. Just because we know something is wrong doesn't mean the average person does.

NO! This is the problem with a lot of intellectual liberals these days....APATHY. DO NOT LET THIS HAPPEN. The worst thing you can do is give up. Write your representative. Write to a newspaper. Just don't sit back and hope that someone out there will do your dirty work for you. You have an opinion. Let people who can make a difference know about it.

You wonder why public schools suck? An educated populace wouldn't tolerate this shit. The government has no need to make them better when ignorance is rewarded and they can stay in power by keeping them poor.

Couldn've said it better. The best kind of slaves are ones too dumb to know any better. This trend has to stop before it's too late.

Then again, today's U.S. Judicial branch throws precedent, law, and the U.S. Constitution out the window, so maybe I should just shut up and pledge my loyalty to Big Brother and atone for my double plus ungood badthink.

Philip Coyle:

The ground-based midcourse defense system, as it is now called, has not shown that it can hit anything other than missiles whose trajectory and targets have been preprogrammed by missile defense contractors to eliminate the surprise or uncertainty of battle. Nor has it proven that it can hit a tumbling target, perform at night, or find ways to counter the decoys and countermeasures that a real enemy would use to throw a defense off track. Tests so far have all been conducted at unrealistically low speeds and altitudes, and it is not clear that the system will be able to track and identify the warhead it is supposed to destroy.

Defense Tech:

collection of top physicists concluded that it was essentially impossible to knock down a missile in its "boost phase," right after it launches.

Slate:

In the past six years of flight tests, here is what the Pentagon's missile-defense agency has demonstrated: A missile can hit another missile in mid-air as long as a) the operators know exactly where the target missile has come from and where it's going; b) the target missile is flying at a slower-than-normal speed; c) it's transmitting a special beam that exaggerates its radar signature, thus making it easier to track; d) only one target missile has been launched; and e) the "attack" happens in daylight.

But hey, it's not like they aren't doing their best, testing it thoroughly, acting to develop a real system capable of doing real work:

Thomas P. Christie, director of the Pentagon's office of Operational Test and Evaluation, said a shortage of testing data would likely make it difficult for him to assess the system's effectiveness ahead of any deployment

But, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe all those scientists working for the military contractors know something that the rest of the scientific world doesn't.

In earlier testing of tracking and targeting systems, which critics derided as highly scripted, missile interceptors went five-for-eight in hitting target missiles.

The chief weapons tester doesn't even have confidence in the system.

The current chief weapons tester, Thomas Christie, said in a written reply to Reuters that the test, if successful, would increase confidence that the system "has some operational capability against a North Korean threat ballistic missile."

Coyle said the tests so far and the coming one gave him no such confidence.

"The target launch time and location, the flight trajectory, the point of impact, what the target looks like, and the make-up of other objects in the target cluster have all been known in advance to plot the intercept," he said. "No enemy would cooperate by providing all that information in advance."

I don't see how this system will ever work unless our attacker warns us in advance of the missile's launch time, its location, flight trajectory,....etc. What a waste of taxpayer money. People should be outraged.

Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Laura Brown said the agency doesn't have its own ban on in-flight cell-phone use, though it has supported the FCC's rule and individual airline policies that regulate whether a traveler can make calls once a plane lands and before it reaches the gate.

While the FCC prohibits in-flight cell phone use because of concerns that communication by callers in airplanes will interfere with calls between on-ground users, the FAA is focused on whether cell phone use will interfere with a plane's navigation system, Brown said. An independent organization is reviewing that issue for the agency, she said.

The Bush Administration rejects the Kyoto protocols, whether for good reasons or not, and then refuses to do anything else about global warming.

Bullshit.

14 Nations to Participate in Plan to Reduce Methane

This is largely driven by the US and it includes India and China. It'll have the same greenhouse effect as removing 7% of US fleet of cars from the road and it costs next to nothing.

Just because Bush doesn't sign up to a program with name recognition, doesn't mean the US government isn't doing anything.

