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Slashback: Wikipedia Correction, NASA Tape, BPI Rejected
Reuters offers correction to Wikipedia slam. junger writes "Reuters put out a hit piece on Wikipedia, saying that the encyclopedia wasn't credible in 'covering' the breaking news of the death of Enron's Ken Lay, but then Reuters has to correct their own story because they couldn't properly identify one of their sources."
Lord of the Rings stage show ends. l8f57 writes "After only 3 months, the 'Lord Of The Rings' stage show in Toronto, Ontario Canada is ending early. According to the Globe & Mail, the producers are blaming the critics for giving it a bad review. It looks like the last show is scheduled for September 3, 2006. Ticketmaster still has tickets available for shows up to the end."
Duct tape holds NASA together again. vasanth writes to tell us NASA has solved another problem with their favorite repair device, a roll of duct tape. From the article: "First pressed into service during the homemade repairs that saved Apollo 13 from disaster in 1970, the tape has since been at the center of a variety of ingenious quick fixes dreamed up by the space agency's scientists. The latest patch-up will secure British astronaut Piers Sellers to his jet-propelled backpack today for the final spacewalk of the shuttle Discovery's 13-day mission to the International Space Station."
UK ISP rejects BPI request. Glyn writes "One of the ISPs that the British recording industry tried to strong-arm into terminating customers' accounts on accusation of file-sharing has responded with an emphatic no. From the response: 'You have sent us a spreadsheet setting out a list of 17 IP addresses you allege belong to Tiscali customers, whom you allege have infringed the copyright of your members, together with the dates and times and with which sound recording you allege that they have done so. You have also sent us extracts of screenshots of the shared drive of one of those customers. You state that such evidence is "overwhelming". However, you have provided no actual evidence in respect of 16 of the accounts. Further, you have provided no evidence of downloading taking place nor have you provided evidence that the shared drive was connected by the relevant IP address at the relevant time. Similar requests we have dealt with in the past, have included such information and, indeed, the bodies conducting those investigations have felt that a court would consider it necessary to see such evidence, supported by sworn statements, before being able to grant any order.'"
Maine renews middle-school laptop program. markhb writes "The State of Maine has renewed its controversial 'Laptops for Middle-schoolers' program this week. Apple won the contract once again, this time for $41 million, and gets to provide another 36,000 brand-spanking-new iBooks. New this time around: all districts will be required to let the kids take the laptops home, and private and parochial schools will also be invited to join in the fun!"
British ID cards get a rethink. OutOfMyTree writes "The British ID card scheme will miss its planned roll-out date of 2008, according to leaked emails seen by the Sunday Times. In fact civil servants leading the project are afraid that if government ministers keep on 'ignoring reality' the whole mess may be bad enough to delay the acceptance of ID cards for another generation. The contracts already in place are in difficulties because of 'the amount of rethinking going on about identity management', and the escalating costs."
China to further regulate internet use. anaesthetica writes "Director of the Information Office of the State Council, Cai Wu, has announced that new internet control measures are needed. New initiatives include monitoring blogs and search engines, as well as mandatory cellphone and website registration. With 16 million bloggers and 97 million search engine users, the Chinese authorities see search engines as the 'choke point' for information. From the article: 'The potential new regulations, which are still in the discussion stage, are being considered at a time of exploding Internet and cellphone use that has created the freest atmosphere of communication this country has known under Communist rule, despite strenuous government efforts to contain it.'"
OK, critics sometimes do miss the point. It's not uncommon for a newspaper to assign the critic who likes family dramas to review the latest sci-fi extravaganza, in which case a bad review means nothing more than that the critic wasn't in the target audience for the film.
That said, if Lord of the Rings: The Musical really was as bad as the reviews suggested, the problem isn't the reviews, but the show. In that case, the bad reviews are only a symptom.
Has anyone here seen the show? I remember the reviews were terrible, but Toronto is a little out of my way...
Oh noes, somebody at Reuters made a mistake! Amazing as this may sound, professional news organizations do issue corrections from time to time. Why am I not defending Wikipedia in the same statement? The charged and misleading language that appeared on Wikipedia was intentionally put up by some random person.
"And journalism has sunk to a new low"? Come down off your high horse, Mr Unger.
Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.
This tripe gets upgraded as informative? If that post passes as "information" we hardly need to begin debating the Wikipedia.
the same kind of manipulation that ravages the search engines
Not displayed two nerve cells to rub together. Sesame Street goes to a lot of trouble to teach "same" and "different". They only fail in one respect: to point out that it is a lifelong learning project.
What search engine has a centralized, permanent revision history log with a "one click" undo-abuse button? What makes the Wikipedia situation the same as the search engine or spam or blog abuse problems? I can answer that question: approaching the situation with roughly the same level of intellectual accuity required to analyze the plot in Pirates of the Caribbean. They are good guys trying to get something done. There are bad guys who would like to game the system to their advantage. The bad guys have a revenue stream from their sales of creams and extensions. Good guys respond valiantly. Bad guys scale up faster than good guys, because they have more money to burn, and fewer scruples. Good guys hang heads and mope and tell teary stories about the sad end of the good old days.
Fast forward to reality. Bad guys orchestrate 10,000 spambots to hack the Wikipedia. Really pissed of Wikipedia PHP programmer writes script to auto-revert wholesale damage. Another small roadblock is soon erected to prevent "new user" accounts from making certain kinds of edits visible immediately. Bad guys crawl back into dark hole and return to their original campaign of identity fraud against the hopeless banking establishment that came up with the idea that making purchases over the phone by reciting a fixed string of credit-card digits was a good security mechanism.
Get a grip, people. Wikipedia is far harder to abuse than the payment system adopted by the world's richest and most powerful banking institutions. Yes, there will be some outages and growing pains. No, Wikipedia will not degenerate into a spam slum overnight, or anytime soon. Wikipedia is presently most vulnerable to DOS attacks not outright manipulation. Until Google volunteers to host the front-end squid-cache layer. The edit layer can be partially filtered to prioritize access from long-time editors in good standing. Collatoral damage to long-time Wikipedians trying to edit from behind the AOL proxy server. Great outpouring of grief. World comes to an end.
A perfect example of why the argument "robots are just as good as humans at space exploration" doesn't work. When was the last time a robot came up with an "ingenious quick fix"?
When was the last time that a fault on a robot/remotely controlled craft cost human lives? Robots are expendable.
When was the last time that a robot craft had to make the dangerous and expensive return journey to the Earth's surface? Robots have the advantage of not needing to do so unless there is a sample to return.
When was the last time that a craft with humans on board went to the surface of Mars or among the moons of Saturn? Robots have done both.
Robots are not "just as good as humans at space exploration" - their proven track record is that they have done so very much more. And that gap will only widen - the standard of robots is improving faster than the standard of human.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog