Yeah, except that we've always had provisions such as either local militias or the national guard.
"Raising a temporary army" does you little good in the modern era of travel, too. That was made clear by World War II, which is why the National Security Act of 1947 was passed. Of course, we never really did "disband" the military for too long after the Revolutionary War prior, since we were pretty much involved in one war or another nonstop.
The Preamble doesn't actually give any power. There's a reason it's called a "Preamble":
Preamble: 1. an introductory statement; preface; introduction. 2. the introductory part of a statute, deed, or the like, stating the reasons and intent of what follows.
Until you get to the actual body of the document, nothing in it has any legal force.
Of course, this sort of attack on science and education is stock-in-trade for a group of idiots I've had to take to calling "Retardicans", because they - despite having gained far too much power in the Republican Party over recent times - make actual, reasonable Republicans who are closer to the center look like idiots by association.
In a previous thread we were discussing "Senator Dan Patrick" - Teabagger/idiot extraordaire from the Texas 7th State Senate district. What's his claim to fame? Screaming a lot about how every government service should be less expensive, how there should be no taxes anywhere, and lying a lot. He was caught on his radio show declaring that anything but engineering and medical research is "research nobody cares about" when he was discussing Texas's insane education cuts recently.
He's also been constantly sucking up to, and having his other radio hosts "interview", a major Texas liar by the name of Michael Quinn Sullivan, who loves to trot out the statistic (see also: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics) that there is "waste" in Texas Education because there is a "1 to 1 ratio" between teachers and "non-teachers" (his definition).
Sure, Texas has a "1 to 1 ratio" of teachers to nonteachers. How do you get there?
Step 1: count the teachers who have a "homeroom." Step 2: discount anyone else who teaches or aids students - librarians, substitute teachers, speech therapists, deaf sign language interpreters, English as Second Language teachers, Special Ed teachers - as a "nonteacher." Step 3: Tutors and study hall monitors: Again, "not teachers." Step 3: count the lunchlady and school nurse. Step 4: count the janitors. Step 6: count the school security personnel (esp. the ones in inner city schools). Step 6: count the BUS DRIVERS.
When Michael Quinn Sullivan screams about "waste" and says anyone who wants to find "waste" in government should "Just walk down to your nearest administrative complex" - yet "administrative" personnel are less than 4% of the Texas education force. And yet these pathetic retardicans (yes, I have to call them that) will accept his "1 to 1 ratio" screed with zero analysis and then scream about how we need to "cut education funding."
Pathetic. I can't look a real Republican straight in the face any more without wondering how it is they possibly fail to stand up to the Retardicans that have taken over their party.
No, the judge is saying she has the right to demand that Geohot hand over hardware to Sony.
Not to the court for information to be determined whether it is relevant for Sony's case, but DIRECTLY TO SONY.
Yeah. It is that fucked up. Essentially, he's punished before any guilt is found.
Even further in the ruling, though, she allowed Sony to play jurisdiction-shopping and keep the lawsuit in San Francisco despite NOTHING in the case being related to that area, except that it makes it infinitely harder for Geohot to defend since he will have to fly back and forth and back and forth every time this brainless bimbo schedules a hearing.
Yet another case with a technological moron judge saying "oh, what the big corporation wants the big corporation gets. Shut up you peon you shouldn't have messed with a big corporation."
Someone please - check into this corrupt judge's finances. I suspect there are some doozies in there.
Dan Patrick was caught on his radio show saying anything but engineering or medical research is research nobody cares about when justifying Texas's asinine education cuts coming up.
He's the definition of a retardican. Just what the US doesn't need in public representatives.
The problem right now is that the TX legislature got full of a bunch of Retardicans and PeeTardiers who want government to simultaneously provide them cheap everything without being willing to pay for it.
They have this lying jerk "Michael Quinn Sullivan" who runs around claiming that the public education system is "wasting money" because it has a "1 to 1 ratio" of teachers to nonteachers. Technically he's true - because his definition of "teacher" is "runs a homeroom."
