That's complete bullshit. The tech crowd is a lot like the car crowd: It doesn't take a lot for them to worship a product/company they like, and they're willing to forgive a lot. For example, TiVo has committed huge privacy violations with its viewer profiles, yet Slashdotters are perfectly willing to defend them whenever the issue comes up - TiVo runs on Linux and is a fairly cool product. IBM is the real industry behemoth (not Microsoft) and has a huge portfolio of software and hardware patents - yet Slashdotters love IBM, because IBM is pro-Linux. It takes a lot to piss Slashdotters off, on the other hand. Even Microsoft, which uses its market position to protect its operating system and browser monopoly and which has hampered progress in the IT industry for the last couple of decades, has staunch defenders here on Slashdot (although one wonders how many of them are paid).
Most people here are apolitical and fairly apathetic. Even cases of obvious injustice, such as the DMCA and the MPAA's anti-competitive tactics, do not prevent Slashdot from eagerly reporting about every new Hollywood release and even about the Oscars. Boycott? Is that some exotic food? Add to this a substantial crowd of "free market" libertarians who will defend anything and everything a corporation does, as long as the big, evil government isn't involved. And posters like you who rail against a hypothetical Indymedia-style Slashdot crowd which, unfortunately, does not exist.
Google deserves criticism now, for its censorship practices, for hiring a former NSA spook, for its never-expiring cookies. But just look at this thread -- Google is loved by everyone. And they do make damn good products. Most people are unable to separate a product from the company that makes it, though - and unable to realize that capitalism is, fundamentally, amoral. Ultimately, Google doesn't give a shit about "doing the right thing", only insofar as "doing the right thing" is necessary to prevent bad publicity. Sure, there are many people working for Google who do care. But for any sufficiently large company, it's the bottom line that counts, nothing else.
Sorry, but "the information is similar" is not quite correct. Let's go through this:
Aristarchus: That article is straight from the 1911 Britannica (i.e. no original work) and not up-to-date. For example, we know now that Copernicus did, in fact, know about Aristarchus because of an unpublished manuscript where he cites his predecessors (he later removed this citation). It does not contain the actual quote from Archimedes, which is useful, nor the information about parallax; the coverage of his surviving work in Wikipedia is more detailed.
Democritus: Largely accurate, but reads somewhat incoherently, is incomplete and needs actual quotations.
Hypatia: A good start, but doesn't provide nearly enough coverage of the sources on Hypatia's life and death. Also note that I will add a lot more information to the Wikipedia article.
LoA: Besides being non-encyclopedic and lacking coverage of the events under Theophilus, this one is actually fairly good. The author could become an excellent Wikipedia contributor.
Abstinence: Sorry, this doesn't even compete. Non-encyclopedic to the extreme and hardly any useful information.
Wikipedia hasn't been around for very long, yet all the Wikipedia articles are superior. The biggest problem is that there's no easy way to fix these articles on E2./msg the user - sure, but who knows if he ever logs in again? Even if he does, who knows if he's interested in presenting my POV? Add another W-U -- great, but then you have to needlessly duplicate effort, plus the whole node gets harder to read for anyone looking for useful information. On Wikipedia, you just keep improving articles you come across. That's the key difference, and it works really well.
The reason E2 has a graded level system which takes more effort to progress as you go on is that you can learn from higher-level users,
There is an assumption behind that notion: Higher level users are inherently "better" in many ways and therefore good teachers. The problem with it is that, because of the way E2 works, any reasonably eloquent and motivated writer can and will easily advance to a higher level -- it doesn't take knowledge or social skills, it just takes motivation. As a result, many of the high level users are, frankly, arrogant jerks and get off by pushing newbies around and feeling superior. Don't tell me this isn't true -- you just have to look at the level names. "Seer","Godhead","Pseudo_God". I know, this is all very sophisticated and ironic, but many people seem to take it very literally. Of course, you can also see this as an advantage: E2 is great for masochists and for sadists alike.
In that sense it is MORE collaborative than Wiki.
Abusing each other is not collaboration;-). On Wikipedia we learn constantly from each other without needing any experience system. We don't even need to talk to each other that much (although we do talk a lot), because we just look at each other's edits. There are many cases of people who came to Wikipedia writing entirely biased articles and who quickly learned how to follow our NPOV guidelines and become valuable contributors. On E2, it's very easy to make enemies; it's a relatively closed circles with arbitrary rules. I have seen more than one newbie get "borged" (another of those ingenious inventions) or abused in the chatterbox. On Wikipedia, we have clear behavioral guidelines. All of us can be rude sometimes, but we generally forgive and forget, because we share the common goal of building an encyclopedia.
It's unfortunate that your WU was blown away but it probably was insufficient to the task of adequately explaining the title of the node.
See, this kind of attitude is one of the problems with E2. Failures in the system are not acknowledged. "Your write-up was deleted? Well, it was probably insufficient anyway." A mistake made by an editor? Arbitrary deletion? This kind of thing doesn't happen. The E2 FAQ calls abuse of editorial power a "remote possibility". Here's a node of mine that was deleted, at a reputation of 24:
The greatest mind in human history? That's a question impossible to answer, since we can only judge the little remaining writings that we have. Most of what has been written in ancient times was lost over the Dark Ages, including some complete encyclopedias. In the Middle Ages and even later, books were burned and their distribution prohibited. Many authors were murdered before they could finish their works, many others after they finished them. And we can only judge what has been written, not the brilliant thoughts that were never written down or not even spoken, for fear of persecution or mockery.
Even if we had more information, judging a single mind as "the greatest" would be inappropriate, since what makes a mind great? It is the thoughts and musings of its teachers, but also of its friends and enemies. The creation of ideas, the development of one's own worldview, is a process that is determined by the environment. Nowhere is this more obvious than on Everything2, where you can often follow the line of thoughts that has lead to the creation of a particular node.
Therefore, the notion of quality in this context makes little sense. What we can judge is the influence that a certain "mind" has had, and the correctness of their overall worldview, based on what we know today. Based on this, there are several people who I can think of -- and mind you, these are just the ones that we know about.
Let's go backwards in time. From the 20th century, I would nominate Carl Sagan, for his skills of teaching and storytelling, his wonderful vision, and his scientific achievements during his work for NASA. Other candidates would be Noam Chomsky, Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman. Before the 20th century, there were Charles Darwin (publication of results long postponed for fear of consequences), Louis Pasteur, Isaac Newton, Christiaan Huygens, Leonardo da Vinci, Giordano Bruno (murdered by the church), Johannes Kepler, Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei (put on trial for his views), Roger Bacon -- and many others, many of whom were persecuted for their views. In ancient times, there were Hypatia (librarian in Alexandria, brutally murdered by a Christian mob), Aristotle, Plato, Archimedes, Erasthostenes, Aristarch, Thales and many others, some we know, most we don't.
Before that there were many wonderful people we know nothing about, people who often hadn't mastered the art of writing yet, but who could tell great stories at the campfire, knew how to talk to the animals, mused about the movements of the planets, developed simple mathematics without any precedence to build upon, rescued their wives and children from wild animals, fire and thunderstorm through the application of simple, yet impressive science. Great minds among them? Certainly. Put in the 20th century, who knows what they would have become. Biologically, the human mind hasn't changed much in the last 10000 years.
Of one thing I am absolutely certain, however, if there is such a thing as the "greatest mind in human history", it is certainly not Ayn Rand. The Randian ideology is the background for many of the evils of capitalism, and although I wouldn't say that Rand is responsible for that -- things weren't much different before she arrived -- she has certainly created a religion of greed and egoism that has many followers.
The write-up was created in response to a rabid objectivist rand, and because of that, the entire node was deleted. Sure, I could have re-added it, but realistically, why should I? Why are these kind of arbitrary deletions even possible? That was one of my last write-ups. Contrast the write-up cited by another one in this discussion, "pukeporn". That one still exists.
I've had nodes deleted which were factual but an editor found offensive. That's unfortunate, but them's the breaks.
Not on Wikipedia!
I *am* really annoyed that a comment is not required when a node is deleted,
Not on Wikipedia!
but anonymous is okay; we don't need pogroms against editors on E2.
