A) $100 Mail-In Rebate (so $299). And remember how much fun trying to claim a Mail-In Rebate is (and the lengths that they'll go to deny such claims?) B) You have to be able to switch phones.. for those of you who still have an agreement length date.. if you really want it.. throw in an early termination fee.. ($449) C) Plus you're locked in for two years.
I do agree that the process for uploading photos needs to be improved (anyone with MediaWiki experience want to write us a better mousetrap?) But it does work, kludgey, but it works.
(Please note, stating my Conflict of Interest up front: I am currently a Wikipedia Administrator, one of the 2,500 or so)
I do agree that photos are not a good spot for Wikipedia. And we're currently in a spot where our pictures are simultaneously decried as not good enough (this topic) and too good (http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/07/17/085244/New-Developments-In-NPGWikipedia-Lawsuit-Threat , the museum in question says that low res versions would be ok, but high res infringes on their copyright (note, the items in question are in the public domain in the US, but the laws regarding reproductions of items are a bit wonky in the UK)
We are a free encyclopedia. The people who use the encyclopedia have a right to reuse the material on Wikipedia in any way possible. Therefore, we cannot present any material that doesn't meet the requirements, because outside the two categories (things permissible under the GFDL/CC-BY-SA licensing terms, and limited fair-use exemptions, usually when no other picture is possible, such as photos of a person who is no longer living).
One could quite possibly argue that if we did not restrict items to these categories, then on other versions of Wikipedia, or otherwise legal use of Wikipedia (for example, reusing the article elsewhere), Wikipedia would be contributing to copyright infringement, or even considering the terms the rest of the website is under, encouraging copyright infringement.
Do I (speaking more as a user of the encyclopedia, rather than an administrator) want professional looking photographs and information on Wikipedia? Yes, Of course. I would LOVE for a lot of professional photographers to be able to release their work. But it's their decision. If they don't want to donate the phots under the suitable license, then, unfortunately, we cannot use them.
And I should say that there are categories where Wikipedia shines. Several governments including the German goverment (http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08%2F12%2F06%2F1654246&from=rss) have released hundreds of thousands of historical to current day photographs to be used on Wikipedia by the site's terms.
I know a user on Wikipedia (who I am proud to call a friend), who makes it their mission to restore old, faded pictures and photographs. They have close to 300 featured picture credits to their name. There's a whole category at the Wikipedia Commons (a sister project to Wikipedia) that makes it their goal to restore these photos and historical documents. (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Potential_restorations).
So it's an ever-improving process. We can only take what we are GIVEN, but everyday we're given more and more to work with.
If this was true, then talk about your dammed if you do, dammed if you don't moment. Some countries require this data to only be kept for a small amount of time, others require it for a long amount of time. They demand data.. do you face trouble for not turning over the data that the foreign folks require, or fufill the data request and take it in the shorts from your home nation?
as we can affix a sticker to said State Representative's head that says "WARNING:Excessive exposure to politics has been linked to corruption and susceptibility to Moral Panics."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic/
"BTW: you never mentioned whether wikipedia accepted a donation from Merkey - or one of Merkey's sponsors."
That's because I have no particular knowledge whether Merkey is a donor to the Wikimedia Foundation, other than JVM's words. I am an administrator, but last I checked, there was, I want to say, about 2,000 of us (administrators) on the project. So, there's people who are in the know about various things, but I'm not one of them.
I did comment on JVM on some of the previous steps prior to the Arbitration Committee(as I said, there's no doubt that there is a bunch of folks who travel around trying to troll JVM into losing his cool, but to be quite honest, it doesn't take much prompting, as you can see from some of the other posts that have surfaced.
And as for the whitewashing, well, first off I didn't do it, or review it at the time, but the rules in general, are that on BLP (Biography of Living Persons) articles, if information is contested, or controversial, and it's not highly sourced, it comes out of the article, and should not be added back in unless it's properly sourced. While usually a request doesn't get Jimbo's attention straight out, it's not uncommon for intense scrutiny to be focused on an BLP article by a cadre of volunteer editors who answer complaints by people or companies via email about their article (it's called the OTRS system), where they consider information to be incorrect. Sometimes, when a vast majority of the information in the article is either incorrect, or presented in a biased manner, it requires a total re-write of the article, which may have happened here.
Again, I'm not trying to say what did, or did not happen, I'm just trying to explain how things should work. Whether it is how it works in practice, as well as it does in theory, is something I won't venture to guess on.
