Apple is generally quite open about allowing people to run whatever they want on the Hardware they sell (their computers anyway, not their Consumer Electronics) Back in the power days, you could run MacOS or any of a number of variants of POWER Unix (Linux, BSD, etc) now you have the option of running OS X, BSD, Linux, or even Windows. The hardware isn't exactly closed in terms of what it can run.
Yeah, just like BeOS. It wasn't Apple's fault that BeOS wouldn't run on the new G3 machines, because open Apple were really open about the hardware.
So create a new Wiki for original research purposes. That's a sufficiently different area that it's better to set it up separately, rather than having Wikipedia become bogged down with all the problems that would come with allowing original research.
I hate MySpace for those reasons - but I was unimpressed when PCWorld went into a "OMG won't somebody think of the children" rant: "The ease with which anyone of any age can create a page, upload photos, share deeply personal details of their lives, and make new "friends" quickly turned MySpace into a one-stop shopping mall for online predators."... "MySpace has begun modifying its policies--for example, limiting adults' ability to contact minors. That's hardly enough. Requiring some kind of authentication from MySpacers--or their parents--to validate their ages and identities would go a long way toward scaring off the creeps and making the site a kinder, gentler social network."
Most sites on the Internet that allow people to communicate have no such restrictions, and I'm going to be wary of any site which requires proof of personal information just because of a few highly publicised cases that used the site as a scapegoat. Perhaps we should be teaching these children a bit of personal responsibility.
This is not a "security" issue as they claim. This is the sort of ranting I'd expect from the Daily Mail, not a tech site.
The question of "why" is of a different nature -- it can't be answered using the tools of science -- and falls into the problem domains of philosophy and theology.
I agree, and I'd say the reason it can't be answered by science is that it's an assumption that there is "Why?" to be answered in the first place. If there was evidence that there was some kind of purpose to the Universe, then it would fall into the realm of science.
Proof: The evidence or argument that compels the mind to accept an assertion as true.
So I think observations can form a "proof". A proof in the absolute sense does not exist in science, but no one claims it does, so I'm not sure what your point is.
If you were thinking of Proof: The validation of a proposition by application of specified rules, as of induction or deduction, to assumptions, axioms, and sequentially derived conclusions. then that's relevant to mathematics, not science.
Hell, you might as well say "It's not a proof, because there wasn't a jury involved", or "It's not proof, because there isn't any alcohol in it"...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiabili ty : The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth. If the information is collected by you going to gaming conventions and reporting your findings, and not from published sources, then sorry, that's original research and shouldn't be in Wikipedia.
I think it makes sense. It stops people saying "Trust me, I know because of such-and-such". Now, I wonder if an encyclopedia that requires editors to be "experts" could drop this restriction. But firstly, I still don't think that an encyclopedia is the place for new research, and secondly, as you point out, it would be hard to rate who was an "expert" in gaming conventions.
The fact that it's hard to quantify expertise is one of the reasons why Wikipedia requires verifiability.
A friend of mine is an authority in his very specific field of medicine. Surgeons have been taught new methods based on his discoveries and new drugs can be made also due to him. He told me that he looked up his particular area in Wikipedia and found some of the information to be incorrect, so he edited it to correct the flaws. Soon after that, the previous author had removed his edits. Perhaps ego sometimes wins the day at Wikipedia and then the truth suffers.
So tell us what that article is, and which edits, please?
I'm not saying you're lying, but there may be some reasons for why this happened. (I just love how we're not supposed to edit Wikipedia, but we are supposed to trust ACs on Slashdot who make claims without references...)
And if you're absolutely right, readers can at least make sure it's fixed now.
Encyclopedias are supposed to be authoritive texts.
Because the point of an encyclopedia is the distillation of quality scholarship, not the preservation of crap.
I see nothing about an encyclopedia which means it can only cover academic subject. Popular culture including music is certainly reasonable to include.
