To be specific, it sums up Wikipedia edits. (The philosophy being that vandalism such as libelous and childish edits should be reverted without discussion, thus even if the range of edits is uniform between beneficial and vandalism, what a user actually sees is more likely to be biased towards the beneficial end.)
And someone could start selling encyclopdias which had random errors intentionally put in.
Just because something is hypothetically possible (a large number of people on different IPs vandalising a large number of articles), doesn't mean it is happening.
And if that ever did happen, and couldn't be resolved, I guess they might consider disallowing anonymous edits which would put a stop to it. But it isn't happening now, so I'm not sure what your point is - I'm sure someone could take down Slashdot by flooding it with anonymous comments, but you're still reading here, aren't you?
For instance, how many of the GPL project contributors are too young to sign a legal contract (i.e., 17 years or younger) and therefore not able to legally contribute code to a GPL project?
How is this an issue? The GPL is not a legal contract (either for the user or the author), and young people are still allowed to hold copyrights.
Perhaps it might be an issue for projects where you are expected to hand over your copyright of your contribution, but that only applies to some GPL projects. And I'm not convinced it's an issue anyway (eg, think of all the teenage popstars who presumably have signed over copyright to the record companies).
The RIAA forgets that to have a crime, you must have intent. If Windows default-shares My Documents, and you've got a pile of music in there with your tax returns and travel plans, can they really allege that you intended to share all that stuff? I sure as hell didn't.
What has intent got to do with whether or not somebody actually downloads it?
If someone can accidently share music, then there is still no intent even if someone is downloading their music. On the other hand, one could intend to share music, but then not have anyone actually download it.
Did you know that video or photography taken on private property or of private property requires the permission of the owner before you can exhibit them?
Google Earth owes me royalties!!!
Really, do you think they have permission from every property holder on the planet?
The links you posted referred to usage "for trade or advertising purposes", "for commercial purposes in an annual report, advertisement, etc.", "in order to sell your photo for commercial use ", and even then are a just-in-case point of view ("We know of no case that has ever settled those kinds of questions").
Can you provide a link to IP law, and not some "property release"?
When it comes to letting people know about you, for the most part it's a lot better to let other people choose whether they want to read it, rather than you having to decide who might want to read it. On the one hand, you might miss out emailing some people fearing they are uninterested, and on the other hand, you end up spamming people who aren't interested.
When you take into account commenting, the "spam" issue becomes a far bigger problem. It's bad enough if a friend emails a whole load of people when I'm not really interested - but it's much worse when I get spammed loads of messages, because people are having an email conversation about it. With something like LiveJournal, you can choose whether to follow it or not.
Email is great for 1-to-1 communication, but it's not up to doing the job of what LiveJournal can be used for.
Considering the mainstream perception of the stereotypical "geek", I always find it amusing when people on Slashdot bash emo and/or Livejournal... Eg, "smelly geek who posts to Slashdot all day from his mum's basement" is hardly high up on the ladder of admired stereotypes;)
(And on a more serious note, in my experience self-harm seems to be pretty common amongst "geeks", certainly more so than average.)
Apple hasn't bashed an Intel chip via their marketing since back when the G4 was actually considered a fast chip.
Not true - even with the G5, they were still making claims of "fastest personal computer", with carefully chosen benchmarks to show PPC being (supposedly) faster than x86 (eg, see http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2003/jun/23pmg5.ht ml ).
Oh really? What is to stop the company from giving a bogus reason and then documenting false evidence to show why they fired someone? Say like they don't like a person's religion, and they encourage some of their coworkers to file complaints against them in exchange for better working hours or pay raises? Suddenly that person has bad behavior and unethical conduct, and thus is fired for such and has the documentation to back it up and these people will swear to it in court as well. How can you defend yourself against a dozen of your former coworkers who are testifying against you, and they used to be your best friends?
Well obviously a company could choose to illegally fabricate evidence - in that case, you make a claim of unfair dismissal, and get the courts to sort it out. You might as well say that it's pointless making theft (or whatever) illegal, because someone could get their friends to lie for them and hence get away with it.
The point is that if it's a lot harder to fire someone, and the company has to both engage in illegal activity, and encourage the coworkers to illegally file false claims, then clearly this is not going to happen anywhere as often, and if it does happen, the employee has some chance of sorting it out through the courts.