Oh, a lot of people feel the same way.. They're just too polite to use the same words I did. Most of the pages dealing with the whole situation have been courtesy blanked, to avoid being picked up by Google Spiders and the like.;)
(fair notice: I am an administrator on Wikipedia, same nick)
There's two types of protection:
Semi-Protection: Where all anonymous editors (those without accounts), and those whose accounts are less then four days old (I believe) are kept from editing these articles. This is to prevent someone from registering a new account, and going on a vandalism spree.
Full-Protection: What the JVM article was for a while. That means only administrators can edit the article. This is GENERALLY used only for short periods, where vandalism/edit-wars are too great. This is generally to make the folks take it to the articles talk page and hash things out. In GENERAL (not saying every circumstance, or what have you), when an article is full-protected, the only edits that are done, even by administrators, are either to remove vandalism, material that violates Wikipedia's policies on the Biographies of Living People (Libelous material, etcetera), or things that have full consensus on the talk page.
Once tempers cool down, the article is unprotected. The problem is: There's a great amount of people who take great pleasure in poking Mr. Merkey with sticks, just so they can get a reaction out of him (the Yahoo SCO Message Board took great pleasure in trying to drive him insane, for example). In the ArbCom case that Mr. Merkey was banned from Wikipedia (again), three of his main annoyances, were also banished.
In this specific case, I can understand why the page was full-locked for a while, because these people were taking great pleasure in their attempts to make JVM lose the plot.
Let's not forget this was the person who wanted to buy Linux because the GPL would be its doom, so he could re-issue it under a Cherokee license.
This is the person who demanded that all homosexuals recuse themselves from dealing with the ArbCom case the last time he was banned from Wikipedia.
He demanded special treatment the last time he was on there, because he was such a big donor. (didn't get it mind you, but he wanted it, real bad).
This is a person who:"In 1998, the Fourth Judicial District Court of Utah found that Merkey "regularly exaggerates or lies in his comments to others about events happening around him. It is as though he is creating his own separate reality" (From SCOFacts)
But good for GoDaddy. Spam is one of the scourges of the net and anyone who spams doesn't deserve to be on it.
Besides, check out Spamhaus, it takes a lot more then a "few reports of spamming" to end up on their list. It takes solid evidence that you're a large-scale spammer or provide spam support services (such as bulletproof hosting)
A non-standard precipitation warning has been issued for the Redmond, WA area, as it is expected to be raining chairs for the next few days, or until Steve Ballmer runs out of furniture..
didn't this just get ruled as fair use? At least with the "Caching" involved?
Seems to me that the Newspaper companies are using the courts as a weapon.. "Pay us for our stuff or see you in court.. You probably will win, but that won't make your legal bills any lower.."
Late Friday afternoon, plaintiff's attorney Marc Bern said he filed a lawsuit against Random House and its Doubleday imprint in U.S. District Court in Manhattan charging that the publishers misrepresented that book as nonfiction. His client, California resident Karen Futernick, alleges in the suit that she purchased "A Million Little Pieces" on that basis but that the defendants "failed to conduct a reasonable investigation or inquiry regarding the truthfulness or accuracy" of the material. Mr. Bern said that he will seek more than $50 million in damages for the plaintiffs. "Nobody can get away with profiting with a product that you represented as something that it is not," says Alan Ripka, another partner in Napoli Bern Ripka LLP, the New York City law firm that filed the suit.
Ayup. $50 Million dollars because she bought a book marked as non-fiction that was actually fictional. If she ever went into the Boston Public Library, we could clear the national deficit just from the Natural Sciences section alone!
Ok... trying to lock this down is like asking a geek which editor he prefers, vi or emacs.... So far we've found three "authorative" references to the damn boomstick (hmm.. nah..) that Marvin attempts to blow the earth up with.
Which has absolutely nothing to do with comets and things travelling through space..
(must... resist urge to.. aw hell..)
"Welcome to another episode of PIIIGGGSSSS IN SPPPPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACCCCEEE"
Slashdot Mirror
Clicked on this article because they thought "Penthouse Cooling" had to do something with the smut mag? :)
The summary states it's $199. Not really true.
Not just the $10/mo fee for data.. but..
A) $100 Mail-In Rebate (so $299). And remember how much fun trying to claim a Mail-In Rebate is (and the lengths that they'll go to deny such claims?)
B) You have to be able to switch phones.. for those of you who still have an agreement length date.. if you really want it.. throw in an early termination fee.. ($449)
C) Plus you're locked in for two years.
With these things, that if it can be read by a device, then it can be broken. All that differs is how long will it take to break it..