He counts as nonteachers the speech therapists, sign language interpreters, ESL teachers, art teachers, music teachers, and anyone else who teaches but doesn't run a homeroom. And then on top of it he counts everyone down to the janitors and bus drivers in his "1 to 1 ratio." I bet there is a 1 to 1 ratio, but it's not a bad thing - ask his supporters what category of employee they can cut without actually screwing up the education system, and these retards just default back to "but but but 1 to 1 ratio but but but" sputtering and retardedness.
"They should have been ranked lower because the voter-participation is low in USA."
The reason voter participation is low is simple: the two-party system encourages anyone in the middle, and anyone with half a brain, to stay home or else hold their nose for insane choices.
I support the US's military spending - after all, if we didn't, we couldn't be the world's policeman and cover 99% of the UN's peacekeeping bills with our own troops. I support the US's public education system and think it needs more money for improvement.
I support reasonable taxation - not "OMG take everyone's money" but not "OMG NO TAXES EVER."
But what are my choices?
I could vote Dummycrat, and get a party that loves education but treats the military like the plague and wants to hamstring our soldiers. Or I could vote Retardican/PeeTardier, and and get a party that loves the military and will see my relatives in the service well funded, protected and armed, but at the same time wants to eliminate the Department of Education and throw our kids to the wolves.
And as a side order, I get to watch these two sets of assholes argue over "gay marriage" and "abortion", when quite frankly I don't give a damn because those will sort themselves out societally without either set of assholes having to impose their way 5 minutes from tomorrow.
That's why people don't vote in America. Because the "choices" are fucking pointless.
You forget: Activision are on the "beat the horse till it's dead then beat it some more" release schedule. And they don't have actual studios to innovate, they just have "me too me too let's rip someone else's idea off" studios like Neversoft who are designed to drive franchises into the ground.
With Rock Band, Harmonix hasn't been pushing out games constantly, and when they have, there's been actual innovation to go with them - RB2 was a marked improvement over RB1, RB3 brings the full-guitar and keyboard options to the table.
As for DJ Hero and "True Crime"... whoever greenlit them past the first game ought to have been fired.
Wow. I haven't even turned mine in in a whole year. I guess the lineup for it was really that crappy.
This guy actually talked about Sony having "the best mp3 players" and "the best audio shit"... what? Sorry, nobody in their right mind buys a Sony MP3 player, and Sony audio stuff is overpriced and underpowered too - Sony barely ever registers beyond a blip at the usualplaces...
I think I know what @TheKevinButler's Slashdot name is now though! Come on down and take a bow, Kevin... I mean "perryizgr8."
NASA has never been great for the "free market." NASA is, and has always been, about making the breakthroughs that needed to be made no matter the cost.
We've gotten more out of NASA's research than we ever expected, and NASA has actually been worth every penny we've ever spent on it. Nowhere in the private sector would the research for any major NASA breakthrough ever have managed to come; the private sector would have taken one look at the development cost and said "screw it, wait for someone else to do the difficult stuff first" and only then come by to make it "cheaper to do" later on - which is precisely what happened, time and again.
The problem is that because its results and benefits aren't immediately realized in a 2-year or 4-year timeframe, politicians on the "cut cut cut rawr rawr kill the government" platform always see it as "wasted money." This is much like the way that retarded "government representatives" scream about how "education funding is wasted" because spending more money doesn't instantly improve results, while ignoring every bit of research that shows quite conclusively that cutting education funding to below a certain minimum guarantees the worst results possible.
The end result today is that NASA's been hamstrung under the "do more with less" attitude for so long, as ordered by blind nincompoops who are insulated from the results of their own decisions, that they're stuck trying to "do more" with mere pennies for the tasks they are continually given.
Oh look it's my stalker. What happened, run out of mod points to attack my karma with, so now you just have to run around posting AC troll attacks at me?