The fear is justified, but it shows a problem inherent with the process of appointing editors (again, according to the wrong criteria) instead of using an open forum (such as Wikipedia's Votes for deletion page) to decide which content should be deleted.
You don't want a discussion in a node which should stand on its own. If you have a brilliant discussion with someone on a topic, node the discussion separately and quit whining.
That's great, except that such discussions are deleted, too. There was a long node called "Why are you an atheist?", and I wrote a long explanation which I can gladly paste here. The entire node was deleted. Oh, I know, that's a "getting to know you" page and therefore bad[TM]. Please, please explain to me how a Dream Log is more valuable than such a discussion?
The fact that WUs should stand on their own is also the reason for no web links. If you have to link to a website to explain something, you haven't explained it.
The relatively small number of users on E2 cannot realistically provide all the information that is already on the web, no matter how much the project grows. Restricting yourself to "original" content (much is still copied and pasted, but without a source) only means that the information you provide will always be inferior to what you could provide if you linked to the hard work that others have already done. For example, in the Bible node I provided a link to the Skeptic's Annotated Bible, a comprehensive collection of nonsense, atrocities, lies and contradictions. Of course, it was deleted -- but the effort that went into that project will never be duplicated on E2.
I do list the URLs of my references (when they are websites, as they usually are) so that people can find them for more information. This is the way it is done in professional literature; This is the way it was meant to be done on E2. This is why the bibliography was invented.
And that's the way Wikipedia does it. But because of the way E2 works, I cannot just go to a node and add a link to the existing material. If I do so, it's deleted, because the write-up does not "stand on its own". I cannot edit other people's write-ups. On Wikipedia, if I know an interesting link about a topic, I just go to the respective article and add it. On E2, I would have to write a complete, separate article to justify the link. Or hope that the maintainer of the node will read my message and add the information (if he isn't an anti-weblink person).
The lack of a different link color for those links which go somewhere annoys the piss out of me but it's also a blessing. I have been known to click on a link, get frustrated that it doesn't go anywhere, and construct a writeup so that it does.
I know that a lot of the E2 satisfaction comes from this process, but ask yourself: Are you really writing anything useful here? Right now, the top of the "Cream of the cool" page is this:
...
We are no stranger to these late night snow falls. Even so, it is with a child's wonder that I watch as tomorrow's stark white glittering fields fall from the sky. If not for the scattered ambience of street lights, there would be only a dark and beautiful midnight. Instead, there are a thousand tiny snowflakes flitting in and out of the light - a million frantic fire flies struggling to see who might reach the ground first. There is a way that a bitterly cold winter night will hold onto the day here, between the earth and sky a warm orange glow - the sort that seems a work of the sun, no other.
Oh yeah, Mr. or Mrs. Hamster Bong, I am deeply touched. If you like that kind of thing, E2 is for you. And because every other word in an article is linked, it is encouraged to write stuff like that. What useful content could I put in a node called "like having a knife pushed into our hearts and slowly twisted"? Emotional, yes. Fictional, yes. Factual? Perhaps, with some thinking, but it would hardly be usefully searchable.
While it IS trivial to gain experience, writing COMPLETE crap will cause you to lose it.
Absolutely! Morons will not get far on Everything2.
The experience system does two really major things; it prevents new users from voting
If you want voting, there are numerous ways to limit it. Wikipedia is more oriented towards finding consensus.
Even a mediocre writeup which provides some content is useful. As per the comment I link above, when it has been superseded, it can be deleted. I have personally superseded a fair number of writeups which were more than a couple paragraphs.
On Wikipedia, the evolution of an article is vastly more interesting. What starts as just a short comment by an anonymous user evolves in different stages --copyedit, added links, rewrite, more copyedit, photo, new links, NPOV debate about a certain link, presentation of additional POV.. it's absolutely fascinating.
Your addiction to E2 is fading. Give Wikipedia a try, you may well be hooked again.:-)
And why is that so? Everything2 is a highly emotional community, much like an online role playing game, but for people who are more textually oriented. If there's any valuable factual information, it is merely a byproduct of the game, not the actual playing goal. Compare discussions about Everquest, you will find the same kind of emotional reaction.
Don't get me wrong: I have absolutely no problem with people writing on E2. It's an interesting project that should by all means continue. I do worry about unnecessary duplication of effort and hope that, with increasing awareness of Wikipedia, Everything2 users will contribute their factual articles to WP under the terms of the FDL, so that they can be improved and re-used.
Well, if you call K5 highly left-wing you obviously have a different definition than I do. If you want to see left-wing writing, try Indymedia. K5 is more like Wired, it leans towards libertarianism, which is much different from being left-wing.
You should actually use Wikipedia for a while and see how the problems you allege are solved in reality:
"Ownership" of writing: Wikipedia retains a complete history of each article. You can find out who made which specific change by looking at an article's history. In several cases, I have contacted specific users who have made specific additions and asked them for a reference. If material is added which cannot be verified, it is simply deleted by someone else.
Credibility: Generally speaking, we try to add references wherever possible, much more than you will find on Everything2. Our policy states that when a certain fact is "surprising" to a reader, it is especially in need of being backed up. Users watch over the Recent changes page and check additions to articles, and when there are any which are surprising, they ask on the Talk pages. Even subtly inserted malicious information is usually detected, the biggest problem is eloquent nonsense with lots of footnotes that nobody understands or dares to touch. This usually gets fixed when an expert in the subject comes across the article.
Discussions: Editing other people's comments (except for fixing spelling etc.) is considered vandalism and treated as such. It rarely happens, but when it does, it is quickly reverted (like all other vandalism), and if the user does it repeatedly, he is banned. Because there is a strict separation between article pages and discussion ("talk") pages, it's possible for us to let discussions run relatively freely, only archiving them when the page gets too long.
See also the Wikipedia article Our Replies to Our Critics. Really, all these problems are solved. What Wikipedia needs is a structured fact-checking and certification process to give it more authority and credibility.
See, 11 people found it funny, and one person even "cooled" it. But here's the problem: Because E2 links everything (often complete sentences), you are encouraged to write about everything. And a substantial subset of everything is crap. It's all about the expectations the community defines. Contrast some articles on Wikipedia I put considerable effort into:
And many others. This kind of writing is simply not appreciated on E2, neither through the voting/xp system (you might get a lot of XP, but your write-up count would only increase by one) nor by the community at large. So you get random crap, created by clicking on random links in another mindlessly linked text. Some of it is deleted, some is not -- the criteria, again, are entirely arbitrary.
I couldn't care less about "how to brush your teeth in a combat zone". People who like that kind of ideosyncratic writing like Everything2. But people who like factual knowledge prefer Wikipedia.
"Pukeporn" was humor inspired by another write-up. It was rated quite highly, if I recall correctly. But yes, many of my write-ups on E2 were crap like this -- that's what the system encourages, mindless associative writing.
In my opinion, E2 is a failure. Because writeups are only editable by their authors, they rarely get updated. The prose is usually clearly subjective, often poor and frequently annoying. Lots of conservative political rambling there.
There's no useful criteria for what is acceptable content and what is not. The voting/experience system has led to the development of a strict hierarchy, where many highly ranked members go around deleting articles arbitrarily. The "reason" for deletion is sent to you via an anonymous bot. It's the Slashdot story rejection system in perfection. The number of votes for an article is often completely irrelevant for whether it is deleted or not -- I've had write-ups with over 25 votes deleted because another write-up in the same node was considered spam. Uh, yeah. On the other hand, every next geek can freely post their "Dream Log" and boyfriend/girlfriend experiences. It's a mess of diary-type and almanach-type content. Discussions are basically impossible because write-ups are supposed to stand on their own.
And then the links. On E2, you are almost required to link every third word in an article -- it's about "everything", after all. But there's no distinction made between pages that exist and those that do not. On Wikipedia, links to non-existent pages are red, normal links are blue. On E2, all you can do is guess.
E2 is interesting because of its experience system which makes it somewhat addictive. But that very same system rewards quantity, not quality. Gaining experience points is trivial, but to advance to the next level (yes, they actually use RPG-like levels) you have to create lots and lots of write-ups. So many people do, and the result is crap, crap, crap. There may be brilliant prose on Everything2, but it's hard to find. Much of it is like Slashdot at 0/1. Other annoyances: no images, web-links largely prohibited.