By the way, do you never throw anything away because its outlived its usefulness because "someone, somewhere, cared enough to create it"?
Unuseful articles can be deleted on Wikipedia, so that's a strawman. The question is, do you throw things away because someone somewhere thinks your stuff is crap?
That being that it _is_ the broad mass of eyes that have produced that peice of crap in the first place. I cannot tell you how many articles I've found on wikipedia that are completely full of crap. And since I don't have the time to sit around and watch for when someone comes along and changes it back or to something equally false, the few that actually know something can't make things right.
Do you have examples of such articles, and where an article was fixed, but then reverted because the original fixer wasn't around to watch it?
People (in general) do NOT go through the wikipedia with suspicion but take it as absolute fact. Furthermore, wikipedia is do little if anything to change this perception.
My own experience is the complete opposite. People can take any other book, person or website as absolute proof ("so-and-so says it, so it must be true"), but as soon as someone mentions Wikipedia, it's taken with a huge grain of salt (often people will use phrases like "according to Wikipedia" when linking to it).
I love this statement. I especially love rephrasing it: "We'd normally chop off your whole arm for this, but we're only going to chop off your hand. Consider yourself lucky."
Less restrictive is still restrictive.
My rephrasing: "Normally I wouldn't give you anything, but here's $10, consider yourself lucky", and then you whine that I didn't give you $20.
But neither of these analogies are really relevant here (not redistributing someone's software doesn't infringe on you in the same way as forceably chopping off body parts).
Do you criticise everyone except those who release everything they do into the public domain?
And in its own bizarre manner/. admits the RIAA has a point.
Leaving aside the point that there exists more than one person on Slashdot, it's notable that on software piracy threads, far more people tend to be against the idea of people profiting from copyright infringement, or doing so in a commercial context in some way. So this isn't connected to the RIAA suing grannies for downloading stuff to listen to.
How does karma stop spam? Not moderation (which Wikipedia already has on a far more powerful level than Slashdot, in that edits can be reverted rather than simply moderated down), but the karma bonus system? I see no way to distinguish the trolls from the majority of Slashdotters who are not trolls, but simply do not have a karma bonus.
You're missing the point of an encyclopedia - it's not useful because it's written by self-appointed experts - if I want that, I go to a primary or secondary source. It's useful because it collects together facts, and provides sources for those facts.
Now not every Wikipedia page has references, so there is much work to be done, but this shouldn't be a case of trusting random strangers, whether it's Wikipedia or some random book or website.
As far people rewriting history the way they like it, the fact remains that Wikipedia ends up being far less biased than any other freely available source of information (please don't tell me you're willing to believe news corporations!)
While the slashdot moderation system is complete crap, can you imagine what this place would be like without anything at all? Me neither.
You're confusing moderation with karma. Wikipedia already has the highest level of moderation - previous edits can actually be reverted. As for karma - well, I can imagine Slashdot without it, because I have the karma bonuses/penalties disabled in my preferences. And boy does it make things more readable.
You're missing the point - yes, Slashdot moderation works well for getting rid of trolls, or what would be vandalism on Wikipedia - but Wikipedia already has a system far more stronger than moderation: You can edit the post so the material is deleted altogether.
What people are talking about here is a karma system, where people who post "good" things somehow get treated better. I'm not sure how that would work with vandals/trolls - giving them negative karma won't work because they just get new accounts or edit anonymously.
And what is wikipedia today if not "groupthink"? As much as they like to say their is "NPOV" and that this is purely objective, I call BS.
But if what you say is true, then a karma system would only make this worse. Who would get the most karma? Those people who are spending all their time editing on Wikipedia, of course.
Slashdot's karma system is far from perfect, but at the end of the day it works.
I disagree. I set my preferences so anons don't have a -1, and people with karma bonuses aren't shown with +1.