Like any law, the system isn't perfect, but that doesn't mean the law is useless.
Furthermore, this doesn't really change my point, in fact, you argue in favour of it: If a company is willing to lie, then there is no point protecting only some classes such as race or religion. A company would simply fire the employee for some other unprotected reason, and it's a lot easier to do that than having to fabricate evidence that they've committed some gross misconduct worthy of dismissal.
Actually, I wonder why sexual orientation discrimination can't be considered a subset of gender discrimination. Consider, if a man is discriminated against because he is attracted towards men, when a woman who is attracted towards men wouldn't be, then that is clearly discrimination based on gender (yes, clearly it's specifically based on orientation, but only as a subset of gender discrimination).
It seems a bit of an odd way of looking at it, but only because we are used to thinking of orientation in terms of straight/gay rather than in terms of attracted to men/attracted to women.
I would rather the laws stop discrimination against phyiscal attributes only, rather than beliefs or other vague things that are hard to define.
It's unfair that religion is protected, but other personal beliefs are not - but I'd go the opposite way, and say that all discrimination should be protected.
For example, in the UK, unlike many (most?) US states, you can't be fired for no reason. This to me seems a better and fairer system than one where you can be fired for any reason, except if one of a few arbitrary protected classes.
To be fair, Steve's statements were absolutely 100% accurate (assuming the figures are accurate, which I expect them to be). For that benchmark, the intel machine is 2x-3x faster.
And I remember the days when they hand-picked the benchmarks to show the PowerPC being 2x faster than Intel...
Imagine if MS hadn't killed BE... instead of Intel and MS ruling the desktop market for so long and forcing single threaded high-Megahurtz toaster oven computers on the world, we could have had BeOS 7 systems with Quad PPC chips with 4 cores on each by now.
Actually, whilst MS' unfair practices put a final end to Be, on x86, I think it's fair to say that it was Apple who put an end to BeOS on PPC.
I DO NOT want to go/come to the USA because of the current regime (not the average septic;o) ), however, I have still been forced to have one of these passports.
Indeed, here in the UK, biometric passports are being introduced "because they're needed for the US".
As for damaged cards - the UK's planned ID card (which will also be a passport) will even require you to notify the authorities if it is damaged, or you will face up to 51 weeks in prison ( http://www.defy-id.org.uk/bill_guide.htm ).
That's funny, the machines I've used at work (first with 2000, then XP) have never crashed, in four and a half years (I used NT for about a year before that, which crashed once or twice). Maybe I should troll out my story about how I once tried Linux, and it sometimes crashed causing me to have to reboot.
My machine at home (running 2000) did crash sometimes due to a driver problem, though this was a machine built from a load of different bits of hardware (the problem piece was a really old sound card, made long before 2000 was around) - whether it's right or wrong that it crashed, this is simply incomparable to Macs where you don't have that option to pick-and-mix hardware yourself.
If admins were honest with their users and didn't try to defend Windows or say that all operating systems crash just as much, the world would be a better place.
The world would be a better place if people stopped peddling anecdotal evidence as if it were some kind of replacement for actual research.
Thanks, but we'll keep calling them Macs for so long as they run Macintosh OS.
*ahem* They don't run MacOS anymore, or at least not the same one;)
Of course, the original post is wrong, since trademarks don't have to be tied to the actual technology, but I see a point here. (Compare how on the articles about new Amigas in the past, we had to wade through hundreds of "But it's not an Amiga!" whining, which strangely often got modded up whilst pointing out the same here is a Troll.)
I do enjoy using Wikipedia for day-to-day use but I would not have used it for either of my Masters Thesis' as I don't think either oral defense committee would have accepted Wiki as an authoritative source.
No one claims Wikipedia should be used as an "authoritative source". In fact, Wikipedia is quite clear that Original Research is not even allowed there.
My Youngest son was buying his drugs ( mostly pot, at least I fucking hope ) from this site. And after hacking into his profile, tracking his so-called friends and online buddies,
Meanwhile on MySpace, I can just imagine parents describing Slashdot as a place where their kids have been learning all these naughty hacking tricks, and wondering if they should just blacklist the damn thing...