E2 is good for lyrics and some tech stuff. Sadly, even though the creators should have known better, they have not put the project under an open content license. That makes it very hard to re-use content in any way until around 2120 or so, when most of its contributors are dead for more than 70 years, bless Sonny Bono.
Wikipedia is the antithesis to E2. World-editable, it encourages massive cooperation. All content is GNU FDL and therefore open for all kinds of re-use. But there's a clear focus, and unverifiable or POV material is not tolerated. There are images (often photos shot by the users themselves) and many good weblinks. There's plenty of brilliant, well-researched prose. Plenty of poor articles, too, but you know you can fix them.
Generally speaking, the more it is edited, the better it gets. What Wikipedia needs is a certification system to build a selection of accurate articles, this is being discussed. You can help build it by working on the software, which is, of course, free (GPL).
Wikipedia is truly lovely. I need to write a manifesto about it some day.
Try looking in/usr/bin/X11 and/etc/X11 some time. Or try reading the XFree86 Font De-uglification HOWTO. I have never needed a Windows or MacOS font de-uglification howto, why do you think that is so?
Idiot.
Is that your signature? Are you completely illiterate? Like most of the Pavlovian responses to the comment, you ignored my remark: "but I am not only criticizing the looks here but also the lack of structure and meaningful information."
Where is the wiki or knowledgebase? Where's the discussion forum for news items? Where is the structure? (Hint: Putting lots of links in a list does not make a site structured.) Learn a little bit about usability and community building before you take your next verbal dump on Slashdot.
You should. You really don't want me to get into the subject of biblical contradictions and forgery. Not even the most devout theologians assert the authenticity of much of the New and Old Testament any longer.
Do you know what the majority of those scrolls were?
No, and neither do you. They were destroyed, probably during Theophilus' time.
Except by you, you mean. If anyone is as revisionistic as you seem to think the Christians were, it's modern anti-Christian scholars.
In no century has Christianity regained as much ground in scholarship as in the 20th. You should read Norman Cantor's "Inventing the Middle Ages":
"Therefore, Leo XIII's successor, Pope Pius X, put on the brakes heavily to
stop the incipient intellectual and spiritual revolution that was loosely
called
Catholic modernism. He condemned it as heresy in 1907. The work of
the most distinguished Catholic historian of the early church, Louis
Duchesne, was unembarrassedly put on the Index of Prohibited Books
in 1912, even though Father Duchesne continued to hold a senior
position in a clerical institution in Rome until his death in 1922. A
chill descended on Catholic historical scholarship, and repressive in-
tellectual guidelines were promulgated that were not extensively
withdrawn until the 1960s. They have been partly reimposed, with
respect to the teaching of theology and sexual ethics, under John Paul
II in the 1980s.
"As a result of these starts and stops in the modernization of Catholic
culture, rigid codes readily emerged for the way Catholic scholars were
supposed to interpret the Middle Ages. It had to be a very
defensive approach to the church's role. An extremely positive view
of the continuity of a benignly arrayed papal power was prescribed.
Catholics could write about the Middle Ages, but only in ways that
made the modern church and papacy, held to be the direct continuator
of the medieval institution, look very good. Catholic scholars in
their invention of the Middle Ages were not to say things that would
bring the church and papacy at any time into disrepute or to raise
questions about the absolute authority of the papacy or universal ap-
plicability of canon law, the merit of religious orders, or the wisdom
and learning of medieval Schoolmen. In short, nothing bad about the
Middle Ages was to be articulated so as to give comfort to critics of
the Catholic Church."
Cantor describes in detail how this new historical tradition was created and
how it permeates, to this day, much of historical scholarship about the
medieval period. He's professor emeritus of history, sociology and comparative
literature at New York University.
Please don't tell me you're using Democritus as the paragon of modern science. Yes, he was an atomist, but his atoms were NOTHING like the atoms of modern atomic theory. Just because he called them atoms and we call them atoms doesn't mean that he was right, and anyone who rejects him is wrong. His atomic theory was an absolute joke.
Democritus correctly realized that the attributes of matter are the attributes of interaction among atoms. He correctly saw them as the smallest building blocks of matter. His theory was logically consistent and not to be surpassed for many centuries. To call it an "absolute joke" is consistent with your demonstrated ignorance.
And a "populated universe"? Where exactly is your evidence of a populated universe? Oh, right, there is none.
Our observations about the universe make the hypothesis of a populated universe (whether intelligently or not is another question) virtually inevitable, as the contrary hypothesis requires the postulation of too many assumptions (Ockham's Razor). The microbiological evidence from neighbouring planets is already fairly strong as well.
Serious (non-bigoted) scholars recognize Christian scholarship as in the tradition of true modern scholarship.
You mean like Roger Bacon, who explained in detail how to catch and ride a dragon? Or your beloved Augustine with his sophisticated demonology? From W.G. Soldan's "Geschichte der Hexenprozesse" (translation mine):
According to Augustine, since the beginning of the world there have been two empires predestined by God and coming true through history, the "civitas Dei", to which all good people and angels belong, and the "civitas Diaboli", which covers the complete demon world. The latter one also includes the "civitas terrena" of Rome with the cult of demons ruling within it. This demon empire, this "civitas Diaboli", still exists, but the church has defeated it (3). - The demons are beings that possess an aerial body (corpus aerium) and therefore they have an inconceivable sensory precision (acrimonia sensus) and quickness of movements (celeritas motus).
(1) "Athanasius". de incarnatione verbi Dei (Basel, 1604, p. 42);
"Cyrillus", contra Juhanum Lib. Vl. (Paris, 1572, p. 608).
(2) "Eusebius", Histor. eccles. VII, 17 and "Lactanz", Instit. IV, 27.
(3) Cf. A. Dorner: `Augustinus`, sein theologisches System und seine
religionsphilosophische Anschauung (Berl. 1873) p. 97, 299ff., 313.
p80:
In addition, by the long duration of their lives they have obtained an experience which a human could never gain in his short lifetime. This "natura aerii corporis" allows the demons to predict future events and to do miraculous things. As the people have recognized superhuman abilities in the demons, they have regarded them as gods and worshiped them with a cult (1). This cult is paganism. - The demons do, for example, have the ability to cause diseases, to pollute the air and to motivate the godless people to do evil deeds. They do this by entering the people who are susceptible because of their ungodliness. They easily manage to achieve this without notice because of their aerial bodies. During the procedure, they mix their thoughts into those of the people (2).
These are basic ideas of Augustine's demonology. For him, the heathen mythology is not based on imagination but on reality. Therefore he explains, for instace, the eternal light in the temple of Venus, which was not harmed by any thunderstorm, with a demon named Venus who either created the impression of a burning light or who actually let the light burn (3). What was told about Circe would be unbelievable by itself, but there were still people today reporting similar things. To support this claim, Augustine states that he has learned in Italy that there were landladies who knew how to turn the incoming travellers into draft animals with the help of cheese they gave them to eat and how to turn them back into humans after they had performed the work imposed upon them (4). Therefore, Augustine was familiar with the idea of animal transformation.
Do you want me to go into the subject of Christian "medicine"?
Hypatia was not a philosopher, as far as we can tell. What we know about her was that she edited and compiled mathematical works, and that she was pretty good at it. Anyway, she was murdered by fanatical monks, not even close to being representative of Christians of her day. Rule #1 of debate: never use fringe particulars to prove a universal. You only end up making yourself look silly. Hypatia doesn't help your argument one iota.
Nonsense, nonsense and more nonsense. Even the revisionist Dzielska calls Hyptia a philosopher, as do all contemporary sources, such as Socrates Scholasticus:
"There was a woman at Alexandria named Hypatia, daughter of the philosopher Theon, who made such attainments in literature and science, as to far surpass all the philosophers of her own time. Having succeeded to the school of Plato and Plotinus, she explained the principles of philosophy to her auditors, many of whom came from a distance to receive her instructions. On account of the self-possession and ease of manner, which she had acquired in consequence of the cultivation of her mind, she not unfrequently appeared in public in presence of the magistrates. Neither did she feel abashed in going to an assembly of men. For all men on account of her extraordinary dignity and virtue admired her the more."
