1-Click is an obvious use of cookies. In fact, it's almost exactly what cookies were developed for. Amazon are lying bastards when they claim that this is their idea.
Don't buy from Amazon. Is it really that hard to understand?
There is another key reason for an encyclopedia's existence:
Ease of access to information.
True, but it really has to be trustworthy information, otherwise why would you care if it was handy or not? That's what I don't get about Wikipedia and it's "this is not a reliable source" excuse: if it's unreliable then what is the motivation for using it? I can make stuff up for myself if I'm not interested in reliability; I don't need a bunch of unemplyed bloggers to do it for me!
Some people care about how long it takes them to get something done.
So, you're implying that getting it wrong quickly is better than getting it right slowly? That doesn't make sense to me.
Wish the Linux guys would have figured that out 5 years ago when it would have made a difference.
You're kidding yourself. 5, 10, 15 years ago was the same as today: as long as Windows is pre-paid and pre-installed on most machines, there is nothing anyone can do to break Microsoft's monopoly other than find a way to establish a new hardware platform that's not tied to them. And that ain't easy.
Until then, MS could include a turd with each Windows install and still make a fortune.
Not only is authority not the sole reason for an encyclopedia, it's not even the main reason
It's the main reason to consult one. In fact, it's the only reason.
The main reason is simply ready access to information
Information you can't trust ceases to be information.
Information doesn't have to be totally reliable to be useful.
How do you measure the reliability of information provided by WP? I have read pages which were simply nonsense but I only knew they were because they concerned things which were local to me and I could physically go and look. What chance does someone on the other side of the world have?
Wikipedia has some big advantages over traditional encyclopedias. One obvious one is that it is updated much more frequently.
I'd say that's its fatal weakness. If it was improved much more frequently then that would be a killer feature. But it's not, it's just changed more frequently.
Another thing I like is that it often dishes a little dirt about the subject that you wouldn't find in a traditional encyclopedia.
The dirt is rarely kept in for long before a NPOV-fanatic clears it out.
Interestingly, I often prefer not to rest on authority. Being an academic, I prefer citations wherein I can verify for myself the data in the primary source.
That's a moot point in the case of an encyclopedia. The assumption must be that someone that comes to such a tertiary source has not the means to do such detailed checking. I would not dream of using any encyclopedia as a source in its own right for serious work (unless a historical reference to a victorian edition, for example), but I might use it to locate secondary sources and use their citations if need be. Or just to gain an overview of a subject for interest's sake.
What's interesting is that you state this with authority in your voice... as if you were an authority... without any evidence that you *are* an authority on this matter. Or, for that matter, any evidence whatsover
A good point but I think "authority" is overstating my expression of opinion slightly. I do stand by the assertion that if one uses both WP and a decent print encyclopedia for any length of time it becomes clear that the only thing WP has going for it is that it's near to hand where most people work these days. Try it and see, would be my advice.
What you claim has not at all been my experience with the articles I've contributed to.
I have done several entries on historical and political issues as well as simple ones on specific towns and places and I can assure you that the level of entropy is high there. Regardless of that, since I do not know which articles you edited your qualifications are meaningless; which is the problem with using WP as an encyclopedia, especially in these days of paid shills and astroturfing.
You are making a bunch of contentions without support or verifiability
I suggest that you can verify them for yourself by looking up almost any article on Northern Ireland, for example.
Keeping an eye on the pages I care about as an authority takes about an hour per month.
Good for you. In a real encyclopedia, the errors just naturally stay out after they've been fixed. That seems a clear advantage to me.
I dont really want to flame here, so i just hope you die of leukemia or something (as you annoy me, and have before).
Right, well I can see that the rhetorical spirit of Socrates is alive and well.
Oh! Sorry, I forgot you were a wikiot. Obviously, the idea that Socrates was in any way special or gifted is elitist; any crowd of a few thousand ordinary plebs could have done what he did without having to be so frigging insightful about it. Show-off bastard deserved the hemlock. "Corrupting youth" is as bad as reverting other people's edits just because you're a so-called "expert".
Hang them all! Death to knowledge; all hail consensus!
Sorry, wrong. And quoting The Register is the most direct way to show that its bullshit.
Defending Wikipedia is the most direct way to show that you are an idiot. Simply using Wikipedia, as a reader or an editor, for more than five days demonstrates how worthless it is as a resource, and particularly as a replacement for a real encyclopedia.
