And you only say that because you've been brainwashed into thinking that nuclear power is more dangerous than fossil fuel power.
Well, it is. Which leads to the somewhat major irony that its danger means it generally doesn't hurt or kill as many people, because we consider the importance of safety far more when dealing with Nuclear power than we do with more traditional means of power generation.
Cars are relatively safe compared to airliners. They're on the ground, so if they fail they're not going to kill the passengers except in a highly limited set of circumstances. They lack complexity (well, compared to a 747 anyway) so there's less that can go wrong. A Jumbo Jet, by comparison, is a giant, complex, contraption with any number of things that can go wrong, that carries unbelievable amounts of fuel just waiting to explode, and with any number of structures and systems whose failure would result in an unflyable plane with only one direction it can go. Oh, and when a 747 dives into an ocean, that's 500 people dead. Not 4.
The 747 has a better reliability record than any car because the 747's operators, handlers, builders, designers, and everyone else involved with the 747 respects the dangers involved. The plane endures far more inspections every week than an average car sees in a lifetime. The features of every subsystem is documented and well known to everyone involved in the plane's upkeep. Whereas a car will join a highway when a driver judges it to be safe, a 747 will not enter an airspace unless an entire team of people and computers has determined the air is clear, any one of which can veto a decision to enter that space.
Nuclear power is much the same way. If it fails, it fails big-time. For the most part, engineers and operators of virtually every Nuclear power plant in the world takes safety far more seriously than any other type of plant. The ill-effects of Nuclear radiation are so much a matter of concern that preventing pollution is given a much higher priority than it would ever be at a coal plant.
If we have equal budgets, and people of equal skills, and equal concern for safety, then I'd reluctantly take a coal plant over a nuclear plant any day of the week.
But to call the edits partisan or manipulative just because they gave the benefit of the doubt to Bush is going too far.
No, that's not true. As you said, the edits changed some absolutes into guarded statements that suggested uncertainty about the facts, where no uncertainty existed. The facts were known, to suggest otherwise is deliberately misleading.
And comparing it to book burning is way over the top, given that no information was even removed from the article.
I didn't compare it to book burning. I made an analogy concerning Dave's misrepresentation of what happened here. (I only hope that if I'd written a car analogy, you wouldn't have protested that I was comparing the edits to the fuel line on a 1983 Mercury Grand Marquis!)
Ironically, your justification for saying that a comparison to book burning was wrong is, in fact, in error. The edits changed the effect of what was written to imply known facts were not actually known. This is a straight removal of information.
The word used was "manipulate" not edit, and it's appropriate. The edits done were done to inject a partisan element into what had been a more neutral article. If the edits had been purely informative, then they'd have been legitimate.
Your comment is akin to saying "Wow, you mean someone entered a public library that everyone is allowed to enter" when in fact the charge is that the person went in and set fire to the books.
I hate to agree with Dave on anything, but I'm not seeing your point here.
First of all, Imeem may or may not have done bad things in the past, but we're talking about the here and now, and the content creators are apparently blessing what they're doing today, largely because the dynamic has been changed a little (the content creators apparently getting some kind of value back.)
As for YouTube, the copyright infringement that was going on in YT was never what YouTube's founders intended, they're taking positive steps to remove copyright infringing materials, from complying with DMCA take-down notices to creating new filters that use nifty AI algorithms to locate infringing content. Intent does mean something when you're evaluating the morality of someone's actions.
If someone creates a non-profit Imeem, that still delivers the same benefits to content creators and their investors that Imeem does, I don't see why it wouldn't be backed by the same group. Or are you seeing evidence that such an organization exists, and it's being ripped to shreds by the music industry? Who is this mystery organization?