Exactly - even if he did wrong, this was entirely an internal issue between the school and a student.
There often seem to be "Student arrested for such and such" stories - I wonder, is this some general difference between the US and UK, or just that people think that computer related offences are more serious and need to be dealt with by the police?
I mean, back in my day, if you graffitied on the blackboard, the teacher would tell you off. Now it seems, they call the cops.
As you say yourself, it has to damage someone's reputation, but I can't see this being the case here. It has to be believable (eg, a claim that you are actually an alien is disguise is not going to be libel).
Second, if he goes to a private university, agrees to a code of conduct, then violates it- that's not "civil liberties".
Believe it or not, there's more to the concepts of rights and freedom than that - even private organisations are not exempt from rights given in law, even if you sign them away (eg, consider employment law). If the only way to get education involves restrictions on freedom, then that is a loss of freedom.
Bloggers seem absolutely shocked at a centuries-old legal concept:
On the contrary, it's people who seem absolutely shocked at centuries-old legal concepts that insults and criticisms are perfectly legal, and seem to think that just because it's "online", it's suddenly illegal.
Much of what you say isn't really a "Wikipedia vs everyone else" difference, but more the difference between non-professional and professional. Eg, in much the same way that a commercial programmer is held more accountable than a freeware or open source one.
Something is edited/corrected -> Pet Editor/contributor undoes the edit, often claiming vandalism (I'm right, therefore your edit must be vandalism) -> Edit is reattempted -> repeat.
If the edit is correct, then why aren't other editors stepping in to revert it? If not enough people are watching a particular article, then there are ways of drawing attention to it. If someone repeatedly reverts too often, they can be banned. It's not intended that "edit wars" are a good way of sorting things out on Wikipedia.
And can you provide some examples? Because just about every case where someone moans their edit was reverted, it was with good reason.
Furthermore, newspapers distinguish between FACT and OPINION. If it's news, you print only what you can verify, and you either don't speculate, or you are -extremely- guarded in your language when you do so.
I'd say the complete opposite, especially amongst tabloids. Wikipedia is very clear on only presenting facts, not opinion. Newspapers are often filled with their opinions, and facts are presented in a very biased manner.
A newspaper reporters knows what if he prints "the sky is pink", he'd better have 2-3 sources from scientists to back him up, and just in case, present an alternative viewpoint as a counter...or his ass is out the door the next morning if it turns out the sky is in fact, still blue. In the Wikipedia, there is no such requirement.
No, the reverse. There most certainly is a requirement in Wikipedia for verifiable sources. Meanwhile, newspapers print any old rubbish without evidence, or just because another newspaper said so.
We have an established profession (called Journalism) which is pretty well proven to get the job done.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia not a news service, primarily, so the comparison doesn't entirely make sense. But countless times I've seen twisted facts or even outright falsehoods in the media, which gets circulated around all the newspapers without question.
However, when it matters, journalists are ultimately held accountable, and they bear that in mind every time they flip open their notebook.
But Wikipedia editors are held accountable in one way that journalists are not: That someone may edit what you write. So you'd better make sure it's factual, not-opinionated, unbiased and verifiable.
Yet you contradict yourself - when that happens, people like you scream "Pet Editor/contributor undid my changes". Which is it? Should people be held accountable, or be free to write what they like without it getting changed?
If there is no copyright, why do we need the GPL? The GPL and creative commons were both created in reaction to oppressive copyright laws. Without the laws, we don't need these licenses.
So why do some prefer the GPL over things like BSD? GPL isn't just about keeping things free, it's also about keeping the source open - so that if someone introduces changes to your software, you'll still have access to the source. This won't be possible without copyright laws.
So what if big corporations take all the code and incorporate it in their own works. The point is that these companies will not be able to prevent you from doing the same thing.
Yes they will, simply by not releasing their source. They'll be able to make use of your source code, incorporate it into their own work, and all you'll be able to access is the binaries of their work.
Slashdot Mirror
To be specific, it sums up Wikipedia edits. (The philosophy being that vandalism such as libelous and childish edits should be reverted without discussion, thus even if the range of edits is uniform between beneficial and vandalism, what a user actually sees is more likely to be biased towards the beneficial end.)
And someone could start selling encyclopdias which had random errors intentionally put in.
