They haven't covered them in the exhaustive detail that some people want,
Yes, and thats exactly the problem. What you get from the news is something along the lines of "homebrew exists", well, duh, I already new that, thats not something on which you can base a useful article about the topic. The details are what makes the information useful, everything else is just generic blabla.
In this case the software itself is the primary source, everybody can just load it up and try it out. Its easy to verify the facts for anybody who is actually using it. Just as it is easy for everybody to verify some facts about the movie or book by watching it.
Relying on a middle man as secondary source is just utter nonsense bureaucracy and turned a badly written, but useful article, into a completly useless one.
If something isn't notable that means it hasn't received significant coverage in reliable third party sources.
Wrong, simple example is homebrew development on game consoles, receives close to zero coverage in mainstream press, because gaming press depends on advertising money and gaming companies don't like them reporting about things that can be used for piracy. That doesn't make them less noteworthy, it just makes it near impossible to find any "notable sources", because only real sources are blogs, wikis and other community based stuff.
Which issue are you talking about? Latest time I checked there weren't really any issues with GPLv3 itself, the issue was simply that Linux is "GPLv2 only" instead of "GPLv2 or any later version", which would make an update quite complicated and time consuming.
No editor or even group has the ability on a volunteer basis to manage hundreds of thousands of word articles on a subject.
Thats why you split things up into readable and manageable thunks.
Endlessly adding unsourced trivial and personal opinion to an article doesn't improve its quality.
Strawmen argument, I never mentioned huge amount of unsourced trivia. The point isn't to flood the articles with bad information, but leaving in good articles available and quite frequently that doesn't happen because an article isn't "notable enough" due to an completly arbitrary criteria.
That aside, most trivia is trivial to verify by just watching the movie, reading the book or playing the game or using the device, yet it is often near impossible to find a printed-on-paper source for it.
again you've confused an encyclopedia with a record of all human thought.
You are confusing Wikipedia with a paper encyclopedia. Beside "...given free access to the sum of all human knowledge." is a quote from Jimmy Wales and I think that guy should know a thing or two about Wikipedia, to bad that his wording isn't actually implemented in policy to stop the deletionist.
A single source telling something different might not be enough to make a final call on a fact, after all the source could just be honestly wrong, it however should be enough to cast some doubt on the data and thus require further research. Especially when it comes to release dates it shouldn't be that hard to verify, there should after all be a plenty of magazines from back then that printed something about it.
Anyway, the real crux here isn't so much the policy itself, but the reaction to your request on the Talk page, which basically starts with "...Wikipedia's verifiability policy requires...". That might be all correct, but it also kind of misses the point, since the interesting part isn't what Wikipedia requires, but what the actual facts are. Way to much time is wasted in such discussions about policy instead about worrying how one could verify the actual data in better way. Now sure, the reply in the Talk page was a very mild one, one that I normally wouldn't even complain about, but in many cases, especially when it comes to deletions and larger edits, such discussions can get extremely annoying and unproductive, because one party just misses common sense and throws mindlessly some Wikipedia rules around (which aren't really hard rules in the first place, but just guidelines) while the other tries to get some fact figured out. And well, in the end the party that cares about the fact is just pissed of and no further research is done on the topic and that is really a thing that needs to change.
But we're going to run out of the ability to manage articles that grow even more and more.
If Wikipedia wouldn't scare of the people actually writing and editing the articles it wouldn't have a problem with maintaining them.
I could easily see some articles become novel length piles of garbage if people were allowed to run free with them.
If an article is of bad quality you mark it with one of those 'citation missing', 'npov' and whatever markers to give it a chance of improvement. If there are too many of those articles, Wikipedia is free to move them to an unstable/unreviewed/whatever branch. "Fixing" the problem of to many articles by deletion is doing far more harm then good, because it pissed of everyone that actually cared about the article.
How useful would an article be if people could just endlessly add every piece of trivia or original thought they had about a subject to it.
Much more useful then a non-existent article. When you don't run out of paper there just isn't a reason to restrict the information you want to collect, one might argue about reorganizing stuff, about splitting articles of and such, but just deleting the information really doesn't accomplish anything useful.
Deletionist cause far more harm then vandals ever did.
Such stuff would be easy to figure out, because you wouldn't only have to fake the fact, but month or years of blog posts and comments that make your blog believable.
