This is Google we're talking about. The guys who do everything they can to convince people to place ads on every page on the internet?
Not really. Much of the reason that so many people prefer Google is that Google makes an effort to promote results that are genuinely useful, rather than someone attempting to splash a commercial in everyone's face. Paid advertisements are present (sometimes even useful), but they're clearly marked and kept separate from the actual results.
If this practice becomes more common, I think it'll only discourage Google from making public the dates. It'll probably also encourage a policy of removing (or re-imaging) segments of maps that are noticed to be deliberately unrepresentative of their normal look.
Linux (the underlying OS) should be responsible for keeping the software from running amok, and the developer pay the penalty when their software doesn't perform the way users expect. It's not the Debian's team job, and it shouldn't be.
Okay, I agree that it's not the distribution maintainters' job to keep the application from running amok on the system, although in Debian at least, it wouldn't be unusual for the package maintainer to temporarly fix a bug themselves while they're waiting for a more official upstream release. I believe it's definitely their job to provide a package that installs and uninstalls reliably. The installation should put things where they're supposed to go according to distribution policy, and the uninstallation should remove all traces that the application existed (if I specify that), including things such as additional config files or data files that it might have generated through it's normal process. (Unless it doesn't make sense, such as entries in log files, perhaps.) If I noticed that an uninstall script in Debian wasn't doing this properly, I expect that I could submit a bug report to the Debian package maintainer, and it'd probably be fixed pretty quickly. The best thing about this is that it's fully in the distribution's interest to help me keep a reliable system, even if it's not so for the application developer.
In Windows this doesn't happen as much, because the installers tend to be designed by the application developers themselves, and more often than not those developers come from commercial entities who are trying to make money from the users in one way or another. There are often conflicting commercial interests. Lots of apps out there still install spyware, which they won't uninstall because it's in their interests to make it as difficult as possible for people to get rid of it. Other vendors just happen to be more interested in getting their apps onto your PC and usurping as many file associations as possible than getting it off, so don't put in as much effort. Authors of some Shareware apps intentionally make sure that traces remain hidden in the system so that they can prevent people from getting extended trial periods by simply re-installing. Certainly the application vendors can be blamed for this sort of behaviour, but it doesn't really help a lot of the time because the lack of software that doesn't act like this in many areas makes it difficult to boycott them.
Distributions are one of the biggest hurdles in Linux adoption - everybody has their way of doing things, and they believe that their way is "right." Unfortunately, projecting one's personal ideas of rightness on others has never been the best formula for making friends.
I can appreciate this point of view, but sometimes I wonder if the stated need for some kind of unified way of doing things is just because so many people right now are used to only wanting to know about a single way of doing things. That's basically what Windows is -- you do things "The Microsoft Way" or you can't do them without jumping through lots of hoops and constantly running into problems. Restrictions on Microsoft products, such as taking ages to add certain features or to fix certain bugs, dominates what people are capable of.
I really like the diversity in package management, because it lets the distribution provide the software they want to provide in the way that best suits the distribution. That said, it probably wouldn't hurt to have a popular package management standard for third party applications to use, that distributions could also support as an added extra.
Whatever it is, though, I'd personally prefer that it allowed for the installing administrator to put a few more restrictions on the app being installed. eg. Perhaps I'd want to install a particular app, but make sure it could only see its own userspace, so there wasn't a chance of a bad application from leaving junk around the system when I wanted to purge it afterwards.
Thanks for the link. I've tried to make MSI's from time to time, although only simple ones, and I'm still figuring it out. The main point I was trying to make, though, was that installers for most Windows apps come directly from a third party vendor. There's a lot of depending on third parties to get the installation scripts right, even though there might be conflicting commercial interests, or just general laziness to provide a good (un)installer.
I've had problems using MSI's in the past. I think it's mostly because the vendor's screwed up, maybe intentially on some occasions. That aside, there also doesn't seem to have been anything built into the package manager to protect the system when a vendor screws up. In Windows' case when it's necessary to rely on packages from third parties, I'd love to have a package manager that can reliably roll back broken packages, as well as whatever changes the application in the package might have made when it was in use, without relying on a rollback script that came with the package. If Microsoft's able to make MSI's more reliable in the future, then that's great and it'll make my life at work quite a lot easier.
Desktop Linux isn't like MS Windows or Mac, where you can simply go hunting on the Internet (or at your local computer store), find a piece of interesting software, and quickly install it. With desktop Linux, you must first find the program, if it's even supported to begin with, then hope they've provided the right files and installation process for "your" particular Linux distribution. (.deb files,.rpm files,.tar.gz files etc.) It's all far too complicated for the average person, and it's no wonder they shy away from Linux.
I hear this argument a lot, and if it's a concern then I guess it makes sense to try and address it, whether it's by trying to improve what's offered, or by trying to educate people about alternative ways to do things. I don't really understand it, though, and to be honest, the huge amount of packages that actually are in a distribution archive (esp. Debian, which I use), is one of the big reasons I prefer to use open source instead of closed source. (I'm sure there's a certain amount of me just being used to it, too.)
I think people often look at things the wrong way when trying to compare Windows with Linux distros, because they work fundamentally differently. The reason there are different installer types is that they're different systems, and the installers and packages are made to match the system. (Granted this doesn't mean it couldn't be improved and made more compatible.) Windows shouldn't be compared with Linux, it should be compared with RedHat, or Ubuntu, or Gentoo, or whatever, because the distributions are what operate at the same level as Windows. The fact that they use similar or identical apps and are often compatible with each other just makes Windows stand out because it doesn't.
I don't see the issues as being as much between Linux and Windows as being between Open Source and Closed Source, because the distribution model is what makes the difference.
Microsoft strongly encourages third parties to release closed source apps, as they do themselves. As a result, Microsoft doesn't have a lot of control over the app or how it interacts with the OS. Microsoft isn't legally allowed to tinker with third party apps and throw them into a big Windows software repository. There are some weak conventions about how applications should interact with the system, but it all comes down to whether the vendor actually implements these and does it correctly. (eg. Install in the Program Files folder, use a particular structure in the registry to store settings, and so on.) Some apps follow the conventions properly, and some don't. It's entirely up to the vendor. If I download and install a typical third party app for Windows, it's not unusual that it might be unstable, fail to take advantage of and integrate nicely with other apps I have on the system, and so on. It's very unlikely that a Windows installer will go and download dependencies for me -- chances are it'll package them inefficiently and often unnecessarily, or it'll tell me to go and find them manually. And if I try to uninstall it, I'm usually relying entirely on the independent vendor's uninstall scripts to properly remove itself. I don't know about other people, but personally I've found that they often leave a lot of residue lying around. (Old folders and files, registry entries, broken links and icons, obsolete dll's, etc.)
