It seems an article is at least 10 times more relevant in the news, if the word "Smartphone" is in the headline. In reality, this is just a normal device which has nothing to do with calling people or surfing on the web. If you read the abstract, you'll notice Smartphones aren't even mentioned.
Back in those days when I had a crappy internet connection, I downloaded all video files. Sure, I had to wait some time until it was done, but at least I didn't have to wait every 10 seconds while watching the video. It's much cleaner, you can fast-forward, go backwards, watch the whole thing a second time, with no delay whatsoever. And no Flash.
I never really understood why video sites don't have a download option. It would make watching videos over a small internet connection so much better. (Then again I guess they don't want us to leave their site and watch videos without their annoying ads)
Also, what ethical problem is there is eating meat ?!?
The basic premises most people have is:
a) human interests have to be considered when weighting different options of actions
b) non-human animal rights & interests do NOT to be considered in an equal way as human interests
These premises lead to the conclusion, that there must be a fundamental difference between humans and non-human animals. Throughout history, philosophers have searched for such a distinction. Long story short, they failed.
Take "the ability to talk" for instance. Long believed to be an uniquely human feature, we now know that at least some other animals communicate as well (using a different language of course).
Take another example, the ability to do complex math. Fine, non-human animals can't do that, but neither do all humans, right? When we're saying that only humans can do complex math and therefor deserve to be considered, doesn't that mean we should not give rights to those, who are unable to do that? You might respond that every human (e.g. a child) being may evolve to someone who can do complex math, but that's simply not true. There are serious illnesses which disables some children to do math for all their live. So, what's that magical difference between humans and animals? Many modern philosophers have came to the conclusion, that there isn't such a big difference after all, and that we should consider animal interest's equally to human interests.
It should be obvious, that factory farming greatly violates animal interests not to be tortured.
I recommend reading Animal Rights by Peter Singer; unlike popular belief, Slashdot comments are not sufficient to give philosophical debates the space they deserve.
Yes, of course. What makes eating meat unethical is the support for factory farming, in which animals greatly suffer. (I recommend reading Jonathan Safran Foers Eating Animals)
If there is no animal, there is no pain, and everything is fine (except that we're already eating so much meat that it's unhealthy).
In fact, PETA promised One Million Dollars for the first commercially viable growing of artificial meat.
More interesting though, there is an parallel to the Interesting number paradox: If there is an uninteresting natural number (or day), there must be a smallest (earliest) uninteresting natural number (date), which would make it interesting of course. Therefor, all natural numbers (days) are interesting.
The question is: Can a software that doesn't even know what's Viagra spam all the time claim to take over sorting important mail for you? Filtering important emails sounds much more difficult than filtering the usual spam: One one hand, spam usually comes in bulk; it is distributed to millions of addresses (which provides a way of detecting it) with little variety in regards to content. On the other hand, spam messages do have much more in common (because there are few authors with a handful of different content types) than "important mail", which is created by many different people with a huge variety in regards to content.
In my school, one student who wrote his own little programs in Basic and didn't want to loose them due to an exam, wrote another program that faked the normal UI and displayed a menu where you could 'reset' the calculator even though nothing really happened. You could only tell by one small detail (a tiny bar on the upper right corner, indicating a program was currently running) that it wasn't the real deal. None of the teachers realized that.
And that was done with a normal Basic program. I guess if you code directly in Assembler, you can do much more.
Yeah, and what about coal? Fossil fuels are still by far the cheapest ways of getting / storing energy. (I recommend reading "Physics for future presidents", which lists and explains the reasons for our "love" of oil/gas/coal).
I'm not arguing that we should use coal, but rather that a free market is inherently not (always) in line with protecting the environment. Sure, in the long run fossil fuels will become more expensive and "green energy" more affordable. But in the meantime, the government has to make sure that the industry doesn't destroy the environment. International treaties (Copenhagen, I'm looking at you) would have been a first step.
In the USA, all government works are in the public domain, which leads to NASA images and others being usable by the public and due to the copyright status, also by Wikipedia.