Yeah, KGhostview was probably it. The amount of code certainly wasn't "inconsequential", the KDE code was little more than a front end to the (GPL'd) application. RMS's comment therefore was correct. His comments were taken offensively, but shouldn't be - RMS was essentially saying "Technically, the KDE people did violate the GPL and lost their rights to redistribute some code as a result, so the legal procedure of "forgiveness" needs to be done." But it didn't come out that way as the forgiveness thing made it sound like RMS was calling upon KDE developers to go on their needs and plead.
3) Incidents like advocating the execution of cartoonists and teachers who name a teddy bear after a religious figure are hardly the mark of particularly rational thought processes.
I don't know if Iran ever commented on either situation, but:
The cartoonists were in Europe and generally trying to stir up anger amongst Muslims, which they succeeded into doing, a minority of Muslims going overboard. Muslims are not unique in this regard, the film The Last Temptation of Christ was greeted by cinema bombings by Catholic extremists in France.
The Teddy Bear incident was in Sudan, not Iran.
Your second point, about extreme forms of Islam advocating things like suicide bombing, really aren't that interesting. Extreme groups within Christianity and Judaism have surfaced in the past and continue to do so doing much the same thing. You might want to look at the history of a certain little province of the United Kingdom called Northern Ireland for some examples.
Iran is a country with a poor colonial/imperialist history which has resulted in a society with massive hostility to the West. The overthrow of the Shah in the 1970s was Iran throwing off the last vestiges of Western influence in its affairs, and you don't need to political scientist to see how a revolution based upon anti-Western hysteria might still have some influence decades later. In most countries, the religion is more influenced by the people supposedly under its influence than vice versa. Most people looking at the situation from outside are misidentifying what constitutes the tail, and what constitutes the dog.
Just as "PitaBred should stop posting nonsense to Slashdot" is not the same thing as "It's time for PitaBred to be hacked into little pieces by an angry dwarf with an incontinence problem".
You guys all know that Miguel has been distancing himself from GNOME for years now? He even had a signature at one point on his Slashdot account (since removed) asking people not to complain to him about perceived flaws in GNOME's UI.
Miguel is a Mono developer. Mono is linked to GNOME in the sense that some GNOME tools use it, but it's about as accurate to paint him as a GNOME developer as it would be to paint GCC developers the same way.
Wait, that isn't a car analogy. Hold on - it's about as accurate to paint him as a GNOME developer as it would be to paint a Goodyear tire salesman a Ford mechanic.
MPEG4 is patent encumbered and does require license fees. While there may be patents for Ogg Theora, On2 has made it clear Theora is a genuinely open standard that doesn't require payment of royalties to them.
MPEG4 is only open in certain senses. It is not usable from the point of view of a web standardization body, given the dependence the web has on the free software world.
BTW, DECS runs the supremely awful "RoughlyDrafted" website, a kind of brain damaged Apple advocacy thing. I'd take anything he writes with a pinch of salt.
How do some of the colder European countries handle some of these situations, although it is hard to compare since the U.S. is a lot larger and some of the communities might be closer together?
Not really a straight comparison. Europe hasn't been doing the whole "Growing fast in relatively untested waters" thing that the US has been doing. I live in Florida right now, the city 7 miles to my North didn't exist 35 years ago, and it's now one of the most populous cities in Florida.
Florida. A huge swamp. In the middle of a major Hurricane zone. With lots of tornadoes.
Now, I used to live in Britain. Britain gets hit by hurricane force winds once every five to ten years - but we're so used to it that most British people reading this are right now thinking "WTF is he talking about?" I recall my mother once calling me while the eye of a storm went over her home in Wales around 5 years ago. The next day she told me about a brick wall that had fallen on her business partner's car and other such damage.
And a few months later she asked me what I was talking about when I mentioned it to her. It only clicked when I mentioned the wall.
BTW guess which country supposedly has the largest number of tornadoes per square mile? More than Texas? Unbelievably to me, it's the UK. They're not very big, and rarely do that much damage, but obviously they amount to a hazard.
