That's the stupidest statement I've ever seen here on slashdot, and that's saying something. Al Fraken said it best in his book - people complain that news sources are biased towards the left or the right, and that's really missing the point. Yes, the NY Times might have a very, very slight left bias; the Wall Street Journal might have a teensy bit of a right-wing view on it; however, these institutions do their best to make their stories accurate and neutral. Their job is to inform the reader.
Then, you have the news that comes from other organizations like Fox News and the Washington Times. These are organizations which are so utterly, appallingly biased that it's clear their primary mission is to persuade. MediaWatch, a non-partisan media watchdog, actually found Fox viewers were MORE IGNORANT (that is, more likely to get current events questions wrong) than people WHO DID NOT WATCH THE NEWS. You actually become less informed by watching Fox!
"The articles are not stable. They change on a regular basis. If my students cite something, I need it to be static so that I can verify their citations easily." - you do realize that every article now has a "Permanent link" hyperlink in the side right (e.g, it's a link to the permanent version of the article you are viewing).
"No original research" means that, in fact, Wikipedians explicitely are NOT equiped to judge whether something is an expert consensus or not." -- Not exactly. No-Original-Research originated in the early days of Wikipedia because of physics cranks who had their own, erm, "creative" ideas about physics. The No-Original-Research policy means, in a nutshell, that you shouldn't be putting anything on Wikipedia that you thought up or concluded yourself; that any conclusions you do should be attriuted/attributable to a reputable person/organization within the field. Judging reputability is something we can and do practive on a daily basis.
(Dislaimer - I'm a wikipedia administrator, arbitrator, and the "featured article director" -- I choose the featured articles you see on the main page every day)
Last week I was a guest speaker for a group of education graduate students about Wikipedia (the course was on technology use in education; wikipedia was part of the curriculum). Before the lecture, sent them a few items I thought they should read - objective studies of Wikipedia's accuracy done by impartial, outside organization. Here's what I sent them:
---------- 1) "A group of students in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois has published a paper entitled "Information Quality Discussions in Wikipedia" (PDF format). The focus of the paper was on assessing the IQ of Wikipedia featured articles -- in this case, IQ stands for "information quality" -- when compared to other samples from the project, including featured article removal candidates, pages marked as NPOV disputes, and a selection of random pages. According to the paper, the study showed how seriously the Wikipedia project views issues of article quality. The authors concluded that as a quality standard, the featured article process "is not ideal, but it does seem relatively rigorous." They also noted that the process is not as resource-intensive as other possibilities, such as blind judging." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_S ignpost/2005-08-01/Featured_content PDF of research paper can be found at: http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~stvilia/papers/qualWiki. pdf
3) "As publicly editable sites, Wikis are vulnerable to vandalism. We've examined many pages on Wikipedia that treat controversial topics, and have discovered that most have, in fact, been vandalized at some point in their history. But we've also found that vandalism is usually repaired extremely quickly--so quickly that most users will never see its effects." - IBM study of Wikipedia - http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/history/results. htm
As far as my personal interactions - as featured article director, I can say first-hand that we've been hitting really hard on the need to have inline cited sources in the article text. It's been an explicit requirement for featured articles for some time now (9-12 months or so). In many ways, this makes our content much more trustworhty than most other information sources.
Furthermore, purely from personal experience, I can say there's something to be said for the expert-hobbyist. For example, the "best" writer on wikipedia (in terms of number of featured articles written) is a 17 year old from New Jersey who writes long, thorough, well referenced, accurate articles on, erm, British and the Bri
"Well...maybe it was for the best. Now I...I finally have time to do what I've always wanted: write the great American novel. Mine is about a futuristic amusement park where dinosaurs are brought to life through advanced cloning techniques. I call it "Billy and the Cloneasaurus." -- Principal Skinner, Episode 1F18
"the right for a company to use AND MODIFY a program to suit their own internal needs WITHOUT sharing the code with anyone" - internal, in this case, is subjective. If you are giving people the ability to run the program remotely via the web, is that really internal? You aren't, legally, distributing the code (as it remains on the servers), but in effect you are using someone else's code externally.
