How is Google supposed to know a word is violating someone's trademark?
They should hire someone to research these things.
Okay, so does my local newspaper have to do an expensive trademark search on all of the copy in every advertisement they sell, or should that be the responsibility of the person placing the ad?
What if I use a phrase in the copy of my ad that happens to be a registered trademark of one of my competitors. So the family-owned and operated local weekly newspaper I like to read - which competes, by the way, with large, corporate-owned media giants who own both daily newspapers, most of the other local weeklies and one of the TV stations - that local newspaper has to wear it? They have to keep someone on staff (if one could manage it for a small paper) and do a trademark search in all ads, including classifieds? Or pay a company to do it?
Not the person running the ad, but the publication? You're sure?
I don't think so.
If anyone, this woman should be suing the companies who are purchasing the adsense words. But she won't, because that won't get big media coverage the way suing a giant like Google will.
I'll buy this CD, and I hope others do as well. It sends a good message to the public that the **aa-types are wrong when they content people won't pay for music if you give it to them on their terms. Same with In Rainbows. I'm also really interested in the David Lynch artwork.
The irony is I rip CDs to my media server as soon as I buy them and put them away for safe keeping, so burning the album to a blank will be a purely symbolic - and ass-backwards - gesture on my part.
But no one is being impersonated. Is it illegal for a business to place an advertisement next to a competitor's advertisement in the yellowpages? No.
To expand on your Yellowpages angle, if the Yellow Pages people put "Xerox" in the index, instead of "Copiers," and it pointed it at a page with Xerox, Cannon and Brother copier ads, they would be diluting the Xerox's trademark and potentially guilty of infringement.
So what's the difference? I think it's that Google isn't choosing the word that will trigger its customer's ad, the way the Yellow Pages do. So it's Google's customer who is potentially infringing, and this woman should be suing them.
How is it illegal for Ford to place an advertisment next to a GM dealership?
That's about the best analogy I've read so far. There's a car angle and everything.
Google is simply firing ads at users based on the search string they entered. If they wanted to give Fold ads to people who searched for 'peanut butter' that's their business.
How is Google supposed to know a word is violating someone's trademark? They're not all as obvious as Xerox, or IBM. Is Google expected to do a trademark search on every word and phrase their advertising customers want to purchase? That's going to get awfully expensive.
Or should the customer have to sign an agreement stating that none of their adsense words violate anyone's trademark anywhere, and provide some sort of notification/counter-notification system? I guess the customer should be doing a trademark search anyway, if they are going to compete in the international marketplace.
Why isn't this woman suing the company who purchased her name as an adsense word? If anyone has violated her trademark, it's them.
Here's another analogy, if I bought an ad in a national magazine advertising my company, who's name happens to be trademarked by another another company in the same industry that I may or may not have known about, is that company going to sue the magazine that ran the ad, or me? Can the magazine be responsible for doing a trademark search on every ad they run?
How about other IP laws? Is Google responsible because I bought an adsense word to advertise my new software that violates someone else's software patent? Or violates the GPL?
Is Google responsible because I advertised a site with a bunch of bit torrent trackers to illegal copies of Wolverine?
It will be interesting to see where this one goes.
Opting for "Plain Old Text" is will go a long way to ensure your posts are actually readable by everyone else. The only benefit the HMTL option offers is numbering/bullets.
I use the "old-school" UI, and didn't know there was a WYSIWYG editor. Fortunately, the "ol" tag works, so marking up your own text is still the better option imo (less strain, too, not having to keep reaching for a mouse or touch pad).
Further off topic to whomever moderated my parent and gp OT. I know those comments were off the subject of this story. The gp made that clear by putting "OT" in the subject line. The author also gave a concise summary of the content of his comment, so people who could actually address his question - like my parent - could take the time to read it and respond.
If the gp had simply replied to the same "Why, that's a nice gift horse" thread as everyone else, modding him OT would have been appropriate. But he didn't. He started his own thread, labelled clearly and asked his question. There is nowhere else to post a question that many slashdotters are likely to see, unless you're in the habit of reading journals (I'm not). From the looks of things he got some advice that may also be helpful to others who are having trouble with the UI.
