Where did I use the word "bias"? I didn't say the quote was biased. I didn't even disagree with the facts as stated. Indeed, I think the statement is probably correct — though I don't know enough about the issues to make a statement with certainty. And the statement could have been added to Wikipedia by somebody who doesn't know much more than me. That person certainly hasn't given me any reason to think he's an authority on the matter.
Even if you happen to agree with it, you can't take an unsubstantiated statement from an unknown source, and quote it as if it had some kind of authority. (If you do, you're just quoting yourself!) And that's all a lot of Wikipedia is, unsubstantiated statements from unknown sources. Dressing it up as "encylopedia articles" doesn't change that.
Wikipedia actually has a rule that you can't add material unless you can give sources. But I've never seen that rule enforced, and maybe 10% of the content actually has sources attached to it. Until that changes, nobody can cite Wikipedia as a authority for anything.
The statement you quote is not the statement I was quibling with. Which was: "[Shared Source] is not open source according to the Open Source Definition, because none of the license programs allows for commercial use of modified code". To be authoritative and NPOV, that sentence needs an "according to...".
Every Wikipedia contributor honors NPOV, but few seem to understand when they're violating it. I used to make a recreation of bringing up random Wikipedia pages and doing some basic editing. If I could fix the page without changing what the authors were trying to say, I'd go ahead and edit. Otherwise, I'd leave suggestions on the talk page, and sometimes I'd slap an appropriate tag on content I considered dubious.
Once I found this statement: "[Kraven] was obviously inspired by the classic short story, The Most Dangerous Game." Now, it's not unreasonable to suggest that there's a connection between the comic book character and the short story. But "obvious" is pretty damned subjective. Ideally, that statement should be backed up by references that show it's not just the author's opinion. (In a real encylopedia, the editors would probably insist on it.) Failing that, you should word it so that opinion doesn't get passed off as fact.
After much patient persuasion, I got the guy who owned that text to change "obviously" to "most likely". But only after much patient persuasion of somebody who just didn't see that he was documenting his own opinion. And that was with somebody who was open-minded about the possibility that they were wrong. If he'd been one of those brittle personalities who takes every friendly criticism as a personal attack, I never would have gotten the change made without some serious escalation. Which is something I had to do too often, and got no pleasure from. Which is why I no longer edit on Wikipedia.
Even within Wikipedia's loose definitions, that's not an authoritative statement, since it doesn't even try to follow the NPOV. Really, nothing is "according to Wikipedia", it's just according to the last person to edit the passage you're reading.
You've got a very good point. In fact, that's the crucial assumption in clean room design, without which IBM will still have the only workable PC bios!
The web site is very popular, and the lady has a rather memorable face. Lately, every time she's started a new job, somebody has said, "Isn't that..." and it's been all over the company in days.
I guess the lesson is that if you're ordinary-looking, it's safe to put your picture on the web.
Ask most wiki users what a wiki is, and they'll say something like, "It's a platform for collaborative writing." That's mainly what it's used for of course, but that's not what it is. Cunningham's original definition is much better: "The simplest database possible." And that's the concept's main virtue, simplicty. I do wish people would bear that in mind when they decide to use a wiki for something — especially when it's something that'd be better done another way.
I have to admit I know nothing about Nike's sweatshop issues. But when you say there's nothing they can do about sweatshops, you're full of shit. With their purchasing power, they can easily force their suppliers to improve working conditions. This is something many other companies have done, in response to consumer pressure.
No, sorry. Slashdotters (or at least the sexually unfulfilled hetero males, who are probably the vast majority) are only interested in lesbians to the extent that it allows them to fantasize about a ménage à trois. Pretty hard to work Ellen into that fantasy. The lesson you should take is a general one about pandering to our less decorous tastes, rather than an incidental one about the daughters of Sappho.
Dude, not everybody wants or needs to do all that stuff. If I did, I'd probably just get my own DSL connection. I just want to watch Season 2.1 of Battlestar. For that I can wait until the DVDs come out later this year. I mean, it's a good show, but not that good.
Re:So much for current events...
on
Green Geek Beer
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· Score: 1
"Patty" is obviously a Slashdot misspelling for "Paddy".
According to the Census bureau, 35 million Americans claim Irish ancestry. Which I guess is more like 14%. I think the percentage used to be much higher, before later immigrants arrived. I recall learning in school how Irish Americans and German Americans were a big enough voting block to delay the entry of the U.S. in World War I. That's probably where I got the 25% figure.
Even 35 million might sound inflated. As you point out, that's 7 times the population of Ireland itself! But note that a huge number of Irish have immigrated to the U.S. — 2 million people during the Potato Famine alone. (Before the Famine, Ireland had 8 million people!) That was 150 years ago, plenty of time for those 2 million people to intermarry and produce 35 million offspring, to say nothing of later immigrants.