OSS distribution maintainers, on the other hand, have every right to tinker with the software before they put it in their repository. I know that if I apt-get install something from Debian, it's likely to work with whatever else I have, because Debian's package maintenance team has made sure that the package strictly adheres to all of Debian's policies. I'm not just getting the app, I'm getting a guarantee that it's been tuned to work nicely on my system. Of course, if I don't want that, I can still download the app indepen
I hope that someone ports a terminal emulator that supports the RIP protocol, because ANSI and AVATAR are just boring.
RIP graphics had a shiny factor, and were sometimes faster to load, but I definitely preferred ANSI or ASCII for most things. Both put limits on the sysop's often limited design ability to disguise useful information inside shiny graphics. Programs like RIPTerm (in DOS, at least) tended to be a lot more klunky than ANSI terminal apps, although it could have been quite different on Amigas.
For example it takes ages to delete a bunch of files now, apparently because of the new progress bar...
I couldn't find a reference to this in the weblog article if that was what you were referring to, so sorry if I've misunderstood, but I often find that it takes ages and mountains of disk work to delete even a single file in XP.
It wasn't until recently that I realised that this was entirely because of the Recycle Bin (which I almost never use). If it's filled up with thousands of tiny files, XP can spend on the order of minutes looking at them, re-organising them, and deciding what to purge every time you decide to delete a file or two. Is it possible that this is also what's happening in Vista?
This can be very frustrating when you don't have a clue why it's taking so long, because all it states is that it's deleting the file you told it to delete. Until I figured it out, I often just opened up a command line to delete files because it went so much faster.
I don't think this will do much to stop Wikipedia link spamming for several reasons:
Many spam links on Wikipedia aren't commercially motivated spam, but just people who've naively put external links in articles without properly understanding or caring about the editing policy. They're not thinking so much about search engines as about pointing people to their website (or their favourite website) because they think it's more important than it probably is. If it's a relatively obscure article, it might stay there for months or longer before someone goes through and reviews the links.
Wikipedia is only one of the websites that publishes Wikipedia content. There are lots of other sources that clone it, precisely as they're allowed to under the licence, and re-publish it. They usually add advertising to the content, or use it to lure people to some other form of revenue. These sites are easy to find by picking a phrase from Wikipedia and keying it in to a search engine like Google, and I doubt they'll add the nofollow attribute to their reproductions of the content.
Wikipedia is probably treated as a more important source of links by search engines, but whatever's published on Wikipedia will be re-published in many other places within the weeks that it takes for the new content to be crawled and to propagate. And links on any Wikipedia articles will propagate too, of course.
Even if you ignore search engines, having external links from a well written Wikipedia article that gets referenced and read a lot is probably going to generate at least some traffic to a website. Wikipedia articles are often a good place to find good external sources, probably because they get audited and the crappy ones get removed from time to time. This is exactly what provides motivation for spammers to try and get their links added, though.
Good on them for trying something, but I don't think it'll stop spammers very much.
I didn't see anything hypocritical about it. He stated pretty clearly that the reason he didn't fork an existing project was because he couldn't do so and achieve his goals, and he gave several reasons. (eg. Nothing had the right framework for where he wanted to go, he wanted the experience of developing his own project, etc.) Also, immediately after the part that you quoted, he says:
"I hope to transition poMMo development efforts to a wider group of individuals. I am always happy when others seek to help out, maintaining open discussion and policy."
I think he fully understands that people have a licensed right to modify the code, and is okay with this. He simply thought it was disappointing that people who do this often don't bother to make their changes available back to the developers. If anything, he was just mentioning that he wants to make his own project one where people are actively encouraged to do so.
It's not exactly a revolutionary article in FOSS development, but it's handy for anyone who wants a general idea, and hopefully people don't blame him for writing a simple article when it was Slashdot that decided to link to it.
...the speech is full of really interesting comments. I've only just skimmed it for now, and there are several highlights for me. eg. Page 26:
But nonetheless, I mean, Windows 95 programming for Mac developers on the conference agenda at the Macworld Expo--I mean, you couldn't pay enough to get that. And all it cost me was some free software, and her husband had had a stroke and I sent her some articles about recent therapy and research in strokes, went to the library and looked it up. I had a problem with that one. I mean, that one was...you know, I care about her as a person, I've known her for years, you know, I was truly sorry that her husband had a strokel my grandmother died of a stroke. I was kind of interested in the topic. I went to the library anyway, I found this information. I was about to fax it to her, and I said, 'Wait a minute. This is, like, totally scummy. I know I'm doing this for a purpose!'"
Page 27:
"I've killed at least two Mac conferences. First there was hte Mac App Developers Conference. I was on hte Board of Directors of the Mac App Developers Association long ago, and after I left I worked to try to turn it into a cross-platform developers conference, and I did. I managed to make it...their last conference was very cross-platform, both Windows and Macintosh, which of course turned off their Macintosh audience; half of the conference was irrelevant to them. They didn't care about Windows. They were a bunch of Mac guys. Which diluted the value of the conference. And they didn't know how to advertise the Windows guys when the Windows guys showed up. So they lost money that year and the group folded. Oh well. One less channel of communication that Apple can use to reach its developers."
Here's the funniest bit from page 32:
"Don't look like you're trying to snooker them or something, and don't sound arrogant. Microsoft people have this...It is going to be presumed that you're an arrogant asshole until you prove otherwise. So be nice and polite on email."
Page 37:
Technical support. Well, you know, tech support costs money, but you can fudge a little on it. What I do is I promise people enhanced technical support, which means that they go through the normal technical support channels, and if PSS doesn't satisfy their need, then they send me the email thread of the service request, and then I'll send it around through the channels and say, hey, PSS, why didn't you solve this problem? The key thing there is that they have to send me the email thread of the service request, which means that PSS actually has to screw up for them to send this to me. They have to go through PSS first. PSS is very good, and so it doesn't usually happen. So I almost never have to deal with this, but it sounds great. Ooh, if you have a problem with PSS, escalate it to me. Cool.
Why? Because all DRM will eventually be circumvented.
Surely this line of reasoning could only possibly work for as long as:
Circumventing DRM happens to be legal, or
Circumventing DRM is illegal, but not seriously enforced.
Circumventing DRM is illegal and enforced, but not heavily penalised.
In other words, as soon as governments around the world make it illegal, law enforcement agencies start seriously enforcing it, and courts start heavily penalising it, your reasoning becomes useless.
