You sound like a grumpy engineer who decides what foods to eat based on their nutrient content and keeps asking everyone "Is That Really Necessary?"
It isn't important if C++ or any other language really did solve the same problems. Why should people use C++ if they don't like and and no one is paying them to use it?
Are you also deadset against every other language, too?
Considering the fact that almost everything in Linux and the opn source arena is a knock-off of something else, accusations of "copying" ring loud and false.
First, consult a lawyer. A lawyer does not need to be an expert in privacy law to look up the relevant law for the state you're in. Or refer you to another lawyer who does have expertise and experience in that area.
Go to the police and make a complaint. That doesn't guarantee anyone will investigate and prosecute, but they certainly won't if you don't tell them.
Consider civil action: sue 'em. That's what suits are for. That means, though, you need to be convincing when you say you know who did it.
I have an absolute right to remain free of crime and the police have an absolute obligation to protect me from crime.
I have an absolute right to liberty and freedom. Crime directed against me thwarts my exercise of that right. That, in essence, is why certain behaviors are considered crimes.
The fact that society and the state are no able to povide perfect protection from crime does not bear on my rights.
It was an (apparently feeble) attempt at irony. directed at the tinfoil brigade. A lot of people around here seem to value their "right" to hide their public activities a lot more than my right to stay free of crime.
Actually, the AP article does not explicitly state that this agency is directing satellites to acquire new imagery inside the U.S. Perhaps, they are, perhaps they aren't. Personally, I'm not too worried about anyone watching my public activities. If I was concerned about seeing me, I'd stay home.
Of, course, who's going to exercise oversight of all those Russian, Chinese, French, Indian and Israeli reconn satellites?
The trick isn't building such a spacecraft. That's been do-able since the 1960's. The trick is figuring out how to make a profit operating the damn thing.
The "media" is probably no more or no less biased than it has ever been. There's just a great deal more of it these days. Most of it is geared toward very profitable entertainment, including much that is called "news". That's to be expected, since they are in business to make money. That's a good thing, because the alternative is an unfree press funded and regulated by the government.
People are right to criticize media bias. They are wrong, however, to expect to find a single source that always reports all the news completely objectively.
The poster provides no evidence to support his claim of widespread embarrassment in the U.S. about the OSCE monitors, relying on a single BBC report for credibility. That report, in turn, does not mention embarrassment, and, in fact, sites a single anonymous source for the alleged widespread cynicism about voting. (How can enbarrassment be widespread about an activiry hardly anyone knows about?)
All that is typical from Slashdot and BBC. One organization practices advocacy yellow journalism while claiming over and over that it doesn't engage in journalism, while the other has sullied a decades-long record of professional journalism with bias and incompetence.
Of course, neither the poster, not Slashdot or the BBC, mention that the monitors are here because we invited them. They are both quite ready to omit facts that don't suit their agenda.
>>"...while it isn't perfect, it's the only way to do it. Otherwise, if the editing authority gets bogged down, or behind, or just plain bored, or gets hit by a bus..."
It isn't the only way to do it. Another way is to hire professionals and pay them to do the job. If they don't do the job, you fire them and hire someone else. That model has worked well for millenia. I doubt that Wikipedia, which represents an experiment in extending the open source software development model into, perhaps, inappropriate areas, is going to reverse that record.
The absence of pre-publication review by qualified individuals is a serious, perhaps fatal, flaw in Wikipedia.
The ideology represented by ventures like Wikipedia is not convincing enough to lure me into writing for free.
I am not arguing that mistakes do not appear in other publications.
I am stating that Wikipedia enables the deliberate creation of deliberately false content and provides no assurance that any given piece of content will be factchecked and reviewed before or after publication.
That is akin to filling newspapers with lies and rumors gathered at the local bars, and waiting for the readers to call in with corrections.
I assume you can distinguish between mistakes and errors made as the result of improper research or bad judgment from mistakes and errors deliberately made in order to mislead and misinform.