The purpose of the GPL is the encourage people to make their contributions available to the community. If you take some GPL'd code, modify it, and use it to sell stuff over the web, why shouldn't you be obligated to give back to the community whose work you are using to make money?
"Or are they going to enforce this based on hundreds of local community standards?" - Yes (as a result of the Miller test, they already do) This is why porn companies avoid Utah like the plague
From TFA: "The Miller test evaluates the literary, artistic, political, and scientific value of content as well as contemporary community standards. If content or expression is well within accepted community standards or it has intrinsic value, it does not constitute criminal obscenity. According to an electronic memo from FBI headquarters, established legal precedents indicate that conviction is most likely in cases where the content "includes bestiality, urination, defecation, as well as sadistic and masochistic behavior."
My rearch group does work with MPI and other C supercomputing extensions (like OMP). I've never heard of TIBCO, so I cannot really compare the two.
As I remember it, MPI is more explicit (you explictely tell it where to do fork-join operations), whereas OMP is more transparent (you set up fork-joins at loops, for example, and specify private vs shared variables and OMP takes care of the rest). As usual, YMMV.
(I know this is a bit offtopic, but...) Last spring, on Wikipedia, a user named Plautus Satire join joined. He was the absolute epitome of a toil-foil-hat crackpot, and unquestionably Wikipedia's most disruptive user ever. Among the many crackpot edits he made, was this this gem, stating that Einstien plagurized all his work from patent applications while he was a patent clerk. [As we were getting ready to kick him out, I started compiling his rantings here. ]
Consider the various rebellions that occured during the post-revolutionary period (Off the top of my head - Bacon's rebellion and the Whiskey rebellion; Shays' rebellion occured prior to the Consitutional Convention). The president authorized the Army to put down those insurrections, and it did not require congressional authorization. So quite frankly, I don't really see much different here, legally, between the two.
You misunderstand what the law says. The Constitution says the President is Command in Chief of the United States armed forces. That power was more-or-less unrestricted until 1973, when the Post-Vietnam Congress passed the War Powers Resolution. That act says that the president cannot deploy the US military in the field for more than 100(?) days without congressional authorization. However, in this case (e.g, a pre-emptive strike) it has no bearing. The president is free under the law to do it, provided that he get congressional authorization within 100 days or withdraw the troops.
Those math courses are not there to look pretty. The idea of a university curriculum is not to teach you how to be a code monkey. "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes" - Edsger Dijkstra
"Microsoft is on top, and will be for a long time."
I find this statement very questionable. Microsoft is big, rich, and entrenched. Those are pretty much their only virtues. On the other hand, when was the last time you heard anyone talking about a Microsoft product in anything but a lament? When was the last time you heard people eagerly talking about Microsoft's next move, like you hear so often with Google nowadays. Microsoft doesn't get the pick of the talent anymore, either. Microsoft only has two successful products - Windows and Office. Quite frankly, I think Microsoft is at the beginning of the same kind of decline that the industry has seen so often from the former giants like DEC and HP and IBM (before IBM re-invented itself)
It's doubtful that any of them would resign; however, it's well known that John Paul Stevens is trying *very hard* to outlast Bush and (hopefully) resign during a liberal president's term in office.
"So, does that mean fair use is not protected by law in the USA?" - yes, fair use is defined (very, very vaguely) in Title 17, section 107. In practice, fair use is defined by in court decisions as whatever-the-hell-we-think-it-should-be. Caselaw is inconsistent, and there are precious few rules.
Also, fair use is not a license, it's a defense in court. But by the time you actually win, you've already paid $100,000+ in legal fees, so you lose anyway.
Um, no - "fall into the public domain" (emphasis mine) almost always refers to a work whose copyright expires (as opposed to being placed into te public domain by its creator)
Creating a substitute for their server is not (in any way, shape, or form) equivalent to posting the entire contents of the book. The bnetd is to a blizzard game what a bookmark is to a book - it extends the functionality of the product. Is using a bookmark copyright infringement? No.