Modding him and my parent OT
is overkill
decreases the chances that his question will be answered, as people who don't browse at -1 won't see it
accomplishes nothing, other than perhaps making a mod feel good about himself for slapping down a noob.
These types of moderations used to be addressed with meta-moderation, but unfortunately, that's another off topic rant about a UI that has devolved into an unuseable state.
Anything that makes paid work for him/her is a good idea to a lawyer.
Yeah, personally I hate anything that brings business to my company. I stand out front with a big sign that reads "Don't bring your business here. We don't want it."
Thank goodness we're not like those greedy lawyers who just want to make money off their trade.
i'd use "dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda" Urandom is slower but better..
If you have access to dd, you probably have access to shred. It makes several passes using different patterns (25 by default), and has the option of zeroing the drive on the last pass. I believe it meets DOD standards. I'm not sure how effective it is with slack space, which often holds recoverable data even after running utilities that are supposed to wipe data off drives, but dd wouldn't be any better.
except that Canada passed a law to levy digital mediums to compensate the Canadian copyright firms for their "lost" sales. There's already a "tax" on fair use defined into law... there's no need to make new laws to make things more complicated.
There shouldn't be a tax on "fair use." Fair use means non-infringing activity. The CRIA should not be compensated because I want to back up the digital media I buy, or because I want to watch TV when it suits me, or listen to a CD I purchased on my iPod while I run.
As far as new laws, Bill C-61 (which would have been law by now if Harper had not violated his own fixed election legislation last autumn) would have outlawed circumventing "digital locks" in order to make fair use of copyrighted material, just like the DMCA. DRM is incompatible with fair use, and prevents materials from entering the public domain. This is the reason it is incompatible with copyright law, and the reason Canadians need copyright reform that protects them from the US entertainment cartel.
Try following the thread. The person I responded to said that the original post should be marked redundant because it has been said dozens of times before. So, following that logic "death to the RIAA" should be also modded redundant. Nowhere did I say the RIAA is good.
What, I can't reply to your comment, I have to reply to the whole thread? Is today your day to be boss of Slashdot?
Okay, here goes:
I don't agree with drinkypoo that the AC's comment was redundant, but he is entitled to express that opinion. I think the AC's comment was a troll, and bordering on flaimbait, because it essentially stated that people who oppose the tactics employed by the RIAA/MPAA simply want to "get stuff free." The comment could also be perceived as a straw man, as it argued against a stance that the original comment didn't take. For these reasons, the original Troll moderation was appropriate.
Your claim that "death to the RIAA" and "information wants to be free" posts get moderated +5 Insightful was neither accurate nor relevant. It's not accurate, because many posts of that nature are modded Troll or Redundant. Despite what a lot of people seem to think, Slashdot isn't just one guy in his basement. There is a broad spectrum of users who moderate, including people with all sorts of vested interests and axes to grind. Your argument was irrelevant, because it does not follow that if the AC post was redundant, so too are all of the "information wants to be free" and "death to the RIAA" posts. Each comment should be judged on its own merits.
Interesting that the AC's straw man comment only received one Troll mod. The rest have been Underrated and Insightful, which actually says a lot about the tendency of Slasddot moderators to overcompensate for one (perceived) bad moderation by heaping positive mods on a post that was neither insightful nor underrated.
But here we are going back and forth discussing this instead of the article, which is exactly what the AC wanted, and another reason his comment was a troll.
Yeah, but all the "information wants to be free" and "death to the RIAA" posts get modded +5 insightful.
Well, information does want to be free. Given that you can not copyright a fact, why would you have a problem with that concept?
As for "death to the RIAA," just minutes ago I listened to a news report on a local radio station quoting the RIAA bemoaning Canada's inadequate copyright laws and border security. In fact, I see Slashdot carried the story yesterday.
And I agree, our copyright laws are in need of reform. The term needs to be shortened; the definition of fair dealing needs to be expanded so copying for the purpose of time-shifting, archiving and backing up purchased media is included; and the use of DRM should invalidate copyright, as the two are incompatible.