I'd ask you politely to stop, but apparently you stalkers never listen.
erk: Ask Noah. Be prepared to scoop a lot of petrified animal shit. riv: Colorado. pub: Med. r: The Dread Pirate Roberts never takes prisoners! n: protons 7, electrons 7, add neutrons to taste. k: makes a really lousy fake table salt when added to chlorine. da: DAAAAAAAAA!
erk: hidden in a crate labeled "top secret" in a giant government warehouse filled with identical crates. riv:Mississippi. pub: a place operated by a publican. Not to be confused with a (re)publican, which is a species of brainless human. R: harr fiddle de dee, being a pirate is alright with me... n: e way you want it, that's the way you need it, any way you want it... K: O. Da: dweeee da da da Dweee dao!
Both sides have their kooky and their mature sites.
I had almost listed Little Green Footballs as yet another site that operates more on cult of personality (which is ironic given that Mad King Charles has all the personal magnetism of day-old jello left in the trash), and a perfect example of how such cultishness is not unique to one side of the aisle or the other, as evidenced by the way he went from the right-wing deep end to the left-wing deep end in such a perfect performance of blackwhite (complete with unpersoning an amazing number of his former commentariat) that George Orwell himself could scarcely have written better.
As for "liberalism tends to be so fueled by emotion that it drives centrists away" - the right wing is much the same way. The lunatic fringe of the Pee Tardiers out there today are, let's face it, frightening in their behavior. What's going on in Texas with regard to education funding right now, to name just one example, is downright criminal - but to the Pee Tardier mindset, "OMG public education is left wing indoctrination against god they wanna teach evolution insteada tha bible kill it kill it break out the torches and pitchforks."
It's sad but true. Good luck finding the sensible, sane middle these days; between the media outlets and the politicians, the centrists have been told by both sides that we aren't "fundamentalist" enough for either side and we should just stay home or let both sides call us traitors.
Slanted news is slanted news. Makes no difference whether it's Fox, CNN, MSNBC, Huffington Post, Drudge, DailyKos, or even the freak-of-the-week-show from over at Little Green Fucktards.
I don't know. Huffington Post and DailyKos were the two big attempts of the left wing to create their own "viral" websites. The end result's been a lot of hate speech, a whole lot of banned commentariat, and very little if anything accomplished.
Huffington Post's biggest claim to fame in recent years has been as a haven for the anti-vaccination lunacy of retards like Jenny McCarthy, Dana Ullman, and followers of Andrew Wakefield.
Not really, no. I stand by my original point that it's rather a joke at best.
Please see my commentary below with links regarding places Wikipedia goes horribly, horribly wrong.
Then again, the Wikitrolls are currently expending their modpoints attacking my karma, so I must have hit a bit too close to the truth for their liking
"if the alleged source you citied isn't accessible on the Web, there's no way for anyone editing your article who doesn't have a triple doctorate, a $10,000 subscription to the specialist journal you quoted and a dozen plane tickets to visit museums, to check that it does, in fact, exist, and that you're not just making it up"
Funny. I can go look just about any source up. All I have to do is go to my local library, or failing that, the local university library. They can pull the article from their stacks for me, allow me to view it for free, even let me photocopy it, and they'll do it for maybe a few cents a page xerox cost. Worst case scenario, I have to have them request an interlibrary loan, which means I get it into my hands in about a week's time.
You're just lazy, like most Wikipedia "researchers."
The problem with Wikipedia in respect to 1990 is actually fairly clear; to most Wikipedians, "if it's not on the web it doesn't exist." Their faulty, backwards "reliable sources" sections have left them ignoring, or sometimes destroying, records painstakingly crafted on the history of various industries in which much of the documentation is not found in newspapers, but in archives like USENet and inter-BBS communication.
Here's a great example of where wikipedia screwed up in covering and handling the topic of content management systems.