Since you seem to like to bash on CBS, here's the difference: CBS was misled by the individual who created those bogus memos. Even after all their own review and factchecking, CBS went with the story. That was a mistake.
However, in Wikipedia-world, the person who created the fraudulent memos -- with the obvious intent to mislead and misinform -- would have published those lies and no one would have done any review or factchecking prior to publication. In fact, Wikipedia offers no guarantee that anyone will factcheck and review any content at all, before or after publication.
Those are clear, obviuos and important distinctions.
If content was reviewed and edited by people with the requisite skills and attitudes prior to publication on Wikipedia, I'd be more inclined to trust it. Until that happens, I won't.
You're being deliberately trite and sarcastic. Typical.
But, for the record, I did not say the "only reason" to submit to Wikipedia is to mislead., I said Wikipedia enables the posting of entries intended to mislead. That, presumably, is not a terribly subtle distinction.
If I'm wrong, prove it. Does Wikipedia fact check content before it goes live?
The Wright brothers were, in fact, very competent engineers. Viewing them as amateur Midwestern bumpkins who stumbled their way to inventing the airplane is evidence of ignorance and bigotry.
As for Rather, well, competence does not imply perfection. Rather was, and is, a professional journalist, a profession with standards that puts this forum to shame.
In any case, you've neither addressed nor acknowledged my central point: Wikepedia enables the creation of deliberately false entries and cannot provide its readers any assurance that those lies will be eliminated.
That is entirely different from errors in other publications. If tomorrow's CBS Evening News makes a mistake, it will be because CBS and its staff made a mistake, not because someone snuck into the building and entered a deliberate lie into Rather's script. There's nothing preventing the equivalent in the Wikipedia.
To what? Enabling people with agendas other than accuracy and truth to alter content to further those agendas?
I can't do that in a newspaper, or a book, a TV progrtam, or in this website. But, I can certainly do it in Wikipedia.
The rather obvious fact that any publication can contain errors doesn't have anything to do with the equally obvious fact that Wikipedia is vulnerable to deliberate distortion in ways they are not.
It is also disingenuous to counter this by asserting that if I find a mistake on Wikipedia I have a responsibility to correct. First, I have no such responsibility. Second, if I'm doing research or asking questions, presumably I do not know enough about the subject to know the entry is wrong, much less to correct it.
I read Slashdot. It's amusing. I don't trust Slashdot.
It isn't fair to compare errors in traditional publications with errors in Wikipedia. ("Print" has nothing to do with it. That's just a medium.)
Here's the point: Wikipedia is vulnerable to to deliberate falsification of content by its users and the reader has no assurance that any given entry has been vetted, corrected, and edited by competent professioals.
I used to read several political blogs daily, but I've stopped. All of them are as predictable as Rush Limbaugh, regardless of their politics.
Too many blogs spend their time excoriating real journalists for occasionally falling prey to the sins they commit on a daily basis.
Precious little original news reporting happens in the blogosphere. Instead, there's a lot of unsourced and unsubstantiated opinion and commentary. You can call it journalism if you want to, but it ain't news and it ain't reporting.
In fact, anytime a real reporter starts publishing real news in blog format, the self-appointed judges of the blogdom usually berate the poor sod for prostituting their little gimmick. Tell us what you think, they chant, not what happened. The blogosphere is more interested in how people interpret reality than they are in reality itself.
I still read a few blogs written by people who know how to write and who have something interesting to say. I've given up on blogs written by people who imagine that banging on a keyboard is journalism.
Remember, if you have a hard time believing posts on Slashdot, why should you believe a blog?
The best way to control your content is to use real live human editors. Technical tricks will not eliminate all the offensive content.
While you are, in fact, operating a forum that allows people to converse with each other, you are, first and foremost, publishing content on the web. Your primary responsibility is controlling that content. Think like a publisher.
I'm talking about "Linux, the operating system" that users install on their machines. From that point of view, distinctions about distributions, packages or kernels make no difference.