A growing (but now recognized as problematic) movement over the past few years has been the introduction of the "Investigations" math curriculum into public schools. see here. The goal is to make kids "feel better" about learning math, which in many ways has been a code for dumbing down the curriculum so that academic rigor is out and poorer students can achieve better on tests. They learn by approximating answers, like 12x48 will approximately be like 10x50. In my opinion, this is the opposite of math -- where the goal is to find the one *correct* answer.

In this curriculum, the kids learn by discovering the rules of math on their own, but this is absolutely ridiculous -- the whole point of passing knowledge through civilization is that we don't have to relearn like cavemen from birth. They spend time playing with blocks to count numbers, all the way up to 4th grade. These children are going to be severely hurt. Part of the problem is that teaching math at home has failed many of them, plus the teachers aren't qualified to teach math, so they grasp any curriculum that seems to make the subject more "fun" at the expense of real learning. An annoying part of the curriculum is that it also inserts a very touchy-feely agenda into the textbooks, and while I'm quite liberal about educating kids on history, etc., this has no useful place in math class.

Also, some people suspect that the test scores are rising because we're dumbing down the tests themselves -- which is outrageous. See here for example.

You may not think that these questions affect you, but they do. When we have a large fraction of the population unable to do basic math, we all will suffer. From things like being unable to hire competent workers, to the person serving you at a restaurant or a store unable to compute change, to your kid having access to only the most basic math education because the rest of the kids are so far behind they have to be specially taught, taking away resources for the higher achievers...(part of the No Child Left Behind = No Gifted Child Gets Ahead program) read this report on how gifted children are done given the shaft in the US..

In the US, we are legally obliged to educate EVERYONE, no matter their ethnicity, sex OR disability.

There is no such obligation. Alabama just shot down a move to get rid of wording in their constitution regarding segregation and a guaranteed education for all.
This was partly due to racism and mostly due to not wanting additional taxes for schools.

It really blows that 100 people can RUIN what millions watch...

PTC lost a LOT of their political clout after WWE kicked their ass in court a couple years ago. Other targets should repond the same way.

Some questions never asked, due to totalitarian "no debate" from Tom "The Exterminator" Delay:

What will it really cost?
What NASA programs will be cut to fund it?
How will other science agencies be affected?

Welcome to the United States of Mexico.

Stem cell research is also important because it could also be used to cure/treat other things from Alzeihmers
Uh, no, it can't. Stem cells have no applicable use in the treatment of Alzheimer's. This is a common misconception perpetuated by people like Ron Reagan.
While stem cell research is important, bad science is bad science.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A295 61-2004Jun9.html

In case people are interested, you can find the actual article in the most recent issue of Nature (abstract is free but you pay for the full text). Also, there were stories about this on NPR and in the Washington Post.

Some of these stories stress that if the study is seen as proof that the preponderance of the evidence points to fossil fuels as the source of deadly heat waves, then people may begin trying to bring civil suits against fossil fuel producers and distributors on that basis. That seems far fetched to me, since it seems like the you'd have to prove the specific corporation you're suing is responsible, but who knows? It would seem to be a very liberarian solution to the problem of global warming, though, so /. oughta like it.

It is your solemn duty let the Washington Post know they can't get away with this kind of abuse.
Go to their contact form immediately and let them know how offensive Rob Pegoraro's article was. If anyone knows Rob's personal email address, I'd love to have that, too.

The Washington Post just called the Gamecube obsolete. how are they gonna raise money for movies... I hate the mdia this generation of gaming, I really do. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A256 13-2004Dec1.html

This article was in the November 16 Washington Post Sunday magazine. Not chock full of technical details, but it does provide some insight into the personalities and the process involved.

The problem is that focused monitoring tends to expand and quickly consumes resources and/or becomes ineffective.
First visitors from which countries get monitored? You say Iranians, what about Saudis? The US has many enemies/potential enemies spread around the world.
Terrorist organizations exist obviously in the middle east, but also asia, africa, even south america.
Next, out of those countries who do you monitor? Those with visitor visas, student visas, legal immigrants, first generation americans?
Do you limit it to just nationalities? What about religions, or political affiliations (ie communists).
These questions may seem slippery slope, but if you look historically at the expansion of terrorist laws towards citizens, it isn't that far fetched. Will the suburban 40 year old white mother be monitored any time soon? Probably not, but you don't think they will try to expand monitoring towards organized crime suspects or suspected drug dealers.I think some degree of control is acceptable, the new foreign entry requirements are minimally intrusive. However, when you advocate active monitoring I think it's too intrusive and not effective for the time/cost requirements involved.