Here's the thing: it's not that you can't live in a hurricane and tornado infested swamp. You can. It's just Floridians are still trying to make it work. We don't have hundreds of years of experience of getting large numbers of people to live well in this kind of environment. In Britain, homes are generally built to withstand the winds we have hundreds of years of experience dealing with. In Florida, most homes are barely ten years old, and those that are older are very often not built to modern codes. Roofs are frequently put on homes that in the UK would be considered temporary, needing to be completely replaced every 10-20 years. In the UK most cabling (power, phone, etc) is put underground or attached to the outside of buildings except for remote rural areas. In this part of Florida, there are poles carrying power, phone, and cable TV everywhere, there are few if any underground wires. During the last four years we were hit by major hurricanes in this area three times, each time taking out the power as trees toppled on lines, and older, rotting, poles were broken.
These decisions are made - the temporary roofs, the fragile power lines, etc - because everything is being rebuilt from scratch with little experience of the area's unique conditions and with cost always being a factor, especially when you're talking about a high growth area like Florida. Over time, these issues will be resolved. But for now, the disasters will always feel a little worse and the infrastructure screwed up more than it could be because we just haven't had the time to get everything right. In 2107, when a Cat 5 Hurricane Bush hits this area of Florida, I suspect there'll be a few people upset that their flying car got hit by trees, or garden walls that collapsed, but the power will stay on, the phones will work, the roofs will stay on.
You can't get a 20GB HD for $20 but you can get a 1GB HD-like system for $20.
Hard disks consist of a fixed cost bit (the general hardware) and a "gets better with every new generation without costing more" part (the density of the data on the platters.) As a result, it'll always cost something in the region of $100 for the low end devices.
Flash memory on the other hand seems to be more linear with the material costs of the devices being miniscule and pretty much the entire expense being related to the density of the storage. So if you wait long enough, a $20 20G drive will turn up. It'll just take longer because flash costs more per-byte than magnetic disks.
I prefer EMACS!
on
Hacking VIM
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
Sorry, what good's an article about VI without a completely unnecessary war about whether EMACS or VI is better?
As a follow-up, feel free to flame me about capitalizing "VI";-)
Which means that I tend to get married to design decisions I made and have to deal with the inevitable consequences when what looks graceful programmatically is a nightmare when converted to a UI for the end user.
One of the interesting lessons I took from Mac OS X and GNOME, probably the two best mass market UIs on computers these days, is you can't always orientate your applications towards future expandability, because adding modularity and extendability frequently results in a poorer user experience.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Nokia's major issue with Ogg Vorbis is the lack of DRM. That certainly does pertain to a discussion of the difference between format and container - a format certainly isn't going to deal with DRM, a container is. Vorbis can be constrained using any DRM scheme that uses a container format compatible with Vorbis. Ogg is not such a container format.
The difference here between Ogg and Vorbis appears to matter and appears to pertain to the discussion, and I think it's not reasonable to attack people who point out the difference as somehow being too geeky.
Quite. We're still on two controllers. We haven't seen it as absolutely necessary to get another nunchuck though it's something we plan to get. We saved $10 by not buying Wii-play (I've yet to hear a positive word about the bundled games.) My mother is coming to stay with us this Christmas so we'll probably get another controller, but I'm not seeing a need for four right now.
As you say though, the price isn't even the major selling point of the Wii. It's relatively low cost, but that's not what makes it great. Forget my parents, I really have no interest in the other two - my computer is a better platform for anything I'd use the X-Box 360 or PS3 for anyway.
And no, it isn't a lie, its my interpretation of what you were saying.
BTW, yes, it's a lie. You had it explained to you twice by the time you hit the submit button, at least once by the person you were replying to, and as I said, my me several minutes previous.
It wasn't, by this time, your "interpretation", because you knew your interpretation to be false. You'd had it pointed out to you. You continued at this point, so it was no longer an error on your part, it was quite deliberate.
it is actually a system whereby groups can vie for control of the information that others see about a particular topic
And yet somehow it works.