But those are not the reforms the RIAA is talking about. They want Canada and other countries to adopt anti-circumvention laws similar to the DMCA, which would make it illegal to defeat DRM for legitimate purposes like those I listed above, and are busy spreading the usual misinformation in order to achieve their goal.
So yes, death to the RIAA and their propaganda machine.
No about the sociopathy. One's mental state while under drugs is not the same as one's normal mental condition, and this sounds like the flying-high, stupid behavior of a teenager on cocaine.
You're right that it would be unfair to label her a "sociopath" based on the scant information in the NewSpeak article. I don't think I did that. I intended to draw a parallel. The cocaine may have been the stimulus that lead to the behaviour, however the result is the same.
Take a look at this video. The chap featured in it has since turned his life around and is lecturing school kids in an effort to stop them from following the path he took. And that is commendable, but the fact is if he had killed someone while on his meth-fueled joyride - say, for example, his gun hadn't failed to fire or he simply lost control of the vehicle he was driving at 140 KM/H down a residential street - I think you would be hard pressed to convince the family of his victims that he hadn't demonstrated indifference to the well being of other members of society.
As I've said elsewhere, I'm not condoning harassing this family, but I don't know the motives of the person doing this. Life experience tells me that things are rarely as cut and dried as they appear on the surface. As hard as it is for the girl's family to have their noses rubbed in the circumstances of her death, it's very possible that someone out there feels justified in doing so.
Yes they could have but they were not in this case nor are her family responsible for her actions to this degree. So how does this excuse causing distress to her remaining family?
I wasn't excusing people causing distress to her family, simply presenting an example of why someone might be motivated to do so. In fact, I plainly wrote "I have no idea who is taunting this family, and agree sending the photos to the family simply to taunt them is a dick move." But we don't know if the person who sent the photos feels justified to do so because of some personal vendetta, or if they are just doing it to be dicks.
The fact that her actions didn't result in tragedy for another family in this case is fortunate. Would you have been more empathetic if she had left left a trail of causalities in her wake?
What a horrible horrible set of pictures. I've seen other death photos on the 'net (haven't we all) but this hits their family with what I would think an unbearable amount of sorrow and anger. No one should see their child that way....
Think about another parent who maybe saw their innocent child "in that way" because of the actions of an impaired, drug-addicted teenager driving a stolen car recklessly through a residential neighborhood. It's not like the girl was only putting herself in danger. She clipped another car then slammed in to a toll booth. She showed complete disregard for the well being of anyone else, which is pretty much the definition of a sociopath.
I understand she had suffered a brain injury early in life and there were other circumstances that contributed to her addiction, and I'm not judging her for any of that. But her actions could have been devastating to another family as well.
I have no idea who is taunting this family, and agree sending the photos to the family simply to taunt them is a dick move. But they are displaying classic Streisand Effect tactics: telling the rest of us we should give up our freedom and anonymity rather than them accepting that their daughter's actions may ultimately result in them seeing some horrific photos of the way her corpse looked after she killed herself.
The article states that they are all getting counseling and I think that is a good thing. My family suffered the loss of a child, and it is a life-altering experience for everyone left behind. I think they need to deal with accepting her loss, the guilt they may be feeling for actions/inactions on their part that all of us feel "when it's too late," and they need to come to terms with the fact that these photos are out there.
Keeping the other kids off the social network sites is probably a good idea for the time being, but they all need to prepare themselves for the possibility that they may encounter them one day.
Sorry, I read your comment too quickly and missed your point. Yes, you can take a pen to your copy of your local newspaper and change it as you see fit.
And I can see that you did that, and check the edits you've made against other sources to determine their validity. If you alter the article on the President of the United States to say that Ross Perot won the election, I can check that fact against other sources, see that you've provided no credible citation for that claim and either report the abuse or correct the article myself, providing references for the changes I've made.