And Bush cries about Democrats embarking on pork barrel spending? The Department of Education doesn't need to get their hands in this. There are already companies out there who are doing it: they're called student loan companies. I'm sure you've heard of them (i.e. Sallie Mae, the biggest one ever!). They know everything about you, and they'll track you down if you try to run and hide. They make sure to know when you graduate, because that's when they start getting paid!

College students should worry about their privacy, because I know that Sallie Mae outsources their service/call center, and current laws are vague about the legalities of this. Imagine all your personal information accessible halfway across the world by god knows who? Sure the internet does this already, but how secure is Sallie Mae's systems? If the government wants to spend dollars where it's worth it, then spend it on auditing Sallie Mae and their practices, to ensure that students are treated fairly.

In the southern city of Basra, police said Thursday they had arrested five Arab foreign fighters who escaped from Fallujah with plans to attack coalition troops and Iraqi police in the south.

The five - two Saudis, two Tunisians and a Libyan, were arrested Wednesday night at a checkpoint north of Basra, police said.

acording to thisThe locals have started throwing the foreigners out sometime around october. I cannot find my 15-25% reference but it was before the article here The iraqi government and "other officials" claim there are more foreigners but it is hard to tell because they clensed themselves of identityIt also apears that the foreigners are the ones mostly commiting the terrorist activities like attacking civilians and such.

It also appears that they have set up shop in thier nobel fashion in other areas too.

Not so in France, where four prisoners from the U.S. naval base were arrested as soon as they arrived home in July, and haven't been heard from since. Under French law, they could remain locked up for as long as three years while authorities decide whether to put them on trial -- a legal limbo that their attorneys charge is not much different than what they faced at Guantanamo.

Armed with some of the strictest anti-terrorism laws and policies in Europe, the French government has aggressively targeted Islamic radicals and other people deemed a potential terrorist threat. While other Western countries debate the proper balance between security and individual rights, France has experienced scant public dissent over tactics that would be controversial, if not illegal, in the United States and some other countries.

2004.11.09: Intel quietly pushing Linux to Asian PC makers
Quote from a story in today's Inquirer:
"...Intel, according to the Wall St Journal, is offering a package called Quick Start Kit for Linux to distributors which includes a number of software drivers to support a range of PC peripherals...."
The Washington Post's Webb's Filter[registration needed] column examines the significance of this move to Microsoft, which stands to be hurt if this development is the start of some trend. Sounds like a nice counterpoint to Ballmer's bomb to prospective Linux OEMing in Asia.

God help you if you should get sick while over
there working in India -- most Western medical
plans will not cover your overseas "deployment".
(Well, you could rely on the herbal remedies
available locally -- just put enough money aside
to have your body shipped home to Mum and Pop.)

Actually, India is becoming somewhat of a medical tourist destination, you probably won't have to worry about medical bills and health insurance so much if you "self-insure" -- the health insurance companies don't seem to have their claws in the system over there like they do in the US so medicine is still reasonably affordable, especially for someone with a decent (indian) job.

Apparently, this took place over a long time... I didn't realise just how long it takes to shut down a government website... (or how quickly it goes from necessary and useful to redundant...)

October 1999 http://www.pnl.gov/energyscience/11-99/art2.htm - PubScience opened.
http://arl.cni.org/info/frn/gov/pubscience02.html

2001 http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb010709-1.htm - they decide to cut funding, suggesting that the system be shut down.
http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Arti cles/butler.html

2002 http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb020819-2.htm - decision to close... Comments invited...

2004 http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename= article&contentId=A17568-2002Nov20&notFound=tr ue - it's closed...

