"It gives them the right to publish without prior restraint,"
- Funny thing, that. Damages for publishing what you know to be false are SERIOUS; there certainly is 'prior restraint', the legal term is 'due diligence', meaning that you have CHECKED YOUR FUCKING SOURCE AND MADE SURE YOU ARE NOT PUBLISHING SOMETHING FALSE.
Wikipedia publishes falsehoods all the time, every day. Some are serious slander. Wikipedia has no "vetting" process despite being a publisher. This IS a problem.
"If you make legal threats to any publication or its contributors, its a good way to get yourself not to be looked to as a future contributor to that publication."
- If you make a threat to sue a publisher for slander, or send them a cease-and-desist demanding retraction, the publisher is obligated to follow up, and print a retraction.
Wikipedia ignores this. Wikipedia, when someone tries to go through their byzantine processes, turns around and says "no wikilawyering, go away" to someone who's been slandered. Or turns around and goes "OMG a legal threat you cant even post here or try to fix it."
Wikipedia - "the encyclopedia anyone can edit" - unless you're the person being slandered, or some jumped-up 14 year old with no social skills decides he wants to ban you.
And while the wiki-cultists are slapping themselves on the back for expelling a "troll" who "obviously doesnt belong here cuz hes makin legal threats and that aint allowd" [sic], anyone who googles you sees the slander pop up as the #1 search under your name.
And try to contact the Wikimedia Foundation? What a fucking joke that is. Jimbob the Porn Merchant is flying the world telling everyone how great their publications would be if only they'd allow every asshat with an internet connection the ability to screw with them on the web, the office dorks refer you to legal, but their legal is currently "on hiatus" and not accepting calls.
Yeah. This is a serious problem, whether you see it or not. You have a publication house that ought rightly to be removed from Google for being a giant fucking linkfarm but isn't, they're publishing blatantly false info, and their response to anyone trying to tell them to stop it is the ban-hammer and sticking their fingers in their ears going "lalalalalalalala I cant hear you no legal threats."
You don't find hatred and slander of a religion dangerous?
You don't find people being slandered, which could easily cause them to lose jobs or worse, to be dangerous?
The first amendment does NOT give someone the right to slander or libel. And "editorial review" on Wikipedia is a joke.
"The publisher will engage in editorial review and decide what changes or corrections are appropriate" - and you say this of Wikipedia, where the entire structure is designed to hide those responsible and throw up byzantine mazes of "policy" that, if you actually navigate through, you can be banned for "wikilawyering" and "legal threats"???
And you REALLY think this isn't dangerous? Seriously - whatever the hell you're smoking, share, you stingy bastard.
Chairboy is under the impression that, as a Wikipedia administrator, he has complete control. Sadly for him, Slashdot - while infested with wikipedia trolls who occasionally get a mod point or three - is not Wikipedia. Chairboy cannot ban anyone here.
It is all too telling that Chairboy wants to say "oh you're just an AC, go away"; the fundamental philosophy of a wikipedia administrator whenever they disagree with someone is "oh, you're just a (anon IP, troll, etc), BAN".
See Also: Essjay, who claimed to be a multiple-doctorate, used that as reason to make the wikipedia article on Catholicism into one of the worst pieces of derogatory shit he could, banned those who tried to counter his lies, and then got found out: turns out that he's a 24 year old dropout with delusions of grandeur and a major hatred for Catholics.
Cleaning up his slander and nastiness will take years - but the Wikicultists are already working on getting him re-adminned under a pseudonym.
See Also: John Siegenthaler and damage done to him.
Wikipedia cultists would have it that everyone who they come up with an excuse to write a biography page on, is personally responsible for sitting around watching it for vandalism and slander - except they're not allowed to edit it themselves, or request that it be permanently deleted and have that request definitively honored and respected as policy.
You ought to read this great blog by a former wikipedia admin. He details the powers a wikipedia admin gets and the methods by which admins connected to partisan debates, or just assholes who managed to get an admin bit, abuse people.
They get to be as abusive as they want language-wise, and if anyone chides them on it, the other admin-cultists will back them up.
They get to block anyone, for any reason, at any time, and the "procedures" wikipedia has for an appeal are a joke.
They can block someone indefinitely, lock down the user page and talk page so that filing for an appeal can't even be done, and just walk away. The appeals email list is locked down and non-archived, so nobody can see what they're doing (not that they ever did anything but rubber-stamp abuse by admins anyways).