I can also review the history of the article to see if it has been the subject of abuse by Anonymous Cowards like yourself. In fact, it's unlikely that you could even edit an article like that one, as articles that are the subject of frequent vandalism are generally not editable by anonymous users. Freedom is a great thing, but not everyone can handle the responsibility.
Does your dead-tree encyclopedia let you do that? How about your local newspaper?
Yes it does
Since you've provided no evidence to support your claim that your local newspaper gives you the ability to provide citations and make correction to their articles, I don't believe you've made a factual statement. If you want us to believe you, you will have to provide evidence to back up your claims.
As much as it pains me to use Wikipedia for a meaningful discussion of facts... If this description is accurate (and I remind you again it's from Wikipedia so that's a real concern)
No more of a concern than trusting the facts as reported by any dead-tree format encyclopedia, news organization, or any other non-expert in the subject at hand. Wikipedia is a resource, just like your local news paper. But unlike your local newspaper, Wikipedia articles provide attribution that makes it easy to check out the validity of what they say.
Look at the top of the article you linked to about Conflict of interest. It states in clear english:
This article includes a list of references or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (April 2009)
That doesn't sound to me like an unreliable source in information. In fact, it sounds like the exact opposite. They are saying in effect "the author of this article has not provided the sources necessary to support what it is saying. That doesn't mean it isn't true, just that you should use it in conjunction with other sources. Oh, and if you can provide further supporting documentation or corrections, that would be great."
Does your dead-tree encyclopedia let you do that? How about your local newspaper?
If you rely on any one source of information to get definitive answers - whether that source is Wikipedia or CNN - you're going to get a lot of misinformation. If you use resources like Wikipedia as a starting point, and take the time follow the links in the References section of the article, you will be better informed than you would have been just blindly trusting more traditional sources.
But face it, Google is using others work to make money, its not a favor to newspapers, thats just a side effect.
You could say the same thing of any site Google indexes. And there's a really simple solution if you don't like it: use a robots.txt file.
The same goes for the Associated Press. These news organizations have it within their control to "opt out" of having Google provide one or two sentence snippets of their articles and a link to their site. But they won't do that, because they want Google to index their pages so readers can find them. They just want Google to give them a piece of the action, just like the idiots who think Google should pay for the bandwidth used by the people who use Google to find other sites (never mind the fact that the users are already paying for that bandwidth).
I agree with Jawn98685. Stop linking to AP stories for a couple of weeks. Then cut off News Corp. next. Let them twist in the wind for a while.
Then ask Mr. Murdoch how much he is willing to pay to have his pages appear in Google search results again.
The summary doesn't even mention that the DVDs that Obama gave Brown were encoded for the USA
If you're basing that on the linked Daily News article, what it actually says is
Never mind that Brown is blind in one eye and may have a hard time seeing the stars in "2001: A Space Odyssey," or that American DVDs are usually incompatible with British players.
Do you have information that these were in fact "American" (region 1) DVDs? Or are you just speculating, as the Daily News was?
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, so does my local newspaper have to do an expensive trademark search on all of the copy in every advertisement they sell, or should that be the responsibility of the person placing the ad?
What if I use a phrase in the copy of my ad that happens to be a registered trademark of one of my competitors. So the family-owned and operated local weekly newspaper I like to read - which competes, by the way, with large, corporate-owned media giants who own both daily newspapers, most of the other local weeklies and one of the TV stations - that local newspaper has to wear it? They have to keep someone on staff (if one could manage it for a small paper) and do a trademark search in all ads, including classifieds? Or pay a company to do it?
Not the person running the ad, but the publication? You're sure?
I don't think so.
If anyone, this woman should be suing the companies who are purchasing the adsense words. But she won't, because that won't get big media coverage the way suing a giant like Google will.
I'm listening to it now.
I'll buy this CD, and I hope others do as well. It sends a good message to the public that the **aa-types are wrong when they content people won't pay for music if you give it to them on their terms. Same with In Rainbows. I'm also really interested in the David Lynch artwork.
The irony is I rip CDs to my media server as soon as I buy them and put them away for safe keeping, so burning the album to a blank will be a purely symbolic - and ass-backwards - gesture on my part.