This began to happen years ago, and the changes are propagating. Given the amount of US-based corporate money involved, the design of the US federal government that lets its corporations buy legislation, and international treaties that are forced on other nations by the USA (in exchange for things they can't do without, like lifting of crippling trade barriers), it should really be expected that it could only get worse for everyone. For one thing, all of the DRM circumvention research that people in the US rely on people in other countries to provide is going to dry up.
Besides, all DRM isn't circumvented. The only DRM that's circumvented is the DRM that a large enough majority of people care about. DVD DRM has been circumvented because there happen to be millions of people out there who want to rip DVD's. The possibility of circumvention doesn't prevent companies from penalising minorities in the population for their own interests. They can still construct artificial extensions to copyright law, pretty much whenever its exact restrictions don't suit them, and anyone who has a need to make a copy of the data they provide for whatever reason (preventing it from degrading, using it in another device, preserving it for society's benefit, whatever) ends up at a big disadvantage.
I've heard a lot about bastard IT departments and I've experienced a few of them, thankfully not up close. The university I attended has a classicly awful IT deparment, but I was lucky to be shielded by being in the Computer Science area, which was the only part of the University that managed to resist the university's bureaucracy and keep its own IT people when the university tried to force its own generic IT culture on everyone a decade ago.
I think I'm very fortunate now to be working in an IT department that actually spends effort listening to the people in the organisation it works for. I'm really enjoying it, too, because we get respect from the people we work with. If somebody asks for something that falls outside the range of what we normally support, we actually set up a meeting with them and ask them why they need it. More often than not, we find out we can work with them to figure out an alternative, or occasionally we simply decide it's necessary to start supporting something new, in which case we make an effort to find out if anyone else in the organisation can make use of it.
If the forum isn't particularly time sensitive, how about just not serving recent forum posts ( 1 week) to the search engine spiders, which advertise themselves as being such, no?
I'm pretty sure that presenting pages to Google that are different from what regular people would see is already a breach of the terms of being listed by Google, and it's already resulted in sites being de-listed. (ie. If Google can't see what other people would see, how is it supposed to index and rank it appropriately for its users?)
This might not be the case if it could be done using something like robots.txt, but as someone else pointed out, not letting Google see recent content is a likely way of reducing your pagerank. Google tends to promote sites that have recent content.
Why do we allow our culture to pay people so much money while the minimum wage remains the same for 10 years despite a %400 increase in the cost of living? I do not blame the studio's and would certainly not want to hire him back again. For 1/10th the cost I could find a top hollywood director which has better talent.
Would you care so much if it was a $250 million dispute between Microsoft and IBM?
I doubt that Peter Jackson is personally being paid $250 million, and it's not going into his personal bank account. I also doubt that he negotiated the original deal with his personal fortune in mind. I wouldn't be surprised for a minute, however, to hear that he always had plans to use the money for building his film-making businesses into something really impressive. And that's effectively what he's been doing. This guy's about as down-to-Earth as you'd get, except that he has an interest in making expensive movies. I doubt he really cares about how much money he has with the exception of wanting to be treated fairly so he can continue to make the types of movies he wants to.
From everything I've read so far, it sounds to me as if the studios are acting like retarded morons to try and avoid fronting up. Jackson's main complaint is that a partial audit of the first movie showed a lot of ambiguity about where the money had gone. Now Newline is preventing the rest of that movie, or the other two movies from being audited, and they're simply spinning the media to avoid the bad publicity of talking about the real issue, which is probably that they've cooked the books to avoid giving him money. It sounds completely reasonable to me to want a fuller audit.
Running these types of businesses isn't exactly cheap. The amount of money involved could make a big difference to the ability of Jackson's companies to compete with others in the industry. It's a misconception to believe that this is nothing more than a personal paycheck, when it's really useful income for companies like Weta Workshop or Three Foot Six, and sorting this out will affect everyone who has an interest in those organisations.
It's actually interesting that a lot of people here (Canada) use mixed units. Personally, I usually use feet if I'm estimating a distance (it's just a very convienient size - the closest metric equivalent is a decimeter, just doesn't quite cut it), and pounds and feet/inches for human weight/height.
I've grown up using Metric, since New Zealand's been standardised on it since well before I was born. I use it all the time, and I love it. So many different units of measurement go between each other in logical ways, many of which aren't noticed by most, right down to things like standard pencil widths being designed to match standard paper sizes. There are definitely problems with using it for day-to-day use, though, which I think most people just put up with. (The metre is often too big, the centimetre isn't big enough, and so on. Blocks of 10 cm would make a lot of sense, and I'm a bit surprised they don't get used.)
What imperial really has going for it, though, and one of the reasons it's so convenient, is that the units make it easier to divide things up for day-to-day tasks. In metric, it's easy to divide by 10, and often by 5 and 2, but outside of that the decimal places start getting long and often end up recurring. Dividing things into threes, fours and sixes really doesn't work if you also want twos and fives.
This is more to do with base 10 than with metric. I've often wondered if metric would be better long term if everyone counted in base 12, instead, and if the relationships between metric units were based on multiples of 12 instead of 10. For day to day use, simpler fractions translate to decimals (or whatever decimals are called in base 12) more nicely with base 12 than base 10. eg.
1/1 in base 10 is 1.0, in base 12 is 1.0.
1/2 in base 10 is 0.5, in base 12 is 0.6.
1/3 in base 10 is 0.333333..., in base 12 is 0.4.
1/4 in base 10 is 0.25, in base 12 is 0.3.
1/5 in base 10 is 0.2, in base 12 is 0.24.
1/6 in base 10 is 0.166666.... in base 12 is 0.2.
Base 12 makes the first 6 fractions easy to write as a decimal, whereas base 10 becomes a real problem. This probably wouldn't be practical because it's a huge learning curve for everyone, but it'd be quite interesting all the same.
What makes these companies think that this will make them money?
Probably it's for the same reasons that media companies fund cheap crap entertainment that's full of advertising rather than going for quality -- we even get entertainment programs masquerading as "news" in news-time slots. But realistically, the television companies don't work for their viewers... even the pay-TV companies. They work for their advertisers. They know that people will continue to pay for it, irrespective of whether they push crap or quality, simply because there's no alternative.
If businesses get a lot of their money from investors and from advertisers, rather than from subscriptions, it suddenly becomes a lot more about how many people they can claim to have hooked for pushing advertising at. It means a lot to be able to tell investors and advertisers that they have lots of members. Allowing people get away easily doesn't assist with this goal at all.
Personally I don't fully agree with what I just said, and I know there are more responsible ways to make money without abusing users and subscribers, but I can easily see how many businesses would see it that way.
I know, I baked a friend phone in my oven at 150 degrees to bring it back to life.