Wash. Post article, "Permanent Job Proves An Elusive Dream". (Free reg. may be required.)

Get used to it. This is the "trend". There is a shortage of perm tech jobs. I have been type-cast[1] as a "contractor" and cannot break out. Contractors have the reputation of earning big bucks and full-time positition managers feel that this creates wage-spoiled employees. I cannot seem to prove to them that if one factors in lack of benefits, travel, uncertainty, gaps between, etc., contracting is not net better. But they don't seem to believe me.

[1] As in Bob Denver trying to get a serious part in a show or movie.

I'm running Windows 98SE, and I thought that might be the problem. This now seems unlikely, however, because the reviewer at the Washington Post had the same problem--and I doubt he's running Win98Se.

I played with Firefox anyway, to see what it was like. For me, Ctrl++ doesn't work (although View > Text Size > Increase works fine). Also, there are problems when switching between working offline and online. And on one occasion, Firefox crashed. After the crash, a small application started up and asked me what had gone wrong; I entered a brief description and pressed the Send button, to send the information to Mozilla.org; then the small application crashed.

I've reported problems like this before, both on Slashdot and on Mozillazine, but people seem reluctant to accept it. One slashdotter even claimed I was a troll. I was glad that at least one problem was reproduced by the Washington Post.

Here's my conclusion: switching is too problematic for me to switch without strong motivation, and Firefox is actually less reliable than IE6 on my system. So, I'm sticking with IE6. Yes, I know IE6 is supposed to be insecure, but I run without ActiveX controls, and have not encountered problems.

And to those who want to criticise me for posting this, consider that there are doubtless many others who had similar problems, and didn't report them as I have, and just walked away. And I loathe Microsoft and want free software to win.

>If you raised wages, EA would have to use less programmers to get a given job done, produce inferior work or have to charge higher prices.

Exactly!

Everybody knows that paying workers more money results in an inferior product!

With this kind of thinking, it's no wonder that the republicans can get away with proposing tax cuts for the wealthy, paid for by elminating the tax deduction that encourages businesses to provide health insurance for workers.

Welcome to our screw-the-workers theocracy!

(And I'm actually one of the "rich" Bush & co. are trying to help. No thanks -- I'd rather have a functioning socity for my kinds to grow up in instead.)

You can't fight as guerilla fighters without being local or having support of the locals.

Actually, you can. You can be much, much better equipped than the locals, thus overwhelming them with firepower.

Ofcourse, I don't have a link to back me up, but my understanding over the course of the Iraq war has been that since the beginning of our invasion, people started streaming over the Iraqi border from Syria et al. Kerry complained about it during the election, saying that bush failed to secure the borders. These people brought arms with them and set up shop in Fallujah and other cities across Iraq.

Even some of the MSM has been covering the fact that the locals in Fallujah were getting pretty tired of having foreign insurgents in their city, essentially holding them hostage. Here's a WaPo article from today, talking about how the local insurgents are turning against the foreign insurgents.

While it certainly helps to have local support, it's not necessary. Unarmed civilians don't really stand a chance against groups with guns.

--trb

Every single poll I've seen has more than 95% of iraqis wanting this.

Cite, please. This might pass the Slashdot majority who agrees with your overall point, but some of us have standards.

Why should we be there fighting the desires of the Iraqi people?

Are we? 85% of them are planning to vote in the elections in January. The Bush administration and the military is working hard to make sure it happens.

If our goal was to get rid of Sadam, we've already done that, so why stick around?

Our goal is to bring democracy to the Middle East. It's the only long-term solution to terrorism.

It's not hospitals and food banks that rid the world of terrorism. It's deposing dictators and tyrants that does it.

Oh, the real reason is so we can steal their oil. And I do mean steal.

How much oil have we "stolen" so far? Got numbers?

Plus, most iraqis I've heard interviewed prefer Sadaam to the US. They say things like "at least Sadaam was an Iraqi."

Antecdotal evidence based on "news" reporting from Reuters, no doubt, or possibly Al Jazeera. Every poll I've seen has a large majority of Iraqis glad Saddam is gone, with mixed responses about the future of the country and American occupation. Terrorists (some still insist on calling them "insurgents" even after the discovery of torture chambers in Fallujah) are giving Iraq a very hard time right now, trying to change the minds of the people. And this is the fault of the US?