Nor am I talking about you and your employer. If you aren't in the business of creating Linux distributions, then you, obviously, have no reason to be concerned about user reaction to a product you don't make. Presumably, your employer is, however, in the business of selling some type of product of service, and pays attention to what his customers say. This, again presumably, is reflected in the direction he or she provides you. (As opposed to paying you to happily code whatever strikes your fancy and washing your hands of customers.)
I suppose if you look at things exclusively from the viewpoint of a developer, then users are, in fact, annoying little things who keep you from playing with your toys. The goal of software users is to acquire better and more innovative software that responds to their needs as they see them. Software users have no responsibility to improve code or docunmentation. That's your job. The users' job is to use your product and give you feedback.
It is the same with any other product or serice. I can't build a car, but I am certainly entitled to voice my opinion about car designs. I cannot perform surgery, but I can certainly voice my opinion about surgeons. If automakers and surgeons view the opinions of their customers as annoying irrelevancies that simply get in their way, then they won't be car designers or surgeons very long.
Ditto for software developers, even if the only users they are willing to acknowledge are other developers. If you want people to use what you make, then you must pay attention to their opinions about your product.
It seems you must see Linux and FOSS as a closed community of developers, with little or no reason to pay attention to the people who actually use your software. On the other hand, I'd argue that Linux and FOSS only emerged from its quixotic Stallman-esque days when parts of that community started paying attention to the voices of users.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, no. The post lambasted Mono as an unnecessary ego-driven piece of work that solves problems that were solved by earlier tools.
If one applies that logic to Linux, it ought not to exist.
You sound like a grumpy engineer who decides what foods to eat based on their nutrient content and keeps asking everyone "Is That Really Necessary?"
It isn't important if C++ or any other language really did solve the same problems. Why should people use C++ if they don't like and and no one is paying them to use it?
Are you also deadset against every other language, too?
Considering the fact that almost everything in Linux and the opn source arena is a knock-off of something else, accusations of "copying" ring loud and false.
Why use C#? Because you like the language. If you have a choice, why would you spend your time working with a language you don't like?
First, consult a lawyer. A lawyer does not need to be an expert in privacy law to look up the relevant law for the state you're in. Or refer you to another lawyer who does have expertise and experience in that area.
Go to the police and make a complaint. That doesn't guarantee anyone will investigate and prosecute, but they certainly won't if you don't tell them.
Consider civil action: sue 'em. That's what suits are for. That means, though, you need to be convincing when you say you know who did it.
I have an absolute right to remain free of crime and the police have an absolute obligation to protect me from crime.
I have an absolute right to liberty and freedom. Crime directed against me thwarts my exercise of that right. That, in essence, is why certain behaviors are considered crimes.
The fact that society and the state are no able to povide perfect protection from crime does not bear on my rights.
You might have asked how the Yugo's low cost would change the cars we drive.
Let's see if it works, first.
It was an (apparently feeble) attempt at irony. directed at the tinfoil brigade. A lot of people around here seem to value their "right" to hide their public activities a lot more than my right to stay free of crime.
Actually, the AP article does not explicitly state that this agency is directing satellites to acquire new imagery inside the U.S. Perhaps, they are, perhaps they aren't. Personally, I'm not too worried about anyone watching my public activities. If I was concerned about seeing me, I'd stay home.
Of, course, who's going to exercise oversight of all those Russian, Chinese, French, Indian and Israeli reconn satellites?
It's the Shuttle, of course.
The trick isn't building such a spacecraft. That's been do-able since the 1960's. The trick is figuring out how to make a profit operating the damn thing.
The "media" is probably no more or no less biased than it has ever been. There's just a great deal more of it these days. Most of it is geared toward very profitable entertainment, including much that is called "news". That's to be expected, since they are in business to make money. That's a good thing, because the alternative is an unfree press funded and regulated by the government.