The monks who murdered her were in the direct employ of Cyril, patriarch of Alexandria; his personal Christian Sturmabteiling. Hypatia was murdered for her public lectures, and John of Nikiu calls her a witch:
"And in those days there appeared in Alexandria a female philosopher, a pagan named Hypatia, and she was devoted at all times to magic, astrolabes and instruments of music, and she beguiled many people through (her) Satanic wiles. And the governor of the city honored her exceedingly; for she had beguiled him through her magic. And he ceased attending church as had been his custom."
The earlier remains of "idolatry" were of course destroyed by Theophilus during his storm of the Serapeum and the destruction of the other pagan temples. The murder of Hypatia was consistent with Christian policy of the time, which laid the foundations of later anti-scientism and witchhunts.
why should we be expected to believe anything you or anyone else says about the ancients?
It's a matter of consistency. When authors cite each other and we even have citations from directly surviving manuscripts, we can create a reasonably accurate picture. It is often possible to create a "family tree" for a particular document to see what was added when. Alas, this kind of analysis is hardly done nowadays - unlike 19th century historians, which were a lot more critical, 20th and 21st century historians hardly ever analyze the credibility of their sources in sufficient detail (with some notable exceptions).
In fact, medieval Christians based their theology largely upon the philosophy of Aristotle.
Yes, the Christians liked to copy Aristotle (and probably modified him when necessary, just as they modified the Bible, where we now have whole books about the extent of forgery in the Old and New Testament). Meanwhile, they ignored the majority of scientific writings of antiquity, such as those of Democritus, who postulated atoms and a populated universe. What do you think happened to the 700,000 scrolls in Alexandria? Hint: Caesar didn't destroy them. Read up on Hypatia some time to find out what Christian "theology" really is about.
XFree86 is a patched together mess. The windowing system consists of many different modules, the function of which is incomprehensible to all but the most advanced users. Configuration files are differently structured and found in different locations. Trivial stuff like font installation has long been a horrible mess and is only slowly getting fixed (fontconfig etc.) - the defaults are still atrocious to anyone with a basic understanding of font usability. Performance of many basic tasks (window resizing etc.) is terrible due to client/server sync issues.
That being said, it does the job of being the foundation of a basic desktop system. After installation and proper configuration (which most distros get right by now), most users won't even notice the difference. There are specialized libraries for direct rendering, and games performance is not an issue. Driver availability is OK and getting better.
The problem is that X is such a mess that the traditional open source collaboration model doesn't work too well. There are only relatively few people hacking on the project -- it doesn't even have a Bugzilla and according to Keith Packard, one of the real X gurus, doesn't want one because there aren't enough people to deal with the bug reports. Just look at their gopher-era homepage to get an impression about their professionality. Yeah, I know, HTML 2.0 should have been the end of web technology, but I am not only criticizing the looks here but also the lack of structure and meaningful information.
X would be fixable in a dedicated corporate effort (if IBM got their act together and started pushing LOTD it would not be an issue), otherwise open source will slowly evolve it into something more usable. Whether a competing GUI system will reach this state sooner remains to be seen.
The problem with the church fathers is that they replaced a culture that was very much based on rationalism and empirical exploration with one of irrationalism, antisexuality and dogmatic belief; the effects of this are still visible today. Much of this christianization was achieved using a massively organized campaign of temple destructions, with "temples" being anything from small places of worship to large buildings like the Serapeum in Alexandria, part of the Great Library (destroyed 391 by Theophilus, we even have a surviving manuscript that shows him triumphantly standing on the ruins). Book burnings were also common, cf. Arianism, Nestorianism. All the public libraries were closed by AD 380, according to Ammianus Marcellinus.
Even many contemporaries blamed the Christians for the decline of Roman culture, which is why Augustine asked Orosius to write a whole "history against the pagans", generally recognized as a fictional account whose primary purpose was to discredit time before the Christians. The claim about Caesar and many other misconceptions about ancient Roman culture are related to these deliberate Christian acts of historical revisionism. Since almost all ancient writings have survived only through the hands of Christian monks (carefully selected, with 90% of material ignored), we have no idea how much of it is manipulated.
Surely it is possible to treat the writings of the church fathers for their literary value, just as it is possible to look objectively at the belief set of the Taliban. However, given the damage both have done to society, to history even, you should not be surprised that many people frown upon such historical fetishes.
So the megabytes and megabytes of Klez-type spam in my inbox are "little impact"? The fact that even my mother almost infected her machine because the mail seemingly came from one of her friends, in spite of the fact that I told her not to run any attachments, is little impact? ILOVEYOU, Melissa etc. had little impact? Well, if so, I don't want to know what the deep impact is. They must be referring to extinction level events. And you know why we haven't had one of these yet? Because most virus programmers are just kids who want to try something new and not evil "cyberterrorists". Except for the 911 dialing virus, most viruses and worms have not really explored the realm of possibility. To therefore dismiss the risk of security exploits is frivolous, preposterous, stupid, arrogant, ignorant, foolish -- adjectives fail me. Why did this piece of PR crap get linked? And why hasn't Michelle Delio been fired yet for writing it?
thanks for replying at all. I agree, threads expire pretty quickly, which is a problem with a high turnover site like Slashdot. Yeah, I realize that implementing these things is work, and you'll have to set your own priorities.
As for Usenet vs. Web, Usenet would clearly be a better technology to build on -- it's decentralized, it's scalable, it's fast, etc. -- but the simple fact is that the real progress on stuff like collaborative filtering happens in web forums -- both the coders and the users hang out there. At least finally web forums are getting offline-reader functionality with tools like Forumzilla.
What's the big deal on the Tinsel Town club video? It was just a lark, a fun project a couple of staffers wanted to do, and as far as I know the animation and singing were all volunteer/donated efforts. You seem to dislike it because it looked too good to be the simple fun side project that it was?
No, I dislike it, and the even more annoying DRM Game for the reasons I already stated: It's very ineffective and not particularly informative or even funny, and it doesn't survive media transitions because of Flash. (Aside from that, the drawing style is of the cute+annoying variant that, in my experience, hardly anybody likes.) If you want to use art for propaganda purposes, take a few lessons from Scott McCloud and other web comic artists. These people not only draw well, they also know how to convey messages. Good information design is very hard, and both EFF animations are an example for how not to do it.
The CBDTPA animation, for example, may be cute for someone who knows what it is about, but these people probably haven't even installed Flash. The actual target audience will just see it as some anti-corporate rambling, with little actual substance. You can't just reprogram people to suddenly dislike Disney, Disney is associated for millions of people with fond childhood memories. If you want an example for Flash animations on the subject which were at least funny (and successful to the extent that people spread them on their own), take a look at the "Napster Bad" video and its successors.
I have no problem if little money is wasted on these efforts, but especially with regard to the DRM game, that's not my impression.
The EFF had a discussion area (comp.org.eff.talk) from the very beginning
Most people aren't even aware that Usenet exists.
but it became clear that it was not cost-effective to have staff spend the amount of time that would be necessary to even read the flamewars
Yeah, that's why modern web forums, including the one you're using now, have moderation systems that allow community volunteers to moderate and evaluate the posts by other members. The most sophisticated system is IMHO the one used by Scoop.
Instead it's better to listen directly to the specifically addressed comments from members and the public, and surf more casually the many discussion areas that cover the same topics, from slashdot, to greplaw, to 100 blogs.
First, this misses one main point of the discussion forum, which is to create a social bond between the EFF and the visitors to the site, and to encourage them to visit the site daily. Slashdot got millions of pageviews per day because it's a group-froming site (see Metcalfe's Law). It would makes the EFF site a more powerful outlet for action calls, which Slashdot is NOT because action calls disappear in the archives a few hours after they were posted at all.
Second, no, that's not better even for your own use if you compare it with a local moderated forum, because you are bound to miss important information if it's spread across different places, and you miss opportunities to explain.
Our outreach coordinator, Cory Doctorow, runs one of the most popular blogs, and has run some for the EFF directly.
