It's hit it's halfway point? It hasn't even launched yet! The headline is rather deceptive. Lot of thinks can happen, particularly with a President spending us into poverty and certain to be replaced in a couple of years.
Not sure about you, but if I was setting up a data center, I'd fork the $250. It'd probably be your smallest expense and is bound to have some good ideas in it.
Well that sure is an interesting comment. Just how many marks do you think that you can round up who would each pay $250 a pop for a 148 page report because it "is bound to have some good ideas in it"? At that price it wouldn't take too many people to convince me to crank out 150 pages of opnion, particular when the subject is as broad as "every single aspect of a data center". Maybe even sell it at the bargan price of $229.99 and undercut this report (but be close enough in price that some might think mine and the one discussed here are the same). And it wouldn't be like I was stealing their money, would it? It's bound to have some good ideas in it.
Sure they charge $250 to look at it. If they just released it then people whould show what foolishness it is and all the flaws in it. But if you pay $250 to look at it, do you want to admit that you paid $250 for a bogus standard? Do you want to explain to your boss why you spent $250 of the company's money to do that? If you sell your time as a consultant do you want to tell your customers you are someone who was duped into paying $250 to see 148 pages of bogus standards, or do you want to paint yourself as someone who has knowledge that they will have to pay to have acces to?
It's the same with hazing or initations, the people who go through it are a lot more inclined to accept the end result, because it's one of the ways they justify to themselves what they went through. I doubt that many will pay $250 to read this spec and then be able to give a completely unbiased view of it.
I think this is a perfectly valid use for DRM. It allows libraries to offer digital content
I don't think it's a valid use at all. It's a public library, paid for with public funds, but it distributes midia based on a Microsoft-only DRM plan. Users with Linux (or I expect Apple) who decide not to spend the money on a Microsoft version of the software that will support this DRM approach get less access to material than those who support Microsoft. I think that's an extremely dangerous trend to start with libraries funded with public dollars. Unless the libraries also offer the same media in some form that is available to Linux users, then I would fight this when it rears it's ugly head at my libbrary.
"... but the respectable, well established sites would be incredibly foolish to riske their daily millions on such an idea.
Party poker..."
Party Poker seems to be well know by many people to be also making lots of maoney by installing spyware in there victims, err... customers, systems (do a Google search). So much for the logic of a well established site not doing anything to risk their reputation. They work on the rules established by P.T. Barnum, there will plenty of marks. They are hardly concerned about tarnishing their name. And the small off-shore on-line site, even less so. Sure they make a killing in the house's take, but if the owner needs a new Rollex or a few grand walkin around money, why not just take a player for it by watching his hand and the deck? No one will ever be caught, and you can see by the response here that even is the information does come out the chumps will not want to believe it.
Do you really believe that the operators of these on-line "casinos" are above playing poker against you while they can watch your hands, or when they can tell the computer what to deal next? And while dealing themselves the good cards too often might be caught by statistical analysis of the decks (if you can afford to loose enough to gather maeningful data), their watching and knowing your hands would only look like skillful play on their part.
Another form of cheating that I know is going on (because I know someone who admits to doing it) is to play multiple hands in the same game against another player and share information about your hands. This is a great way to part the fools from their money, since having lots more information about the deck than non-cheating players geatly improves your odds. You know, for example, if the chance of drawing that fourth king is very high because it hasn't been dealt to the other hands you know about, or zero because it has. And when one of the positions you control has a particularly good hand you can drive up the pot by having the other hands you control place small raises when they would otherwise drop.
If you like on-line poker, let me introduce you to three card monty. Some people confuse it with a game of chance too, but it's just a very expensive private magic show.
So one problem with education costs is that the schoolbus gas costs is going up? Here's an idea that might help:
Back in in the olden days when I went to school we walked to our bus stop. For grade school the bus stop was only about 1/10 to 2/10 of a mile frm my house. But for jr. high and high school there were fewer routes and stops and my bus stop was about a mile from my house. This is the north where there was often significant snow to walk through, and some icy hills to climb. Now I live in the mid-south. No snow for the kids to walk through (they close the schools for a week if there is even a dusting of snow, sometimes on the threat of snow that doesn't come). But the school buses drive up and down the streets, delivering the kids to their doors! I live on a dead end street that's less than 2/10 of a mile long, yet several yellow busses rush up and down the street every school day morning and afternoon transporting kids. Apparently these kids can't walk up our relativey level short dead end street to meet the bus on the main road. Or even get of at the end of the street and walk down the dead end street to their homes.