People are right to criticize media bias. They are wrong, however, to expect to find a single source that always reports all the news completely objectively.
The poster provides no evidence to support his claim of widespread embarrassment in the U.S. about the OSCE monitors, relying on a single BBC report for credibility. That report, in turn, does not mention embarrassment, and, in fact, sites a single anonymous source for the alleged widespread cynicism about voting. (How can enbarrassment be widespread about an activiry hardly anyone knows about?)
All that is typical from Slashdot and BBC. One organization practices advocacy yellow journalism while claiming over and over that it doesn't engage in journalism, while the other has sullied a decades-long record of professional journalism with bias and incompetence.
Of course, neither the poster, not Slashdot or the BBC, mention that the monitors are here because we invited them. They are both quite ready to omit facts that don't suit their agenda.
Heh.
Except that we usually don't need to worry about cars falling through the roof.
Then there's the Flying Yahoo Tossing Beer Bottle From Window issue...
>>"...while it isn't perfect, it's the only way to do it. Otherwise, if the editing authority gets bogged down, or behind, or just plain bored, or gets hit by a bus..."
It isn't the only way to do it. Another way is to hire professionals and pay them to do the job. If they don't do the job, you fire them and hire someone else. That model has worked well for millenia. I doubt that Wikipedia, which represents an experiment in extending the open source software development model into, perhaps, inappropriate areas, is going to reverse that record.
The absence of pre-publication review by qualified individuals is a serious, perhaps fatal, flaw in Wikipedia.
The ideology represented by ventures like Wikipedia is not convincing enough to lure me into writing for free.
You still don't get it, perhaps deliberately.
I am not arguing that mistakes do not appear in other publications.
I am stating that Wikipedia enables the deliberate creation of deliberately false content and provides no assurance that any given piece of content will be factchecked and reviewed before or after publication.
That is akin to filling newspapers with lies and rumors gathered at the local bars, and waiting for the readers to call in with corrections.
I assume you can distinguish between mistakes and errors made as the result of improper research or bad judgment from mistakes and errors deliberately made in order to mislead and misinform.
Since you seem to like to bash on CBS, here's the difference: CBS was misled by the individual who created those bogus memos. Even after all their own review and factchecking, CBS went with the story. That was a mistake.
However, in Wikipedia-world, the person who created the fraudulent memos -- with the obvious intent to mislead and misinform -- would have published those lies and no one would have done any review or factchecking prior to publication. In fact, Wikipedia offers no guarantee that anyone will factcheck and review any content at all, before or after publication.
Those are clear, obviuos and important distinctions.
If content was reviewed and edited by people with the requisite skills and attitudes prior to publication on Wikipedia, I'd be more inclined to trust it. Until that happens, I won't.
Deliberately ignorant, putting ideology before reality.
You're apparently incapable of a generating a serious response, but quite capable of making lame attempts at being smarmy.
You're being deliberately trite and sarcastic. Typical.
But, for the record, I did not say the "only reason" to submit to Wikipedia is to mislead., I said Wikipedia enables the posting of entries intended to mislead. That, presumably, is not a terribly subtle distinction.
If I'm wrong, prove it. Does Wikipedia fact check content before it goes live?
Cute, but wrong and pointless.
The Wright brothers were, in fact, very competent engineers. Viewing them as amateur Midwestern bumpkins who stumbled their way to inventing the airplane is evidence of ignorance and bigotry.
As for Rather, well, competence does not imply perfection. Rather was, and is, a professional journalist, a profession with standards that puts this forum to shame.
In any case, you've neither addressed nor acknowledged my central point: Wikepedia enables the creation of deliberately false entries and cannot provide its readers any assurance that those lies will be eliminated.
That is entirely different from errors in other publications. If tomorrow's CBS Evening News makes a mistake, it will be because CBS and its staff made a mistake, not because someone snuck into the building and entered a deliberate lie into Rather's script. There's nothing preventing the equivalent in the Wikipedia.
>>" All mediums are vulnerable to that."