Wikipedia's admin-cultists exist by trying to control the debate. They control who can speak, and when. They control whether or not a source or fact can even be mentioned in an article. They extend this behavior to mailing lists, to IRC channels; in short, if an admin decides you ought to be "banned", even if the admin is just doing it because they disagree with something that you posted that meets all the other sourcing/NPOV criteria, they WILL do it and they WILL get away with it.
I'm gonna quote him here because he said it better than anyone:
Interestingly enough, the BITE policy has a telling statement: nothing scares potentially valuable contributors away faster than hostility or elitism.
Why is this interesting? Because this is precisely the goal of the abusive administrators. They want, no, need, to drive away anyone new who disagrees with them, because if they did not, then ultimately they bear the risk of enough new users coming in to overturn their bogus "consensus" on the articles they control.
Wikitroll clue #1: "your bozo bit has been set." Common phrasing used by admins who are targeting someone (via watch-list and frequent refreshing of their contribution list) for harassment.
Wikitroll clue #2: admits he's an admin-cultist... er cabalist.
Wikitroll clue #3: doesn't ask why the person has an issue, just assumes what it was and drops in a strawman "presumably", and skips over the amazing number of reasons someone could have a problem on wikipedia that have nothing to do with "site policy" and everything to do with abuse by the administrators...
Wikitroll confirmed. Chairboy would be a part of the problem, not part of the solution.
is how many false charges of "sockpuppet" or "troll" are put in by the abusive administrators that run the place.
Whoops. Did I say something less then complimentary about the quantum fucking encyclopedia, where info may or may not be correct based on which second of the day it is, and where you can be assured that the moment someone tries to fix it, they'll be beat down by an army of socially inept retards who have nothing better to do than accumulate hundreds/thousands of edits per day in hopes that they, too, can become administrators and ban anyone they disagree with?
Motorstorm? Boring as hell. Resistance: FOM? Call of Duty with aliens instead of Nazis, it could have just been released as an expansion pack. I'm not interested in Yet Another Crappy FPS/3PS, thank you.
Fl0w... good for about 30 minutes. Then it gets boring.
The only game I remotely enjoy on my PS3 is Lemmings. Other than that, it plays PS2 games. I could have stayed with a PS2 for that.
Congrats on being a Sony Fanboi Loser, now come back when they have some real games to offer the rest of us.
The entire basis of the court system is the adversarial system.
Once the MafiAA have gotten a court order / judgement, it "can" be overturned, but it's much harder to get a ruling overturned than it is to get one in the first place.
The whole trick with the MafiAA going for a ex parte decision is so they can go behind closed doors, give the judge a long blowjob of lies and deception, pay him off, and get their "judgement" which they'll then use to threaten and abuse even more people - without anyone being able to give the other side of the issue and point out where the MafiAA is full of shit.
Jack Valenti just kicked the bucket. Wouldn't it be nice if the MafiAA lawyers/suits would follow in his footsteps quickly? It's not like they are contributing members of society. They won't be missed and I doubt even their own mothers would cry at their funerals.
From January 2006 to February 2006 the Xbox 360 sales trailed off 36% (250K units down to 161k units). At the same point in its lifespan, Sony's PlayStation 3 experienced a drop-off of 48% (244K units down to 127K units).
250,000 is bigger than 244,000. 161,000 is bigger than 127,000.
PS3 sold LESS units than the "supply-constrained Xbox360", and the PS3 isn't - as Sony so frequently tries to say - "supply-constrained."
It's just a waste of money, and the sales figures are the proof.
"Tom is a FAG" "Bilbo Lives!" "Search engine optimization: do it the Wiki way" "In the year 1432, the United States of America was founded by Bill Gates and his horde of windows-operating-system killbots..."
"Do No Evil" became "Be as corrupt and evil as possible."
An "editable search engine"? Great, now even MORE of the searches I run will pop up ads for v14GR4 and enhancements for body parts I don't possess, nevermind those linkspam sites that just insert the entire fucking dictionary in metacode.
You searched for: Bill Gates you got: 400 pictures of penises, vaginas, and one picture of a penis covered in something that looks like it came out of the OTHER opening.
you're going to try to sell me some oceanfront property in Kansas?
Really, now. There are ways to put those protections in place, without making everything a behind-closed-doors proceeding. The only reason to close that list down as tightly as they did is to ensure that administrators cannot be held accountable for their behavior.