A real encyclopedia rests on authority, that is its sole reason for existance. If you can't afford the time to to go primary sources and can't afford the time or the money to get a library full of secondary ones, you use an encyclopedia based on whether you can trust the people who write and edit it to give a reasonable (and I do mean "reasonable", not NPOV or any of that shit) overview of any subject the rest of your library is weak on. A real encyclopedia addresses this in the most direct way possible: it tells you who wrote it, who edited it and what their qualifications are. Wikipedia does not.
There is no authority in any wikipedia page. Some have plausibility, but that's it. And they may not even have that tomorrow. And if you are well enough versed in a subject to know what is plausible but wrong and what seems implausible but is nevertheless right, then why are you even reading the entry? To fix it? Why bother? The same idiot that messed it up in the first place may well be back in an hour to revert your changes. Are you going to waste the rest of your life policing an ever-changing page of folk-wisdom?
If the equation were 1:1.9 as you suggest, then the machine would net more energy out than in, which would break a fundamental law of physics (suggesting that E does not equal mc^2).
Only globaly/universally. From the point of view of the (non-closed) system of the machine, it is giving out more energy than it is getting in.
Pointing at the mass and saying E=mc^2 is about as useful in this context as pointing to a lump of coal in your living room and saying that it can heat the room for the rest of your life. But it remains a lump of coal until you extract the energy. If you use less energy to ignite and burn the coal than it emits then you're ahead of the game, regardless of E=mc^2 or any other pointless appeals to thermodynamics.
I'm not saying you're wrong; I'm saying that your argument is irrelevant to a discussion of the usefulness of this device.
You can't just discount the energy derived from the material being processed
Yes you can, since it was garbage which was otherwise generating no energy at all and was already "extracted" etc. I could see your point if it was coal or something.
You will need to fix things that break in the upgrade process...
Perhaps; accidents happen in all systems, whether Windows or Linux Distros; sometimes a library is missed or some combination of apps causes a problem even in "release"-level updates.
This is hard with Gentoo.
No it's not. Once you know what went wrong, mask the package that caused the problem, then re-emerge.
Gentoo wants you to change a lot of stuff.
No it doesn't, at least not on a server. Desktop Gentoo machines offer to update something most days but servers go weeks between updates. And, frankly, I want security updates to my servers ASAP.
It wants to be bleeding edge.
No it doesn't. There is a toggle - both global and per-package - for "bleeding edge" and it defaults to "off". You will get very little sympathy from me for running with that set on your server.
So, to recap: The poster is a moronic little self-publicising blogger who doesn't understand what he's talking about and is incapable of using even the basic Gentoo sys-admin tools (like the -p flag to emerge, for example) and decided to whine about it to/. in order to get his hit count through the roof and then strut about it to his loser blog-friends. Magic.
One thing I would do is make patents non-transferable except via a will.
Another would be to require the patent filer to show that they are using and commercially benefiting from the invention once at the filing stage and then every five years thereafter, a bit like the recent case with Cisco and the iPhone trademark.
You do know that wikipedia has a function that lets you link to a version of a page that will never change (unless the page is completely deleted) don't you?
No.
So the fall-back position is: wikipedia is full of shite and you shouldn't cite it anyway because it only shows that your research is lousy.
Regardless of what you may or may not think about Crapipedia, citing things on the web is pretty pointless. The whole idea of a citation is to allow the reader to follow it up. What's the point when the thing cited may change at any moment?
Getting donations that add up to more than X dollars, and being financially supported while you go about using your time to express your own opinion in a public context - there's nothing ethically wrong with that, and should be nothing legally wrong with that.
That's true, if they are your opinions. But once you get paid to do it then I think you should have to tell people that you are being paid, just so they can decide for themselves if they believe that they really are your opinions. One way to make sure that you don't "forget" to mention that you've been hired as a shill (because you're a really good, sincere shill) is to have a registry of shills where I can go and check your name and who it is that thinks your enthusiasm and interest is worth paying for.
After all, we're all used to the idea that research into tobacco which is funded by tobacco companies should be labeled as such. Doesn't mean the researchers were bribed, but we like to know all the same.
They are not; don't be so stupid. Free speech is the right to express your opinion; expressing someone else's opinion as if it were your own is being a shill and is already illegal in many contexts, such as in a courtroom.
And? So what if they're favorable to them. What matters is if they're true, not whom they're favorable to.
I'm just pointing out that you can make corrections which are true and accurate and still be exhibiting bias by ignoring corrections which would be just as true but not to your advantage.
The only reason this is on Slashdot is because slashdotters tend to knee-jerk categorize anything MS does as evil,
I doubt that the same story being told about IBM or FSF would have any difficulty getting on Slashdot. Indeed, a very similar story about Jimmy Whales himself has been on/. at least twice.
if the average Wikipedia author is as biased as this article summary.