Does this work for most phones? Our Chief Executive tried to do this with his Blackberry just last week, after he accidentally dropped and got it wet. He'd waited for the oven to cool down enough so that he didn't think it'd be too hot, hoping it'd dry it out.
Unfortunately, someone else came past and turned the oven on to heat it up for some other reason. The resulting Blackberry was quite melted by the time he brought it in for us to replace it, and he was quite embarassed about it. To his credit, he'd thought to remove the SIM card, so we were able to at least plug that into a new one.
And the voter's abusive husband's scrutiny, and the records of the person trying to buy the vote, and any union, employer, or church that wants to coerce the voter. The need to keep the vote anonymous and secret seriously complicates the job of designing a voting system.
Isn't this why the parent suggested displaying it behind a safety glass screen? I don't think the point was to allow a voter to take a receipt home with them. Rather, it's intended to let them confirm that a correct paper record has also been made of their vote before they leave the booth, in case a paper recount is necessary.
The only extra requirement I'd consider adding is the ability for the voter to cancel their vote if they disagree with the paper ballot. This should be by a visible mechanical means that the voter has clear and understandable control over. eg. Push lever marked "Correct" to control the door that drops the paper record into a ballot box. Push lever marked "Wrong", and watch the other door open to drop the paper record into a flaming pit where it's incinerated, after which the digital part of the machine allows the voter to cast an alternative vote.
Digital records basically aren't trustworthy in an election, no matter what, because you can't simply look at a computer or digital device and see what's happening inside. This is why the paper records should always be authoritative in case of any doubt, and digital records should only be used as a conveniently faster counting mechanism to have on the side. The complication is being able to make as difficult as possible for the two records to become inconsistent with each other.
Well, Ford already injured his back during the second Indy movie. He had to have surgery and the whole project was almost cancelled.
I'm a fan of the existing set of Indianna Jones movies, but the second film doesn't have much to do with it, and personally I think that missing out on the second one would not have been a bad thing. The whole movie was stereotypical 80's trash, complete with an annoying kid and a helpless constantly complaining woman who needed to be saved from something every two minutes.
Raiders was a great film because it had a really strong female character among many other things that made it stand out. Temple of Doom was just a sell-out, trying to capitalise the franchise on the popular movie trends of the 1980's.
I really hope the fourth movie has a good script, but right now I don't want to assume too much.
slightly OT, but they're still at it. The government was recently ousted by the commander of the military. I think it's been a fairly painless coup though, apart from utter failure of democratic process. Commander Bainimarama promises elections at an unspecified date in the future.
Fiji's biggest problem for the past several decades is that it's had a culture of coups, and of radicals overrunning the democratically elected governments because they're frustrated that things aren't going the way they like. Even though the coups so far have been mostly peaceful (at least in terms of people ending up dead, although the 2000 coup came close), the recent coup is just a continuation of that culture. The last generation or two of people living in Fiji have been growing up with role models who demonstrate to them that if they don't like what's going on, it's okay to change things by force.
This isn't to say that the Fijian governments are perfect; the recently-ousted government most likely had its share of corruption from what I hear, and it's very likely that Commander Bainimarama feels he's doing the right thing for his country... but when a country can't maintain a stable government, whether it's due to gangs of locals taking parliament members hostage and threatening to execute them, or due to a military hierarchy that believes in democracy in theory but not in practice, it has serious problems somewhere.
Why Microsoft would want to code-name its flagship OS after Fiji, I wouldn't have a clue, unless it's just through ignorance which seems most likely. It's a very nice place to visit as a tourist (I've been there), and the majority of people who live there are great, as well as relying on the tourist trade which plummets every time they have a coup, but it's not exactly known for stable government.
Unable to choose and analyze a single figure honestly, Time decided to pick everyone and to laud their audience with praise about how something created and maintained by very few (the Internet) has enabled millions to show their creativity, stupidity, whatever.
I'm not a frequent reader of Time Magazine and certainly not an expert on media, but usually when I've picked it up, I have come away with an impression that it's just trying to tell readers what they want to hear. This hasn't been anything particularly recent, or anything that covers the whole media. It's just Time Magazine. And this is probably the main reason that I'm not a frequent reader of it.
Time Magazine has always been like this, as far as I can tell. You can probably go back through archives for decades and get a really good idea of what trends of thinking the majority was following. (It is called Time Magazine, after all.) It's not terribly interesting if you're after originality, but certainly symbolic.
Whereas in the past science was misused and constrained by the church, today it has been co-opted by politics.
At least at the US Federal level, I'm not sure there's much difference between the church and politics. Perhaps with a slightly different hierarchy, but sometimes the motivations seem similar.
Most people I know don't trust the mainstream media anymore and that ranges from people who are nearly communist in their left leanings to people who are practically John Birchers. Dispassioned, reasoned discussions are rare these days.
I don't think the problem is not trusting it so much as not being able to critically evaluate it. I don't usually trust the general media for what I think are some very good reasons, but many people I see, mostly outside my circle of friends, seem to be quite happy to simply accept most of what they're shown for one reason or another. The media has a huge role in shaping opinions of society as a whole.
The truth is that there are so many people who are significantly maleducated today that it's no wonder why people are screwed up. I mean, it was a real eye opener for me, when I started reading up on my own time, about some of the cultural practices of the ancient world.
Hasn't this always been the case, though? I'm not aware of any time when it wouldn't be possible to reasonably argue that there weren't masses of low-educated people who, for one reason or another, didn't always think rationally about issues.
I think you're just noticing them because you're living amongst them, and perhaps you're not noticing them in the past because people who are remembered traditionally tend to have been well educated.
Let me just say that I am so tired of the the rampant bias against wikipedia in education. I have had teachers go on 10 minute rants on how horrible of a site it is. I also am frustrated with the fact that during these rants generally there are no facts, studies or examples given to why they believe wp is untrustworthy only that anyone can change it so that means it is bad.
Personally I think Wikipedia is great, and I use it a lot for day-to-day reference when I want to find out about things... and to be honest, this is exactly what I'd use a traditional encyclopedia for. I wouldn't use Britannica for serious research, because it doesn't go into enough depth, anyway.
The most important thing with using Wikipedia is to understand what you're getting, which is a dynamic source of information that's able to be edited and maintained by anyone, irrespective of their expertise or views. Usually things are fine, occasionally they're not in certain niche ways. Even if there haven't been suspicious edits lately, it doesn't mean that people who wrote what's there know what they're talking about. After all, if Wikipedia was perfect and correct thanks to the tireless efforts of people's good intentions, it wouldn't be necessary for other people with good intentions to be continuously updating it. Unless there was a very good reason to, I'd never use Wikipedia as a solitary source of authoritative information for something important, at least without cross-referencing the relevant facts I cared about with other sources. If I did, I'd feel compelled to justify why I thought Wikipedia was so authoritative. But then, I wouldn't do that for a lot of other sources, either. The best measure I have of a Wikipedia article, in this sense, is if it provides a good list of references that I can follow up and check on at times when I decide it matters.