Or where obvious POV-pushing is not just tolerated by Wikipedia, but actively supported by Wikipedia insiders: Tellingly, it was later revealed that one of the Wikipedia editors who led the attack is actually an employee of Electronic Intifada.
And then there's what they do to actual researchers who try to contribute.
Wikipedia is at best a joke, at worst a farce. Analyses of what's wrong with Wikipedia - insular central circle of power-hungry xenophobes calling the shots, constant wikilawyering and assumption that anyone new is automatically an "invader", scandal after scandal after scandal... wikipedia is a great resource if you want a single page for every freaking pokemon, and a lousy resource for documentation of anything that happened prior to 1990.
And don't even think of going near Wikipedia if you want to try to correct a problem article. Remember Lie #2: Nobody new ever comes to Wikipedia. Given the way their "culture" works, I don't wonder that women don't want to go near it - after all, women are notoriously more sane than men, and nobody with an ounce of sanity would want to get involved with the incestuous circle-jerk that makes up Wikipedia's power structure.
No, that 3 point font in a font color 2 shades lighter than the background will refer you to the "full EULA available in the EULA display department."
The EULA display department is, of course, in the third subbasement of Capcom's headquarters. Past where the stairs and light have gone, so you'll have to bring a ladder and torch. Keep going and you'll find a disused lavatory with a sign saying "beware the leopard", in which there's a locked filing cabinet with the key broken off inside the lock...
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, except that we've always had provisions such as either local militias or the national guard.
"Raising a temporary army" does you little good in the modern era of travel, too. That was made clear by World War II, which is why the National Security Act of 1947 was passed. Of course, we never really did "disband" the military for too long after the Revolutionary War prior, since we were pretty much involved in one war or another nonstop.
The Preamble doesn't actually give any power. There's a reason it's called a "Preamble":
Preamble:
1. an introductory statement; preface; introduction.
2. the introductory part of a statute, deed, or the like, stating the reasons and intent of what follows.
Until you get to the actual body of the document, nothing in it has any legal force.
Of course, this sort of attack on science and education is stock-in-trade for a group of idiots I've had to take to calling "Retardicans", because they - despite having gained far too much power in the Republican Party over recent times - make actual, reasonable Republicans who are closer to the center look like idiots by association.
In a previous thread we were discussing "Senator Dan Patrick" - Teabagger/idiot extraordaire from the Texas 7th State Senate district. What's his claim to fame? Screaming a lot about how every government service should be less expensive, how there should be no taxes anywhere, and lying a lot. He was caught on his radio show declaring that anything but engineering and medical research is "research nobody cares about" when he was discussing Texas's insane education cuts recently.
He's also been constantly sucking up to, and having his other radio hosts "interview", a major Texas liar by the name of Michael Quinn Sullivan, who loves to trot out the statistic (see also: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics) that there is "waste" in Texas Education because there is a "1 to 1 ratio" between teachers and "non-teachers" (his definition).
Unfortunately for him, first he's stretching his definitions, then he's outright lying about them.
Sure, Texas has a "1 to 1 ratio" of teachers to nonteachers. How do you get there?
Step 1: count the teachers who have a "homeroom."
Step 2: discount anyone else who teaches or aids students - librarians, substitute teachers, speech therapists, deaf sign language interpreters, English as Second Language teachers, Special Ed teachers - as a "nonteacher."
Step 3: Tutors and study hall monitors: Again, "not teachers."
Step 3: count the lunchlady and school nurse.
Step 4: count the janitors.
Step 6: count the school security personnel (esp. the ones in inner city schools).
Step 6: count the BUS DRIVERS.
When Michael Quinn Sullivan screams about "waste" and says anyone who wants to find "waste" in government should "Just walk down to your nearest administrative complex" - yet "administrative" personnel are less than 4% of the Texas education force. And yet these pathetic retardicans (yes, I have to call them that) will accept his "1 to 1 ratio" screed with zero analysis and then scream about how we need to "cut education funding."