In Germany, a different concept was chosen. The general idea is that mostly private corporation want to use works by the government, e.g. publishers of books, maps, etc. In order to give a bit of the money spend on the works back to the taxpayer, everyone who wants to use those images has to pay royalties. This results in slightly less costs for the taxpayer, which is exactly the goal of that concept.
However, this approach is no longer viable. In the digital age, everyone is a potential user of works by the government, including works like maps and satellite images. NGOs like Wikimedia Deutschland (the German chapter of Wikimedia and supporter of the Wikipedia project) are lobbying to free those images. But the laws are, as usual, at least 10 years behind the technological and sociotechnical development.
Wikimedia is terribly understaffed. They have about 35 employees, for one of the 5th largest sites on the Internet (and that includes legal/finance/MediaWiki devs/etc. staff). Basically the site is run by a dozen guys. Compare that to any other Top 10 site, this is just crazy.
Given their limited resources (both human and financial), it is amazing that Wikipedia is down so rarely. If you want the site to be more reliable, there is something you can do: Donate to the Wikimedia Foundation
This assumption seems flawed. Wikipedia prefers open licensed content for images, but will accept non-open content with a fair use rationale. Presumably, the same would be true of video clips.
You are referring to the fair use policy on the English Wikipedia. Please note that this is a policy for English only, not all language versions allow non-free content.
IANAL, but I doubt that non-free videos would really be a breakthrough. They'd have to be short and low-resolution (at least that's what Wikipedia demands for non-free images and audio). You couldn't just take any youtube video.
In my opinion, that's a good thing. The original idea behind Wikipedia (or it's predecessor Nupedia) was to create a free-as-in-freedom encyclopedia. Wiki-style editing, a strong community and rejection of ads, all those concepts are nice and good, but they are secondary. The real goal is to create a free encyclopedia. There is a wonderful page that explains why fair use should not be on Wikipedia: Veganism parable
As for the project itself (the summary doesn't mention much about the technical background), this brings some nice usability features with it. Until now, if you wanted to add media (images/audio/video), you would have to register (preferably) on Wikimedia Commons, upload the file there, then remember/copy the exact name of the file and include it in the article. Now you can just go to an article, click on the add media button and a wizard pops up and you can upload your file, while editing.
Don't say they know shit. They knew enough to know that their expertise didn't suffice and that's why they invited specialists (including the CCC which of course loved to help). They've carefully heard this case for two years and now they've come to an excellent decision. The Federal Constitutional Court did exactly the right thing, that's what is important. It's not their job to know everything about computers and technical measures of data retention. Remember the/. story of a judge who didn't know what the Internet was and had it explained to him before he judged? You don't have to know everything, you just have to know when you should educate yourself.
One of the restrictions the Federal Constitutional Court has imposed is that such data may only be saved decentralized. Additionally they have to be stored securely and must only be used for very severe crimes. The court is very careful: Technical possibilities change very quickly and they want the verdict to be still useful in 10 or 20 years. That's why they avoid saying "such data cannot be stored securely, therefore data retention is for all times unconstitutional".
In another verdict the court has ruled that e-voting is not principally unconstitutional. However, it imposed rules that no e-voting system in the near future is able to fulfill: Every citizen must be able to verify the correctness of the vote without specific technical knowledge. Not even open source e-voting systems meet this requirement.
I doubt that a new data retention law will be passed any time soon. Most parties have realized by now that data retention sucks and I don't think they can pull together a majority for this.
In my story submission, I included a few more details. 35,000 citizens filed a class-action against this law and now after two years we finally see this law voided.
If I had mod points, I'd mod the parent up and the grandparent down. Seriously, almost everything in Wikipedia is transparent. Search the revision history and logs and look for the information you need. RTFM.
A lot of people on/. seem to derive very general opinions about admins from a personal disappointing encounter. They do not include diffs of their edits or their username. From my experience in most cases the guy who got reverted by an admin broke some kind of rule (and often enough they just got reverted by a regular non-admin, but they assume it was an admin). Instead of RTFM those people post as AC complaining generally about admins without providing any traceable cases of admin abuse. I know my opinion isn't very popular, but unless you give concrete examples your allegations are just FUD.