Then again, despite my own issue with the younger generation's seeming inability to use its/it's, their/there/they're, and effect/affect correctly, I'm becoming too lazy to point it out any more.
The problem of admins pushing their own agenda should be tackled by other admins.
No, other admins are precisely who shouldn't be judging this, because other admins are as likely as not to be doing the same thing. Admins by their nature are the powerful, and power corrupts. In the case of wikipedia, the "good" administrators are silent for fear of causing a "wheel war" or provoking the naughtier admins into a flamefest; the bad admins, meanwhile, stand up for each other when their abuses are caught, claim they are not really abuses, claim the abusing admin has a "right" to do so, attack anyone who points out their abuses as a "troll", and quickly ban or eliminate that person from wikipedia.
It's very similar to trying to suggest publicly that the Communist system didn't work in 1980 East Germany. You know what the result would have been for anyone saying so: they'd be dragged off to prison, their written works banned, their communication with the outside world stopped.
Wikipedia's administrators, as a whole, behave in a manner entirely similar to how "the Party" quashed dissent there and still does in places like China and Cuba. Anyone who catches an administrator engaging in untoward behavior, and reports it, is blocked/abused/banned from the site.
I generally don't trust any of the "Idiot's guide to X" books... they're precisely that, subject matter dumbed down enough to make people think they know something, while missing a great deal of information that is important. This is even worse when the subject matter is something like religion, rather than something concrete that one can point to (like plumbing or automobile engines).
"The Idiot's Guide to Islam" is particularly poorly written in that regard.
Slashdot Mirror
"It gives them the right to publish without prior restraint,"
- Funny thing, that. Damages for publishing what you know to be false are SERIOUS; there certainly is 'prior restraint', the legal term is 'due diligence', meaning that you have CHECKED YOUR FUCKING SOURCE AND MADE SURE YOU ARE NOT PUBLISHING SOMETHING FALSE.
Wikipedia publishes falsehoods all the time, every day. Some are serious slander. Wikipedia has no "vetting" process despite being a publisher. This IS a problem.
"If you make legal threats to any publication or its contributors, its a good way to get yourself not to be looked to as a future contributor to that publication."
- If you make a threat to sue a publisher for slander, or send them a cease-and-desist demanding retraction, the publisher is obligated to follow up, and print a retraction.
Wikipedia ignores this. Wikipedia, when someone tries to go through their byzantine processes, turns around and says "no wikilawyering, go away" to someone who's been slandered. Or turns around and goes "OMG a legal threat you cant even post here or try to fix it."
Wikipedia - "the encyclopedia anyone can edit" - unless you're the person being slandered, or some jumped-up 14 year old with no social skills decides he wants to ban you.
And while the wiki-cultists are slapping themselves on the back for expelling a "troll" who "obviously doesnt belong here cuz hes makin legal threats and that aint allowd" [sic], anyone who googles you sees the slander pop up as the #1 search under your name.
And try to contact the Wikimedia Foundation? What a fucking joke that is. Jimbob the Porn Merchant is flying the world telling everyone how great their publications would be if only they'd allow every asshat with an internet connection the ability to screw with them on the web, the office dorks refer you to legal, but their legal is currently "on hiatus" and not accepting calls.
Yeah. This is a serious problem, whether you see it or not. You have a publication house that ought rightly to be removed from Google for being a giant fucking linkfarm but isn't, they're publishing blatantly false info, and their response to anyone trying to tell them to stop it is the ban-hammer and sticking their fingers in their ears going "lalalalalalalala I cant hear you no legal threats."
Hmmmm.
You don't find hatred and slander of a religion dangerous?
You don't find people being slandered, which could easily cause them to lose jobs or worse, to be dangerous?
The first amendment does NOT give someone the right to slander or libel. And "editorial review" on Wikipedia is a joke.
"The publisher will engage in editorial review and decide what changes or corrections are appropriate" - and you say this of Wikipedia, where the entire structure is designed to hide those responsible and throw up byzantine mazes of "policy" that, if you actually navigate through, you can be banned for "wikilawyering" and "legal threats"???
And you REALLY think this isn't dangerous? Seriously - whatever the hell you're smoking, share, you stingy bastard.