So maybe the increased gas costs will finally get the policy makers to tell these kids they have to walk to the bus stop. But I rather doubt it, when they can just use higher gas costs as an excuse to raise taxes. Still, one can hope. Now if we could only in some way address childhood obesity. Hey, wait....
I just want to say that as someone who has hired my share of programmers, I'm not impressed with people who have certifications. I find that many times they really have less understanding in the area that they are certified in than I'm looking for, and they have tended to make passing a test rather than working with and understanding the subject their priority. On top of that, they seem to expect better pay than the good programmers because they have a certification.
I understand that this is not the universal trend in the industry, but I want people who can write good code, have the ability to understand things on a system level, and can adapt to new situations rather than certified people who slowly produce poorer quality work and give me blank stares. Give me someone who can write code to make different systems on a network interact, and who will get out network tools and track down complex network problems over someone with multiple network certifications any day of the week. I don't work in a BSD shop and I don't see that happening any time soon, so this doesn't directly concern me, but if I did I would not take this certification as a good thing.
Better to have two standards technically uncompromised by a need to play with the other side and let the market decide which they want, than one designed by committee. No one gets hurt except the early adopters, and they have far too much money anyway.
It's not a real problem! Nothing stops a game company from coming out with titles football or pigskin or any other generic football term in the title. There is only a restriction on using property like NFL (and, I expect actual NFL team names and likenesses). Who cares? This doesn't affect game play, it only makes the games more expensive as a cut has to go to the NFL. If the complaint is that there are no good football games, then that should have been what was stated, but it wasn't, the complaint is that the only game with the NFL logo all over it isn't very good. Boo Hoo!
And if there are no good football titles than that only says that it's not a market that others want to try to tap. Maybe it's something that programming geeks just don't relate to. Maybe it just been done to death and cranking out a new group of titles every single year really isn't needed. I hardly care.
Quite frankly I think that the NFL should only be allowed to sell rights to one game company. Otherwise it would be like being told that Budwiser was the Official Beer of the NFL, then the next day after you had stocked up on BUD being told that Coors was the Official Beer of the NFL and, after resolving that conflict, you learn that Molson is the Offical Beer of the NFL. Life is too hard already without conflicts like that!
That's just crazy talk. It must be purchased. It has the NFL logo on it! Who cares about quality or gameplay, that's clearly only secondary. This game must be purchased, after all, it's the only officail NFL game this year!!!!
"... this is the only NFL title you'll get to play this year. "So, what are the players to do?"
Oh My God! The tragedy! How awful to only be able to play other football titles that don't have the sacred NFL trademark, but may be much better games. Such games might even cost less besause a few bucks didn't have to flow to the NFL, or play better because dollars that would have gone to the NFL can be spent on coders or testing, how can players accept that??? How horriable it would be to play completely different games and have to stretch one's mind beyond the limits of NFL football! And lets not even think of actually putting the console down and actually going outside and throwing around a football or playing other sports. What in the world are players to do when they have been deprived of the sacred NFL logo by the evil forces of EA????
Doing anything except just playing the official NFL labeled game is completely unthinkable. Players must accept what they are given. It will be good.
"the shelf life can be prolonged and create additional revenue for the publisher not generated by the retail channel"
I'm not very familiar with the Microsoft game line, but are not most or all of the games offered ones that there has been a follow-up sequel to? Might Microsoft not see this as a way to gain revenue while at the same time use an old version of a game to promote a newer version of the game? I noticed the obvious absence of the Microsoft "Train Simulator" here, the game that even beta testers reported in bug reports "Unable to have fun with this game" and suspect it's because there is no sequel (the game rapidly lost it's shelf space). So while other companies sometimes release an older title into the wild as a way to promote a newer version, Bill has decided to charge users a reoccuring monthly fee for people to receive such promotions of new games. Nothing new there from the way Microsoft normally views their customers.
defined in Joules, where a Joule is (approximately for comparison) the amount of force required to lift 1 kilogram of mass up by 10 centimeters
In Imperial measurements, the relation would be identical, except for semantic differences. The closets unit of measurement in the Imperial system to the Joule the foot-pound, which is the amount of force required to lift 1 pound of material up by 1 foot...
I think your argument is even more flawed than this, but one obvious problem with what you say is that the units don't matter as long as the relationship stays the same, but as an example you offer a comparison between feet, pounds and foot pounds, but then on the metric side you claim the relationship is the same but you state that joules are killograms and 10 centimeters (one tenth of a meter). So where did this one tenth suddenly come from if " Concisely put, the relationship is the same nomatter what units you use.????