If you have something good to say, it should stand on its own merit - and that applies to Wikipedia. We should accept information there because it is verifiable, and not because we trust the random person who wrote it.
It's the Internet. Anyone and everyone can get the information that is out there regardless of the easily circumvented restrictions put in place by the website.
So if your ISP started publishing your private emails publically, that'd be okay because "it's the Internet"?
I fail to see what is so special about "The Internet" anyway. By this logic, if I can find out information about you, it's okay to publish it worldwide.
This goes for anything that you post publically including your blog, your gallery, your Slashdot posts, your old usenet posts, your random Dodgeball history, etc.
True, but the thing about Facebook is the information is not public in the sense of viewable by all - so if it turns out that they then retain the right to publish the information to all, then that is something to be worried about. This isn't the same as Slashdot making your Slashdot posts public, because they're already public, and you know that when you post.
In order to sell free software, you need to add value to it - since people are free to obtain the original software freely, this is not seen as profiting from someone else's work.
With piracy, chances are he isn't adding value - or rather, the only value he's adding is making it easier to get hold of, but the only reason it's hard to get hold of for free is because that's not legal.
I have never replied on/. but had to on this one alone -- great reply. You captured not only the essence of three major sites, you also captured the soul three generations. Nice Job!
It was funny, yeah, but it's not meant to be taken seriously. It'd be like summarising Slashdot as geeks with no social life who live in their mother's basement and write "First Post!" all the time. We can laugh at it, but I'd be worried if someone thought that was a genuine summary of here...
This just plain scares me. In a society where a criminal can sue the homeowner of the house he broke into and got injured AND WIN.
How on earth is this relevant? People with disabilities are now criminals?
As long as this covers commercial websites and not a personal ones, the comparison to being injured in someone's home isn't relevant. And I assume it doesn't cover private websites, where the person has to hack into it, either.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple is generally quite open about allowing people to run whatever they want on the Hardware they sell (their computers anyway, not their Consumer Electronics) Back in the power days, you could run MacOS or any of a number of variants of POWER Unix (Linux, BSD, etc) now you have the option of running OS X, BSD, Linux, or even Windows. The hardware isn't exactly closed in terms of what it can run.
Yeah, just like BeOS. It wasn't Apple's fault that BeOS wouldn't run on the new G3 machines, because open Apple were really open about the hardware.
Or more likely, they'd shoot first and mug second.
So create a new Wiki for original research purposes. That's a sufficiently different area that it's better to set it up separately, rather than having Wikipedia become bogged down with all the problems that would come with allowing original research.
I hate MySpace for those reasons - but I was unimpressed when PCWorld went into a "OMG won't somebody think of the children" rant: "The ease with which anyone of any age can create a page, upload photos, share deeply personal details of their lives, and make new "friends" quickly turned MySpace into a one-stop shopping mall for online predators." ... "MySpace has begun modifying its policies--for example, limiting adults' ability to contact minors. That's hardly enough. Requiring some kind of authentication from MySpacers--or their parents--to validate their ages and identities would go a long way toward scaring off the creeps and making the site a kinder, gentler social network."
Most sites on the Internet that allow people to communicate have no such restrictions, and I'm going to be wary of any site which requires proof of personal information just because of a few highly publicised cases that used the site as a scapegoat. Perhaps we should be teaching these children a bit of personal responsibility.
This is not a "security" issue as they claim. This is the sort of ranting I'd expect from the Daily Mail, not a tech site.
The question of "why" is of a different nature -- it can't be answered using the tools of science -- and falls into the problem domains of philosophy and theology.
I agree, and I'd say the reason it can't be answered by science is that it's an assumption that there is "Why?" to be answered in the first place. If there was evidence that there was some kind of purpose to the Universe, then it would fall into the realm of science.
Proof: The evidence or argument that compels the mind to accept an assertion as true.
So I think observations can form a "proof". A proof in the absolute sense does not exist in science, but no one claims it does, so I'm not sure what your point is.