Sorry, but I'm not impressed by Cory's work so far. He tends to talk over people's heads, he is used to writing for the geek/blog scene. The blog "Consensus at Lawyerpoint" is a perfect example for that. A random example entry:
The parent group of the BPDG, the Copy Protection Technical Working Group (CPTWG), will hold its next meeting in Los Angeles on July 19, 2002.
$100 gets you a seat at the table and a chance to eat a hearty catered lunch. What's more, you can make a presentation to the CPTWG just by emailing Maryann Nicoletti. In times gone by, the EFF has brought down the GNU Radio people to demonstrate the futility of the BPDG; we'd love to get your suggestions for future speakers to bring to the meeting (anyone friends with any tony anti-trust attorneys, open source video hackers, ASIC engineers, fair use advocates, or capture-card vendors who'd like to present on the technical feasibility of the BPDG mandate?)
Now read this entry to someone who has no idea what any of these acronyms mean. Cory is terrible at explaining stuff, and, worst of all, the blog doesn't even have a discussion forum. Cory is great at creating hypes (see his OpenCola past), but that's not what you need. The blog style is good for a simple "events of my life" type site, but it's not what the EFF actually needs, namely a news/discussion community on cyber liberties issues. For something like that, you need a more sophisticated system like Scoop or Slashcode.
You can do this yourself, or you can outsource it to groups that will take your money and apply it for you to direct action. The EFF does that. It has several lawyers on staff who do the scutwork on all sorts of cases. Some we lose -- that's the way of things -- and others we win.
That's great, and few people criticize the EFF's legal work. Sometimes the people outside would like to understand better what the EFF is actually fighting for, but most people generally believe that the legal work is reasonable. Personally I think that the DMCA-related stuff didn't work so well so far, and that there was a major communication problem regarding the function of DeCSS -- even today, people still tell me that it's "just a cracking tool". IMNSHO the EFF should have focused more on the simple "You cannot play DVDs under Linux because.." message than on more complex "you have a right to do.." messages. Specific messages that can connect to what people already know are more effective than abstract ones.
I personally am not very convinced of any long-term approach that tries to use the legal system to combat laws that should not have been made in the first place. I believe that our political system (and I'm speaking globally here, I'm not in the US) is fundamentally corrupt and needs to be replaced, step by step. That's one of the projects I'm working on. You can support me if you want, see the infoAnarchy donation link;-)
That's utter and complete nonsense. It's a case of Linux/Open Source being picked on because it would be completely legal to develop an open source, freely distributed DVD player if it wasn't made illegal by the DMCA. To say that Linux should play "by the rules of the rest of the world" is to say "OK, so they criminalized open source, deal with it, use closed source software".
Wrong again. This is not a patent issue, so there is no such thing as a "right" to the invention. You could read/decrypt DVDs without violating any patents. It's the DMCA that makes it illegal. So stop trolling.
You missed my point entirely. Sure, such a closed source player could exist. But it could not be made part of any of the standard distributions which can be downloaded freely. The point of open source is freedom. The DMCA criminalizes this freedom.
as a matter of fact, I'm spending a lot of my time running infoAnarchy (see sig) and hacking on its underlying code, developed by Rusty Foster for Kuro5hin. Currently I'm busy trying to make it ready for i18n, and to create a German translation, which hopefully be useful to other community/advocacy sites in the spirit of the EFF and infoAnarchy. I'm also planning to merge wiki and weblog concepts, you can see first steps in that direction on iA. So I'm spending a lot of my time on the causes I find important. I would probably be involved with the EFF if I was in the US, but I'm in Berlin/Germany.
Well, as someone who tries to look beyond the obvious, I actually researched the reasons why these laws spread and, surprise, it's not because of the US government, it's because of WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organization of the United Nations. The 1996 WIPO World Copyright Treaty, among other things, requires signatory nations to enact legislation that prohibts the circumvention of copy prevention. See my article Understanding WIPO for details. Unfortunately, most people don't recognize the importance of WIPO, and EFF does little to bring it into the spotlight.
First, I'm not in the US, so I'm not in their target audience in the first place.
Second, I'd estimate that about 1%, probably less, of the people who are in their target audience have done what you suggest. That means that the site is broken from a design perspective.
I don't know if the EFF is the answer either. Generally speaking, the ACLU seems to be more effective, but they cover a larger scope and not everyone agrees with their politics. I hated the EFF's "Tinsel Town Club" cartoon -- it may sound like a good idea to produce a cartoon to convey complex ideas, but it was a Flash video, not even a particularly good one, which makes it unsuitable for anything but web use. They probably spent big bucks on hiring designers to do these cartoons -- bucks that came from the people who donated to them. I would have preferred it if they had asked their membership before doing this.
I also think the EFF should have built a more weblog/community style website long ago. Their current site still looks very 1997-ish to me, without much potential for interaction. People aren't really given many incentives to visit eff.org regularly, which makes it less effective to issue calls for action. That's what they should spend money on. Projects like Indymedia, love them or hate them, need good software to run on, and this software would be developed faster with some help, while benefitting EFF's own site at the same time. And then they could also have spent money to fund interesting peer-to-peer-projects that are related to free speech.
Generally speaking, too few people at the EFF have a real clue about how to use the Internet to coordinate grassroots activity, and they are definitely not spending their money as effectively as they could. They're acting more like a traditional lobbying organization, with their impact more or less proportional to the amount of money behind them. The RIAA and MPAA, of course, will always be able to outspend them, so better strategies are needed.
I don't know any alternatives, though. I always thought Slashdot would be in the best position to organize effective grassroots protests (a real Slashdot effect, not just a server-related one), but the editors seem more concerned about movies and anime -- no offense intended.
I agree, there are definitely different ways to contribute. In the end, it's about finding the right balance. If you contribute some content to the public domain, but still consume most of the blockbuster movies produced by Hollywood, you may end up helping the oligarchy more than hurting it. The question is not "What's better" but "What's the sum of my actions".
It's also about capability: Some people can only contribute money, others can only contribute code, others can do both. That's why it's so stupid to tell people who complain about open source to fix the problems they report -- some people can't code, but they may help by donating or by reporting problems. Everyone who doesn't have to spend most of their time struggling for survival (which is, unfortunately, true for a large part of the world population) can contribute to open source and open content.
Slashdot Mirror
Most people here are apolitical and fairly apathetic. Even cases of obvious injustice, such as the DMCA and the MPAA's anti-competitive tactics, do not prevent Slashdot from eagerly reporting about every new Hollywood release and even about the Oscars. Boycott? Is that some exotic food? Add to this a substantial crowd of "free market" libertarians who will defend anything and everything a corporation does, as long as the big, evil government isn't involved. And posters like you who rail against a hypothetical Indymedia-style Slashdot crowd which, unfortunately, does not exist.
Google deserves criticism now, for its censorship practices, for hiring a former NSA spook, for its never-expiring cookies. But just look at this thread -- Google is loved by everyone. And they do make damn good products. Most people are unable to separate a product from the company that makes it, though - and unable to realize that capitalism is, fundamentally, amoral. Ultimately, Google doesn't give a shit about "doing the right thing", only insofar as "doing the right thing" is necessary to prevent bad publicity. Sure, there are many people working for Google who do care. But for any sufficiently large company, it's the bottom line that counts, nothing else.
Aristarchus: That article is straight from the 1911 Britannica (i.e. no original work) and not up-to-date. For example, we know now that Copernicus did, in fact, know about Aristarchus because of an unpublished manuscript where he cites his predecessors (he later removed this citation). It does not contain the actual quote from Archimedes, which is useful, nor the information about parallax; the coverage of his surviving work in Wikipedia is more detailed.
Democritus: Largely accurate, but reads somewhat incoherently, is incomplete and needs actual quotations.
Hypatia: A good start, but doesn't provide nearly enough coverage of the sources on Hypatia's life and death. Also note that I will add a lot more information to the Wikipedia article.
LoA: Besides being non-encyclopedic and lacking coverage of the events under Theophilus, this one is actually fairly good. The author could become an excellent Wikipedia contributor.