So did joules not exist as a unit of measure until after Al came up with this equation? If they existed previously, and I'm pretty sure meters and kilograms did too, then I still don't understand how the units all happen to match up.
Of course, if joules came after the equation, then I really have to hand it to Einstein for being a genius. I would have never expected to get away with saying something (in the form of an equation) like e is equeal to m time a constant, as long as e is expressed in terms of m and that constant. No, it would take real genius to figure that you could get away with saying something as obvious as that and act like it was a revalation. Of course, the "matter is energy" thing is pure briliance. But the formula e = m times a constand as long as you play with the units and make it work isn't much of an equation.
Please tell me you didn't seriously think that you'd break the Special Theory of Relativity by changing unit conventions...
We are talking about e-mc^2 here. Not the Special theory of Relativity. Not the General theory of Relativity. Not relativity at all. I'm just asking (and still not quite convinced) how it happens that a formula based on joules, kilograms and meters can just happen to work out in nice round numbers. I do understand the relationship between mass and energy; I don't yet accept what links joules, killograms and meters so serendipitously in this simple equation.
I, of course, learned this famous equation back in grade school. And I understand the relationship between matter and energy (at least as well as most physics students do and better than most lay people, if anyone really understands it).
But I have a few nagging question about this famous equation. People just tend to explain c^2 by saying something like "a little matter represents a lot of energy, and c is a big number and so c squared is even bigger". Well, that certainly is true if c is measured in meters per second or any other common unit. But it's all about the units. If c is expressed in light-seconds/second rather than meters per second, or worse yet light-years/second then the "logic" of that argument is exposed as just hype. So the real issue comes down not to the equation e=mc^2 itself, but the selection of the units that e, m and c are expressed in. Use a different unit and, as I try to show above, the whole thing breaks down.
Al himself made a pretty famous point of saying that c was a constant. So c^2 is also a constant. So the equation boils down to expressing an important relation between e and m. But it all depends on the units of measure. So here's the question:
Is there some science behind the selection of the units involved that allows this equation to be so simple, or are we to believe that some serendipitous magic just allows this to be an exact equation and the units somehow just happen to match up? After all, I certainly don't know of any reason why a meter is any more of a valid unit to do this calculation with than a furlong, or a foot, or a parsec. And I am under the impression that the units of both mass and energy were determined before the equation, not as a result of it. So should I believe that this equation is just a serendipitous chance match up of units, that Einstein made some sort of deal with God, or that the equation just might be a bit over simplified?
If a meter were and inch shorter or an inch larger, there would still be an equation that could show the relation between e and m, but a conversion number would have to be added to the
equation to make up for the slight difference in the size of the meter. How is it that this equation works out with the current rather arbitrary length of a meter to such whole numbers?
Didn't they make about the same claims when they came up with their 64 bit CPU that was not backware compatable and didn't give up real estate required to run the old legacy code? AMD rubbed their nose in it. Intel, like the customer, is a victim of their own marketing approach over the years. The customer and even the industry has learned to acceept awful penatalties in order to run old outdated legacy code. It's a bad design, but one that was promoted strongly by Intel. Are they doing anything different here to make one believe that this time they will be more sucessful than their last 64 bit cpu that wouldn't run legacy code?
yup, there's that, and there's the question of why I even want or need another computer (at a $199 or $239 price tag) if it has to plug into another computer to be powered and used.
Technology is letting us do lots of interesting things, but some people seem to skip asking if they should be done.
And, since they are a branch of the federal government, it's a federal offense to violate those terms.
I'm not even going to bother with the fact that the USPS has been spun off and independent for years, but lets go right to the federal offense part. I'm not quite sure what you think you mean by "offense", but if you mean federal crime, that is dead wrong. Congress passes the laws that spell out federal crimes, some low level clerk writing stuff on boxes does not define laws. Maybe there is such an insane law, but without actual reference to it I'll assume there is not and live without fear of discarding a USPS shipping envelope unused.
I'm active in another site that has a wiki based documentation section. The damn spammers have found it and almost daily add lots of links to porn and other unwelcome and unrelated sites. More recently they have also started deleting good information when they insert their spam rather than just appending it. And the wiki software doesn't present a good way to just back their changes out. There is a history that one can find the old information in, but that still seems to cause problems with loss of formatting, links, and the like.