If you were thinking of Proof: The validation of a proposition by application of specified rules, as of induction or deduction, to assumptions, axioms, and sequentially derived conclusions. then that's relevant to mathematics, not science.
Hell, you might as well say "It's not a proof, because there wasn't a jury involved", or "It's not proof, because there isn't any alcohol in it"...
Well, one would be free, as in both beer and in speech.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiabili ty : The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth. If the information is collected by you going to gaming conventions and reporting your findings, and not from published sources, then sorry, that's original research and shouldn't be in Wikipedia.
I think it makes sense. It stops people saying "Trust me, I know because of such-and-such". Now, I wonder if an encyclopedia that requires editors to be "experts" could drop this restriction. But firstly, I still don't think that an encyclopedia is the place for new research, and secondly, as you point out, it would be hard to rate who was an "expert" in gaming conventions.
The fact that it's hard to quantify expertise is one of the reasons why Wikipedia requires verifiability.
You can't be *too* much
more useful or exhaustive than Britannica if you inisist only re-regurgitating
information.
Why is in important to be more useful or exhaustive than Britannica? Wikipedia is not meant to be a place for original research.
A friend of mine is an authority in his very specific field of medicine. Surgeons have been taught new methods based on his discoveries and new drugs can be made also due to him. He told me that he looked up his particular area in Wikipedia and found some of the information to be incorrect, so he edited it to correct the flaws. Soon after that, the previous author had removed his edits. Perhaps ego sometimes wins the day at Wikipedia and then the truth suffers.
So tell us what that article is, and which edits, please?
I'm not saying you're lying, but there may be some reasons for why this happened. (I just love how we're not supposed to edit Wikipedia, but we are supposed to trust ACs on Slashdot who make claims without references...)
And if you're absolutely right, readers can at least make sure it's fixed now.
Encyclopedias are supposed to be authoritive texts.
I disagree that that's part of the definition.
Because the point of an encyclopedia is the distillation of quality scholarship, not the preservation of crap.
I see nothing about an encyclopedia which means it can only cover academic subject. Popular culture including music is certainly reasonable to include.
By the way, do you never throw anything away because its outlived its usefulness because "someone, somewhere, cared enough to create it"?
Unuseful articles can be deleted on Wikipedia, so that's a strawman. The question is, do you throw things away because someone somewhere thinks your stuff is crap?
That being that it _is_ the broad mass of eyes that have produced that peice of crap in the first place. I cannot tell you how many articles I've found on wikipedia that are completely full of crap. And since I don't have the time to sit around and watch for when someone comes along and changes it back or to something equally false, the few that actually know something can't make things right.
Do you have examples of such articles, and where an article was fixed, but then reverted because the original fixer wasn't around to watch it?
People (in general) do NOT go through the wikipedia with suspicion but take it as absolute fact. Furthermore, wikipedia is do little if anything to change this perception.
My own experience is the complete opposite. People can take any other book, person or website as absolute proof ("so-and-so says it, so it must be true"), but as soon as someone mentions Wikipedia, it's taken with a huge grain of salt (often people will use phrases like "according to Wikipedia" when linking to it).
I love this statement. I especially love rephrasing it: "We'd normally chop off your whole arm for this, but we're only going to chop off your hand. Consider yourself lucky."
Less restrictive is still restrictive.
My rephrasing: "Normally I wouldn't give you anything, but here's $10, consider yourself lucky", and then you whine that I didn't give you $20.
But neither of these analogies are really relevant here (not redistributing someone's software doesn't infringe on you in the same way as forceably chopping off body parts).
Do you criticise everyone except those who release everything they do into the public domain?
And in its own bizarre manner /. admits the RIAA has a point.
Leaving aside the point that there exists more than one person on Slashdot, it's notable that on software piracy threads, far more people tend to be against the idea of people profiting from copyright infringement, or doing so in a commercial context in some way. So this isn't connected to the RIAA suing grannies for downloading stuff to listen to.