According to Sue Garnder's email (she is the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation), the gift is "completely unrestricted" (which isn't common - many major grants are restricted to a certain use, e.g. ford, stanton gifts).
Nothing like that will happen. The Wikimedia Foundation has received large grants before (such as Omidyar's $2M grant). WMF isn't a company you can just 'buy out'. It's a charitable 501(c)(3) organization that is controlled by the Board of Trustees, which is composed of 3 community-elected seats, 2 community-seats elected by chapters, a "Jimbo-seat" for the Wikipedia founder, and up to four "Specific expertise" seats elected by the board itself (source). Google could attempt to get a "Specific expertise" seat, but they can't do anything to significantly change the course of the foundation. Also, if they tried, there'd be a major outcry by the community (and perhaps a fork).
(To be fair, one should address the Omidyar case. Around the time Omidyar granted $2M, Matt Halprin, an Omidyar employee got a "Specific expertise" seat. There were of course conspiracy theories about Omidyar 'buying' a seat in the board. I've discussed this matter with one of the board members, and the result was something like this: Omidyar didn't 'buy' a seat, but in the grant negotiations, they became aware of Matt Halprin's expertise and realized of which value he'd be on the board.)
In Germany, a law was passed called Zugangserschwerungsgesetz. It said the Federal Criminal Police Office delivers secret list of blocked domains to the ISPs. After the elections in 2009 the government changed and even though the law has come into effect, the new coalition prevented the feds to give out the list. So de facto, Zugangserschwerungsgesetz has been rejected now.
This is partially the success of the German Pirate Party, which both thrived because of this law proposal (membership decupled in a few months) and forced a public discussion about this law (otherwise it'd just be rubber-stamped: "oh, this law is against kiddie porn. Good!"). It astonished me that the PP actually succeeded to bring common sense into the debate, because politicians often tend to turn of their brain when they hear "kiddie porn". Partially the success was also due to an online petition which had 134,000 signatures (which made it by far the most successful petition in German history).
It is also doubtful that the Zugangserschwerungsgesetz will pass German's highest court, the Federal Constitutional Court, which in the past has proven to value human rights (such as article 5 of Germany's constitution) very highly.
Most articles are poorly translated from english to german
WTF? Do you have any idea what you are talking about? I'm a sysop and oversight in the German Wikipedia and I'm telling you that only a tiny percentage of all articles are translated from English to German. Just look at the import log (which tracks imports for translation from _all_ languages) and keep in mind that every day hundreds of articles are written. The vast majority of them are written from scratch, perhaps some authors look at other Wikipedia articles for reference, but in general, translations are the exception.
Mike Godwin is actually and employee of the Wikimedia Foundation:) Seriously though, notability has been an issue people complain about since the beginning of Wikipedia. There is simply no way of pleasing everyone, no matter where you draw the line. You always have people complaining about "notability nazis" and "we are not/dev/null".
picturephobia (I think due to even stricter fair use constraints but I'm not sure)
I don't think that there is a "picturephobia" in the German Wikipedia. What you are probably referring to is English Wikipedia's fair use rules. We don't have that on the German Wikipedia for two reasons: a) Ideological reasons: "Fair use" images are proprietary. We want to build a free encyclopedia which everyone is allowed to copy, remix and redistribute. "Fair use" images are extremely limited in their use and cannot have a place in a free-as-in-freedom encyclopedia. I recommend reading the Veganism parable. Interestingly, these strict rules have resulted in a positive effect on release of free images. For example, Ubisoft wanted images of their video games in Wikipedia articles, so they licensed everyone to release screenshots of their games under a free license. b) Legal reasons. "Fair use" is mainly an US thing, and while Wikimedia servers are located in the US, German Wikipedia generally aims not to break German law. German copyright law is completely different from US law, we don't have a rule equivalent to "fair use".
Slashdot Mirror
It seems an article is at least 10 times more relevant in the news, if the word "Smartphone" is in the headline. In reality, this is just a normal device which has nothing to do with calling people or surfing on the web.