Just because something is hypothetically possible (a large number of people on different IPs vandalising a large number of articles), doesn't mean it is happening.
And if that ever did happen, and couldn't be resolved, I guess they might consider disallowing anonymous edits which would put a stop to it. But it isn't happening now, so I'm not sure what your point is - I'm sure someone could take down Slashdot by flooding it with anonymous comments, but you're still reading here, aren't you?
For instance, how many of the GPL project contributors are too young to sign a legal contract (i.e., 17 years or younger) and therefore not able to legally contribute code to a GPL project?
How is this an issue? The GPL is not a legal contract (either for the user or the author), and young people are still allowed to hold copyrights.
Perhaps it might be an issue for projects where you are expected to hand over your copyright of your contribution, but that only applies to some GPL projects. And I'm not convinced it's an issue anyway (eg, think of all the teenage popstars who presumably have signed over copyright to the record companies).
The RIAA forgets that to have a crime, you must have intent. If Windows default-shares My Documents, and you've got a pile of music in there with your tax returns and travel plans, can they really allege that you intended to share all that stuff? I sure as hell didn't.
What has intent got to do with whether or not somebody actually downloads it?
If someone can accidently share music, then there is still no intent even if someone is downloading their music. On the other hand, one could intend to share music, but then not have anyone actually download it.
Did you know that video or photography taken on private property or of private property requires the permission of the owner before you can exhibit them?
Google Earth owes me royalties!!!
Really, do you think they have permission from every property holder on the planet?
The links you posted referred to usage "for trade or advertising purposes", "for commercial purposes in an annual report, advertisement, etc.", "in order to sell your photo for commercial use ", and even then are a just-in-case point of view ("We know of no case that has ever settled those kinds of questions").
Can you provide a link to IP law, and not some "property release"?
Put simply, email is push technology, whilst the web is pull technology.
When it comes to letting people know about you, for the most part it's a lot better to let other people choose whether they want to read it, rather than you having to decide who might want to read it. On the one hand, you might miss out emailing some people fearing they are uninterested, and on the other hand, you end up spamming people who aren't interested.
When you take into account commenting, the "spam" issue becomes a far bigger problem. It's bad enough if a friend emails a whole load of people when I'm not really interested - but it's much worse when I get spammed loads of messages, because people are having an email conversation about it. With something like LiveJournal, you can choose whether to follow it or not.
Email is great for 1-to-1 communication, but it's not up to doing the job of what LiveJournal can be used for.
Considering the mainstream perception of the stereotypical "geek", I always find it amusing when people on Slashdot bash emo and/or Livejournal ... Eg, "smelly geek who posts to Slashdot all day from his mum's basement" is hardly high up on the ladder of admired stereotypes ;)
(And on a more serious note, in my experience self-harm seems to be pretty common amongst "geeks", certainly more so than average.)
Apple hasn't bashed an Intel chip via their marketing since back when the G4 was actually considered a fast chip.
t ml ).
Not true - even with the G5, they were still making claims of "fastest personal computer", with carefully chosen benchmarks to show PPC being (supposedly) faster than x86 (eg, see http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2003/jun/23pmg5.h
Oh really? What is to stop the company from giving a bogus reason and then documenting false evidence to show why they fired someone? Say like they don't like a person's religion, and they encourage some of their coworkers to file complaints against them in exchange for better working hours or pay raises? Suddenly that person has bad behavior and unethical conduct, and thus is fired for such and has the documentation to back it up and these people will swear to it in court as well. How can you defend yourself against a dozen of your former coworkers who are testifying against you, and they used to be your best friends?
Well obviously a company could choose to illegally fabricate evidence - in that case, you make a claim of unfair dismissal, and get the courts to sort it out. You might as well say that it's pointless making theft (or whatever) illegal, because someone could get their friends to lie for them and hence get away with it.
The point is that if it's a lot harder to fire someone, and the company has to both engage in illegal activity, and encourage the coworkers to illegally file false claims, then clearly this is not going to happen anywhere as often, and if it does happen, the employee has some chance of sorting it out through the courts.
Like any law, the system isn't perfect, but that doesn't mean the law is useless.