They are.
"Corrections favorable to them?" Corrections are corrections!
That's true, however I doubt that Microsoft or any other company pays people to correct entries where they are credited for something good that they did not in fact do. In other words, they only pay for "corrections that are favorable to them".
Slashdot Mirror
Don't buy from Amazon. Is it really that hard to understand?
TWW
Does this mean that Vista does not allow users to install local copies of programs (eg, Tetris)?
True, but it really has to be trustworthy information, otherwise why would you care if it was handy or not? That's what I don't get about Wikipedia and it's "this is not a reliable source" excuse: if it's unreliable then what is the motivation for using it? I can make stuff up for myself if I'm not interested in reliability; I don't need a bunch of unemplyed bloggers to do it for me!
Some people care about how long it takes them to get something done.
So, you're implying that getting it wrong quickly is better than getting it right slowly? That doesn't make sense to me.
TWW
Cosmic rays? BullSHIT!
You're kidding yourself. 5, 10, 15 years ago was the same as today: as long as Windows is pre-paid and pre-installed on most machines, there is nothing anyone can do to break Microsoft's monopoly other than find a way to establish a new hardware platform that's not tied to them. And that ain't easy.
Until then, MS could include a turd with each Windows install and still make a fortune.
TWW
They switch that feature off until they get back.
TWW
It's the main reason to consult one. In fact, it's the only reason.
The main reason is simply ready access to information
Information you can't trust ceases to be information.
Information doesn't have to be totally reliable to be useful.
How do you measure the reliability of information provided by WP? I have read pages which were simply nonsense but I only knew they were because they concerned things which were local to me and I could physically go and look. What chance does someone on the other side of the world have?
Wikipedia has some big advantages over traditional encyclopedias. One obvious one is that it is updated much more frequently.
I'd say that's its fatal weakness. If it was improved much more frequently then that would be a killer feature. But it's not, it's just changed more frequently.
Another thing I like is that it often dishes a little dirt about the subject that you wouldn't find in a traditional encyclopedia.
The dirt is rarely kept in for long before a NPOV-fanatic clears it out.
TWW
That's a moot point in the case of an encyclopedia. The assumption must be that someone that comes to such a tertiary source has not the means to do such detailed checking. I would not dream of using any encyclopedia as a source in its own right for serious work (unless a historical reference to a victorian edition, for example), but I might use it to locate secondary sources and use their citations if need be. Or just to gain an overview of a subject for interest's sake.
What's interesting is that you state this with authority in your voice ... as if you were an authority ... without any evidence that you *are* an authority on this matter. Or, for that matter, any evidence whatsover
A good point but I think "authority" is overstating my expression of opinion slightly. I do stand by the assertion that if one uses both WP and a decent print encyclopedia for any length of time it becomes clear that the only thing WP has going for it is that it's near to hand where most people work these days. Try it and see, would be my advice.
What you claim has not at all been my experience with the articles I've contributed to.
I have done several entries on historical and political issues as well as simple ones on specific towns and places and I can assure you that the level of entropy is high there. Regardless of that, since I do not know which articles you edited your qualifications are meaningless; which is the problem with using WP as an encyclopedia, especially in these days of paid shills and astroturfing.
You are making a bunch of contentions without support or verifiability
I suggest that you can verify them for yourself by looking up almost any article on Northern Ireland, for example.
Keeping an eye on the pages I care about as an authority takes about an hour per month.
Good for you. In a real encyclopedia, the errors just naturally stay out after they've been fixed. That seems a clear advantage to me.
TWW
Right, well I can see that the rhetorical spirit of Socrates is alive and well.
Oh! Sorry, I forgot you were a wikiot. Obviously, the idea that Socrates was in any way special or gifted is elitist; any crowd of a few thousand ordinary plebs could have done what he did without having to be so frigging insightful about it. Show-off bastard deserved the hemlock. "Corrupting youth" is as bad as reverting other people's edits just because you're a so-called "expert".
Hang them all! Death to knowledge; all hail consensus!
You prat.
Defending Wikipedia is the most direct way to show that you are an idiot. Simply using Wikipedia, as a reader or an editor, for more than five days demonstrates how worthless it is as a resource, and particularly as a replacement for a real encyclopedia.