If you read the abstract, you'll notice Smartphones aren't even mentioned.
Back in those days when I had a crappy internet connection, I downloaded all video files. Sure, I had to wait some time until it was done, but at least I didn't have to wait every 10 seconds while watching the video. It's much cleaner, you can fast-forward, go backwards, watch the whole thing a second time, with no delay whatsoever. And no Flash.
I never really understood why video sites don't have a download option. It would make watching videos over a small internet connection so much better. (Then again I guess they don't want us to leave their site and watch videos without their annoying ads)
Also, what ethical problem is there is eating meat ?!?
The basic premises most people have is:
a) human interests have to be considered when weighting different options of actions
b) non-human animal rights & interests do NOT to be considered in an equal way as human interests
These premises lead to the conclusion, that there must be a fundamental difference between humans and non-human animals. Throughout history, philosophers have searched for such a distinction. Long story short, they failed.
Take "the ability to talk" for instance. Long believed to be an uniquely human feature, we now know that at least some other animals communicate as well (using a different language of course).
Take another example, the ability to do complex math. Fine, non-human animals can't do that, but neither do all humans, right? When we're saying that only humans can do complex math and therefor deserve to be considered, doesn't that mean we should not give rights to those, who are unable to do that? You might respond that every human (e.g. a child) being may evolve to someone who can do complex math, but that's simply not true. There are serious illnesses which disables some children to do math for all their live.
So, what's that magical difference between humans and animals? Many modern philosophers have came to the conclusion, that there isn't such a big difference after all, and that we should consider animal interest's equally to human interests.
It should be obvious, that factory farming greatly violates animal interests not to be tortured.
I recommend reading Animal Rights by Peter Singer; unlike popular belief, Slashdot comments are not sufficient to give philosophical debates the space they deserve.
Yes, of course. What makes eating meat unethical is the support for factory farming, in which animals greatly suffer. (I recommend reading Jonathan Safran Foers Eating Animals)
If there is no animal, there is no pain, and everything is fine (except that we're already eating so much meat that it's unhealthy).
In fact, PETA promised One Million Dollars for the first commercially viable growing of artificial meat.
This slide pretty much sums it up.
The Wikimedia Foundation is extremely efficient in its server operation.
Wikipedia and WolframAlpha would beg to differ.
More interesting though, there is an parallel to the Interesting number paradox: If there is an uninteresting natural number (or day), there must be a smallest (earliest) uninteresting natural number (date), which would make it interesting of course. Therefor, all natural numbers (days) are interesting.
The question is: Can a software that doesn't even know what's Viagra spam all the time claim to take over sorting important mail for you? Filtering important emails sounds much more difficult than filtering the usual spam: One one hand, spam usually comes in bulk; it is distributed to millions of addresses (which provides a way of detecting it) with little variety in regards to content. On the other hand, spam messages do have much more in common (because there are few authors with a handful of different content types) than "important mail", which is created by many different people with a huge variety in regards to content.
That actually happens. See this story and this infographic.
Initial letter from FBI and response by Wikimedia Foundation
Wikipedia article in question, image in question.
New York Times story (login). Britannica uses the logo
In my school, one student who wrote his own little programs in Basic and didn't want to loose them due to an exam, wrote another program that faked the normal UI and displayed a menu where you could 'reset' the calculator even though nothing really happened. You could only tell by one small detail (a tiny bar on the upper right corner, indicating a program was currently running) that it wasn't the real deal. None of the teachers realized that.
And that was done with a normal Basic program. I guess if you code directly in Assembler, you can do much more.
Yeah, and what about coal? Fossil fuels are still by far the cheapest ways of getting / storing energy. (I recommend reading "Physics for future presidents", which lists and explains the reasons for our "love" of oil/gas/coal).
I'm not arguing that we should use coal, but rather that a free market is inherently not (always) in line with protecting the environment. Sure, in the long run fossil fuels will become more expensive and "green energy" more affordable. But in the meantime, the government has to make sure that the industry doesn't destroy the environment. International treaties (Copenhagen, I'm looking at you) would have been a first step.