The most elegant way to fake facts of course is to simply edit Wikipedia, wait till a ton of newspapers just code Wikipedia and then take in turn use that to justify the original edit, fun stuff, that nicely demonstrates of trustworthy paper publications are.
And there are only so many editors at any given time.
Well, yeah, because the rest of them got annoyed over that deletionism and just isn't contributing to Wikipedia any more. The whole problem with deletions is that they happen without a valid logical reason, they happen in a non-democratic manner (i.e. number of people writing the article doesn't help against a single admin wanting to delete it) and they quite often happen on articles that are quite useful.
I have stumbled across interesting articles that got deleted later on far more often then about articles being vandalized.
Articles are meant to provide all the information the average person would find useful about a subject.
By that argument most articles about physics and math could be deleted, because they are pretty much completly useless for somebody not working in that field.
An encyclopedia is a concept that is based around the limitations of paper, Wikipedia isn't printed on paper and therefore should not follow the same restrictions.
My problem is that many Wikipedia admins seem to interpret verifiability as in "was printed on paper somewhere", instead of just as what the word says. There are plenty of topics where a blog or another Wiki is a much more trustworthy and much easier to verify then mainstream press (homebrew software on consoles for example), yet linking them as source gets dismissed or articles even deleted.
Openssl developers screwed up by not giving proper guidance, period.
It is not the job of the OpenSSL developers to babysit Debian people that don't know what the fuck they are doing. And its especially not Debian jobs to fiddle in code that they don't have a clue about. If the Debian people think their patch is useful, they should have submitted it upstream for proper review and wait till it got applied to the upstream branch, not casually asking on the mailing list and then just moving ahead with applying a debugging hack to a production software.
All that aside however, the very simple fact that this patch never got a proper review from other Debian people nicely illustrates that security in Debian is something that mostly works by blind luck, not by well thought out procedure.
What part of "If it helps with debugging," don't you understand? They never got an 'ok' to include it in a production release or a proper review of the patch. The Debian person that took the think out just didn't know what he was doing and that alone makes it very questionable why that person was allowed to make such a change in the first place.
until you realized that even with the umpteen thousands of packages included with Sarge,
And thats exactly the problem. You can run an old Windows release with brand new applications without a problem, you can't really do that with a Linux distribution unless you pretty much bypass everything the distribution provides and compile everything yourself, but then whats the point of having a distribution in the first place?
Debian or Linux distributions in general would really benefit a lot when they would start decoupling the base system form the end user applications, so that the base can be kept stable, while the applications can stay new and fresh. And just for the record, the whole "stable" thing is really overrated anyway, since many of the 'stable' applications are really just obsolete, meaning they won't see any security updates from upstream ever again, since upstream has already moved on.
Exactly, and a simple look at Windows gaming should tell us that this isn't going to change anytime soon, since the PC in general just isn't much of an gaming attractive platform, the Linux-PC even less so. Consoles are where the money is made these days.
Only hope I would see for Linux gaming would be if Valve did a native port for Steam and their games, but if or when that ever happens nobody knows.
On the other side Wine is much more solid today then it was back in early 2000, so from a gamers point of view, Linux is actually useful for at least some games.
That will change the resolution, however the graphics seems to be build for 800x600, which means everything is going to look quite pixelated at 1680x1050, which especially with the vector-graphics look is a little annoying.
Herd immunity, if you get enough people vaccinated, even those few without protection, are protected and you can basically force a disease into non-existence, if on the other side you don't get enough people vaccinated herd immunity no longer works and people will die as a result of that.
Its also questionable if freedom should allow you to let your child suffer and possibly die if a cure exists.
Yes, very true. However its really not so much about games being art or not, since that is a very theoretical and pointless discussion, but about games getting respect from mainstream news, politicians and such and that just isn't going to happen as long as games are mainly about saving the world by shooting zombies/aliens/whatever.
I can't think of any game on par with The Lord of the Rings
If am to believe Wikipedia, Lord of the Ring took around 12 years to write and that is without ever having to think about gameplay, technology or other stuff that games have to worry about. The game industry just hasn't existed long enough and technology hasn't been stable enough to allow any work of such proportions to exist (aside from Duke Nukem Forever of course). But we still have games like The Longest Journey, it might not be Lord of the Rings, but its 'close enough' to at least demonstrate that such a thing would possible in gaming, someday.