The biggest concern I have with Wikipedia is that so many people don't appreciate what they're getting, or acknowledge that it's a source that's open to occasional mis-information under certain circumstances. This isn't so much a concern with Wikipedia as it is with society itself and the people in it. I'm not sure if people's awareness of reliable information has gone down, or if it's always been this way, and the Internet has simply made it more obvious by making all information so much more accessible.
I work alongside a section full of librarians whose job it is to help people in the organisation locate and research useful information. Many of them aren't great fans of Wikipedia or Google, but they are happy to debate the issue. I don't always agree with them, but they're more annoyed at how the sources get used rather than what they are. I can appreciate why librarians and teachers get so frustrated when they see vast numbers of people in society mis-using information sources, citing material because it's there rather than because it's authoritative, and so on. I also find that concerning.
If you listen really really carefully, you can hear a faint cheer from the 2 people that A) listen to Cliff Richard and Jethro Tull and B) have mastered P2P music sharing.
Exactly. And this is why the likes of Jethro Tull and Cliff Richard, Disney, and other prominent copyright holders, should not be allowed to be the excuse for across-the-board extensions in copyright terms. They only own a tiny niche of the entire copyright-able work that's out there, and making massive changes just so a small minority of successful copyright owners can keep their monopoly benefits hardly anyone.
I couldn't care less about Disney's works, or about Cliff Richard's works. They still make their work available at reasonable prices for people who actually want them. What does irritate me is when continuous copyright extensions prevent lots of the valuable work that isn't being re-published from being reproduced by people who want to keep making it available for society. In many cases, the copyright owners are difficult to locate, or aren't interested enough to bother with releasing copyrighted works. To make sure that society gets paid back for the artificial fixed term monopoly, copyright expiration is very important.
If a niche of copyright owners care so much about their work, then the laws should instead be changed to allow for only those creators who care to extend the copyright on their work. Let copyright holders apply for extensions if they want to keep their rights. Ironically this is exactly how the US did it in the first place, and that's when they had it right. A useful addition might be to require that copyright holders also demonstrate that they're making the work they hold available to society for reasonable commissions.
Good stuff gets reproduced, reviewed, studied, dissected, etc. and survives.
It doesn't, always, if it's copyrighted, and in today's world all works are copyrighted automatically for more than a hundred years unless the holder explicitly waives that right. Otherwise it'd be easy for me to get hold of a lot old (but very important) textbooks in fields where it's not economic to republish, but which only come on the market second-hand when someone dies.
Copyright law significantly blocks the distribution of much information, to the point that the remaining stores of it are often lost or destroyed by the time it's legal to reproduce and distribute them to the populace.
Unfortunately today, this problem has become as much of a legal one as a techinical problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Not really. Much of the reason that so many people prefer Google is that Google makes an effort to promote results that are genuinely useful, rather than someone attempting to splash a commercial in everyone's face. Paid advertisements are present (sometimes even useful), but they're clearly marked and kept separate from the actual results.
If this practice becomes more common, I think it'll only discourage Google from making public the dates. It'll probably also encourage a policy of removing (or re-imaging) segments of maps that are noticed to be deliberately unrepresentative of their normal look.
Okay, I agree that it's not the distribution maintainters' job to keep the application from running amok on the system, although in Debian at least, it wouldn't be unusual for the package maintainer to temporarly fix a bug themselves while they're waiting for a more official upstream release. I believe it's definitely their job to provide a package that installs and uninstalls reliably. The installation should put things where they're supposed to go according to distribution policy, and the uninstallation should remove all traces that the application existed (if I specify that), including things such as additional config files or data files that it might have generated through it's normal process. (Unless it doesn't make sense, such as entries in log files, perhaps.) If I noticed that an uninstall script in Debian wasn't doing this properly, I expect that I could submit a bug report to the Debian package maintainer, and it'd probably be fixed pretty quickly. The best thing about this is that it's fully in the distribution's interest to help me keep a reliable system, even if it's not so for the application developer.
In Windows this doesn't happen as much, because the installers tend to be designed by the application developers themselves, and more often than not those developers come from commercial entities who are trying to make money from the users in one way or another. There are often conflicting commercial interests. Lots of apps out there still install spyware, which they won't uninstall because it's in their interests to make it as difficult as possible for people to get rid of it. Other vendors just happen to be more interested in getting their apps onto your PC and usurping as many file associations as possible than getting it off, so don't put in as much effort. Authors of some Shareware apps intentionally make sure that traces remain hidden in the system so that they can prevent people from getting extended trial periods by simply re-installing. Certainly the application vendors can be blamed for this sort of behaviour, but it doesn't really help a lot of the time because the lack of software that doesn't act like this in many areas makes it difficult to boycott them.
I can appreciate this point of view, but sometimes I wonder if the stated need for some kind of unified way of doing things is just because so many people right now are used to only wanting to know about a single way of doing things. That's basically what Windows is -- you do things "The Microsoft Way" or you can't do them without jumping through lots of hoops and constantly running into problems. Restrictions on Microsoft products, such as taking ages to add certain features or to fix certain bugs, dominates what people are capable of.
I really like the diversity in package management, because it lets the distribution provide the software they want to provide in the way that best suits the distribution. That said, it probably wouldn't hurt to have a popular package management standard for third party applications to use, that distributions could also support as an added extra.
Whatever it is, though, I'd personally prefer that it allowed for the installing administrator to put a few more restrictions on the app being installed. eg. Perhaps I'd want to install a particular app, but make sure it could only see its own userspace, so there wasn't a chance of a bad application from leaving junk around the system when I wanted to purge it afterwards.
Thanks for the link. I've tried to make MSI's from time to time, although only simple ones, and I'm still figuring it out. The main point I was trying to make, though, was that installers for most Windows apps come directly from a third party vendor. There's a lot of depending on third parties to get the installation scripts right, even though there might be conflicting commercial interests, or just general laziness to provide a good (un)installer.
I've had problems using MSI's in the past. I think it's mostly because the vendor's screwed up, maybe intentially on some occasions. That aside, there also doesn't seem to have been anything built into the package manager to protect the system when a vendor screws up. In Windows' case when it's necessary to rely on packages from third parties, I'd love to have a package manager that can reliably roll back broken packages, as well as whatever changes the application in the package might have made when it was in use, without relying on a rollback script that came with the package. If Microsoft's able to make MSI's more reliable in the future, then that's great and it'll make my life at work quite a lot easier.