The execution lacks quite a bit. At some point, you have to limit the number of people who can actually edit it, and remove the possibility of it going from encyclopedia of knowledge to something more like Facebook or MySpace.
The execution's fine. At this point the vast majority of articles I read have little or no problems. Most link to relevant information so you can confirm what you're reading is accurate. Interestingly of the articles I see that have "problems" it tends to be obvious trolls on pop-culture articles, or "I hate SuperMegaCorp" type vandalism of large, unpopular, organizations.
I think the unreliability of Wikipedia is overstated. For every troll there's an army of people ready to pounce and revert bad changes. Indeed, getting on-topic for a moment, that's the problem here. Some guy tried to put an arbitrary link into an article after the link had been removed; the change was reverted; the person putting the link in began a campaign of placing unencyclopedic material into Wikipedia. He kept being reverted. He started being banned. He went the sock-puppet route. His sock puppets were banned. etc. Wikipedia isn't being criticized here because they failed to prevent an article from being fair, but for actions they took to keep some articles from being vandalized, with the events mischaracterized, one might suspect deliberately, by El Reg as being the former.
There was nothing in the posts other than Jimbo's word that the bans were appropriate.
Sure, because if I'm acting in bad faith I privately email people I'm being unfair to, and accuse them privately and completely pointlessly of things they're not doing. Riiiiiiiight.
The evidence is that Wales was acting in good faith. He believed sincerely that the people being banned were acting in bad faith as is evident from his public and his private behavior.
That's the point. Your characterization of what I wrote is completely off-base. I wasn't saying the people being banned were acting in bad faith because Wales said so, I said that Wales' behavior shows he believed they were acting in bad faith, which means Wales and the other admins were acting in good faith when they banned them. It's that simple.
And that is the point, ultimately. Because El Reg isn't accusing Wikipedia of merely making an error, it's accusing them of cabalism and conspiracy. Whether the victims really are trolls or not is a secondary issue in that discussion.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it is. Which leads to the somewhat major irony that its danger means it generally doesn't hurt or kill as many people, because we consider the importance of safety far more when dealing with Nuclear power than we do with more traditional means of power generation.
Cars are relatively safe compared to airliners. They're on the ground, so if they fail they're not going to kill the passengers except in a highly limited set of circumstances. They lack complexity (well, compared to a 747 anyway) so there's less that can go wrong. A Jumbo Jet, by comparison, is a giant, complex, contraption with any number of things that can go wrong, that carries unbelievable amounts of fuel just waiting to explode, and with any number of structures and systems whose failure would result in an unflyable plane with only one direction it can go. Oh, and when a 747 dives into an ocean, that's 500 people dead. Not 4.
The 747 has a better reliability record than any car because the 747's operators, handlers, builders, designers, and everyone else involved with the 747 respects the dangers involved. The plane endures far more inspections every week than an average car sees in a lifetime. The features of every subsystem is documented and well known to everyone involved in the plane's upkeep. Whereas a car will join a highway when a driver judges it to be safe, a 747 will not enter an airspace unless an entire team of people and computers has determined the air is clear, any one of which can veto a decision to enter that space.
Nuclear power is much the same way. If it fails, it fails big-time. For the most part, engineers and operators of virtually every Nuclear power plant in the world takes safety far more seriously than any other type of plant. The ill-effects of Nuclear radiation are so much a matter of concern that preventing pollution is given a much higher priority than it would ever be at a coal plant.
If we have equal budgets, and people of equal skills, and equal concern for safety, then I'd reluctantly take a coal plant over a nuclear plant any day of the week.
I'm pretty sure the court system is part of the government.
No, that's not true. As you said, the edits changed some absolutes into guarded statements that suggested uncertainty about the facts, where no uncertainty existed. The facts were known, to suggest otherwise is deliberately misleading.