A real encyclopedia rests on authority, that is its sole reason for existance. If you can't afford the time to to go primary sources and can't afford the time or the money to get a library full of secondary ones, you use an encyclopedia based on whether you can trust the people who write and edit it to give a reasonable (and I do mean "reasonable", not NPOV or any of that shit) overview of any subject the rest of your library is weak on. A real encyclopedia addresses this in the most direct way possible: it tells you who wrote it, who edited it and what their qualifications are. Wikipedia does not.
There is no authority in any wikipedia page. Some have plausibility, but that's it. And they may not even have that tomorrow. And if you are well enough versed in a subject to know what is plausible but wrong and what seems implausible but is nevertheless right, then why are you even reading the entry? To fix it? Why bother? The same idiot that messed it up in the first place may well be back in an hour to revert your changes. Are you going to waste the rest of your life policing an ever-changing page of folk-wisdom?
Only globaly/universally. From the point of view of the (non-closed) system of the machine, it is giving out more energy than it is getting in.
Pointing at the mass and saying E=mc^2 is about as useful in this context as pointing to a lump of coal in your living room and saying that it can heat the room for the rest of your life. But it remains a lump of coal until you extract the energy. If you use less energy to ignite and burn the coal than it emits then you're ahead of the game, regardless of E=mc^2 or any other pointless appeals to thermodynamics.
I'm not saying you're wrong; I'm saying that your argument is irrelevant to a discussion of the usefulness of this device.
TWW
Yes you can, since it was garbage which was otherwise generating no energy at all and was already "extracted" etc. I could see your point if it was coal or something.
This must be some alien, non-clique ridden, Wikipedia that I've never seen.
TWW
They had to change the name after it failed to protect Lincoln.
Of course they know that those things happen; they just want you to buy a new copy of Windows when they do.
TWW
Perhaps; accidents happen in all systems, whether Windows or Linux Distros; sometimes a library is missed or some combination of apps causes a problem even in "release"-level updates.
This is hard with Gentoo.
No it's not. Once you know what went wrong, mask the package that caused the problem, then re-emerge.
Gentoo wants you to change a lot of stuff.
No it doesn't, at least not on a server. Desktop Gentoo machines offer to update something most days but servers go weeks between updates. And, frankly, I want security updates to my servers ASAP.
It wants to be bleeding edge.
No it doesn't. There is a toggle - both global and per-package - for "bleeding edge" and it defaults to "off". You will get very little sympathy from me for running with that set on your server.
So, to recap: The poster is a moronic little self-publicising blogger who doesn't understand what he's talking about and is incapable of using even the basic Gentoo sys-admin tools (like the -p flag to emerge, for example) and decided to whine about it to /. in order to get his hit count through the roof and then strut about it to his loser blog-friends. Magic.
TWW
Another would be to require the patent filer to show that they are using and commercially benefiting from the invention once at the filing stage and then every five years thereafter, a bit like the recent case with Cisco and the iPhone trademark.
No.
So the fall-back position is: wikipedia is full of shite and you shouldn't cite it anyway because it only shows that your research is lousy.
TWW
Citing the Wayback Machine - now that might work.
TWW
That's true, if they are your opinions. But once you get paid to do it then I think you should have to tell people that you are being paid, just so they can decide for themselves if they believe that they really are your opinions. One way to make sure that you don't "forget" to mention that you've been hired as a shill (because you're a really good, sincere shill) is to have a registry of shills where I can go and check your name and who it is that thinks your enthusiasm and interest is worth paying for.
After all, we're all used to the idea that research into tobacco which is funded by tobacco companies should be labeled as such. Doesn't mean the researchers were bribed, but we like to know all the same.
TWW
They are not; don't be so stupid. Free speech is the right to express your opinion; expressing someone else's opinion as if it were your own is being a shill and is already illegal in many contexts, such as in a courtroom.
TWW
I'm just pointing out that you can make corrections which are true and accurate and still be exhibiting bias by ignoring corrections which would be just as true but not to your advantage.
The only reason this is on Slashdot is because slashdotters tend to knee-jerk categorize anything MS does as evil,
I doubt that the same story being told about IBM or FSF would have any difficulty getting on Slashdot. Indeed, a very similar story about Jimmy Whales himself has been on /. at least twice.
TWW
They are.
"Corrections favorable to them?" Corrections are corrections!
That's true, however I doubt that Microsoft or any other company pays people to correct entries where they are credited for something good that they did not in fact do. In other words, they only pay for "corrections that are favorable to them".
TWW
Yes. Of course it is. And sugar is the new health food. Must be: kids love it.
Frankly, I'd rather see Google omit the whole of this piece of crap from its indexing system, never mind its external links.
TWW