To what? Enabling people with agendas other than accuracy and truth to alter content to further those agendas?
I can't do that in a newspaper, or a book, a TV progrtam, or in this website. But, I can certainly do it in Wikipedia.
The rather obvious fact that any publication can contain errors doesn't have anything to do with the equally obvious fact that Wikipedia is vulnerable to deliberate distortion in ways they are not.
It is also disingenuous to counter this by asserting that if I find a mistake on Wikipedia I have a responsibility to correct. First, I have no such responsibility. Second, if I'm doing research or asking questions, presumably I do not know enough about the subject to know the entry is wrong, much less to correct it.
I read Slashdot. It's amusing. I don't trust Slashdot.
It isn't fair to compare errors in traditional publications with errors in Wikipedia. ("Print" has nothing to do with it. That's just a medium.)
Here's the point: Wikipedia is vulnerable to to deliberate falsification of content by its users and the reader has no assurance that any given entry has been vetted, corrected, and edited by competent professioals.
Wikipedia could have a zillion entries and I still won't trust it.
Any publication that permits its readers to alter its text cannot be trusted.
I used to read several political blogs daily, but I've stopped. All of them are as predictable as Rush Limbaugh, regardless of their politics.
Too many blogs spend their time excoriating real journalists for occasionally falling prey to the sins they commit on a daily basis.
Precious little original news reporting happens in the blogosphere. Instead, there's a lot of unsourced and unsubstantiated opinion and commentary. You can call it journalism if you want to, but it ain't news and it ain't reporting.
In fact, anytime a real reporter starts publishing real news in blog format, the self-appointed judges of the blogdom usually berate the poor sod for prostituting their little gimmick. Tell us what you think, they chant, not what happened. The blogosphere is more interested in how people interpret reality than they are in reality itself.
I still read a few blogs written by people who know how to write and who have something interesting to say. I've given up on blogs written by people who imagine that banging on a keyboard is journalism.
Remember, if you have a hard time believing posts on Slashdot, why should you believe a blog?
>>"...saved every spam message and virus-laden e-mail he's received at work since 1997."
O-o-kay. Step away from the keyboard.
The best way to control your content is to use real live human editors. Technical tricks will not eliminate all the offensive content.
While you are, in fact, operating a forum that allows people to converse with each other, you are, first and foremost, publishing content on the web. Your primary responsibility is controlling that content. Think like a publisher.
I'm talking about "Linux, the operating system" that users install on their machines. From that point of view, distinctions about distributions, packages or kernels make no difference.
Nor am I talking about you and your employer. If you aren't in the business of creating Linux distributions, then you, obviously, have no reason to be concerned about user reaction to a product you don't make. Presumably, your employer is, however, in the business of selling some type of product of service, and pays attention to what his customers say. This, again presumably, is reflected in the direction he or she provides you. (As opposed to paying you to happily code whatever strikes your fancy and washing your hands of customers.)
I suppose if you look at things exclusively from the viewpoint of a developer, then users are, in fact, annoying little things who keep you from playing with your toys. The goal of software users is to acquire better and more innovative software that responds to their needs as they see them. Software users have no responsibility to improve code or docunmentation. That's your job. The users' job is to use your product and give you feedback.
It is the same with any other product or serice. I can't build a car, but I am certainly entitled to voice my opinion about car designs. I cannot perform surgery, but I can certainly voice my opinion about surgeons. If automakers and surgeons view the opinions of their customers as annoying irrelevancies that simply get in their way, then they won't be car designers or surgeons very long.
Ditto for software developers, even if the only users they are willing to acknowledge are other developers. If you want people to use what you make, then you must pay attention to their opinions about your product.
It seems you must see Linux and FOSS as a closed community of developers, with little or no reason to pay attention to the people who actually use your software. On the other hand, I'd argue that Linux and FOSS only emerged from its quixotic Stallman-esque days when parts of that community started paying attention to the voices of users.