Abstinence: Sorry, this doesn't even compete. Non-encyclopedic to the extreme and hardly any useful information.
Wikipedia hasn't been around for very long, yet all the Wikipedia articles are superior. The biggest problem is that there's no easy way to fix these articles on E2. /msg the user - sure, but who knows if he ever logs in again? Even if he does, who knows if he's interested in presenting my POV? Add another W-U -- great, but then you have to needlessly duplicate effort, plus the whole node gets harder to read for anyone looking for useful information. On Wikipedia, you just keep improving articles you come across. That's the key difference, and it works really well.
There is an assumption behind that notion: Higher level users are inherently "better" in many ways and therefore good teachers. The problem with it is that, because of the way E2 works, any reasonably eloquent and motivated writer can and will easily advance to a higher level -- it doesn't take knowledge or social skills, it just takes motivation. As a result, many of the high level users are, frankly, arrogant jerks and get off by pushing newbies around and feeling superior. Don't tell me this isn't true -- you just have to look at the level names. "Seer","Godhead","Pseudo_God". I know, this is all very sophisticated and ironic, but many people seem to take it very literally. Of course, you can also see this as an advantage: E2 is great for masochists and for sadists alike.
In that sense it is MORE collaborative than Wiki.
Abusing each other is not collaboration ;-). On Wikipedia we learn constantly from each other without needing any experience system. We don't even need to talk to each other that much (although we do talk a lot), because we just look at each other's edits. There are many cases of people who came to Wikipedia writing entirely biased articles and who quickly learned how to follow our NPOV guidelines and become valuable contributors. On E2, it's very easy to make enemies; it's a relatively closed circles with arbitrary rules. I have seen more than one newbie get "borged" (another of those ingenious inventions) or abused in the chatterbox. On Wikipedia, we have clear behavioral guidelines. All of us can be rude sometimes, but we generally forgive and forget, because we share the common goal of building an encyclopedia.
It's unfortunate that your WU was blown away but it probably was insufficient to the task of adequately explaining the title of the node.
See, this kind of attitude is one of the problems with E2. Failures in the system are not acknowledged. "Your write-up was deleted? Well, it was probably insufficient anyway." A mistake made by an editor? Arbitrary deletion? This kind of thing doesn't happen. The E2 FAQ calls abuse of editorial power a "remote possibility". Here's a node of mine that was deleted, at a reputation of 24:
The write-up was created in response to a rabid objectivist rand, and because of that, the entire node was deleted. Sure, I could have re-added it, but realistically, why should I? Why are these kind of arbitrary deletions even possible? That was one of my last write-ups. Contrast the write-up cited by another one in this discussion, "pukeporn". That one still exists.
I've had nodes deleted which were factual but an editor found offensive. That's unfortunate, but them's the breaks.
Not on Wikipedia!
I *am* really annoyed that a comment is not required when a node is deleted,
Not on Wikipedia!
but anonymous is okay; we don't need pogroms against editors on E2.
The fear is justified, but it shows a problem inherent with the process of appointing editors (again, according to the wrong criteria) instead of using an open forum (such as Wikipedia's Votes for deletion page) to decide which content should be deleted.
You don't want a discussion in a node which should stand on its own. If you have a brilliant discussion with someone on a topic, node the discussion separately and quit whining.
That's great, except that such discussions are deleted, too. There was a long node called "Why are you an atheist?", and I wrote a long explanation which I can gladly paste here. The entire node was deleted. Oh, I know, that's a "getting to know you" page and therefore bad[TM]. Please, please explain to me how a Dream Log is more valuable than such a discussion?
The fact that WUs should stand on their own is also the reason for no web links. If you have to link to a website to explain something, you haven't explained it.
The relatively small number of users on E2 cannot realistically provide all the information that is already on the web, no matter how much the project grows. Restricting yourself to "original" content (much is still copied and pasted, but without a source) only means that the information you provide will always be inferior to what you could provide if you linked to the hard work that others have already done. For example, in the Bible node I provided a link to the Skeptic's Annotated Bible, a comprehensive collection of nonsense, atrocities, lies and contradictions. Of course, it was deleted -- but the effort that went into that project will never be duplicated on E2.
I do list the URLs of my references (when they are websites, as they usually are) so that people can find them for more information. This is the way it is done in professional literature; This is the way it was meant to be done on E2. This is why the bibliography was invented.
And that's the way Wikipedia does it. But because of the way E2 works, I cannot just go to a node and add a link to the existing material. If I do so, it's deleted, because the write-up does not "stand on its own". I cannot edit other people's write-ups. On Wikipedia, if I know an interesting link about a topic, I just go to the respective article and add it. On E2, I would have to write a complete, separate article to justify the link. Or hope that the maintainer of the node will read my message and add the information (if he isn't an anti-weblink person).
The lack of a different link color for those links which go somewhere annoys the piss out of me but it's also a blessing. I have been known to click on a link, get frustrated that it doesn't go anywhere, and construct a writeup so that it does.
I know that a lot of the E2 satisfaction comes from this process, but ask yourself: Are you really writing anything useful here? Right now, the top of the "Cream of the cool" page is this:
Oh yeah, Mr. or Mrs. Hamster Bong, I am deeply touched. If you like that kind of thing, E2 is for you. And because every other word in an article is linked, it is encouraged to write stuff like that. What useful content could I put in a node called "like having a knife pushed into our hearts and slowly twisted"? Emotional, yes. Fictional, yes. Factual? Perhaps, with some thinking, but it would hardly be usefully searchable.
While it IS trivial to gain experience, writing COMPLETE crap will cause you to lose it.
Absolutely! Morons will not get far on Everything2.
The experience system does two really major things; it prevents new users from voting
If you want voting, there are numerous ways to limit it. Wikipedia is more oriented towards finding consensus.
Even a mediocre writeup which provides some content is useful. As per the comment I link above, when it has been superseded, it can be deleted. I have personally superseded a fair number of writeups which were more than a couple paragraphs.
On Wikipedia, the evolution of an article is vastly more interesting. What starts as just a short comment by an anonymous user evolves in different stages --copyedit, added links, rewrite, more copyedit, photo, new links, NPOV debate about a certain link, presentation of additional POV .. it's absolutely fascinating.
Your addiction to E2 is fading. Give Wikipedia a try, you may well be hooked again. :-)
Don't get me wrong: I have absolutely no problem with people writing on E2. It's an interesting project that should by all means continue. I do worry about unnecessary duplication of effort and hope that, with increasing awareness of Wikipedia, Everything2 users will contribute their factual articles to WP under the terms of the FDL, so that they can be improved and re-used.
You should actually use Wikipedia for a while and see how the problems you allege are solved in reality:
See also the Wikipedia article Our Replies to Our Critics. Really, all these problems are solved. What Wikipedia needs is a structured fact-checking and certification process to give it more authority and credibility.
And many others. This kind of writing is simply not appreciated on E2, neither through the voting/xp system (you might get a lot of XP, but your write-up count would only increase by one) nor by the community at large. So you get random crap, created by clicking on random links in another mindlessly linked text. Some of it is deleted, some is not -- the criteria, again, are entirely arbitrary.
I couldn't care less about "how to brush your teeth in a combat zone". People who like that kind of ideosyncratic writing like Everything2. But people who like factual knowledge prefer Wikipedia.
"Pukeporn" was humor inspired by another write-up. It was rated quite highly, if I recall correctly. But yes, many of my write-ups on E2 were crap like this -- that's what the system encourages, mindless associative writing.
There's no useful criteria for what is acceptable content and what is not. The voting/experience system has led to the development of a strict hierarchy, where many highly ranked members go around deleting articles arbitrarily. The "reason" for deletion is sent to you via an anonymous bot. It's the Slashdot story rejection system in perfection. The number of votes for an article is often completely irrelevant for whether it is deleted or not -- I've had write-ups with over 25 votes deleted because another write-up in the same node was considered spam. Uh, yeah. On the other hand, every next geek can freely post their "Dream Log" and boyfriend/girlfriend experiences. It's a mess of diary-type and almanach-type content. Discussions are basically impossible because write-ups are supposed to stand on their own.