Pathetic. I can't look a real Republican straight in the face any more without wondering how it is they possibly fail to stand up to the Retardicans that have taken over their party.
No, the judge is saying she has the right to demand that Geohot hand over hardware to Sony.
Not to the court for information to be determined whether it is relevant for Sony's case, but DIRECTLY TO SONY.
Yeah. It is that fucked up. Essentially, he's punished before any guilt is found.
Even further in the ruling, though, she allowed Sony to play jurisdiction-shopping and keep the lawsuit in San Francisco despite NOTHING in the case being related to that area, except that it makes it infinitely harder for Geohot to defend since he will have to fly back and forth and back and forth every time this brainless bimbo schedules a hearing.
Yet another case with a technological moron judge saying "oh, what the big corporation wants the big corporation gets. Shut up you peon you shouldn't have messed with a big corporation."
Someone please - check into this corrupt judge's finances. I suspect there are some doozies in there.
Oh please.
Dan Patrick was caught on his radio show saying anything but engineering or medical research is research nobody cares about when justifying Texas's asinine education cuts coming up.
He's the definition of a retardican. Just what the US doesn't need in public representatives.
The problem right now is that the TX legislature got full of a bunch of Retardicans and PeeTardiers who want government to simultaneously provide them cheap everything without being willing to pay for it.
They have this lying jerk "Michael Quinn Sullivan" who runs around claiming that the public education system is "wasting money" because it has a "1 to 1 ratio" of teachers to nonteachers. Technically he's true - because his definition of "teacher" is "runs a homeroom."
He counts as nonteachers the speech therapists, sign language interpreters, ESL teachers, art teachers, music teachers, and anyone else who teaches but doesn't run a homeroom. And then on top of it he counts everyone down to the janitors and bus drivers in his "1 to 1 ratio." I bet there is a 1 to 1 ratio, but it's not a bad thing - ask his supporters what category of employee they can cut without actually screwing up the education system, and these retards just default back to "but but but 1 to 1 ratio but but but" sputtering and retardedness.
The rest of the state budget is similarly afflicted. Their "Dan Patrick" Senator actually was caught on his radio show saying that anything but engineering and medical research is "research nobody cares about."
That's what you get when you let the extreme right-wing nutbags into power.
My god you're right!
"They should have been ranked lower because the voter-participation is low in USA."
The reason voter participation is low is simple: the two-party system encourages anyone in the middle, and anyone with half a brain, to stay home or else hold their nose for insane choices.
I support the US's military spending - after all, if we didn't, we couldn't be the world's policeman and cover 99% of the UN's peacekeeping bills with our own troops.
I support the US's public education system and think it needs more money for improvement.
I support reasonable taxation - not "OMG take everyone's money" but not "OMG NO TAXES EVER."
But what are my choices?
I could vote Dummycrat, and get a party that loves education but treats the military like the plague and wants to hamstring our soldiers.
Or I could vote Retardican/PeeTardier, and and get a party that loves the military and will see my relatives in the service well funded, protected and armed, but at the same time wants to eliminate the Department of Education and throw our kids to the wolves.
And as a side order, I get to watch these two sets of assholes argue over "gay marriage" and "abortion", when quite frankly I don't give a damn because those will sort themselves out societally without either set of assholes having to impose their way 5 minutes from tomorrow.
That's why people don't vote in America. Because the "choices" are fucking pointless.
You forget: Activision are on the "beat the horse till it's dead then beat it some more" release schedule. And they don't have actual studios to innovate, they just have "me too me too let's rip someone else's idea off" studios like Neversoft who are designed to drive franchises into the ground.
With Rock Band, Harmonix hasn't been pushing out games constantly, and when they have, there's been actual innovation to go with them - RB2 was a marked improvement over RB1, RB3 brings the full-guitar and keyboard options to the table.