"Unregulated servers would make that much less effective."...and your point is? While Blizzard is fully within their rights to use the Battlenet service to reduce piracy, they are *NOT* entitled to do so by reducing the rights of the people who purchased their software.
Think about it this way - you bought something (a copy of a Blizzard game) and you want to use it in a different way than they want you to. Specifically, you want to connect to a private server instead of theirs [Battlenet]. As other people in this thread have commented, you might want to do it so you can change server settings (such as item spawning in Diablo) or you don't want to deal with politiking and/or the unpleasant people who do use battlenet.
In most cases, the maker of a product has no right to prohibit you from using it in a different way than intended. If I buy a book and use it as a doorstop instead of reading it, for example, the book's publisher has no recourse to stop me from doing just that.
However, Blizzard is using an ill-concieved law (the DMCA) to do just that, at the expense of our civil liberties (the right to use products we have purchased as we please). And, as if to add insult to injury, the DMCA explicitely does not apply to programs for the sake of interoprability, which is quite clearly the case here.
You are correct that the text (excluding quotations, which are copyrighted and an almost-universally accepted form of fair use/fair dealing) is available under the GNU free documentation license.
However, other media types (pictures, sounds, movies) can be under other licenses. In my experience, the most common license for those types of files is the GFDL, and CC-by-SA is the second most common. Public domain (which is not a license) is also fairly common, mostly thanks to the US government (nearly all work produced by/for the US Gov't is public domain)
Slashdot Mirror
Glad to see you citing that -- I wrote that part of WP:NOT :) -- [diff]
That's the stupidest statement I've ever seen here on slashdot, and that's saying something. Al Fraken said it best in his book - people complain that news sources are biased towards the left or the right, and that's really missing the point. Yes, the NY Times might have a very, very slight left bias; the Wall Street Journal might have a teensy bit of a right-wing view on it; however, these institutions do their best to make their stories accurate and neutral. Their job is to inform the reader.
Then, you have the news that comes from other organizations like Fox News and the Washington Times. These are organizations which are so utterly, appallingly biased that it's clear their primary mission is to persuade. MediaWatch, a non-partisan media watchdog, actually found Fox viewers were MORE IGNORANT (that is, more likely to get current events questions wrong) than people WHO DID NOT WATCH THE NEWS. You actually become less informed by watching Fox!
"The articles are not stable. They change on a regular basis. If my students cite something, I need it to be static so that I can verify their citations easily." - you do realize that every article now has a "Permanent link" hyperlink in the side right (e.g, it's a link to the permanent version of the article you are viewing).
"No original research" means that, in fact, Wikipedians explicitely are NOT equiped to judge whether something is an expert consensus or not." -- Not exactly. No-Original-Research originated in the early days of Wikipedia because of physics cranks who had their own, erm, "creative" ideas about physics. The No-Original-Research policy means, in a nutshell, that you shouldn't be putting anything on Wikipedia that you thought up or concluded yourself; that any conclusions you do should be attriuted/attributable to a reputable person/organization within the field. Judging reputability is something we can and do practive on a daily basis.