You know what reporters do? They like to provide "balance" and "conflict" so they go hunt down crusty old former Ba'athists to make statements like, "at least Saddam was an Iraqi." Despite what opinion polls show on that subject, they still think they need 50/50 in the news. (Or worse, given the anti-war attitude amongst the majority of them.)

You really need to get out more. Find out who doesn't like what Kos is saying and read them as well.

Excellent point.

...but I don't think it addresses the question of which source is more trustworthy: the source compiled and extensively peer-reviewed by experts in their fields or the source that may be compiled and may be extensively peer-reviewed by experts but that can then be edited into oblivion by anyone. (I changed the wording of the original options somewhat to remove the strawman-esque aspect of "experts v/s. mobs"). Will those errors be caught by Wikipedia editors? Maybe. Maybe not.

Spreading Knowledge, The Wiki Way

Larry Sanger, Wikipedia's co-founder, said the unlimited public editing process can have a downside. "I was recently looking at some of the philosophy articles that have been edited and re-edited. I actually think some of them have gone backwards lately," he said. Sanger teaches philosophy at Ohio State University.

Any resource can, and probably will, have errors. While I use Wikipedia, and enjoy reading some of the articles on Wikipedia, I do not think it is of the same caliber as a peer-reviewed reference like Funk & Wagnall's or Encyclopedia Britannica. The community nature of Wikipedia (certainly a strength), coupled with a lack of formalized accountability, limits the applicability of the information contained within.

Ironically, when I went to Wikipedia's site in order to get their take on their own reliability I was greeted by a front page sporting the following :

In the news

Due to vandalism, this template has been temporarily shut down.

This wikipedia article on Wikipedia's reliability I think succinctly captures the very debate we are having:

Wikipedia's utility as a reference work has been questioned. The lack of authority and accountability are considered disqualifying factors by some people. For example, librarian Philip Bradley acknowledged in an interview with The Guardian that the concept behind the site was in theory a "lovely idea", but that he would not use it in practice and is "not aware of a single librarian who would. The main problem is the lack of authority. With printed publications, the publishers have to ensure that their data is reliable, as their livelihood depends on it. But with something like this, all that goes out the window." People supporting the idea of Wikipedia counter these arguments by saying that Wikipedia is a more independent source than most traditional encyclopedias and that the reliability is potentially greater than that of a traditional source, since errors can be corrected immediately.

Printed publications do their best to ensure the material they present is accurate. When they fail to do so, they are heavily criticized and pressured to do better (witness the Jayson Blair scandal at the New York Times). Wikipedia has no processes in place to ensure the accuracy of its information other than a hope and a belief that people will do the right thing.

I agree with Bradley, quoted above. I would love to get fully behind Wikipedia (and have even recommended it to family members with a caveat on its reliability) - but I cannot because its reliability is only "potentially greater" than a traditional source (for now).

Here is the final exit poll data bush by 1 which puts bushes victory in the margin of error for the exit poll (+/- 3). Also how accurate can an exit poll be if only 13,047 voters made up the exit poll in an election of well over 100,000,000 people. have a nice day, your average anonymous coward

Love him or hate him, he spent about 10-15 minutes on his radio show Sunday night discussing Firefox. He said he was an Opera user himself (sick of spyware) but praised Firefox for challenging Microsoft and breaking their stranglehold on the web.

The Washington Post's Rob Pegoraro also gave an incredibly positive review to Firefox and took part in a web chat about it (good read if you want to see less techy user's reactions).

Love him or hate him, he spent about 10-15 minutes on his radio show Sunday night discussing Firefox. He said he was an Opera user himself (sick of spyware) but praised Firefox for challenging Microsoft and breaking their stranglehold on the web.

The Washington Post's Rob Pegoraro also gave an incredibly positive review to Firefox and took part in a web chat about it (good read if you want to see less techy user's reactions).

article 1
article 2
article 3