As you quoted from the article:
I hear this argument a lot, and if it's a concern then I guess it makes sense to try and address it, whether it's by trying to improve what's offered, or by trying to educate people about alternative ways to do things. I don't really understand it, though, and to be honest, the huge amount of packages that actually are in a distribution archive (esp. Debian, which I use), is one of the big reasons I prefer to use open source instead of closed source. (I'm sure there's a certain amount of me just being used to it, too.)
I think people often look at things the wrong way when trying to compare Windows with Linux distros, because they work fundamentally differently. The reason there are different installer types is that they're different systems, and the installers and packages are made to match the system. (Granted this doesn't mean it couldn't be improved and made more compatible.) Windows shouldn't be compared with Linux, it should be compared with RedHat, or Ubuntu, or Gentoo, or whatever, because the distributions are what operate at the same level as Windows. The fact that they use similar or identical apps and are often compatible with each other just makes Windows stand out because it doesn't.
I don't see the issues as being as much between Linux and Windows as being between Open Source and Closed Source, because the distribution model is what makes the difference.
Microsoft strongly encourages third parties to release closed source apps, as they do themselves. As a result, Microsoft doesn't have a lot of control over the app or how it interacts with the OS. Microsoft isn't legally allowed to tinker with third party apps and throw them into a big Windows software repository. There are some weak conventions about how applications should interact with the system, but it all comes down to whether the vendor actually implements these and does it correctly. (eg. Install in the Program Files folder, use a particular structure in the registry to store settings, and so on.) Some apps follow the conventions properly, and some don't. It's entirely up to the vendor. If I download and install a typical third party app for Windows, it's not unusual that it might be unstable, fail to take advantage of and integrate nicely with other apps I have on the system, and so on. It's very unlikely that a Windows installer will go and download dependencies for me -- chances are it'll package them inefficiently and often unnecessarily, or it'll tell me to go and find them manually. And if I try to uninstall it, I'm usually relying entirely on the independent vendor's uninstall scripts to properly remove itself. I don't know about other people, but personally I've found that they often leave a lot of residue lying around. (Old folders and files, registry entries, broken links and icons, obsolete dll's, etc.)
OSS distribution maintainers, on the other hand, have every right to tinker with the software before they put it in their repository. I know that if I apt-get install something from Debian, it's likely to work with whatever else I have, because Debian's package maintenance team has made sure that the package strictly adheres to all of Debian's policies. I'm not just getting the app, I'm getting a guarantee that it's been tuned to work nicely on my system. Of course, if I don't want that, I can still download the app indepen
RIP graphics had a shiny factor, and were sometimes faster to load, but I definitely preferred ANSI or ASCII for most things. Both put limits on the sysop's often limited design ability to disguise useful information inside shiny graphics. Programs like RIPTerm (in DOS, at least) tended to be a lot more klunky than ANSI terminal apps, although it could have been quite different on Amigas.
I couldn't find a reference to this in the weblog article if that was what you were referring to, so sorry if I've misunderstood, but I often find that it takes ages and mountains of disk work to delete even a single file in XP.
It wasn't until recently that I realised that this was entirely because of the Recycle Bin (which I almost never use). If it's filled up with thousands of tiny files, XP can spend on the order of minutes looking at them, re-organising them, and deciding what to purge every time you decide to delete a file or two. Is it possible that this is also what's happening in Vista?
This can be very frustrating when you don't have a clue why it's taking so long, because all it states is that it's deleting the file you told it to delete. Until I figured it out, I often just opened up a command line to delete files because it went so much faster.
I don't think this will do much to stop Wikipedia link spamming for several reasons:
Many spam links on Wikipedia aren't commercially motivated spam, but just people who've naively put external links in articles without properly understanding or caring about the editing policy. They're not thinking so much about search engines as about pointing people to their website (or their favourite website) because they think it's more important than it probably is. If it's a relatively obscure article, it might stay there for months or longer before someone goes through and reviews the links.
Wikipedia is only one of the websites that publishes Wikipedia content. There are lots of other sources that clone it, precisely as they're allowed to under the licence, and re-publish it. They usually add advertising to the content, or use it to lure people to some other form of revenue. These sites are easy to find by picking a phrase from Wikipedia and keying it in to a search engine like Google, and I doubt they'll add the nofollow attribute to their reproductions of the content.
Wikipedia is probably treated as a more important source of links by search engines, but whatever's published on Wikipedia will be re-published in many other places within the weeks that it takes for the new content to be crawled and to propagate. And links on any Wikipedia articles will propagate too, of course.
Even if you ignore search engines, having external links from a well written Wikipedia article that gets referenced and read a lot is probably going to generate at least some traffic to a website. Wikipedia articles are often a good place to find good external sources, probably because they get audited and the crappy ones get removed from time to time. This is exactly what provides motivation for spammers to try and get their links added, though.
Good on them for trying something, but I don't think it'll stop spammers very much.
I didn't see anything hypocritical about it. He stated pretty clearly that the reason he didn't fork an existing project was because he couldn't do so and achieve his goals, and he gave several reasons. (eg. Nothing had the right framework for where he wanted to go, he wanted the experience of developing his own project, etc.) Also, immediately after the part that you quoted, he says:
I think he fully understands that people have a licensed right to modify the code, and is okay with this. He simply thought it was disappointing that people who do this often don't bother to make their changes available back to the developers. If anything, he was just mentioning that he wants to make his own project one where people are actively encouraged to do so.
It's not exactly a revolutionary article in FOSS development, but it's handy for anyone who wants a general idea, and hopefully people don't blame him for writing a simple article when it was Slashdot that decided to link to it.
...the speech is full of really interesting comments. I've only just skimmed it for now, and there are several highlights for me. eg. Page 26:
Page 27:
Here's the funniest bit from page 32:
Page 37:
Surely this line of reasoning could only possibly work for as long as:
In other words, as soon as governments around the world make it illegal, law enforcement agencies start seriously enforcing it, and courts start heavily penalising it, your reasoning becomes useless.
This began to happen years ago, and the changes are propagating. Given the amount of US-based corporate money involved, the design of the US federal government that lets its corporations buy legislation, and international treaties that are forced on other nations by the USA (in exchange for things they can't do without, like lifting of crippling trade barriers), it should really be expected that it could only get worse for everyone. For one thing, all of the DRM circumvention research that people in the US rely on people in other countries to provide is going to dry up.