In the USA, all government works are in the public domain, which leads to NASA images and others being usable by the public and due to the copyright status, also by Wikipedia.
In Germany, a different concept was chosen. The general idea is that mostly private corporation want to use works by the government, e.g. publishers of books, maps, etc. In order to give a bit of the money spend on the works back to the taxpayer, everyone who wants to use those images has to pay royalties. This results in slightly less costs for the taxpayer, which is exactly the goal of that concept.
However, this approach is no longer viable. In the digital age, everyone is a potential user of works by the government, including works like maps and satellite images. NGOs like Wikimedia Deutschland (the German chapter of Wikimedia and supporter of the Wikipedia project) are lobbying to free those images. But the laws are, as usual, at least 10 years behind the technological and sociotechnical development.
Wikimedia is terribly understaffed. They have about 35 employees, for one of the 5th largest sites on the Internet (and that includes legal/finance/MediaWiki devs/etc. staff). Basically the site is run by a dozen guys. Compare that to any other Top 10 site, this is just crazy.
Given their limited resources (both human and financial), it is amazing that Wikipedia is down so rarely. If you want the site to be more reliable, there is something you can do: Donate to the Wikimedia Foundation
You are referring to the fair use policy on the English Wikipedia. Please note that this is a policy for English only, not all language versions allow non-free content.
IANAL, but I doubt that non-free videos would really be a breakthrough. They'd have to be short and low-resolution (at least that's what Wikipedia demands for non-free images and audio). You couldn't just take any youtube video.
In my opinion, that's a good thing. The original idea behind Wikipedia (or it's predecessor Nupedia) was to create a free-as-in-freedom encyclopedia. Wiki-style editing, a strong community and rejection of ads, all those concepts are nice and good, but they are secondary. The real goal is to create a free encyclopedia. There is a wonderful page that explains why fair use should not be on Wikipedia: Veganism parable
As for the project itself (the summary doesn't mention much about the technical background), this brings some nice usability features with it. Until now, if you wanted to add media (images/audio/video), you would have to register (preferably) on Wikimedia Commons, upload the file there, then remember/copy the exact name of the file and include it in the article. Now you can just go to an article, click on the add media button and a wizard pops up and you can upload your file, while editing.
Don't say they know shit. They knew enough to know that their expertise didn't suffice and that's why they invited specialists (including the CCC which of course loved to help). They've carefully heard this case for two years and now they've come to an excellent decision. /. story of a judge who didn't know what the Internet was and had it explained to him before he judged? You don't have to know everything, you just have to know when you should educate yourself.
The Federal Constitutional Court did exactly the right thing, that's what is important. It's not their job to know everything about computers and technical measures of data retention. Remember the
One of the restrictions the Federal Constitutional Court has imposed is that such data may only be saved decentralized. Additionally they have to be stored securely and must only be used for very severe crimes. The court is very careful: Technical possibilities change very quickly and they want the verdict to be still useful in 10 or 20 years. That's why they avoid saying "such data cannot be stored securely, therefore data retention is for all times unconstitutional".
In another verdict the court has ruled that e-voting is not principally unconstitutional. However, it imposed rules that no e-voting system in the near future is able to fulfill: Every citizen must be able to verify the correctness of the vote without specific technical knowledge. Not even open source e-voting systems meet this requirement.
I doubt that a new data retention law will be passed any time soon. Most parties have realized by now that data retention sucks and I don't think they can pull together a majority for this.
In my story submission, I included a few more details. 35,000 citizens filed a class-action against this law and now after two years we finally see this law voided.
The "Bundesverfassungsgericht" has once again proven that is the most significant institution in Germany that protects citizens' constitutional rights - in this case the right of informational self-determination.
If I had mod points, I'd mod the parent up and the grandparent down. Seriously, almost everything in Wikipedia is transparent. Search the revision history and logs and look for the information you need. RTFM.