So there is a need to make some changes on our site and I would think it would be even much more important with Wikipedia. Maybe it could be as simple as having approved editors who scan changes before they take effect. While this might at first involve a lot of work in filtering out spam, in the end the spammers would likely quit spamming the wiki since they would learn that doing so doesn't get their crap onto the wiki pages.
Wikipedia also has another serious problem in that anyone who doesn't like what has been said can just remove it. What's the point in having something called a encyclopedia when one crackpot with a grudge against Darwin or a one-sided view on UFOs can delete any information that he doesn't like, and frequently will? It's unfortunate but true that some forms of content control need to be put in place to stop a few people who deal with disagreeing with previous input by deleting it.
That's pretty crazy but typical of the times. You might as well go after Internet Service Providers too rather than tool makers, as they are not only providing a kay part of what is needed but are also profiting from it (something not all tool makers are). Will not happen though, because the ISPs have money and the tool makers generally don't.
But there is actually a group of international criminals that are involved in music piracy too. Why not go after them? The music piracy would not exist without them. I'm talking, of course, about the record companies and their cartels like the RIAA. I suggest that the music companies are certainly more reponsiable for music piracy than the maker of a software tool that is intended for downloading files other than music. They must be stopped from making this music that promotes piracy in the first place! Sure, it may have some legal outlets too, but they know it's being involved in piracy, and so by their own standards it must be stopped.
Re:perhaps not as sure as you seem to think
on
Xbox 360 for $300
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Either that, or I raise them to think that they don't get everything they throw a trantrum for. One has to wonder about the next generation when parents make posts like yours.
Slashdot Mirror
It's hit it's halfway point? It hasn't even launched yet! The headline is rather deceptive. Lot of thinks can happen, particularly with a President spending us into poverty and certain to be replaced in a couple of years.
Well that sure is an interesting comment. Just how many marks do you think that you can round up who would each pay $250 a pop for a 148 page report because it "is bound to have some good ideas in it"? At that price it wouldn't take too many people to convince me to crank out 150 pages of opnion, particular when the subject is as broad as "every single aspect of a data center". Maybe even sell it at the bargan price of $229.99 and undercut this report (but be close enough in price that some might think mine and the one discussed here are the same). And it wouldn't be like I was stealing their money, would it? It's bound to have some good ideas in it.
It's the same with hazing or initations, the people who go through it are a lot more inclined to accept the end result, because it's one of the ways they justify to themselves what they went through. I doubt that many will pay $250 to read this spec and then be able to give a completely unbiased view of it.
I don't think it's a valid use at all. It's a public library, paid for with public funds, but it distributes midia based on a Microsoft-only DRM plan. Users with Linux (or I expect Apple) who decide not to spend the money on a Microsoft version of the software that will support this DRM approach get less access to material than those who support Microsoft. I think that's an extremely dangerous trend to start with libraries funded with public dollars. Unless the libraries also offer the same media in some form that is available to Linux users, then I would fight this when it rears it's ugly head at my libbrary.
Party poker..."
Party Poker seems to be well know by many people to be also making lots of maoney by installing spyware in there victims, err... customers, systems (do a Google search). So much for the logic of a well established site not doing anything to risk their reputation. They work on the rules established by P.T. Barnum, there will plenty of marks. They are hardly concerned about tarnishing their name. And the small off-shore on-line site, even less so. Sure they make a killing in the house's take, but if the owner needs a new Rollex or a few grand walkin around money, why not just take a player for it by watching his hand and the deck? No one will ever be caught, and you can see by the response here that even is the information does come out the chumps will not want to believe it.
Do you really believe that the operators of these on-line "casinos" are above playing poker against you while they can watch your hands, or when they can tell the computer what to deal next? And while dealing themselves the good cards too often might be caught by statistical analysis of the decks (if you can afford to loose enough to gather maeningful data), their watching and knowing your hands would only look like skillful play on their part.
Another form of cheating that I know is going on (because I know someone who admits to doing it) is to play multiple hands in the same game against another player and share information about your hands. This is a great way to part the fools from their money, since having lots more information about the deck than non-cheating players geatly improves your odds. You know, for example, if the chance of drawing that fourth king is very high because it hasn't been dealt to the other hands you know about, or zero because it has. And when one of the positions you control has a particularly good hand you can drive up the pot by having the other hands you control place small raises when they would otherwise drop.
If you like on-line poker, let me introduce you to three card monty. Some people confuse it with a game of chance too, but it's just a very expensive private magic show.