I do agree that the process for uploading photos needs to be improved (anyone with MediaWiki experience want to write us a better mousetrap?) But it does work, kludgey, but it works.
(Please note, stating my Conflict of Interest up front: I am currently a Wikipedia Administrator, one of the 2,500 or so)
I do agree that photos are not a good spot for Wikipedia. And we're currently in a spot where our pictures are simultaneously decried as not good enough (this topic) and too good (http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/07/17/085244/New-Developments-In-NPGWikipedia-Lawsuit-Threat , the museum in question says that low res versions would be ok, but high res infringes on their copyright (note, the items in question are in the public domain in the US, but the laws regarding reproductions of items are a bit wonky in the UK)
We are a free encyclopedia. The people who use the encyclopedia have a right to reuse the material on Wikipedia in any way possible. Therefore, we cannot present any material that doesn't meet the requirements, because outside the two categories (things permissible under the GFDL/CC-BY-SA licensing terms, and limited fair-use exemptions, usually when no other picture is possible, such as photos of a person who is no longer living).
One could quite possibly argue that if we did not restrict items to these categories, then on other versions of Wikipedia, or otherwise legal use of Wikipedia (for example, reusing the article elsewhere), Wikipedia would be contributing to copyright infringement, or even considering the terms the rest of the website is under, encouraging copyright infringement.
Do I (speaking more as a user of the encyclopedia, rather than an administrator) want professional looking photographs and information on Wikipedia? Yes, Of course. I would LOVE for a lot of professional photographers to be able to release their work. But it's their decision. If they don't want to donate the phots under the suitable license, then, unfortunately, we cannot use them.
And I should say that there are categories where Wikipedia shines. Several governments including the German goverment (http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08%2F12%2F06%2F1654246&from=rss) have released hundreds of thousands of historical to current day photographs to be used on Wikipedia by the site's terms.
I know a user on Wikipedia (who I am proud to call a friend), who makes it their mission to restore old, faded pictures and photographs. They have close to 300 featured picture credits to their name. There's a whole category at the Wikipedia Commons (a sister project to Wikipedia) that makes it their goal to restore these photos and historical documents. (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Potential_restorations).
So it's an ever-improving process. We can only take what we are GIVEN, but everyday we're given more and more to work with.
If this was true, then talk about your dammed if you do, dammed if you don't moment. Some countries require this data to only be kept for a small amount of time, others require it for a long amount of time. They demand data.. do you face trouble for not turning over the data that the foreign folks require, or fufill the data request and take it in the shorts from your home nation?
TFS states that it's only a TEMPORARY halt to filing any charges on the teens
as we can affix a sticker to said State Representative's head that says "WARNING:Excessive exposure to politics has been linked to corruption and susceptibility to Moral Panics." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic/
"BTW: you never mentioned whether wikipedia accepted a donation from Merkey - or one of Merkey's sponsors."
That's because I have no particular knowledge whether Merkey is a donor to the Wikimedia Foundation, other than JVM's words. I am an administrator, but last I checked, there was, I want to say, about 2,000 of us (administrators) on the project. So, there's people who are in the know about various things, but I'm not one of them.
I did comment on JVM on some of the previous steps prior to the Arbitration Committee(as I said, there's no doubt that there is a bunch of folks who travel around trying to troll JVM into losing his cool, but to be quite honest, it doesn't take much prompting, as you can see from some of the other posts that have surfaced.
And as for the whitewashing, well, first off I didn't do it, or review it at the time, but the rules in general, are that on BLP (Biography of Living Persons) articles, if information is contested, or controversial, and it's not highly sourced, it comes out of the article, and should not be added back in unless it's properly sourced. While usually a request doesn't get Jimbo's attention straight out, it's not uncommon for intense scrutiny to be focused on an BLP article by a cadre of volunteer editors who answer complaints by people or companies via email about their article (it's called the OTRS system), where they consider information to be incorrect. Sometimes, when a vast majority of the information in the article is either incorrect, or presented in a biased manner, it requires a total re-write of the article, which may have happened here.
Again, I'm not trying to say what did, or did not happen, I'm just trying to explain how things should work. Whether it is how it works in practice, as well as it does in theory, is something I won't venture to guess on.
Oh, a lot of people feel the same way.. They're just too polite to use the same words I did. Most of the pages dealing with the whole situation have been courtesy blanked, to avoid being picked up by Google Spiders and the like. ;)
(fair notice: I am an administrator on Wikipedia, same nick)
There's two types of protection:
Semi-Protection: Where all anonymous editors (those without accounts), and those whose accounts are less then four days old (I believe) are kept from editing these articles. This is to prevent someone from registering a new account, and going on a vandalism spree.