Furthermore, this doesn't really change my point, in fact, you argue in favour of it: If a company is willing to lie, then there is no point protecting only some classes such as race or religion. A company would simply fire the employee for some other unprotected reason, and it's a lot easier to do that than having to fabricate evidence that they've committed some gross misconduct worthy of dismissal.
Actually, I wonder why sexual orientation discrimination can't be considered a subset of gender discrimination. Consider, if a man is discriminated against because he is attracted towards men, when a woman who is attracted towards men wouldn't be, then that is clearly discrimination based on gender (yes, clearly it's specifically based on orientation, but only as a subset of gender discrimination).
It seems a bit of an odd way of looking at it, but only because we are used to thinking of orientation in terms of straight/gay rather than in terms of attracted to men/attracted to women.
I would rather the laws stop discrimination against phyiscal attributes only, rather than beliefs or other vague things that are hard to define.
It's unfair that religion is protected, but other personal beliefs are not - but I'd go the opposite way, and say that all discrimination should be protected.
For example, in the UK, unlike many (most?) US states, you can't be fired for no reason. This to me seems a better and fairer system than one where you can be fired for any reason, except if one of a few arbitrary protected classes.
To be fair, Steve's statements were absolutely 100% accurate (assuming the figures are accurate, which I expect them to be). For that benchmark, the intel machine is 2x-3x faster.
And I remember the days when they hand-picked the benchmarks to show the PowerPC being 2x faster than Intel...
The fact that this gets modded to 5 Insightful shows that actually, nothing's changed: It's still cool to love Apple...
Judging by some Internet sites, I'd say that French people speak English better than many Americans speak English ;)
4% of 71989 would be 2879 virus for the Mac. So at 40 OSX IS REMARKABLE.
By what logic do you think it would scale linearly?
I would say that a disproportionately higher number of people would be attracted to write viruses for the larger platform.
I might as well claim that AmigaOS is more secure, because there haven't been many viruses for that anytime recent.
Imagine if MS hadn't killed BE... instead of Intel and MS ruling the desktop market for so long and forcing single threaded high-Megahurtz toaster oven computers on the world, we could have had BeOS 7 systems with Quad PPC chips with 4 cores on each by now.
Actually, whilst MS' unfair practices put a final end to Be, on x86, I think it's fair to say that it was Apple who put an end to BeOS on PPC.
I DO NOT want to go/come to the USA because of the current regime (not the average septic ;o) ), however, I have still been forced to have one of these passports.
Indeed, here in the UK, biometric passports are being introduced "because they're needed for the US".
As for damaged cards - the UK's planned ID card (which will also be a passport) will even require you to notify the authorities if it is damaged, or you will face up to 51 weeks in prison ( http://www.defy-id.org.uk/bill_guide.htm ).
Computers don't crash: Windows does.
That's funny, the machines I've used at work (first with 2000, then XP) have never crashed, in four and a half years (I used NT for about a year before that, which crashed once or twice). Maybe I should troll out my story about how I once tried Linux, and it sometimes crashed causing me to have to reboot.
My machine at home (running 2000) did crash sometimes due to a driver problem, though this was a machine built from a load of different bits of hardware (the problem piece was a really old sound card, made long before 2000 was around) - whether it's right or wrong that it crashed, this is simply incomparable to Macs where you don't have that option to pick-and-mix hardware yourself.
If admins were honest with their users and didn't try to defend Windows or say that all operating systems crash just as much, the world would be a better place.
The world would be a better place if people stopped peddling anecdotal evidence as if it were some kind of replacement for actual research.
Thanks, but we'll keep calling them Macs for so long as they run Macintosh OS.
;)
*ahem* They don't run MacOS anymore, or at least not the same one
Of course, the original post is wrong, since trademarks don't have to be tied to the actual technology, but I see a point here. (Compare how on the articles about new Amigas in the past, we had to wade through hundreds of "But it's not an Amiga!" whining, which strangely often got modded up whilst pointing out the same here is a Troll.)
I do enjoy using Wikipedia for day-to-day use but I would not have used it for either of my Masters Thesis' as I don't think either oral defense committee would have accepted Wiki as an authoritative source.
No one claims Wikipedia should be used as an "authoritative source". In fact, Wikipedia is quite clear that Original Research is not even allowed there.