Besides, all DRM isn't circumvented. The only DRM that's circumvented is the DRM that a large enough majority of people care about. DVD DRM has been circumvented because there happen to be millions of people out there who want to rip DVD's. The possibility of circumvention doesn't prevent companies from penalising minorities in the population for their own interests. They can still construct artificial extensions to copyright law, pretty much whenever its exact restrictions don't suit them, and anyone who has a need to make a copy of the data they provide for whatever reason (preventing it from degrading, using it in another device, preserving it for society's benefit, whatever) ends up at a big disadvantage.
I've heard a lot about bastard IT departments and I've experienced a few of them, thankfully not up close. The university I attended has a classicly awful IT deparment, but I was lucky to be shielded by being in the Computer Science area, which was the only part of the University that managed to resist the university's bureaucracy and keep its own IT people when the university tried to force its own generic IT culture on everyone a decade ago.
I think I'm very fortunate now to be working in an IT department that actually spends effort listening to the people in the organisation it works for. I'm really enjoying it, too, because we get respect from the people we work with. If somebody asks for something that falls outside the range of what we normally support, we actually set up a meeting with them and ask them why they need it. More often than not, we find out we can work with them to figure out an alternative, or occasionally we simply decide it's necessary to start supporting something new, in which case we make an effort to find out if anyone else in the organisation can make use of it.
I'm pretty sure that presenting pages to Google that are different from what regular people would see is already a breach of the terms of being listed by Google, and it's already resulted in sites being de-listed. (ie. If Google can't see what other people would see, how is it supposed to index and rank it appropriately for its users?)
This might not be the case if it could be done using something like robots.txt, but as someone else pointed out, not letting Google see recent content is a likely way of reducing your pagerank. Google tends to promote sites that have recent content.
Would you care so much if it was a $250 million dispute between Microsoft and IBM? I doubt that Peter Jackson is personally being paid $250 million, and it's not going into his personal bank account. I also doubt that he negotiated the original deal with his personal fortune in mind. I wouldn't be surprised for a minute, however, to hear that he always had plans to use the money for building his film-making businesses into something really impressive. And that's effectively what he's been doing. This guy's about as down-to-Earth as you'd get, except that he has an interest in making expensive movies. I doubt he really cares about how much money he has with the exception of wanting to be treated fairly so he can continue to make the types of movies he wants to.
From everything I've read so far, it sounds to me as if the studios are acting like retarded morons to try and avoid fronting up. Jackson's main complaint is that a partial audit of the first movie showed a lot of ambiguity about where the money had gone. Now Newline is preventing the rest of that movie, or the other two movies from being audited, and they're simply spinning the media to avoid the bad publicity of talking about the real issue, which is probably that they've cooked the books to avoid giving him money. It sounds completely reasonable to me to want a fuller audit.
Running these types of businesses isn't exactly cheap. The amount of money involved could make a big difference to the ability of Jackson's companies to compete with others in the industry. It's a misconception to believe that this is nothing more than a personal paycheck, when it's really useful income for companies like Weta Workshop or Three Foot Six, and sorting this out will affect everyone who has an interest in those organisations.
I've grown up using Metric, since New Zealand's been standardised on it since well before I was born. I use it all the time, and I love it. So many different units of measurement go between each other in logical ways, many of which aren't noticed by most, right down to things like standard pencil widths being designed to match standard paper sizes. There are definitely problems with using it for day-to-day use, though, which I think most people just put up with. (The metre is often too big, the centimetre isn't big enough, and so on. Blocks of 10 cm would make a lot of sense, and I'm a bit surprised they don't get used.)
What imperial really has going for it, though, and one of the reasons it's so convenient, is that the units make it easier to divide things up for day-to-day tasks. In metric, it's easy to divide by 10, and often by 5 and 2, but outside of that the decimal places start getting long and often end up recurring. Dividing things into threes, fours and sixes really doesn't work if you also want twos and fives.
This is more to do with base 10 than with metric. I've often wondered if metric would be better long term if everyone counted in base 12, instead, and if the relationships between metric units were based on multiples of 12 instead of 10. For day to day use, simpler fractions translate to decimals (or whatever decimals are called in base 12) more nicely with base 12 than base 10. eg.
1/1 in base 10 is 1.0, in base 12 is 1.0.
1/2 in base 10 is 0.5, in base 12 is 0.6.
1/3 in base 10 is 0.333333..., in base 12 is 0.4.
1/4 in base 10 is 0.25, in base 12 is 0.3.
1/5 in base 10 is 0.2, in base 12 is 0.24.
1/6 in base 10 is 0.166666.... in base 12 is 0.2.
Base 12 makes the first 6 fractions easy to write as a decimal, whereas base 10 becomes a real problem. This probably wouldn't be practical because it's a huge learning curve for everyone, but it'd be quite interesting all the same.
Probably it's for the same reasons that media companies fund cheap crap entertainment that's full of advertising rather than going for quality -- we even get entertainment programs masquerading as "news" in news-time slots. But realistically, the television companies don't work for their viewers... even the pay-TV companies. They work for their advertisers. They know that people will continue to pay for it, irrespective of whether they push crap or quality, simply because there's no alternative.
If businesses get a lot of their money from investors and from advertisers, rather than from subscriptions, it suddenly becomes a lot more about how many people they can claim to have hooked for pushing advertising at. It means a lot to be able to tell investors and advertisers that they have lots of members. Allowing people get away easily doesn't assist with this goal at all.
Personally I don't fully agree with what I just said, and I know there are more responsible ways to make money without abusing users and subscribers, but I can easily see how many businesses would see it that way.
Unfortunately, someone else came past and turned the oven on to heat it up for some other reason. The resulting Blackberry was quite melted by the time he brought it in for us to replace it, and he was quite embarassed about it. To his credit, he'd thought to remove the SIM card, so we were able to at least plug that into a new one.
Isn't this why the parent suggested displaying it behind a safety glass screen? I don't think the point was to allow a voter to take a receipt home with them. Rather, it's intended to let them confirm that a correct paper record has also been made of their vote before they leave the booth, in case a paper recount is necessary.
The only extra requirement I'd consider adding is the ability for the voter to cancel their vote if they disagree with the paper ballot. This should be by a visible mechanical means that the voter has clear and understandable control over. eg. Push lever marked "Correct" to control the door that drops the paper record into a ballot box. Push lever marked "Wrong", and watch the other door open to drop the paper record into a flaming pit where it's incinerated, after which the digital part of the machine allows the voter to cast an alternative vote.
Digital records basically aren't trustworthy in an election, no matter what, because you can't simply look at a computer or digital device and see what's happening inside. This is why the paper records should always be authoritative in case of any doubt, and digital records should only be used as a conveniently faster counting mechanism to have on the side. The complication is being able to make as difficult as possible for the two records to become inconsistent with each other.
