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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...
Sounds like Reuters committed a classic internet blunder: doing the very thing you're critisizing while critisizing it.
Yay for ducktape, British ISPs with balls, and the State of Maine (why the hell are they getting iBooks though?).
Haiku for you!
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.
ISP. Its nice to see someone not rolling over so easy. Maybe GOOGLE set precedent with the way they said no to the American government. Maybe this will be another 'just say no' generation :L
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them.
That's a strange one, because the ISP in question is well known to be p2p-unfriendly, in terms of blocking ports and throttling traffic. I'd have thought they'd be first in line to roll over for the BPI, can't help but wonder if their response is mainly for the good publicity it will generate.
Oh no... it's the future.
Im confused the bombardment of UV rays from the sun would mean that most plastic materials would turn into goop and become useless. Does that mean duct tape can withstand UV rays or is it just a kludge? I know there is certain tapes developed from NASA that I use every day but it isn't duct tape (It's Kapton tape).
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
Obviously the story was intended as a slam on Wikipedia, but I read it as just the opposite. The story was breaking, and within a very short time, the Wikipedia article evolved into something respectable. Sure, it took some wrong turns, but they didn't last for more than a few minutes. Reuters described Wikipedia working exactly the way it is supposed to work.
Anyone who thinks Wikipedia is reliable is crazy. Whether it's more or less reliable than traditional sources is irrelevant. Wikipedia is a revolutionary and extremely valuable means of information distribution. It's complementary to other sources. I don't think it's misleading, because they're very up front about where the information comes from (i.e. anybody). I fear that if it gets as popular as say google, that it may be destroyed by the same kind of manipulation that ravages the search engines.
My wife and I went to go see it in the spring and enjoyed it very much. Of course, we are both big LotR fans and know the story well. A large portion of the audience were seniors who get the tickets as part of their yearly subscription. Some walked out - there's know way you could follow the story without already knowing it ahead of time.
As a show for fans of the stories, I'd recommend it. For people who just love good theatre - this probably isn't it. Everything you'd like in a show - character development, a clear story line, etc. just aren't there.
I still remember some fool critic in the Los Angeles Times years ago criticizing an Iron Maiden album (Somewhere In Time) for having songs about weird topics (Alexander The Great, for example). He went on and on about how such topics were "nothing a teenager can sink their teeth into".
If the dumbass did even 2 seconds of research on Iron Maiden, he would have learned that lots of their songs are like that, and that's, in fact, why a lot of people like them. So he criticized from ignorance, and also put down a whole class of people (teenagers) in the process.
--Gurthang
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
I'm sure some of you are going to say "Mac OS", but I'm not at all convinced that Mac OS is a win for educational users, as there appears to be a far better selection of educational software for Windows.
If I was a Maine taxpayer, I think I'd be calling and writing my state legislators demanding an investigation.
I guess a good source is impossible to find.
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
Isn't it strange how while the Chinese people are gaining and exercising new civil liberties despite the government, here in the US we are losing our civil liberties to the government, just about as fast as the Chinese are gaining them.
I wonder when they'll catch up with us?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
No, they are really getting iBooks. (The online Apple Store for Education at my school is still selling iBook G4s, even today). An end-of-the-line iBook would give you better performance at running PowerPC applications than a MacBook would (PPC emulation on a x86 results in a performance hit, although Rosetta seems to be handling the task well; and most big software packages won't have Universal Binaries until 2007). Remember that many education users still use Classic applications; you can't run Classic on an Intel Mac.
Buying a PowerPC Mac today isn't a crazy idea, especially if you want something proven to be reliable (have you heard about the problems plauging the MacBook and MacBook Pro lately?) and works flawlessly with existing (and old) software.
Why?
- iBooks are cheaper. They're costing about $289/yr. The MacBooks would be more expensive.
- iBooks are more reliable. MacBooks are still getting the kinks worked out. You want to deal with recalling several thousand MacBooks?
- Most software is still PowerPC. Why pay extra money to run emulated software?
There's no need for the State of Maine to pay more money for hassles and reduced performance just to be on the bleeding edge. In four years, the kinks will be worked out of the hardware and probably most of the software will be Universal or Intel. Then they'll negotiate again.If nothing else, this should shut up anybody who says, "Hey, Apple is going to drop the PowerPC versions of Mac OS X!" They'll probably be around for at least four more years...
I say again -- beating Chinese censorship is easy in the short term, very hard in the long term, but probably also doable in the long term. But it needs a lot of smart techie brainpower from the outside to beat. http://www.monashreport.com/2006/04/17/how-to-beat -chinese-censorship-operation-peking-duck/ is my idea of a good place to start.
To err is human. To forgive is good system design.
But in this case, I think Tiscali did only one thing wrong in their letter The British Phonographic Industry Limited.... they should have added "please feel free to phone us to discuss this further"
I can just imagine the conversation now:
Reuters and other traditional news organizations are threatened by Wikipedia and news blogs. The original article just looked like an opportunity to take some shots at wikipedia and was pretty lame. They frankly seem scared. It just seems extremely odd for them to report such a non-event.
I think instead of attacking new forms of information delivery they should work on becoming a more credible news source. Mainstream media has become horrible in the past few years.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
I found a deployment page on the MLTI site that has PDFs of all the materials that were sent out to the school systems. They are, indeed, as you say, G4 iBooks, with 1 GB RAM, OS X 10.4, a 40 GB hard drive and a new "online learning management system," StudyWiz, preinstalled, whatever that is. Note that the StudyWiz website claims the software is being installed in "all schools in the state," which is just plain wrong (it's only the 7th and 8th grades that are getting the MLTI stuff).
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
Which part of 1996? I don't remember which years but if my memory serves me, search quality degraded very rapidly when searching became popular. At one point, before I found out about Google, I had basically given up on search engines because they barely returned anything but garbage. Google was revolutionary, but it's nothing compared to what it would be if they didn't have to fight spammers. It's actually funny to think that there was a time when the "keywords" meta tag in web pages was actually given serious weight by search engines. For a search engine to put major trust in the keywords meta tag today would be about like trusting nobody would steal a pile of cash laying on the sidewalk. If you think Google gives good results today, imagine if nobody tried to fake out the search engines. The results would be massively better.
We could apply semi-protection, but at the same time you should have seen the article about the 7 July 2005 London bombings. Speculation was rife with, at one point, a edit coming in every 1-2 seconds. However, by now we have a very factual and very informative article. It's not always good to place semi-protection on a rapidly evolving article.
I think the bottom line, which everyone has so far missed, is that you should be checking your sources on Wikipedia before trusting it completely. I know I do, and I'm an administrator on the project.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it