Full-Protection: What the JVM article was for a while. That means only administrators can edit the article. This is GENERALLY used only for short periods, where vandalism/edit-wars are too great. This is generally to make the folks take it to the articles talk page and hash things out. In GENERAL (not saying every circumstance, or what have you), when an article is full-protected, the only edits that are done, even by administrators, are either to remove vandalism, material that violates Wikipedia's policies on the Biographies of Living People (Libelous material, etcetera), or things that have full consensus on the talk page.
Once tempers cool down, the article is unprotected. The problem is: There's a great amount of people who take great pleasure in poking Mr. Merkey with sticks, just so they can get a reaction out of him (the Yahoo SCO Message Board took great pleasure in trying to drive him insane, for example). In the ArbCom case that Mr. Merkey was banned from Wikipedia (again), three of his main annoyances, were also banished.
In this specific case, I can understand why the page was full-locked for a while, because these people were taking great pleasure in their attempts to make JVM lose the plot.
Let's not forget this was the person who wanted to buy Linux because the GPL would be its doom, so he could re-issue it under a Cherokee license.
This is the person who demanded that all homosexuals recuse themselves from dealing with the ArbCom case the last time he was banned from Wikipedia.
He demanded special treatment the last time he was on there, because he was such a big donor. (didn't get it mind you, but he wanted it, real bad).
This is a person who:"In 1998, the Fourth Judicial District Court of Utah found that Merkey "regularly exaggerates or lies in his comments to others about events happening around him. It is as though he is creating his own separate reality" (From SCOFacts)
JVM is a smart guy, no one denies that.
But he's also nuttier then a fruitcake.
... but I'm afraid that hook is buried where the sun don't shine.
But good for GoDaddy. Spam is one of the scourges of the net and anyone who spams doesn't deserve to be on it.
Besides, check out Spamhaus, it takes a lot more then a "few reports of spamming" to end up on their list. It takes solid evidence that you're a large-scale spammer or provide spam support services (such as bulletproof hosting)
Because the Russian law states they can pay the Russian government who disburses the money to the artists? :D
We don't care who you're paying..... it's not us.
It's a song. It's funny. Laugh.
Oh.. Boot to the Head.
A non-standard precipitation warning has been issued for the Redmond, WA area, as it is expected to be raining chairs for the next few days, or until Steve Ballmer runs out of furniture..
didn't this just get ruled as fair use? At least with the "Caching" involved?
Seems to me that the Newspaper companies are using the courts as a weapon.. "Pay us for our stuff or see you in court.. You probably will win, but that won't make your legal bills any lower.."
$3-$4/month for file sharing? fuck yes.
$3/$4 per month per RIGHTS holder? Fuck no.
From TFA
Late Friday afternoon, plaintiff's attorney Marc Bern said he filed a lawsuit against Random House and its Doubleday imprint in U.S. District Court in Manhattan charging that the publishers misrepresented that book as nonfiction. His client, California resident Karen Futernick, alleges in the suit that she purchased "A Million Little Pieces" on that basis but that the defendants "failed to conduct a reasonable investigation or inquiry regarding the truthfulness or accuracy" of the material. Mr. Bern said that he will seek more than $50 million in damages for the plaintiffs. "Nobody can get away with profiting with a product that you represented as something that it is not," says Alan Ripka, another partner in Napoli Bern Ripka LLP, the New York City law firm that filed the suit.
Ayup. $50 Million dollars because she bought a book marked as non-fiction that was actually fictional. If she ever went into the Boston Public Library, we could clear the national deficit just from the Natural Sciences section alone!
It's harsh to compare Bulgaria to Missouri alright
Just trying to figure out who it's harsh to....
Ok... trying to lock this down is like asking a geek which editor he prefers, vi or emacs.... So far we've found three "authorative" references to the damn boomstick (hmm.. nah..) that Marvin attempts to blow the earth up with.
Which has absolutely nothing to do with comets and things travelling through space..
(must... resist urge to.. aw hell..)
"Welcome to another episode of PIIIGGGSSSS IN SPPPPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACCCCEEE"
Funny, wikipedia says Q-36
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_the_Martian
Where was the loud, comet shattering kaboom? I'll tell you what, Mars will not be happy when they hear this, or that they didn't hear this.
Oh Well. Guess next time I will have to use an Illudium-Q-36 Space Modulator.
(toddles off)