I'm a fan of the existing set of Indianna Jones movies, but the second film doesn't have much to do with it, and personally I think that missing out on the second one would not have been a bad thing. The whole movie was stereotypical 80's trash, complete with an annoying kid and a helpless constantly complaining woman who needed to be saved from something every two minutes.
Raiders was a great film because it had a really strong female character among many other things that made it stand out. Temple of Doom was just a sell-out, trying to capitalise the franchise on the popular movie trends of the 1980's.
I really hope the fourth movie has a good script, but right now I don't want to assume too much.
Fiji's biggest problem for the past several decades is that it's had a culture of coups, and of radicals overrunning the democratically elected governments because they're frustrated that things aren't going the way they like. Even though the coups so far have been mostly peaceful (at least in terms of people ending up dead, although the 2000 coup came close), the recent coup is just a continuation of that culture. The last generation or two of people living in Fiji have been growing up with role models who demonstrate to them that if they don't like what's going on, it's okay to change things by force.
This isn't to say that the Fijian governments are perfect; the recently-ousted government most likely had its share of corruption from what I hear, and it's very likely that Commander Bainimarama feels he's doing the right thing for his country... but when a country can't maintain a stable government, whether it's due to gangs of locals taking parliament members hostage and threatening to execute them, or due to a military hierarchy that believes in democracy in theory but not in practice, it has serious problems somewhere.
Why Microsoft would want to code-name its flagship OS after Fiji, I wouldn't have a clue, unless it's just through ignorance which seems most likely. It's a very nice place to visit as a tourist (I've been there), and the majority of people who live there are great, as well as relying on the tourist trade which plummets every time they have a coup, but it's not exactly known for stable government.
I'm not a frequent reader of Time Magazine and certainly not an expert on media, but usually when I've picked it up, I have come away with an impression that it's just trying to tell readers what they want to hear. This hasn't been anything particularly recent, or anything that covers the whole media. It's just Time Magazine. And this is probably the main reason that I'm not a frequent reader of it.
Time Magazine has always been like this, as far as I can tell. You can probably go back through archives for decades and get a really good idea of what trends of thinking the majority was following. (It is called Time Magazine, after all.) It's not terribly interesting if you're after originality, but certainly symbolic.
At least at the US Federal level, I'm not sure there's much difference between the church and politics. Perhaps with a slightly different hierarchy, but sometimes the motivations seem similar.
I don't think the problem is not trusting it so much as not being able to critically evaluate it. I don't usually trust the general media for what I think are some very good reasons, but many people I see, mostly outside my circle of friends, seem to be quite happy to simply accept most of what they're shown for one reason or another. The media has a huge role in shaping opinions of society as a whole.
Hasn't this always been the case, though? I'm not aware of any time when it wouldn't be possible to reasonably argue that there weren't masses of low-educated people who, for one reason or another, didn't always think rationally about issues.
I think you're just noticing them because you're living amongst them, and perhaps you're not noticing them in the past because people who are remembered traditionally tend to have been well educated.
Personally I think Wikipedia is great, and I use it a lot for day-to-day reference when I want to find out about things... and to be honest, this is exactly what I'd use a traditional encyclopedia for. I wouldn't use Britannica for serious research, because it doesn't go into enough depth, anyway.
The most important thing with using Wikipedia is to understand what you're getting, which is a dynamic source of information that's able to be edited and maintained by anyone, irrespective of their expertise or views. Usually things are fine, occasionally they're not in certain niche ways. Even if there haven't been suspicious edits lately, it doesn't mean that people who wrote what's there know what they're talking about. After all, if Wikipedia was perfect and correct thanks to the tireless efforts of people's good intentions, it wouldn't be necessary for other people with good intentions to be continuously updating it. Unless there was a very good reason to, I'd never use Wikipedia as a solitary source of authoritative information for something important, at least without cross-referencing the relevant facts I cared about with other sources. If I did, I'd feel compelled to justify why I thought Wikipedia was so authoritative. But then, I wouldn't do that for a lot of other sources, either. The best measure I have of a Wikipedia article, in this sense, is if it provides a good list of references that I can follow up and check on at times when I decide it matters.
The biggest concern I have with Wikipedia is that so many people don't appreciate what they're getting, or acknowledge that it's a source that's open to occasional mis-information under certain circumstances. This isn't so much a concern with Wikipedia as it is with society itself and the people in it. I'm not sure if people's awareness of reliable information has gone down, or if it's always been this way, and the Internet has simply made it more obvious by making all information so much more accessible.
I work alongside a section full of librarians whose job it is to help people in the organisation locate and research useful information. Many of them aren't great fans of Wikipedia or Google, but they are happy to debate the issue. I don't always agree with them, but they're more annoyed at how the sources get used rather than what they are. I can appreciate why librarians and teachers get so frustrated when they see vast numbers of people in society mis-using information sources, citing material because it's there rather than because it's authoritative, and so on. I also find that concerning.
Exactly. And this is why the likes of Jethro Tull and Cliff Richard, Disney, and other prominent copyright holders, should not be allowed to be the excuse for across-the-board extensions in copyright terms. They only own a tiny niche of the entire copyright-able work that's out there, and making massive changes just so a small minority of successful copyright owners can keep their monopoly benefits hardly anyone.
I couldn't care less about Disney's works, or about Cliff Richard's works. They still make their work available at reasonable prices for people who actually want them. What does irritate me is when continuous copyright extensions prevent lots of the valuable work that isn't being re-published from being reproduced by people who want to keep making it available for society. In many cases, the copyright owners are difficult to locate, or aren't interested enough to bother with releasing copyrighted works. To make sure that society gets paid back for the artificial fixed term monopoly, copyright expiration is very important.
If a niche of copyright owners care so much about their work, then the laws should instead be changed to allow for only those creators who care to extend the copyright on their work. Let copyright holders apply for extensions if they want to keep their rights. Ironically this is exactly how the US did it in the first place, and that's when they had it right. A useful addition might be to require that copyright holders also demonstrate that they're making the work they hold available to society for reasonable commissions.
It doesn't, always, if it's copyrighted, and in today's world all works are copyrighted automatically for more than a hundred years unless the holder explicitly waives that right. Otherwise it'd be easy for me to get hold of a lot old (but very important) textbooks in fields where it's not economic to republish, but which only come on the market second-hand when someone dies.
Copyright law significantly blocks the distribution of much information, to the point that the remaining stores of it are often lost or destroyed by the time it's legal to reproduce and distribute them to the populace.
Unfortunately today, this problem has become as much of a legal one as a techinical problem.