As for DJ Hero and "True Crime"... whoever greenlit them past the first game ought to have been fired.
What amazes me is - this is precisely the same crap the Cult of Scientology keeps doing.
Has anyone ever noticed how many MafiAA bigwigs are also Scientologists? Anyone think there might be a connection?
The PSP even has games still coming out for it?
Wow. I haven't even turned mine in in a whole year. I guess the lineup for it was really that crappy.
This guy actually talked about Sony having "the best mp3 players" and "the best audio shit"... what? Sorry, nobody in their right mind buys a Sony MP3 player, and Sony audio stuff is overpriced and underpowered too - Sony barely ever registers beyond a blip at the usual places...
I think I know what @TheKevinButler's Slashdot name is now though! Come on down and take a bow, Kevin... I mean "perryizgr8."
Kevin Butler's twitter account is now talking about "awesome PS3 exclusives" for the next year.
Someone needs to get him to actually name one. The PS3 hasn't had a "killer app" yet.
I'm also surprised Sony hasn't fired this ridiculously ineffective marketing hack years ago.
NASA has never been great for the "free market." NASA is, and has always been, about making the breakthroughs that needed to be made no matter the cost.
We've gotten more out of NASA's research than we ever expected, and NASA has actually been worth every penny we've ever spent on it. Nowhere in the private sector would the research for any major NASA breakthrough ever have managed to come; the private sector would have taken one look at the development cost and said "screw it, wait for someone else to do the difficult stuff first" and only then come by to make it "cheaper to do" later on - which is precisely what happened, time and again.
The problem is that because its results and benefits aren't immediately realized in a 2-year or 4-year timeframe, politicians on the "cut cut cut rawr rawr kill the government" platform always see it as "wasted money." This is much like the way that retarded "government representatives" scream about how "education funding is wasted" because spending more money doesn't instantly improve results, while ignoring every bit of research that shows quite conclusively that cutting education funding to below a certain minimum guarantees the worst results possible.
The end result today is that NASA's been hamstrung under the "do more with less" attitude for so long, as ordered by blind nincompoops who are insulated from the results of their own decisions, that they're stuck trying to "do more" with mere pennies for the tasks they are continually given.
Oh look it's my stalker. What happened, run out of mod points to attack my karma with, so now you just have to run around posting AC troll attacks at me?
I'd ask you politely to stop, but apparently you stalkers never listen.
I'd be more worried about this sort of thing.
That's because you got your decoder out of a Cracker Jack box rather than mailing in for the official Little Orphan Annie decoder from Ovaltine...
Alternate possibilities.
erk: Ask Noah. Be prepared to scoop a lot of petrified animal shit.
riv: Colorado.
pub: Med.
r: The Dread Pirate Roberts never takes prisoners!
n: protons 7, electrons 7, add neutrons to taste.
k: makes a really lousy fake table salt when added to chlorine.
da: DAAAAAAAAA!
erk: hidden in a crate labeled "top secret" in a giant government warehouse filled with identical crates.
riv:Mississippi.
pub: a place operated by a publican. Not to be confused with a (re)publican, which is a species of brainless human.
R: harr fiddle de dee, being a pirate is alright with me...
n: e way you want it, that's the way you need it, any way you want it...
K: O.
Da: dweeee da da da Dweee dao!
Both sides have their kooky and their mature sites.
I had almost listed Little Green Footballs as yet another site that operates more on cult of personality (which is ironic given that Mad King Charles has all the personal magnetism of day-old jello left in the trash), and a perfect example of how such cultishness is not unique to one side of the aisle or the other, as evidenced by the way he went from the right-wing deep end to the left-wing deep end in such a perfect performance of blackwhite (complete with unpersoning an amazing number of his former commentariat) that George Orwell himself could scarcely have written better.