To expand on your Yellowpages angle, if the Yellow Pages people put "Xerox" in the index, instead of "Copiers," and it pointed it at a page with Xerox, Cannon and Brother copier ads, they would be diluting the Xerox's trademark and potentially guilty of infringement.
So what's the difference? I think it's that Google isn't choosing the word that will trigger its customer's ad, the way the Yellow Pages do. So it's Google's customer who is potentially infringing, and this woman should be suing them.
That's about the best analogy I've read so far. There's a car angle and everything.
Google is simply firing ads at users based on the search string they entered. If they wanted to give Fold ads to people who searched for 'peanut butter' that's their business.
How is Google supposed to know a word is violating someone's trademark? They're not all as obvious as Xerox, or IBM. Is Google expected to do a trademark search on every word and phrase their advertising customers want to purchase? That's going to get awfully expensive.
Or should the customer have to sign an agreement stating that none of their adsense words violate anyone's trademark anywhere, and provide some sort of notification/counter-notification system? I guess the customer should be doing a trademark search anyway, if they are going to compete in the international marketplace.
Why isn't this woman suing the company who purchased her name as an adsense word? If anyone has violated her trademark, it's them.
Here's another analogy, if I bought an ad in a national magazine advertising my company, who's name happens to be trademarked by another another company in the same industry that I may or may not have known about, is that company going to sue the magazine that ran the ad, or me? Can the magazine be responsible for doing a trademark search on every ad they run?
How about other IP laws? Is Google responsible because I bought an adsense word to advertise my new software that violates someone else's software patent? Or violates the GPL?
Is Google responsible because I advertised a site with a bunch of bit torrent trackers to illegal copies of Wolverine?
It will be interesting to see where this one goes.
You know, grownups can generally think about more than one issue at a time.
I use the "old-school" UI, and didn't know there was a WYSIWYG editor. Fortunately, the "ol" tag works, so marking up your own text is still the better option imo (less strain, too, not having to keep reaching for a mouse or touch pad).
Further off topic to whomever moderated my parent and gp OT. I know those comments were off the subject of this story. The gp made that clear by putting "OT" in the subject line. The author also gave a concise summary of the content of his comment, so people who could actually address his question - like my parent - could take the time to read it and respond.
If the gp had simply replied to the same "Why, that's a nice gift horse" thread as everyone else, modding him OT would have been appropriate. But he didn't. He started his own thread, labelled clearly and asked his question. There is nowhere else to post a question that many slashdotters are likely to see, unless you're in the habit of reading journals (I'm not). From the looks of things he got some advice that may also be helpful to others who are having trouble with the UI.
Modding him and my parent OT
These types of moderations used to be addressed with meta-moderation, but unfortunately, that's another off topic rant about a UI that has devolved into an unuseable state.
Yeah, personally I hate anything that brings business to my company. I stand out front with a big sign that reads "Don't bring your business here. We don't want it."
Thank goodness we're not like those greedy lawyers who just want to make money off their trade.
If you have access to dd, you probably have access to shred. It makes several passes using different patterns (25 by default), and has the option of zeroing the drive on the last pass. I believe it meets DOD standards. I'm not sure how effective it is with slack space, which often holds recoverable data even after running utilities that are supposed to wipe data off drives, but dd wouldn't be any better.
mmmmm ... chicken cutlets ...
There shouldn't be a tax on "fair use." Fair use means non-infringing activity. The CRIA should not be compensated because I want to back up the digital media I buy, or because I want to watch TV when it suits me, or listen to a CD I purchased on my iPod while I run.
As far as new laws, Bill C-61 (which would have been law by now if Harper had not violated his own fixed election legislation last autumn) would have outlawed circumventing "digital locks" in order to make fair use of copyrighted material, just like the DMCA. DRM is incompatible with fair use, and prevents materials from entering the public domain. This is the reason it is incompatible with copyright law, and the reason Canadians need copyright reform that protects them from the US entertainment cartel.
What, I can't reply to your comment, I have to reply to the whole thread? Is today your day to be boss of Slashdot?