And then the links. On E2, you are almost required to link every third word in an article -- it's about "everything", after all. But there's no distinction made between pages that exist and those that do not. On Wikipedia, links to non-existent pages are red, normal links are blue. On E2, all you can do is guess.
E2 is interesting because of its experience system which makes it somewhat addictive. But that very same system rewards quantity, not quality. Gaining experience points is trivial, but to advance to the next level (yes, they actually use RPG-like levels) you have to create lots and lots of write-ups. So many people do, and the result is crap, crap, crap. There may be brilliant prose on Everything2, but it's hard to find. Much of it is like Slashdot at 0/1. Other annoyances: no images, web-links largely prohibited.
E2 is good for lyrics and some tech stuff. Sadly, even though the creators should have known better, they have not put the project under an open content license. That makes it very hard to re-use content in any way until around 2120 or so, when most of its contributors are dead for more than 70 years, bless Sonny Bono.
Wikipedia is the antithesis to E2. World-editable, it encourages massive cooperation. All content is GNU FDL and therefore open for all kinds of re-use. But there's a clear focus, and unverifiable or POV material is not tolerated. There are images (often photos shot by the users themselves) and many good weblinks. There's plenty of brilliant, well-researched prose. Plenty of poor articles, too, but you know you can fix them.
Generally speaking, the more it is edited, the better it gets. What Wikipedia needs is a certification system to build a selection of accurate articles, this is being discussed. You can help build it by working on the software, which is, of course, free (GPL).
Wikipedia is truly lovely. I need to write a manifesto about it some day.
You obviously have no idea what you are talking about, but you have already demonstrated to an amazing extent.
Try looking in /usr/bin/X11 and /etc/X11 some time. Or try reading the XFree86 Font De-uglification HOWTO. I have never needed a Windows or MacOS font de-uglification howto, why do you think that is so?
Idiot.
Is that your signature? Are you completely illiterate? Like most of the Pavlovian responses to the comment, you ignored my remark: "but I am not only criticizing the looks here but also the lack of structure and meaningful information."
Where is the wiki or knowledgebase? Where's the discussion forum for news items? Where is the structure? (Hint: Putting lots of links in a list does not make a site structured.) Learn a little bit about usability and community building before you take your next verbal dump on Slashdot.
You should. You really don't want me to get into the subject of biblical contradictions and forgery. Not even the most devout theologians assert the authenticity of much of the New and Old Testament any longer.
Do you know what the majority of those scrolls were?
No, and neither do you. They were destroyed, probably during Theophilus' time.
Except by you, you mean. If anyone is as revisionistic as you seem to think the Christians were, it's modern anti-Christian scholars.
In no century has Christianity regained as much ground in scholarship as in the 20th. You should read Norman Cantor's "Inventing the Middle Ages":
Cantor describes in detail how this new historical tradition was created and how it permeates, to this day, much of historical scholarship about the medieval period. He's professor emeritus of history, sociology and comparative literature at New York University.
Please don't tell me you're using Democritus as the paragon of modern science. Yes, he was an atomist, but his atoms were NOTHING like the atoms of modern atomic theory. Just because he called them atoms and we call them atoms doesn't mean that he was right, and anyone who rejects him is wrong. His atomic theory was an absolute joke.
Democritus correctly realized that the attributes of matter are the attributes of interaction among atoms. He correctly saw them as the smallest building blocks of matter. His theory was logically consistent and not to be surpassed for many centuries. To call it an "absolute joke" is consistent with your demonstrated ignorance.
And a "populated universe"? Where exactly is your evidence of a populated universe? Oh, right, there is none.
Our observations about the universe make the hypothesis of a populated universe (whether intelligently or not is another question) virtually inevitable, as the contrary hypothesis requires the postulation of too many assumptions (Ockham's Razor). The microbiological evidence from neighbouring planets is already fairly strong as well.
Serious (non-bigoted) scholars recognize Christian scholarship as in the tradition of true modern scholarship.
You mean like Roger Bacon, who explained in detail how to catch and ride a dragon? Or your beloved Augustine with his sophisticated demonology? From W.G. Soldan's "Geschichte der Hexenprozesse" (translation mine):
Do you want me to go into the subject of Christian "medicine"?
Hypatia was not a philosopher, as far as we can tell. What we know about her was that she edited and compiled mathematical works, and that she was pretty good at it. Anyway, she was murdered by fanatical monks, not even close to being representative of Christians of her day. Rule #1 of debate: never use fringe particulars to prove a universal. You only end up making yourself look silly. Hypatia doesn't help your argument one iota.
Nonsense, nonsense and more nonsense. Even the revisionist Dzielska calls Hyptia a philosopher, as do all contemporary sources, such as Socrates Scholasticus:
The monks who murdered her were in the direct employ of Cyril, patriarch of Alexandria; his personal Christian Sturmabteiling. Hypatia was murdered for her public lectures, and John of Nikiu calls her a witch:
The earlier remains of "idolatry" were of course destroyed by Theophilus during his storm of the Serapeum and the destruction of the other pagan temples. The murder of Hypatia was consistent with Christian policy of the time, which laid the foundations of later anti-scientism and witchhunts.
But I don't want to omit the Christian perspective on the matter: The History Of Hypatia, A most Impudent School-Mistress of Alexandria: Murder'd and torn to Pieces by the Populace, In Defence of Saint Cyril and the Alexandrian Clergy.
It's a matter of consistency. When authors cite each other and we even have citations from directly surviving manuscripts, we can create a reasonably accurate picture. It is often possible to create a "family tree" for a particular document to see what was added when. Alas, this kind of analysis is hardly done nowadays - unlike 19th century historians, which were a lot more critical, 20th and 21st century historians hardly ever analyze the credibility of their sources in sufficient detail (with some notable exceptions).
In fact, medieval Christians based their theology largely upon the philosophy of Aristotle.
Yes, the Christians liked to copy Aristotle (and probably modified him when necessary, just as they modified the Bible, where we now have whole books about the extent of forgery in the Old and New Testament). Meanwhile, they ignored the majority of scientific writings of antiquity, such as those of Democritus, who postulated atoms and a populated universe. What do you think happened to the 700,000 scrolls in Alexandria? Hint: Caesar didn't destroy them. Read up on Hypatia some time to find out what Christian "theology" really is about.
That being said, it does the job of being the foundation of a basic desktop system. After installation and proper configuration (which most distros get right by now), most users won't even notice the difference. There are specialized libraries for direct rendering, and games performance is not an issue. Driver availability is OK and getting better.
The problem is that X is such a mess that the traditional open source collaboration model doesn't work too well. There are only relatively few people hacking on the project -- it doesn't even have a Bugzilla and according to Keith Packard, one of the real X gurus, doesn't want one because there aren't enough people to deal with the bug reports. Just look at their gopher-era homepage to get an impression about their professionality. Yeah, I know, HTML 2.0 should have been the end of web technology, but I am not only criticizing the looks here but also the lack of structure and meaningful information.
X would be fixable in a dedicated corporate effort (if IBM got their act together and started pushing LOTD it would not be an issue), otherwise open source will slowly evolve it into something more usable. Whether a competing GUI system will reach this state sooner remains to be seen.
Even many contemporaries blamed the Christians for the decline of Roman culture, which is why Augustine asked Orosius to write a whole "history against the pagans", generally recognized as a fictional account whose primary purpose was to discredit time before the Christians. The claim about Caesar and many other misconceptions about ancient Roman culture are related to these deliberate Christian acts of historical revisionism. Since almost all ancient writings have survived only through the hands of Christian monks (carefully selected, with 90% of material ignored), we have no idea how much of it is manipulated.
Surely it is possible to treat the writings of the church fathers for their literary value, just as it is possible to look objectively at the belief set of the Taliban. However, given the damage both have done to society, to history even, you should not be surprised that many people frown upon such historical fetishes.