Back in in the olden days when I went to school we walked to our bus stop. For grade school the bus stop was only about 1/10 to 2/10 of a mile frm my house. But for jr. high and high school there were fewer routes and stops and my bus stop was about a mile from my house. This is the north where there was often significant snow to walk through, and some icy hills to climb. Now I live in the mid-south. No snow for the kids to walk through (they close the schools for a week if there is even a dusting of snow, sometimes on the threat of snow that doesn't come). But the school buses drive up and down the streets, delivering the kids to their doors! I live on a dead end street that's less than 2/10 of a mile long, yet several yellow busses rush up and down the street every school day morning and afternoon transporting kids. Apparently these kids can't walk up our relativey level short dead end street to meet the bus on the main road. Or even get of at the end of the street and walk down the dead end street to their homes.
So maybe the increased gas costs will finally get the policy makers to tell these kids they have to walk to the bus stop. But I rather doubt it, when they can just use higher gas costs as an excuse to raise taxes. Still, one can hope. Now if we could only in some way address childhood obesity. Hey, wait ....
I understand that this is not the universal trend in the industry, but I want people who can write good code, have the ability to understand things on a system level, and can adapt to new situations rather than certified people who slowly produce poorer quality work and give me blank stares. Give me someone who can write code to make different systems on a network interact, and who will get out network tools and track down complex network problems over someone with multiple network certifications any day of the week. I don't work in a BSD shop and I don't see that happening any time soon, so this doesn't directly concern me, but if I did I would not take this certification as a good thing.
Better to have two standards technically uncompromised by a need to play with the other side and let the market decide which they want, than one designed by committee. No one gets hurt except the early adopters, and they have far too much money anyway.
And if there are no good football titles than that only says that it's not a market that others want to try to tap. Maybe it's something that programming geeks just don't relate to. Maybe it just been done to death and cranking out a new group of titles every single year really isn't needed. I hardly care.
Quite frankly I think that the NFL should only be allowed to sell rights to one game company. Otherwise it would be like being told that Budwiser was the Official Beer of the NFL, then the next day after you had stocked up on BUD being told that Coors was the Official Beer of the NFL and, after resolving that conflict, you learn that Molson is the Offical Beer of the NFL. Life is too hard already without conflicts like that!
That's just crazy talk. It must be purchased. It has the NFL logo on it! Who cares about quality or gameplay, that's clearly only secondary. This game must be purchased, after all, it's the only officail NFL game this year!!!!
Oh My God! The tragedy! How awful to only be able to play other football titles that don't have the sacred NFL trademark, but may be much better games. Such games might even cost less besause a few bucks didn't have to flow to the NFL, or play better because dollars that would have gone to the NFL can be spent on coders or testing, how can players accept that??? How horriable it would be to play completely different games and have to stretch one's mind beyond the limits of NFL football! And lets not even think of actually putting the console down and actually going outside and throwing around a football or playing other sports. What in the world are players to do when they have been deprived of the sacred NFL logo by the evil forces of EA????
Doing anything except just playing the official NFL labeled game is completely unthinkable. Players must accept what they are given. It will be good.
I'm not very familiar with the Microsoft game line, but are not most or all of the games offered ones that there has been a follow-up sequel to? Might Microsoft not see this as a way to gain revenue while at the same time use an old version of a game to promote a newer version of the game? I noticed the obvious absence of the Microsoft "Train Simulator" here, the game that even beta testers reported in bug reports "Unable to have fun with this game" and suspect it's because there is no sequel (the game rapidly lost it's shelf space). So while other companies sometimes release an older title into the wild as a way to promote a newer version, Bill has decided to charge users a reoccuring monthly fee for people to receive such promotions of new games. Nothing new there from the way Microsoft normally views their customers.
In Imperial measurements, the relation would be identical, except for semantic differences. The closets unit of measurement in the Imperial system to the Joule the foot-pound, which is the amount of force required to lift 1 pound of material up by 1 foot...
I think your argument is even more flawed than this, but one obvious problem with what you say is that the units don't matter as long as the relationship stays the same, but as an example you offer a comparison between feet, pounds and foot pounds, but then on the metric side you claim the relationship is the same but you state that joules are killograms and 10 centimeters (one tenth of a meter). So where did this one tenth suddenly come from if " Concisely put, the relationship is the same nomatter what units you use.????