As for "liberalism tends to be so fueled by emotion that it drives centrists away" - the right wing is much the same way. The lunatic fringe of the Pee Tardiers out there today are, let's face it, frightening in their behavior. What's going on in Texas with regard to education funding right now, to name just one example, is downright criminal - but to the Pee Tardier mindset, "OMG public education is left wing indoctrination against god they wanna teach evolution insteada tha bible kill it kill it break out the torches and pitchforks."
It's sad but true. Good luck finding the sensible, sane middle these days; between the media outlets and the politicians, the centrists have been told by both sides that we aren't "fundamentalist" enough for either side and we should just stay home or let both sides call us traitors.
Did I say they were any better? No.
Slanted news is slanted news. Makes no difference whether it's Fox, CNN, MSNBC, Huffington Post, Drudge, DailyKos, or even the freak-of-the-week-show from over at Little Green Fucktards.
I don't know. Huffington Post and DailyKos were the two big attempts of the left wing to create their own "viral" websites. The end result's been a lot of hate speech, a whole lot of banned commentariat, and very little if anything accomplished.
Huffington Post's biggest claim to fame in recent years has been as a haven for the anti-vaccination lunacy of retards like Jenny McCarthy, Dana Ullman, and followers of Andrew Wakefield.
Not really, no. I stand by my original point that it's rather a joke at best.
Please see my commentary below with links regarding places Wikipedia goes horribly, horribly wrong.
Then again, the Wikitrolls are currently expending their modpoints attacking my karma, so I must have hit a bit too close to the truth for their liking
"if the alleged source you citied isn't accessible on the Web, there's no way for anyone editing your article who doesn't have a triple doctorate, a $10,000 subscription to the specialist journal you quoted and a dozen plane tickets to visit museums, to check that it does, in fact, exist, and that you're not just making it up"
Funny. I can go look just about any source up. All I have to do is go to my local library, or failing that, the local university library. They can pull the article from their stacks for me, allow me to view it for free, even let me photocopy it, and they'll do it for maybe a few cents a page xerox cost. Worst case scenario, I have to have them request an interlibrary loan, which means I get it into my hands in about a week's time.
You're just lazy, like most Wikipedia "researchers."
The problem with Wikipedia in respect to 1990 is actually fairly clear; to most Wikipedians, "if it's not on the web it doesn't exist." Their faulty, backwards "reliable sources" sections have left them ignoring, or sometimes destroying, records painstakingly crafted on the history of various industries in which much of the documentation is not found in newspapers, but in archives like USENet and inter-BBS communication.
Here's a great example of where wikipedia screwed up in covering and handling the topic of content management systems.
Or where obvious POV-pushing is not just tolerated by Wikipedia, but actively supported by Wikipedia insiders: Tellingly, it was later revealed that one of the Wikipedia editors who led the attack is actually an employee of Electronic Intifada.
And then there's what they do to actual researchers who try to contribute.
Understand the problem yet?
Wikipedia is at best a joke, at worst a farce. Analyses of what's wrong with Wikipedia - insular central circle of power-hungry xenophobes calling the shots, constant wikilawyering and assumption that anyone new is automatically an "invader", scandal after scandal after scandal... wikipedia is a great resource if you want a single page for every freaking pokemon, and a lousy resource for documentation of anything that happened prior to 1990.
And don't even think of going near Wikipedia if you want to try to correct a problem article. Remember Lie #2: Nobody new ever comes to Wikipedia. Given the way their "culture" works, I don't wonder that women don't want to go near it - after all, women are notoriously more sane than men, and nobody with an ounce of sanity would want to get involved with the incestuous circle-jerk that makes up Wikipedia's power structure.
No, that 3 point font in a font color 2 shades lighter than the background will refer you to the "full EULA available in the EULA display department."
The EULA display department is, of course, in the third subbasement of Capcom's headquarters. Past where the stairs and light have gone, so you'll have to bring a ladder and torch. Keep going and you'll find a disused lavatory with a sign saying "beware the leopard", in which there's a locked filing cabinet with the key broken off inside the lock...