Okay, here goes:
I don't agree with drinkypoo that the AC's comment was redundant, but he is entitled to express that opinion. I think the AC's comment was a troll, and bordering on flaimbait, because it essentially stated that people who oppose the tactics employed by the RIAA/MPAA simply want to "get stuff free." The comment could also be perceived as a straw man, as it argued against a stance that the original comment didn't take. For these reasons, the original Troll moderation was appropriate.
Your claim that "death to the RIAA" and "information wants to be free" posts get moderated +5 Insightful was neither accurate nor relevant. It's not accurate, because many posts of that nature are modded Troll or Redundant. Despite what a lot of people seem to think, Slashdot isn't just one guy in his basement. There is a broad spectrum of users who moderate, including people with all sorts of vested interests and axes to grind. Your argument was irrelevant, because it does not follow that if the AC post was redundant, so too are all of the "information wants to be free" and "death to the RIAA" posts. Each comment should be judged on its own merits.
Interesting that the AC's straw man comment only received one Troll mod. The rest have been Underrated and Insightful, which actually says a lot about the tendency of Slasddot moderators to overcompensate for one (perceived) bad moderation by heaping positive mods on a post that was neither insightful nor underrated.
But here we are going back and forth discussing this instead of the article, which is exactly what the AC wanted, and another reason his comment was a troll.
Well, information does want to be free. Given that you can not copyright a fact, why would you have a problem with that concept?
As for "death to the RIAA," just minutes ago I listened to a news report on a local radio station quoting the RIAA bemoaning Canada's inadequate copyright laws and border security. In fact, I see Slashdot carried the story yesterday.
And I agree, our copyright laws are in need of reform. The term needs to be shortened; the definition of fair dealing needs to be expanded so copying for the purpose of time-shifting, archiving and backing up purchased media is included; and the use of DRM should invalidate copyright, as the two are incompatible.
But those are not the reforms the RIAA is talking about. They want Canada and other countries to adopt anti-circumvention laws similar to the DMCA, which would make it illegal to defeat DRM for legitimate purposes like those I listed above, and are busy spreading the usual misinformation in order to achieve their goal.
So yes, death to the RIAA and their propaganda machine.
You're right that it would be unfair to label her a "sociopath" based on the scant information in the NewSpeak article. I don't think I did that. I intended to draw a parallel. The cocaine may have been the stimulus that lead to the behaviour, however the result is the same.
Take a look at this video. The chap featured in it has since turned his life around and is lecturing school kids in an effort to stop them from following the path he took. And that is commendable, but the fact is if he had killed someone while on his meth-fueled joyride - say, for example, his gun hadn't failed to fire or he simply lost control of the vehicle he was driving at 140 KM/H down a residential street - I think you would be hard pressed to convince the family of his victims that he hadn't demonstrated indifference to the well being of other members of society.
As I've said elsewhere, I'm not condoning harassing this family, but I don't know the motives of the person doing this. Life experience tells me that things are rarely as cut and dried as they appear on the surface. As hard as it is for the girl's family to have their noses rubbed in the circumstances of her death, it's very possible that someone out there feels justified in doing so.
I wasn't excusing people causing distress to her family, simply presenting an example of why someone might be motivated to do so. In fact, I plainly wrote "I have no idea who is taunting this family, and agree sending the photos to the family simply to taunt them is a dick move." But we don't know if the person who sent the photos feels justified to do so because of some personal vendetta, or if they are just doing it to be dicks.
The fact that her actions didn't result in tragedy for another family in this case is fortunate. Would you have been more empathetic if she had left left a trail of causalities in her wake?
There are lot's of links on the net. Here's another one, at the very same site you linked to, which tells us:
Stop being a pedant.
Think about another parent who maybe saw their innocent child "in that way" because of the actions of an impaired, drug-addicted teenager driving a stolen car recklessly through a residential neighborhood. It's not like the girl was only putting herself in danger. She clipped another car then slammed in to a toll booth. She showed complete disregard for the well being of anyone else, which is pretty much the definition of a sociopath.