I didn't compare it to book burning. I made an analogy concerning Dave's misrepresentation of what happened here. (I only hope that if I'd written a car analogy, you wouldn't have protested that I was comparing the edits to the fuel line on a 1983 Mercury Grand Marquis!)
Ironically, your justification for saying that a comparison to book burning was wrong is, in fact, in error. The edits changed the effect of what was written to imply known facts were not actually known. This is a straight removal of information.
The word used was "manipulate" not edit, and it's appropriate. The edits done were done to inject a partisan element into what had been a more neutral article. If the edits had been purely informative, then they'd have been legitimate.
Your comment is akin to saying "Wow, you mean someone entered a public library that everyone is allowed to enter" when in fact the charge is that the person went in and set fire to the books.
So how are those gold-tipped Monster cables you use to connect your iPod to your Bose noise-cancelling headphones working out for you?
I hate to agree with Dave on anything, but I'm not seeing your point here.
First of all, Imeem may or may not have done bad things in the past, but we're talking about the here and now, and the content creators are apparently blessing what they're doing today, largely because the dynamic has been changed a little (the content creators apparently getting some kind of value back.)
As for YouTube, the copyright infringement that was going on in YT was never what YouTube's founders intended, they're taking positive steps to remove copyright infringing materials, from complying with DMCA take-down notices to creating new filters that use nifty AI algorithms to locate infringing content. Intent does mean something when you're evaluating the morality of someone's actions.
If someone creates a non-profit Imeem, that still delivers the same benefits to content creators and their investors that Imeem does, I don't see why it wouldn't be backed by the same group. Or are you seeing evidence that such an organization exists, and it's being ripped to shreds by the music industry? Who is this mystery organization?
I've never seen the version with the voice-over. The Director's Cut was perfectly understandable to me.
I'm not sure why you would have found it hard to follow. It really doesn't need explanation.
Er, do you mean:
1. Watch anything that's called a Directors Cut, which by definition was released when it was first released.
2. Watch the Director's Cut that was released when Bladerunner was first released (that would be nearly a decade before the Director's Cut existed)
3. Watch the original release, with voiceover.
or
4. Travel back in time to 1991, and watch the Director's Cut.
Least impressive fact evah.
You do know that the Jonestown Massacre, as awful as it was, killed fewer people than die in Christian countries every year, don't you?
You make it sound like the Peoples Temple has terrible mass murders all the time... (etc, etc)
Yeah, KGhostview was probably it. The amount of code certainly wasn't "inconsequential", the KDE code was little more than a front end to the (GPL'd) application. RMS's comment therefore was correct. His comments were taken offensively, but shouldn't be - RMS was essentially saying "Technically, the KDE people did violate the GPL and lost their rights to redistribute some code as a result, so the legal procedure of "forgiveness" needs to be done." But it didn't come out that way as the forgiveness thing made it sound like RMS was calling upon KDE developers to go on their needs and plead.
Most of it was their code. Some of it wasn't. IIRC there was a PDF viewer or something similar that used third party GPL'd code.
That's not an "except", that's an anecdote. He's not a GNOME developer, he was once, but he hasn't been involved in it for years.
I don't know if Iran ever commented on either situation, but:
Your second point, about extreme forms of Islam advocating things like suicide bombing, really aren't that interesting. Extreme groups within Christianity and Judaism have surfaced in the past and continue to do so doing much the same thing. You might want to look at the history of a certain little province of the United Kingdom called Northern Ireland for some examples.
Iran is a country with a poor colonial/imperialist history which has resulted in a society with massive hostility to the West. The overthrow of the Shah in the 1970s was Iran throwing off the last vestiges of Western influence in its affairs, and you don't need to political scientist to see how a revolution based upon anti-Western hysteria might still have some influence decades later. In most countries, the religion is more influenced by the people supposedly under its influence than vice versa. Most people looking at the situation from outside are misidentifying what constitutes the tail, and what constitutes the dog.
Yes, it does.