How does karma stop spam? Not moderation (which Wikipedia already has on a far more powerful level than Slashdot, in that edits can be reverted rather than simply moderated down), but the karma bonus system? I see no way to distinguish the trolls from the majority of Slashdotters who are not trolls, but simply do not have a karma bonus.
You're missing the point of an encyclopedia - it's not useful because it's written by self-appointed experts - if I want that, I go to a primary or secondary source. It's useful because it collects together facts, and provides sources for those facts.
Now not every Wikipedia page has references, so there is much work to be done, but this shouldn't be a case of trusting random strangers, whether it's Wikipedia or some random book or website.
As far people rewriting history the way they like it, the fact remains that Wikipedia ends up being far less biased than any other freely available source of information (please don't tell me you're willing to believe news corporations!)
While the slashdot moderation system is complete crap, can you imagine what this place would be like without anything at all? Me neither.
You're confusing moderation with karma. Wikipedia already has the highest level of moderation - previous edits can actually be reverted. As for karma - well, I can imagine Slashdot without it, because I have the karma bonuses/penalties disabled in my preferences. And boy does it make things more readable.
You're missing the point - yes, Slashdot moderation works well for getting rid of trolls, or what would be vandalism on Wikipedia - but Wikipedia already has a system far more stronger than moderation: You can edit the post so the material is deleted altogether.
What people are talking about here is a karma system, where people who post "good" things somehow get treated better. I'm not sure how that would work with vandals/trolls - giving them negative karma won't work because they just get new accounts or edit anonymously.
And what is wikipedia today if not "groupthink"? As much as they like to say their is "NPOV" and that this is purely objective, I call BS.
But if what you say is true, then a karma system would only make this worse. Who would get the most karma? Those people who are spending all their time editing on Wikipedia, of course.
Slashdot's karma system is far from perfect, but at the end of the day it works.
I disagree. I set my preferences so anons don't have a -1, and people with karma bonuses aren't shown with +1.
If you have something good to say, it should stand on its own merit - and that applies to Wikipedia. We should accept information there because it is verifiable, and not because we trust the random person who wrote it.
It's the Internet. Anyone and everyone can get the information that is out there regardless of the easily circumvented restrictions put in place by the website.
So if your ISP started publishing your private emails publically, that'd be okay because "it's the Internet"?
I fail to see what is so special about "The Internet" anyway. By this logic, if I can find out information about you, it's okay to publish it worldwide.
This goes for anything that you post publically including your blog, your gallery, your Slashdot posts, your old usenet posts, your random Dodgeball history, etc.
True, but the thing about Facebook is the information is not public in the sense of viewable by all - so if it turns out that they then retain the right to publish the information to all, then that is something to be worried about. This isn't the same as Slashdot making your Slashdot posts public, because they're already public, and you know that when you post.
In order to sell free software, you need to add value to it - since people are free to obtain the original software freely, this is not seen as profiting from someone else's work.
With piracy, chances are he isn't adding value - or rather, the only value he's adding is making it easier to get hold of, but the only reason it's hard to get hold of for free is because that's not legal.
I have never replied on /. but had to on this one alone -- great reply. You captured not only the essence of three major sites, you also captured the soul three generations. Nice Job!
It was funny, yeah, but it's not meant to be taken seriously. It'd be like summarising Slashdot as geeks with no social life who live in their mother's basement and write "First Post!" all the time. We can laugh at it, but I'd be worried if someone thought that was a genuine summary of here...
This just plain scares me. In a society where a criminal can sue the homeowner of the house he broke into and got injured AND WIN.
How on earth is this relevant? People with disabilities are now criminals?
As long as this covers commercial websites and not a personal ones, the comparison to being injured in someone's home isn't relevant. And I assume it doesn't cover private websites, where the person has to hack into it, either.