I understand she had suffered a brain injury early in life and there were other circumstances that contributed to her addiction, and I'm not judging her for any of that. But her actions could have been devastating to another family as well.
I have no idea who is taunting this family, and agree sending the photos to the family simply to taunt them is a dick move. But they are displaying classic Streisand Effect tactics: telling the rest of us we should give up our freedom and anonymity rather than them accepting that their daughter's actions may ultimately result in them seeing some horrific photos of the way her corpse looked after she killed herself.
The article states that they are all getting counseling and I think that is a good thing. My family suffered the loss of a child, and it is a life-altering experience for everyone left behind. I think they need to deal with accepting her loss, the guilt they may be feeling for actions/inactions on their part that all of us feel "when it's too late," and they need to come to terms with the fact that these photos are out there.
Keeping the other kids off the social network sites is probably a good idea for the time being, but they all need to prepare themselves for the possibility that they may encounter them one day.
Go to Help and Preferenes -> Index -> General. In the Date/Time Format drop-down, choose one that displays the information you want to see.
Sorry, I read your comment too quickly and missed your point. Yes, you can take a pen to your copy of your local newspaper and change it as you see fit.
And I can see that you did that, and check the edits you've made against other sources to determine their validity. If you alter the article on the President of the United States to say that Ross Perot won the election, I can check that fact against other sources, see that you've provided no credible citation for that claim and either report the abuse or correct the article myself, providing references for the changes I've made.
I can also review the history of the article to see if it has been the subject of abuse by Anonymous Cowards like yourself. In fact, it's unlikely that you could even edit an article like that one, as articles that are the subject of frequent vandalism are generally not editable by anonymous users. Freedom is a great thing, but not everyone can handle the responsibility.
Since you've provided no evidence to support your claim that your local newspaper gives you the ability to provide citations and make correction to their articles, I don't believe you've made a factual statement. If you want us to believe you, you will have to provide evidence to back up your claims.
See how easy that is?
No more of a concern than trusting the facts as reported by any dead-tree format encyclopedia, news organization, or any other non-expert in the subject at hand. Wikipedia is a resource, just like your local news paper. But unlike your local newspaper, Wikipedia articles provide attribution that makes it easy to check out the validity of what they say.
Look at the top of the article you linked to about Conflict of interest. It states in clear english:
That doesn't sound to me like an unreliable source in information. In fact, it sounds like the exact opposite. They are saying in effect "the author of this article has not provided the sources necessary to support what it is saying. That doesn't mean it isn't true, just that you should use it in conjunction with other sources. Oh, and if you can provide further supporting documentation or corrections, that would be great."
Does your dead-tree encyclopedia let you do that? How about your local newspaper?
If you rely on any one source of information to get definitive answers - whether that source is Wikipedia or CNN - you're going to get a lot of misinformation. If you use resources like Wikipedia as a starting point, and take the time follow the links in the References section of the article, you will be better informed than you would have been just blindly trusting more traditional sources.
And then post a link to it on Facebook.
You could say the same thing of any site Google indexes. And there's a really simple solution if you don't like it: use a robots.txt file.
The same goes for the Associated Press. These news organizations have it within their control to "opt out" of having Google provide one or two sentence snippets of their articles and a link to their site. But they won't do that, because they want Google to index their pages so readers can find them. They just want Google to give them a piece of the action, just like the idiots who think Google should pay for the bandwidth used by the people who use Google to find other sites (never mind the fact that the users are already paying for that bandwidth).
I agree with Jawn98685. Stop linking to AP stories for a couple of weeks. Then cut off News Corp. next. Let them twist in the wind for a while.
Then ask Mr. Murdoch how much he is willing to pay to have his pages appear in Google search results again.
If you're basing that on the linked Daily News article, what it actually says is
Do you have information that these were in fact "American" (region 1) DVDs? Or are you just speculating, as the Daily News was?
You're right, he should have said "cripple anonymous speech," which is a critical component of "free speech."
So assuming the host and the one you use for browsing are running XP as well, does that mean you have four Windows licenses?