A lot of people on /. seem to derive very general opinions about admins from a personal disappointing encounter. They do not include diffs of their edits or their username. From my experience in most cases the guy who got reverted by an admin broke some kind of rule (and often enough they just got reverted by a regular non-admin, but they assume it was an admin). Instead of RTFM those people post as AC complaining generally about admins without providing any traceable cases of admin abuse. I know my opinion isn't very popular, but unless you give concrete examples your allegations are just FUD.
You mean like in the UK? (more info)
According to Sue Garnder's email (she is the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation), the gift is "completely unrestricted" (which isn't common - many major grants are restricted to a certain use, e.g. ford, stanton gifts).
Nothing like that will happen. The Wikimedia Foundation has received large grants before (such as Omidyar's $2M grant). WMF isn't a company you can just 'buy out'. It's a charitable 501(c)(3) organization that is controlled by the Board of Trustees, which is composed of 3 community-elected seats, 2 community-seats elected by chapters, a "Jimbo-seat" for the Wikipedia founder, and up to four "Specific expertise" seats elected by the board itself (source). Google could attempt to get a "Specific expertise" seat, but they can't do anything to significantly change the course of the foundation. Also, if they tried, there'd be a major outcry by the community (and perhaps a fork).
(To be fair, one should address the Omidyar case. Around the time Omidyar granted $2M, Matt Halprin, an Omidyar employee got a "Specific expertise" seat. There were of course conspiracy theories about Omidyar 'buying' a seat in the board. I've discussed this matter with one of the board members, and the result was something like this: Omidyar didn't 'buy' a seat, but in the grant negotiations, they became aware of Matt Halprin's expertise and realized of which value he'd be on the board.)
In Germany, a law was passed called Zugangserschwerungsgesetz. It said the Federal Criminal Police Office delivers secret list of blocked domains to the ISPs. After the elections in 2009 the government changed and even though the law has come into effect, the new coalition prevented the feds to give out the list. So de facto, Zugangserschwerungsgesetz has been rejected now.
This is partially the success of the German Pirate Party, which both thrived because of this law proposal (membership decupled in a few months) and forced a public discussion about this law (otherwise it'd just be rubber-stamped: "oh, this law is against kiddie porn. Good!"). It astonished me that the PP actually succeeded to bring common sense into the debate, because politicians often tend to turn of their brain when they hear "kiddie porn". Partially the success was also due to an online petition which had 134,000 signatures (which made it by far the most successful petition in German history).
It is also doubtful that the Zugangserschwerungsgesetz will pass German's highest court, the Federal Constitutional Court, which in the past has proven to value human rights (such as article 5 of Germany's constitution) very highly.
If only they would have stood up for free speech at the beginning, and not only after they found themselves with a disappointing 29% market share.
WTF? Do you have any idea what you are talking about? I'm a sysop and oversight in the German Wikipedia and I'm telling you that only a tiny percentage of all articles are translated from English to German. Just look at the import log (which tracks imports for translation from _all_ languages) and keep in mind that every day hundreds of articles are written. The vast majority of them are written from scratch, perhaps some authors look at other Wikipedia articles for reference, but in general, translations are the exception.
Mike Godwin is actually and employee of the Wikimedia Foundation :) /dev/null".
Seriously though, notability has been an issue people complain about since the beginning of Wikipedia. There is simply no way of pleasing everyone, no matter where you draw the line. You always have people complaining about "notability nazis" and "we are not
I don't think that there is a "picturephobia" in the German Wikipedia. What you are probably referring to is English Wikipedia's fair use rules. We don't have that on the German Wikipedia for two reasons:
a) Ideological reasons: "Fair use" images are proprietary. We want to build a free encyclopedia which everyone is allowed to copy, remix and redistribute. "Fair use" images are extremely limited in their use and cannot have a place in a free-as-in-freedom encyclopedia. I recommend reading the Veganism parable. Interestingly, these strict rules have resulted in a positive effect on release of free images. For example, Ubisoft wanted images of their video games in Wikipedia articles, so they licensed everyone to release screenshots of their games under a free license.
b) Legal reasons. "Fair use" is mainly an US thing, and while Wikimedia servers are located in the US, German Wikipedia generally aims not to break German law. German copyright law is completely different from US law, we don't have a rule equivalent to "fair use".