Chairboy is under the impression that, as a Wikipedia administrator, he has complete control. Sadly for him, Slashdot - while infested with wikipedia trolls who occasionally get a mod point or three - is not Wikipedia. Chairboy cannot ban anyone here.
It is all too telling that Chairboy wants to say "oh you're just an AC, go away"; the fundamental philosophy of a wikipedia administrator whenever they disagree with someone is "oh, you're just a (anon IP, troll, etc), BAN".
He's gone back to abusing people on Wikipedia.
See Also: Essjay, who claimed to be a multiple-doctorate, used that as reason to make the wikipedia article on Catholicism into one of the worst pieces of derogatory shit he could, banned those who tried to counter his lies, and then got found out: turns out that he's a 24 year old dropout with delusions of grandeur and a major hatred for Catholics.
Cleaning up his slander and nastiness will take years - but the Wikicultists are already working on getting him re-adminned under a pseudonym.
See Also: John Siegenthaler and damage done to him.
Wikipedia cultists would have it that everyone who they come up with an excuse to write a biography page on, is personally responsible for sitting around watching it for vandalism and slander - except they're not allowed to edit it themselves, or request that it be permanently deleted and have that request definitively honored and respected as policy.
"Bullshit!"
You ought to read this great blog by a former wikipedia admin. He details the powers a wikipedia admin gets and the methods by which admins connected to partisan debates, or just assholes who managed to get an admin bit, abuse people.
They get to be as abusive as they want language-wise, and if anyone chides them on it, the other admin-cultists will back them up.
They get to block anyone, for any reason, at any time, and the "procedures" wikipedia has for an appeal are a joke.
They can block someone indefinitely, lock down the user page and talk page so that filing for an appeal can't even be done, and just walk away. The appeals email list is locked down and non-archived, so nobody can see what they're doing (not that they ever did anything but rubber-stamp abuse by admins anyways).
Wikipedia's admin-cultists exist by trying to control the debate. They control who can speak, and when. They control whether or not a source or fact can even be mentioned in an article. They extend this behavior to mailing lists, to IRC channels; in short, if an admin decides you ought to be "banned", even if the admin is just doing it because they disagree with something that you posted that meets all the other sourcing/NPOV criteria, they WILL do it and they WILL get away with it.
I'm gonna quote him here because he said it better than anyone:
Interestingly enough, the BITE policy has a telling statement: nothing scares potentially valuable contributors away faster than hostility or elitism.
Why is this interesting? Because this is precisely the goal of the abusive administrators. They want, no, need, to drive away anyone new who disagrees with them, because if they did not, then ultimately they bear the risk of enough new users coming in to overturn their bogus "consensus" on the articles they control.
Wikitroll clue #1: "your bozo bit has been set." Common phrasing used by admins who are targeting someone (via watch-list and frequent refreshing of their contribution list) for harassment.
Wikitroll clue #2: admits he's an admin-cultist... er cabalist.
Wikitroll clue #3: doesn't ask why the person has an issue, just assumes what it was and drops in a strawman "presumably", and skips over the amazing number of reasons someone could have a problem on wikipedia that have nothing to do with "site policy" and everything to do with abuse by the administrators...
Wikitroll confirmed. Chairboy would be a part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Wiki trolls are still at it - now "40% flamebait, 20% troll"
Slashdot's got an infestation of wikipedia cultists trying to hide their project's flaws, we shouldn't let them get away with it.
So, at least 3 Wikipedia admin-cultists got mod points today so far. How many more will it be?
is how many false charges of "sockpuppet" or "troll" are put in by the abusive administrators that run the place.
Whoops. Did I say something less then complimentary about the quantum fucking encyclopedia, where info may or may not be correct based on which second of the day it is, and where you can be assured that the moment someone tries to fix it, they'll be beat down by an army of socially inept retards who have nothing better to do than accumulate hundreds/thousands of edits per day in hopes that they, too, can become administrators and ban anyone they disagree with?
Then you're obviously a nitwit.
Motorstorm? Boring as hell. Resistance: FOM? Call of Duty with aliens instead of Nazis, it could have just been released as an expansion pack. I'm not interested in Yet Another Crappy FPS/3PS, thank you.
Fl0w... good for about 30 minutes. Then it gets boring.
The only game I remotely enjoy on my PS3 is Lemmings. Other than that, it plays PS2 games. I could have stayed with a PS2 for that.
Congrats on being a Sony Fanboi Loser, now come back when they have some real games to offer the rest of us.