Just as "PitaBred should stop posting nonsense to Slashdot" is not the same thing as "It's time for PitaBred to be hacked into little pieces by an angry dwarf with an incontinence problem".
You guys all know that Miguel has been distancing himself from GNOME for years now? He even had a signature at one point on his Slashdot account (since removed) asking people not to complain to him about perceived flaws in GNOME's UI.
Miguel is a Mono developer. Mono is linked to GNOME in the sense that some GNOME tools use it, but it's about as accurate to paint him as a GNOME developer as it would be to paint GCC developers the same way.
Wait, that isn't a car analogy. Hold on - it's about as accurate to paint him as a GNOME developer as it would be to paint a Goodyear tire salesman a Ford mechanic.
Yeah, yeah. That one works.
MPEG4 is patent encumbered and does require license fees. While there may be patents for Ogg Theora, On2 has made it clear Theora is a genuinely open standard that doesn't require payment of royalties to them.
MPEG4 is only open in certain senses. It is not usable from the point of view of a web standardization body, given the dependence the web has on the free software world.
BTW, DECS runs the supremely awful "RoughlyDrafted" website, a kind of brain damaged Apple advocacy thing. I'd take anything he writes with a pinch of salt.
Not really a straight comparison. Europe hasn't been doing the whole "Growing fast in relatively untested waters" thing that the US has been doing. I live in Florida right now, the city 7 miles to my North didn't exist 35 years ago, and it's now one of the most populous cities in Florida.
Florida. A huge swamp. In the middle of a major Hurricane zone. With lots of tornadoes.
Now, I used to live in Britain. Britain gets hit by hurricane force winds once every five to ten years - but we're so used to it that most British people reading this are right now thinking "WTF is he talking about?" I recall my mother once calling me while the eye of a storm went over her home in Wales around 5 years ago. The next day she told me about a brick wall that had fallen on her business partner's car and other such damage.
And a few months later she asked me what I was talking about when I mentioned it to her. It only clicked when I mentioned the wall.
BTW guess which country supposedly has the largest number of tornadoes per square mile? More than Texas? Unbelievably to me, it's the UK. They're not very big, and rarely do that much damage, but obviously they amount to a hazard.
Here's the thing: it's not that you can't live in a hurricane and tornado infested swamp. You can. It's just Floridians are still trying to make it work. We don't have hundreds of years of experience of getting large numbers of people to live well in this kind of environment. In Britain, homes are generally built to withstand the winds we have hundreds of years of experience dealing with. In Florida, most homes are barely ten years old, and those that are older are very often not built to modern codes. Roofs are frequently put on homes that in the UK would be considered temporary, needing to be completely replaced every 10-20 years. In the UK most cabling (power, phone, etc) is put underground or attached to the outside of buildings except for remote rural areas. In this part of Florida, there are poles carrying power, phone, and cable TV everywhere, there are few if any underground wires. During the last four years we were hit by major hurricanes in this area three times, each time taking out the power as trees toppled on lines, and older, rotting, poles were broken.
These decisions are made - the temporary roofs, the fragile power lines, etc - because everything is being rebuilt from scratch with little experience of the area's unique conditions and with cost always being a factor, especially when you're talking about a high growth area like Florida. Over time, these issues will be resolved. But for now, the disasters will always feel a little worse and the infrastructure screwed up more than it could be because we just haven't had the time to get everything right. In 2107, when a Cat 5 Hurricane Bush hits this area of Florida, I suspect there'll be a few people upset that their flying car got hit by trees, or garden walls that collapsed, but the power will stay on, the phones will work, the roofs will stay on.
You can't get a 20GB HD for $20 but you can get a 1GB HD-like system for $20.
Hard disks consist of a fixed cost bit (the general hardware) and a "gets better with every new generation without costing more" part (the density of the data on the platters.) As a result, it'll always cost something in the region of $100 for the low end devices.