So the megabytes and megabytes of Klez-type spam in my inbox are "little impact"? The fact that even my mother almost infected her machine because the mail seemingly came from one of her friends, in spite of the fact that I told her not to run any attachments, is little impact? ILOVEYOU, Melissa etc. had little impact? Well, if so, I don't want to know what the deep impact is. They must be referring to extinction level events. And you know why we haven't had one of these yet? Because most virus programmers are just kids who want to try something new and not evil "cyberterrorists". Except for the 911 dialing virus, most viruses and worms have not really explored the realm of possibility. To therefore dismiss the risk of security exploits is frivolous, preposterous, stupid, arrogant, ignorant, foolish -- adjectives fail me. Why did this piece of PR crap get linked? And why hasn't Michelle Delio been fired yet for writing it?
thanks for replying at all. I agree, threads expire pretty quickly, which is a problem with a high turnover site like Slashdot. Yeah, I realize that implementing these things is work, and you'll have to set your own priorities.
As for Usenet vs. Web, Usenet would clearly be a better technology to build on -- it's decentralized, it's scalable, it's fast, etc. -- but the simple fact is that the real progress on stuff like collaborative filtering happens in web forums -- both the coders and the users hang out there. At least finally web forums are getting offline-reader functionality with tools like Forumzilla.
What's the big deal on the Tinsel Town club video? It was just a lark, a fun project a couple of staffers wanted to do, and as far as I know the animation and singing were all volunteer/donated efforts. You seem to dislike it because it looked too good to be the simple fun side project that it was?
No, I dislike it, and the even more annoying DRM Game for the reasons I already stated: It's very ineffective and not particularly informative or even funny, and it doesn't survive media transitions because of Flash. (Aside from that, the drawing style is of the cute+annoying variant that, in my experience, hardly anybody likes.) If you want to use art for propaganda purposes, take a few lessons from Scott McCloud and other web comic artists. These people not only draw well, they also know how to convey messages. Good information design is very hard, and both EFF animations are an example for how not to do it.
The CBDTPA animation, for example, may be cute for someone who knows what it is about, but these people probably haven't even installed Flash. The actual target audience will just see it as some anti-corporate rambling, with little actual substance. You can't just reprogram people to suddenly dislike Disney, Disney is associated for millions of people with fond childhood memories. If you want an example for Flash animations on the subject which were at least funny (and successful to the extent that people spread them on their own), take a look at the "Napster Bad" video and its successors.
I have no problem if little money is wasted on these efforts, but especially with regard to the DRM game, that's not my impression.
The EFF had a discussion area (comp.org.eff.talk) from the very beginning
Most people aren't even aware that Usenet exists.
but it became clear that it was not cost-effective to have staff spend the amount of time that would be necessary to even read the flamewars
Yeah, that's why modern web forums, including the one you're using now, have moderation systems that allow community volunteers to moderate and evaluate the posts by other members. The most sophisticated system is IMHO the one used by Scoop.
Instead it's better to listen directly to the specifically addressed comments from members and the public, and surf more casually the many discussion areas that cover the same topics, from slashdot, to greplaw, to 100 blogs.
First, this misses one main point of the discussion forum, which is to create a social bond between the EFF and the visitors to the site, and to encourage them to visit the site daily. Slashdot got millions of pageviews per day because it's a group-froming site (see Metcalfe's Law). It would makes the EFF site a more powerful outlet for action calls, which Slashdot is NOT because action calls disappear in the archives a few hours after they were posted at all.
Second, no, that's not better even for your own use if you compare it with a local moderated forum, because you are bound to miss important information if it's spread across different places, and you miss opportunities to explain.
Our outreach coordinator, Cory Doctorow, runs one of the most popular blogs, and has run some for the EFF directly.
Sorry, but I'm not impressed by Cory's work so far. He tends to talk over people's heads, he is used to writing for the geek/blog scene. The blog "Consensus at Lawyerpoint" is a perfect example for that. A random example entry:
Now read this entry to someone who has no idea what any of these acronyms mean. Cory is terrible at explaining stuff, and, worst of all, the blog doesn't even have a discussion forum. Cory is great at creating hypes (see his OpenCola past), but that's not what you need. The blog style is good for a simple "events of my life" type site, but it's not what the EFF actually needs, namely a news/discussion community on cyber liberties issues. For something like that, you need a more sophisticated system like Scoop or Slashcode.
You can do this yourself, or you can outsource it to groups that will take your money and apply it for you to direct action. The EFF does that. It has several lawyers on staff who do the scutwork on all sorts of cases. Some we lose -- that's the way of things -- and others we win.
That's great, and few people criticize the EFF's legal work. Sometimes the people outside would like to understand better what the EFF is actually fighting for, but most people generally believe that the legal work is reasonable. Personally I think that the DMCA-related stuff didn't work so well so far, and that there was a major communication problem regarding the function of DeCSS -- even today, people still tell me that it's "just a cracking tool". IMNSHO the EFF should have focused more on the simple "You cannot play DVDs under Linux because .." message than on more complex "you have a right to do .." messages. Specific messages that can connect to what people already know are more effective than abstract ones.
I personally am not very convinced of any long-term approach that tries to use the legal system to combat laws that should not have been made in the first place. I believe that our political system (and I'm speaking globally here, I'm not in the US) is fundamentally corrupt and needs to be replaced, step by step. That's one of the projects I'm working on. You can support me if you want, see the infoAnarchy donation link ;-)
That's utter and complete nonsense. It's a case of Linux/Open Source being picked on because it would be completely legal to develop an open source, freely distributed DVD player if it wasn't made illegal by the DMCA. To say that Linux should play "by the rules of the rest of the world" is to say "OK, so they criminalized open source, deal with it, use closed source software".
Wrong again. This is not a patent issue, so there is no such thing as a "right" to the invention. You could read/decrypt DVDs without violating any patents. It's the DMCA that makes it illegal. So stop trolling.
You missed my point entirely. Sure, such a closed source player could exist. But it could not be made part of any of the standard distributions which can be downloaded freely. The point of open source is freedom. The DMCA criminalizes this freedom.
as a matter of fact, I'm spending a lot of my time running infoAnarchy (see sig) and hacking on its underlying code, developed by Rusty Foster for Kuro5hin. Currently I'm busy trying to make it ready for i18n, and to create a German translation, which hopefully be useful to other community/advocacy sites in the spirit of the EFF and infoAnarchy. I'm also planning to merge wiki and weblog concepts, you can see first steps in that direction on iA. So I'm spending a lot of my time on the causes I find important. I would probably be involved with the EFF if I was in the US, but I'm in Berlin/Germany.
Oh, and I posted this story, too ;-)
Well, as someone who tries to look beyond the obvious, I actually researched the reasons why these laws spread and, surprise, it's not because of the US government, it's because of WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organization of the United Nations. The 1996 WIPO World Copyright Treaty, among other things, requires signatory nations to enact legislation that prohibts the circumvention of copy prevention. See my article Understanding WIPO for details. Unfortunately, most people don't recognize the importance of WIPO, and EFF does little to bring it into the spotlight.
Second, I'd estimate that about 1%, probably less, of the people who are in their target audience have done what you suggest. That means that the site is broken from a design perspective.
I also think the EFF should have built a more weblog/community style website long ago. Their current site still looks very 1997-ish to me, without much potential for interaction. People aren't really given many incentives to visit eff.org regularly, which makes it less effective to issue calls for action. That's what they should spend money on. Projects like Indymedia, love them or hate them, need good software to run on, and this software would be developed faster with some help, while benefitting EFF's own site at the same time. And then they could also have spent money to fund interesting peer-to-peer-projects that are related to free speech.
Generally speaking, too few people at the EFF have a real clue about how to use the Internet to coordinate grassroots activity, and they are definitely not spending their money as effectively as they could. They're acting more like a traditional lobbying organization, with their impact more or less proportional to the amount of money behind them. The RIAA and MPAA, of course, will always be able to outspend them, so better strategies are needed.
I don't know any alternatives, though. I always thought Slashdot would be in the best position to organize effective grassroots protests (a real Slashdot effect, not just a server-related one), but the editors seem more concerned about movies and anime -- no offense intended.
It's also about capability: Some people can only contribute money, others can only contribute code, others can do both. That's why it's so stupid to tell people who complain about open source to fix the problems they report -- some people can't code, but they may help by donating or by reporting problems. Everyone who doesn't have to spend most of their time struggling for survival (which is, unfortunately, true for a large part of the world population) can contribute to open source and open content.