Proving Slashdot's been infiltrated.
The entire basis of the court system is the adversarial system.
Once the MafiAA have gotten a court order / judgement, it "can" be overturned, but it's much harder to get a ruling overturned than it is to get one in the first place.
The whole trick with the MafiAA going for a ex parte decision is so they can go behind closed doors, give the judge a long blowjob of lies and deception, pay him off, and get their "judgement" which they'll then use to threaten and abuse even more people - without anyone being able to give the other side of the issue and point out where the MafiAA is full of shit.
Jack Valenti just kicked the bucket. Wouldn't it be nice if the MafiAA lawyers/suits would follow in his footsteps quickly? It's not like they are contributing members of society. They won't be missed and I doubt even their own mothers would cry at their funerals.
What a shame - all those PS3's, and not a single decent game to play on them.
The Radeon X1950 beats the NVidia cards in every single test save for the "synthetic" crapmark test that has nothing to do with reality.
Yet their final page says you should buy the NVidia rather than the X1950?
Somebody's been paid off. This wasn't an article, it's a fucking stealth ad. They have no integrity.
From January 2006 to February 2006 the Xbox 360 sales trailed off 36% (250K units down to 161k units). At the same point in its lifespan, Sony's PlayStation 3 experienced a drop-off of 48% (244K units down to 127K units).
250,000 is bigger than 244,000.
161,000 is bigger than 127,000.
PS3 sold LESS units than the "supply-constrained Xbox360", and the PS3 isn't - as Sony so frequently tries to say - "supply-constrained."
It's just a waste of money, and the sales figures are the proof.
Now I search and my results are:
"Tom is a FAG"
"Bilbo Lives!"
"Search engine optimization: do it the Wiki way"
"In the year 1432, the United States of America was founded by Bill Gates and his horde of windows-operating-system killbots..."
Or whatever other term you want to use for bullshit, misleading, false claims of disparity between a corporation and a corporate shell game.
while my post just above got modded "troll"?
:(
Someone gave a wikinazi mod points.
"Do No Evil" became "Be as corrupt and evil as possible."
An "editable search engine"? Great, now even MORE of the searches I run will pop up ads for v14GR4 and enhancements for body parts I don't possess, nevermind those linkspam sites that just insert the entire fucking dictionary in metacode.
You searched for: Bill Gates
you got: 400 pictures of penises, vaginas, and one picture of a penis covered in something that looks like it came out of the OTHER opening.
you're going to try to sell me some oceanfront property in Kansas?
Really, now. There are ways to put those protections in place, without making everything a behind-closed-doors proceeding. The only reason to close that list down as tightly as they did is to ensure that administrators cannot be held accountable for their behavior.
Then again, despite my own issue with the younger generation's seeming inability to use its/it's, their/there/they're, and effect/affect correctly, I'm becoming too lazy to point it out any more.
The problem of admins pushing their own agenda should be tackled by other admins.
No, other admins are precisely who shouldn't be judging this, because other admins are as likely as not to be doing the same thing. Admins by their nature are the powerful, and power corrupts. In the case of wikipedia, the "good" administrators are silent for fear of causing a "wheel war" or provoking the naughtier admins into a flamefest; the bad admins, meanwhile, stand up for each other when their abuses are caught, claim they are not really abuses, claim the abusing admin has a "right" to do so, attack anyone who points out their abuses as a "troll", and quickly ban or eliminate that person from wikipedia.
It's very similar to trying to suggest publicly that the Communist system didn't work in 1980 East Germany. You know what the result would have been for anyone saying so: they'd be dragged off to prison, their written works banned, their communication with the outside world stopped.
Wikipedia's administrators, as a whole, behave in a manner entirely similar to how "the Party" quashed dissent there and still does in places like China and Cuba. Anyone who catches an administrator engaging in untoward behavior, and reports it, is blocked/abused/banned from the site.
I generally don't trust any of the "Idiot's guide to X" books... they're precisely that, subject matter dumbed down enough to make people think they know something, while missing a great deal of information that is important. This is even worse when the subject matter is something like religion, rather than something concrete that one can point to (like plumbing or automobile engines).
"The Idiot's Guide to Islam" is particularly poorly written in that regard.
From Essjay's 4th edit ever:
"This is a text I often require for my students, and I would hang my own Ph.D. on it's credibility."
Original link.
As it turns out... he had no such Ph.D.