(Dislaimer - I'm a wikipedia administrator, arbitrator, and the "featured article director" -- I choose the featured articles you see on the main page every day)
/Lexika: Wikipedia gegen Brockhaus und Encarta/, starting on p. 132 - http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_vs_Brockh aus_and_Encarta
Last week I was a guest speaker for a group of education graduate students about Wikipedia (the course was on technology use in education; wikipedia was part of the curriculum). Before the lecture, sent them a few items I thought they should read - objective studies of Wikipedia's accuracy done by impartial, outside organization. Here's what I sent them:
----------
1) "A group of students in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois has published a paper entitled "Information Quality Discussions in Wikipedia" (PDF format). The focus of the paper was on assessing the IQ of Wikipedia featured articles -- in this case, IQ stands for "information quality" -- when compared to other samples from the project, including featured article removal candidates, pages marked as NPOV disputes, and a selection of random pages. According to the paper, the study showed how seriously the Wikipedia project views issues of article quality. The authors concluded that as a quality standard, the featured article process "is not ideal, but it does seem relatively rigorous." They also noted that the process is not as resource-intensive as other possibilities, such as blind judging." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_S ignpost/2005-08-01/Featured_content
PDF of research paper can be found at: http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~stvilia/papers/qualWiki. pdf
2) An article comparing the WP to Brockhaus and Encarta has appeared in issue 21/04 of C't, a major German computer engineering magazine. It is titled
Full survey results can be found at: http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/20 04-October/035339.html
3) "As publicly editable sites, Wikis are vulnerable to vandalism. We've examined many pages on Wikipedia that treat controversial topics, and have discovered that most have, in fact, been vandalized at some point in their history. But we've also found that vandalism is usually repaired extremely quickly--so quickly that most users will never see its effects." - IBM study of Wikipedia - http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/history/results. htm
4) Computer Science professor (and minor geek rockstar) Ed Felton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Felten) posted in his blog about a
small-scale survey he did of Wikipedia: http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=674
-----------------
As far as my personal interactions - as featured article director, I can say first-hand that we've been hitting really hard on the need to have inline cited sources in the article text. It's been an explicit requirement for featured articles for some time now (9-12 months or so). In many ways, this makes our content much more trustworhty than most other information sources.
Furthermore, purely from personal experience, I can say there's something to be said for the expert-hobbyist. For example, the "best" writer on wikipedia (in terms of number of featured articles written) is a 17 year old from New Jersey who writes long, thorough, well referenced, accurate articles on, erm, British and the Bri
"Well...maybe it was for the best. Now I...I finally have time to do what I've always wanted: write the great American novel. Mine is about a futuristic amusement park where dinosaurs are brought to life through advanced cloning techniques. I call it "Billy and the Cloneasaurus." -- Principal Skinner, Episode 1F18
"the right for a company to use AND MODIFY a program to suit their own internal needs WITHOUT sharing the code with anyone" - internal, in this case, is subjective. If you are giving people the ability to run the program remotely via the web, is that really internal? You aren't, legally, distributing the code (as it remains on the servers), but in effect you are using someone else's code externally.
The purpose of the GPL is the encourage people to make their contributions available to the community. If you take some GPL'd code, modify it, and use it to sell stuff over the web, why shouldn't you be obligated to give back to the community whose work you are using to make money?
"Or are they going to enforce this based on hundreds of local community standards?" - Yes (as a result of the Miller test, they already do) This is why porn companies avoid Utah like the plague
From TFA: "The Miller test evaluates the literary, artistic, political, and scientific value of content as well as contemporary community standards. If content or expression is well within accepted community standards or it has intrinsic value, it does not constitute criminal obscenity. According to an electronic memo from FBI headquarters, established legal precedents indicate that conviction is most likely in cases where the content "includes bestiality, urination, defecation, as well as sadistic and masochistic behavior."
Sorry, but when you are talking about blood sucking vampires (Buffy et al), you've left the realm of Science Fiction and entered fantasy.
My rearch group does work with MPI and other C supercomputing extensions (like OMP). I've never heard of TIBCO, so I cannot really compare the two.
As I remember it, MPI is more explicit (you explictely tell it where to do fork-join operations), whereas OMP is more transparent (you set up fork-joins at loops, for example, and specify private vs shared variables and OMP takes care of the rest). As usual, YMMV.
(I know this is a bit offtopic, but...) Last spring, on Wikipedia, a user named Plautus Satire join joined. He was the absolute epitome of a toil-foil-hat crackpot, and unquestionably Wikipedia's most disruptive user ever. Among the many crackpot edits he made, was this this gem, stating that Einstien plagurized all his work from patent applications while he was a patent clerk. [As we were getting ready to kick him out, I started compiling his rantings here. ]
Consider the various rebellions that occured during the post-revolutionary period (Off the top of my head - Bacon's rebellion and the Whiskey rebellion; Shays' rebellion occured prior to the Consitutional Convention). The president authorized the Army to put down those insurrections, and it did not require congressional authorization. So quite frankly, I don't really see much different here, legally, between the two.