Flash memory on the other hand seems to be more linear with the material costs of the devices being miniscule and pretty much the entire expense being related to the density of the storage. So if you wait long enough, a $20 20G drive will turn up. It'll just take longer because flash costs more per-byte than magnetic disks.
Sorry, what good's an article about VI without a completely unnecessary war about whether EMACS or VI is better?
As a follow-up, feel free to flame me about capitalizing "VI" ;-)
Which means that I tend to get married to design decisions I made and have to deal with the inevitable consequences when what looks graceful programmatically is a nightmare when converted to a UI for the end user.
One of the interesting lessons I took from Mac OS X and GNOME, probably the two best mass market UIs on computers these days, is you can't always orientate your applications towards future expandability, because adding modularity and extendability frequently results in a poorer user experience.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Nokia's major issue with Ogg Vorbis is the lack of DRM. That certainly does pertain to a discussion of the difference between format and container - a format certainly isn't going to deal with DRM, a container is. Vorbis can be constrained using any DRM scheme that uses a container format compatible with Vorbis. Ogg is not such a container format.
The difference here between Ogg and Vorbis appears to matter and appears to pertain to the discussion, and I think it's not reasonable to attack people who point out the difference as somehow being too geeky.
Quite. We're still on two controllers. We haven't seen it as absolutely necessary to get another nunchuck though it's something we plan to get. We saved $10 by not buying Wii-play (I've yet to hear a positive word about the bundled games.) My mother is coming to stay with us this Christmas so we'll probably get another controller, but I'm not seeing a need for four right now.
As for the component cable, that was $6.87 from Amazon, including shipping. There's no need to pay $20 for anything.
As you say though, the price isn't even the major selling point of the Wii. It's relatively low cost, but that's not what makes it great. Forget my parents, I really have no interest in the other two - my computer is a better platform for anything I'd use the X-Box 360 or PS3 for anyway.
BTW, yes, it's a lie. You had it explained to you twice by the time you hit the submit button, at least once by the person you were replying to, and as I said, my me several minutes previous.
It wasn't, by this time, your "interpretation", because you knew your interpretation to be false. You'd had it pointed out to you. You continued at this point, so it was no longer an error on your part, it was quite deliberate.
And yet somehow it works.
The execution's fine. At this point the vast majority of articles I read have little or no problems. Most link to relevant information so you can confirm what you're reading is accurate. Interestingly of the articles I see that have "problems" it tends to be obvious trolls on pop-culture articles, or "I hate SuperMegaCorp" type vandalism of large, unpopular, organizations.
I think the unreliability of Wikipedia is overstated. For every troll there's an army of people ready to pounce and revert bad changes. Indeed, getting on-topic for a moment, that's the problem here. Some guy tried to put an arbitrary link into an article after the link had been removed; the change was reverted; the person putting the link in began a campaign of placing unencyclopedic material into Wikipedia. He kept being reverted. He started being banned. He went the sock-puppet route. His sock puppets were banned. etc. Wikipedia isn't being criticized here because they failed to prevent an article from being fair, but for actions they took to keep some articles from being vandalized, with the events mischaracterized, one might suspect deliberately, by El Reg as being the former.
Sure, because if I'm acting in bad faith I privately email people I'm being unfair to, and accuse them privately and completely pointlessly of things they're not doing. Riiiiiiiight.
The evidence is that Wales was acting in good faith. He believed sincerely that the people being banned were acting in bad faith as is evident from his public and his private behavior.
That's the point. Your characterization of what I wrote is completely off-base. I wasn't saying the people being banned were acting in bad faith because Wales said so, I said that Wales' behavior shows he believed they were acting in bad faith, which means Wales and the other admins were acting in good faith when they banned them. It's that simple.
And that is the point, ultimately. Because El Reg isn't accusing Wikipedia of merely making an error, it's accusing them of cabalism and conspiracy. Whether the victims really are trolls or not is a secondary issue in that discussion.