And there's been a lot of intermarriage. A famous case is Mohammed Ali, who supposedly has family in Ennis!
Not all that offtopic, and indeed she was in customer support. But that was never the issue. As I recall, it started with the HR head complaining that her web site was "anti-Christian". Which might have gotten them in deep trouble if they'd had to admit it in court. But of course it never got that far, and even if they had, they would have simply denied it.
Oh, sure, I'm going to tell my landlord he has to buy a new router so I can play video games. I suppose I could offer to pay for it — but I don't want to watch BG that badly.
She actually tried. But, as another poster has already pointed out, the law doesn't give her that much recourse. Also, the official reason for her firing was that she had posted pictures of her workplace — herself sitting at her desk.
Suing for wrongful termination is rarely a practical thing to do. Even if all your legal ducks are in a row, you have to find a lawyer who's willing to work on contingency, since an unemployed person obviously can't afford to pay up front. That's unlikely for a single plaintiff, since the money involved isn't enough to make it worthwhile. Finally, the case will certainly take years to work itself out. Better to get on with your life.
That didn't work for one camgirl I know. She never uses her real name online, but the popularity of her web site makes it inevitable that her employers find out about her double life. She actually got canned a few years ago when she refused her then-employer's orders to take down the web site.
Sure, the NSA employs translators. So do many schools, courthouses, social services agencies, used car lots.... But none of these is somebody you go to because you need to hire a translator!
Uh, you do know the difference between decryption and translation? No, I guess you don't.
Re:So much for current events...
on
Green Geek Beer
·
· Score: 1
"Paddy" (from the name Patrick) is U.S. slang for Irishman. Originally pretty offensive, but nowadays Irish-Americans have co-opted it.
Maybe the Irishmen in your part of the world don't drink green beer, but Americans with Irish ancestry (and that's about 25% of us) insist on it. Hey, on St. Patrick's day, they even dye the Chicago River green.
St. Patrick's Day is one of many traditional holidays that Americans have coopted for our own purposes. In this case, it's a big celebration meant to assert Irish-American pride. (Columbus Day serves a similar purpose for Italian-Americans.) It's full of strange rituals of uncertain origin. One of the biggest is eating corned beef and cabbage — a dish I understand nobody in Ireland ever eats, if they can avoid it.
And in point of fact, keeping their tweaks secret was the reason they didn't want to give the Justice Department all those search records. It really had nothing to do with protecting anybody's privacy.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if you happen to agree with it, you can't take an unsubstantiated statement from an unknown source, and quote it as if it had some kind of authority. (If you do, you're just quoting yourself!) And that's all a lot of Wikipedia is, unsubstantiated statements from unknown sources. Dressing it up as "encylopedia articles" doesn't change that.
Wikipedia actually has a rule that you can't add material unless you can give sources. But I've never seen that rule enforced, and maybe 10% of the content actually has sources attached to it. Until that changes, nobody can cite Wikipedia as a authority for anything.
The statement you quote is not the statement I was quibling with. Which was: "[Shared Source] is not open source according to the Open Source Definition, because none of the license programs allows for commercial use of modified code". To be authoritative and NPOV, that sentence needs an "according to...".
Every Wikipedia contributor honors NPOV, but few seem to understand when they're violating it. I used to make a recreation of bringing up random Wikipedia pages and doing some basic editing. If I could fix the page without changing what the authors were trying to say, I'd go ahead and edit. Otherwise, I'd leave suggestions on the talk page, and sometimes I'd slap an appropriate tag on content I considered dubious.
Once I found this statement: "[Kraven] was obviously inspired by the classic short story, The Most Dangerous Game." Now, it's not unreasonable to suggest that there's a connection between the comic book character and the short story. But "obvious" is pretty damned subjective. Ideally, that statement should be backed up by references that show it's not just the author's opinion. (In a real encylopedia, the editors would probably insist on it.) Failing that, you should word it so that opinion doesn't get passed off as fact.
After much patient persuasion, I got the guy who owned that text to change "obviously" to "most likely". But only after much patient persuasion of somebody who just didn't see that he was documenting his own opinion. And that was with somebody who was open-minded about the possibility that they were wrong. If he'd been one of those brittle personalities who takes every friendly criticism as a personal attack, I never would have gotten the change made without some serious escalation. Which is something I had to do too often, and got no pleasure from. Which is why I no longer edit on Wikipedia.