You misunderstand what the law says. The Constitution says the President is Command in Chief of the United States armed forces. That power was more-or-less unrestricted until 1973, when the Post-Vietnam Congress passed the War Powers Resolution. That act says that the president cannot deploy the US military in the field for more than 100(?) days without congressional authorization. However, in this case (e.g, a pre-emptive strike) it has no bearing. The president is free under the law to do it, provided that he get congressional authorization within 100 days or withdraw the troops.
Those math courses are not there to look pretty. The idea of a university curriculum is not to teach you how to be a code monkey. "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes" - Edsger Dijkstra
"Microsoft is on top, and will be for a long time."
I find this statement very questionable. Microsoft is big, rich, and entrenched. Those are pretty much their only virtues. On the other hand, when was the last time you heard anyone talking about a Microsoft product in anything but a lament? When was the last time you heard people eagerly talking about Microsoft's next move, like you hear so often with Google nowadays. Microsoft doesn't get the pick of the talent anymore, either. Microsoft only has two successful products - Windows and Office. Quite frankly, I think Microsoft is at the beginning of the same kind of decline that the industry has seen so often from the former giants like DEC and HP and IBM (before IBM re-invented itself)
"Therefore, if this policy will prevent me from refilling a certain brand of ink cartridge, I will simply buy a different brand."
...And when everyone starts doing this?
It's doubtful that any of them would resign; however, it's well known that John Paul Stevens is trying *very hard* to outlast Bush and (hopefully) resign during a liberal president's term in office.
"So, does that mean fair use is not protected by law in the USA?" - yes, fair use is defined (very, very vaguely) in Title 17, section 107. In practice, fair use is defined by in court decisions as whatever-the-hell-we-think-it-should-be. Caselaw is inconsistent, and there are precious few rules.
Also, fair use is not a license, it's a defense in court. But by the time you actually win, you've already paid $100,000+ in legal fees, so you lose anyway.
Um, no - "fall into the public domain" (emphasis mine) almost always refers to a work whose copyright expires (as opposed to being placed into te public domain by its creator)
Creating a substitute for their server is not (in any way, shape, or form) equivalent to posting the entire contents of the book. The bnetd is to a blizzard game what a bookmark is to a book - it extends the functionality of the product. Is using a bookmark copyright infringement? No.
...and your point is? While Blizzard is fully within their rights to use the Battlenet service to reduce piracy, they are *NOT* entitled to do so by reducing the rights of the people who purchased their software.
"Unregulated servers would make that much less effective."
The neandarthals were a different species, which means (by definition) there was no interbreeding.
Think about it this way - you bought something (a copy of a Blizzard game) and you want to use it in a different way than they want you to. Specifically, you want to connect to a private server instead of theirs [Battlenet]. As other people in this thread have commented, you might want to do it so you can change server settings (such as item spawning in Diablo) or you don't want to deal with politiking and/or the unpleasant people who do use battlenet.
In most cases, the maker of a product has no right to prohibit you from using it in a different way than intended. If I buy a book and use it as a doorstop instead of reading it, for example, the book's publisher has no recourse to stop me from doing just that.
However, Blizzard is using an ill-concieved law (the DMCA) to do just that, at the expense of our civil liberties (the right to use products we have purchased as we please). And, as if to add insult to injury, the DMCA explicitely does not apply to programs for the sake of interoprability, which is quite clearly the case here.
You are correct that the text (excluding quotations, which are copyrighted and an almost-universally accepted form of fair use/fair dealing) is available under the GNU free documentation license.
However, other media types (pictures, sounds, movies) can be under other licenses. In my experience, the most common license for those types of files is the GFDL, and CC-by-SA is the second most common. Public domain (which is not a license) is also fairly common, mostly thanks to the US government (nearly all work produced by/for the US Gov't is public domain)
--A Wikipedia Administrator