My Youngest son was buying his drugs ( mostly pot, at least I fucking hope ) from this site. And after hacking into his profile, tracking his so-called friends and online buddies,
Meanwhile on MySpace, I can just imagine parents describing Slashdot as a place where their kids have been learning all these naughty hacking tricks, and wondering if they should just blacklist the damn thing...
Why can't schools handle things in-house anymore?
Exactly - even if he did wrong, this was entirely an internal issue between the school and a student.
There often seem to be "Student arrested for such and such" stories - I wonder, is this some general difference between the US and UK, or just that people think that computer related offences are more serious and need to be dealt with by the police?
I mean, back in my day, if you graffitied on the blackboard, the teacher would tell you off. Now it seems, they call the cops.
As you say yourself, it has to damage someone's reputation, but I can't see this being the case here. It has to be believable (eg, a claim that you are actually an alien is disguise is not going to be libel).
Second, if he goes to a private university, agrees to a code of conduct, then violates it- that's not "civil liberties".
Believe it or not, there's more to the concepts of rights and freedom than that - even private organisations are not exempt from rights given in law, even if you sign them away (eg, consider employment law). If the only way to get education involves restrictions on freedom, then that is a loss of freedom.
Bloggers seem absolutely shocked at a centuries-old legal concept:
On the contrary, it's people who seem absolutely shocked at centuries-old legal concepts that insults and criticisms are perfectly legal, and seem to think that just because it's "online", it's suddenly illegal.
Much of what you say isn't really a "Wikipedia vs everyone else" difference, but more the difference between non-professional and professional. Eg, in much the same way that a commercial programmer is held more accountable than a freeware or open source one.
Something is edited/corrected -> Pet Editor/contributor undoes the edit, often claiming vandalism (I'm right, therefore your edit must be vandalism) -> Edit is reattempted -> repeat.
If the edit is correct, then why aren't other editors stepping in to revert it? If not enough people are watching a particular article, then there are ways of drawing attention to it. If someone repeatedly reverts too often, they can be banned. It's not intended that "edit wars" are a good way of sorting things out on Wikipedia.
And can you provide some examples? Because just about every case where someone moans their edit was reverted, it was with good reason.
Furthermore, newspapers distinguish between FACT and OPINION. If it's news, you print only what you can verify, and you either don't speculate, or you are -extremely- guarded in your language when you do so.
I'd say the complete opposite, especially amongst tabloids. Wikipedia is very clear on only presenting facts, not opinion. Newspapers are often filled with their opinions, and facts are presented in a very biased manner.
A newspaper reporters knows what if he prints "the sky is pink", he'd better have 2-3 sources from scientists to back him up, and just in case, present an alternative viewpoint as a counter...or his ass is out the door the next morning if it turns out the sky is in fact, still blue. In the Wikipedia, there is no such requirement.
No, the reverse. There most certainly is a requirement in Wikipedia for verifiable sources. Meanwhile, newspapers print any old rubbish without evidence, or just because another newspaper said so.
We have an established profession (called Journalism) which is pretty well proven to get the job done.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia not a news service, primarily, so the comparison doesn't entirely make sense. But countless times I've seen twisted facts or even outright falsehoods in the media, which gets circulated around all the newspapers without question.
However, when it matters, journalists are ultimately held accountable, and they bear that in mind every time they flip open their notebook.
But Wikipedia editors are held accountable in one way that journalists are not: That someone may edit what you write. So you'd better make sure it's factual, not-opinionated, unbiased and verifiable.
Yet you contradict yourself - when that happens, people like you scream "Pet Editor/contributor undid my changes". Which is it? Should people be held accountable, or be free to write what they like without it getting changed?
If there is no copyright, why do we need the GPL? The GPL and creative commons were both created in reaction to oppressive copyright laws. Without the laws, we don't need these licenses.
So why do some prefer the GPL over things like BSD? GPL isn't just about keeping things free, it's also about keeping the source open - so that if someone introduces changes to your software, you'll still have access to the source. This won't be possible without copyright laws.
So what if big corporations take all the code and incorporate it in their own works. The point is that these companies will not be able to prevent you from doing the same thing.
Yes they will, simply by not releasing their source. They'll be able to make use of your source code, incorporate it into their own work, and all you'll be able to access is the binaries of their work.