Even within Wikipedia's loose definitions, that's not an authoritative statement, since it doesn't even try to follow the NPOV. Really, nothing is "according to Wikipedia", it's just according to the last person to edit the passage you're reading.
You've got a very good point. In fact, that's the crucial assumption in clean room design, without which IBM will still have the only workable PC bios!
I guess the lesson is that if you're ordinary-looking, it's safe to put your picture on the web.
Ask most wiki users what a wiki is, and they'll say something like, "It's a platform for collaborative writing." That's mainly what it's used for of course, but that's not what it is. Cunningham's original definition is much better: "The simplest database possible." And that's the concept's main virtue, simplicty. I do wish people would bear that in mind when they decide to use a wiki for something — especially when it's something that'd be better done another way.
I have to admit I know nothing about Nike's sweatshop issues. But when you say there's nothing they can do about sweatshops, you're full of shit. With their purchasing power, they can easily force their suppliers to improve working conditions. This is something many other companies have done, in response to consumer pressure.
No, sorry. Slashdotters (or at least the sexually unfulfilled hetero males, who are probably the vast majority) are only interested in lesbians to the extent that it allows them to fantasize about a ménage à trois. Pretty hard to work Ellen into that fantasy. The lesson you should take is a general one about pandering to our less decorous tastes, rather than an incidental one about the daughters of Sappho.
A slight grammar lesson: "losing" is not the same as "lost". It comes first.
Dude, not everybody wants or needs to do all that stuff. If I did, I'd probably just get my own DSL connection. I just want to watch Season 2.1 of Battlestar. For that I can wait until the DVDs come out later this year. I mean, it's a good show, but not that good.
According to the Census bureau, 35 million Americans claim Irish ancestry. Which I guess is more like 14%. I think the percentage used to be much higher, before later immigrants arrived. I recall learning in school how Irish Americans and German Americans were a big enough voting block to delay the entry of the U.S. in World War I. That's probably where I got the 25% figure.
Even 35 million might sound inflated. As you point out, that's 7 times the population of Ireland itself! But note that a huge number of Irish have immigrated to the U.S. — 2 million people during the Potato Famine alone. (Before the Famine, Ireland had 8 million people!) That was 150 years ago, plenty of time for those 2 million people to intermarry and produce 35 million offspring, to say nothing of later immigrants.
And there's been a lot of intermarriage. A famous case is Mohammed Ali, who supposedly has family in Ennis!
Surely I don't have to explain what a camgirl is....
How can you call yourself a serious Slashdotter if you're not versed with the full Python canon?!
Not all that offtopic, and indeed she was in customer support. But that was never the issue. As I recall, it started with the HR head complaining that her web site was "anti-Christian". Which might have gotten them in deep trouble if they'd had to admit it in court. But of course it never got that far, and even if they had, they would have simply denied it.
Oh, sure, I'm going to tell my landlord he has to buy a new router so I can play video games. I suppose I could offer to pay for it — but I don't want to watch BG that badly.
Suing for wrongful termination is rarely a practical thing to do. Even if all your legal ducks are in a row, you have to find a lawyer who's willing to work on contingency, since an unemployed person obviously can't afford to pay up front. That's unlikely for a single plaintiff, since the money involved isn't enough to make it worthwhile. Finally, the case will certainly take years to work itself out. Better to get on with your life.
You can easily get them, but you'll need a credit-card number...
That didn't work for one camgirl I know. She never uses her real name online, but the popularity of her web site makes it inevitable that her employers find out about her double life. She actually got canned a few years ago when she refused her then-employer's orders to take down the web site.
Sure, the NSA employs translators. So do many schools, courthouses, social services agencies, used car lots.... But none of these is somebody you go to because you need to hire a translator!
Being Hungarian, all I can say to that is, my hovercraft is full of eels.
Uh, you do know the difference between decryption and translation? No, I guess you don't.
Maybe the Irishmen in your part of the world don't drink green beer, but Americans with Irish ancestry (and that's about 25% of us) insist on it. Hey, on St. Patrick's day, they even dye the Chicago River green.
St. Patrick's Day is one of many traditional holidays that Americans have coopted for our own purposes. In this case, it's a big celebration meant to assert Irish-American pride. (Columbus Day serves a similar purpose for Italian-Americans.) It's full of strange rituals of uncertain origin. One of the biggest is eating corned beef and cabbage — a dish I understand nobody in Ireland ever eats, if they can avoid it.
One thing you forgot to mention: in order to travel, beer has to be refrigerated. I seem to recall that Brits really hate cold beer.
They're a "light reference"? There's a word for that!
And in point of fact, keeping their tweaks secret was the reason they didn't want to give the Justice Department all those search records. It really had nothing to do with protecting anybody's privacy.