Of course, if joules came after the equation, then I really have to hand it to Einstein for being a genius. I would have never expected to get away with saying something (in the form of an equation) like e is equeal to m time a constant, as long as e is expressed in terms of m and that constant. No, it would take real genius to figure that you could get away with saying something as obvious as that and act like it was a revalation. Of course, the "matter is energy" thing is pure briliance. But the formula e = m times a constand as long as you play with the units and make it work isn't much of an equation.
We are talking about e-mc^2 here. Not the Special theory of Relativity. Not the General theory of Relativity. Not relativity at all. I'm just asking (and still not quite convinced) how it happens that a formula based on joules, kilograms and meters can just happen to work out in nice round numbers. I do understand the relationship between mass and energy; I don't yet accept what links joules, killograms and meters so serendipitously in this simple equation.
But I have a few nagging question about this famous equation. People just tend to explain c^2 by saying something like "a little matter represents a lot of energy, and c is a big number and so c squared is even bigger". Well, that certainly is true if c is measured in meters per second or any other common unit. But it's all about the units. If c is expressed in light-seconds/second rather than meters per second, or worse yet light-years/second then the "logic" of that argument is exposed as just hype. So the real issue comes down not to the equation e=mc^2 itself, but the selection of the units that e, m and c are expressed in. Use a different unit and, as I try to show above, the whole thing breaks down.
Al himself made a pretty famous point of saying that c was a constant. So c^2 is also a constant. So the equation boils down to expressing an important relation between e and m. But it all depends on the units of measure. So here's the question:
Is there some science behind the selection of the units involved that allows this equation to be so simple, or are we to believe that some serendipitous magic just allows this to be an exact equation and the units somehow just happen to match up? After all, I certainly don't know of any reason why a meter is any more of a valid unit to do this calculation with than a furlong, or a foot, or a parsec. And I am under the impression that the units of both mass and energy were determined before the equation, not as a result of it. So should I believe that this equation is just a serendipitous chance match up of units, that Einstein made some sort of deal with God, or that the equation just might be a bit over simplified?
If a meter were and inch shorter or an inch larger, there would still be an equation that could show the relation between e and m, but a conversion number would have to be added to the equation to make up for the slight difference in the size of the meter. How is it that this equation works out with the current rather arbitrary length of a meter to such whole numbers?
Didn't they make about the same claims when they came up with their 64 bit CPU that was not backware compatable and didn't give up real estate required to run the old legacy code? AMD rubbed their nose in it. Intel, like the customer, is a victim of their own marketing approach over the years. The customer and even the industry has learned to acceept awful penatalties in order to run old outdated legacy code. It's a bad design, but one that was promoted strongly by Intel. Are they doing anything different here to make one believe that this time they will be more sucessful than their last 64 bit cpu that wouldn't run legacy code?
Technology is letting us do lots of interesting things, but some people seem to skip asking if they should be done.
I'm not even going to bother with the fact that the USPS has been spun off and independent for years, but lets go right to the federal offense part. I'm not quite sure what you think you mean by "offense", but if you mean federal crime, that is dead wrong. Congress passes the laws that spell out federal crimes, some low level clerk writing stuff on boxes does not define laws. Maybe there is such an insane law, but without actual reference to it I'll assume there is not and live without fear of discarding a USPS shipping envelope unused.
Is is just me, or are the /. editors at it again?
It looks to me that what SCO got is that they got away with it. They stole GPL code and are certainly not being punished for it.
So there is a need to make some changes on our site and I would think it would be even much more important with Wikipedia. Maybe it could be as simple as having approved editors who scan changes before they take effect. While this might at first involve a lot of work in filtering out spam, in the end the spammers would likely quit spamming the wiki since they would learn that doing so doesn't get their crap onto the wiki pages.
Wikipedia also has another serious problem in that anyone who doesn't like what has been said can just remove it. What's the point in having something called a encyclopedia when one crackpot with a grudge against Darwin or a one-sided view on UFOs can delete any information that he doesn't like, and frequently will? It's unfortunate but true that some forms of content control need to be put in place to stop a few people who deal with disagreeing with previous input by deleting it.
But there is actually a group of international criminals that are involved in music piracy too. Why not go after them? The music piracy would not exist without them. I'm talking, of course, about the record companies and their cartels like the RIAA. I suggest that the music companies are certainly more reponsiable for music piracy than the maker of a software tool that is intended for downloading files other than music. They must be stopped from making this music that promotes piracy in the first place! Sure, it may have some legal outlets too, but they know it's being involved in piracy, and so by their own standards it must be stopped.
Either that, or I raise them to think that they don't get everything they throw a trantrum for. One has to wonder about the next generation when parents make posts like yours.