Games are some of highest forms of art in existence as they include:
Games also include tons of mindless shooting, monsters and other random just-for-entertainment crap. There have been quite a few good games that told an interesting story (The Longest Journey, Planscape Tourment, Grim Fandango, etc.), but more often then not they are over 10 years old and their genres no longer deemed fit for todays game console generation. If mainstream gaming wants to be taken serious it has to try to be more then a gameified version of a monster b-movie. Heck, even highly acclaimed games like Bioshock are really nothing more then a glorified zombie shooter.
I think the real problem is that gaming hasn't figured out how to create artistic/emotional depths trough gameplay. Even if you look at the good games of the past, more often then not the depth is created in cutscenes, not trough gameplay. NPC interaction sadly hasn't really improved much in the last 20 years, its still either a short sequence of predefined sentences or just the random "shot him till he is dead" thing, since you don't have a talk-button to begin with. And until that is solved gaming will always come in second to movies and books when it comes to handle serious topics, because quite todays game simply have no mechanics to handle such topics.
Is a monopoly even possible for an open source company?
Just because another company can rebundle open source software doesn't mean that they can make money with it, after all its hard to compete with a product that costs $0. So its completly possible to run all the competition into the ground with an open source product. That of course doesn't mean that your monopoly will run forever, when it gets to bad somebody might create a better fork, but that can take years. And the chance of starting a completly new product with similar goals is also rather smallish, since most of the community will go to the already existing one, so nobody is left starting a new one.
It would of course be a very different kind of monopole then in classic commercial software development, but still very much monopoly like since you wouldn't have that much alternatives left to go to. Luckily there exist enough alternatives to most Open Source products, so that you can chose between Abiword or OpenOffice, Linux or BSD, KDE or Gnome, Gimp or Krita, etc. so only very few, if any, real 'open source monopoly' exist.
Slashdot Mirror
They haven't covered them in the exhaustive detail that some people want,
Yes, and thats exactly the problem. What you get from the news is something along the lines of "homebrew exists", well, duh, I already new that, thats not something on which you can base a useful article about the topic. The details are what makes the information useful, everything else is just generic blabla.
In this case the software itself is the primary source, everybody can just load it up and try it out. Its easy to verify the facts for anybody who is actually using it. Just as it is easy for everybody to verify some facts about the movie or book by watching it.
Relying on a middle man as secondary source is just utter nonsense bureaucracy and turned a badly written, but useful article, into a completly useless one.
If something isn't notable that means it hasn't received significant coverage in reliable third party sources.
Wrong, simple example is homebrew development on game consoles, receives close to zero coverage in mainstream press, because gaming press depends on advertising money and gaming companies don't like them reporting about things that can be used for piracy. That doesn't make them less noteworthy, it just makes it near impossible to find any "notable sources", because only real sources are blogs, wikis and other community based stuff.
As long as the result of being wrong is an awesome piece of software like 'git' I can totally accept that :)
Which issue are you talking about? Latest time I checked there weren't really any issues with GPLv3 itself, the issue was simply that Linux is "GPLv2 only" instead of "GPLv2 or any later version", which would make an update quite complicated and time consuming.
If you have to many licenses you can no longer combine two pieces of Open Source software, because the licenses are incompatible with each other.
No editor or even group has the ability on a volunteer basis to manage hundreds of thousands of word articles on a subject.
Thats why you split things up into readable and manageable thunks.
Endlessly adding unsourced trivial and personal opinion to an article doesn't improve its quality.
Strawmen argument, I never mentioned huge amount of unsourced trivia. The point isn't to flood the articles with bad information, but leaving in good articles available and quite frequently that doesn't happen because an article isn't "notable enough" due to an completly arbitrary criteria.
That aside, most trivia is trivial to verify by just watching the movie, reading the book or playing the game or using the device, yet it is often near impossible to find a printed-on-paper source for it.
again you've confused an encyclopedia with a record of all human thought.
You are confusing Wikipedia with a paper encyclopedia. Beside "...given free access to the sum of all human knowledge." is a quote from Jimmy Wales and I think that guy should know a thing or two about Wikipedia, to bad that his wording isn't actually implemented in policy to stop the deletionist.
A single source telling something different might not be enough to make a final call on a fact, after all the source could just be honestly wrong, it however should be enough to cast some doubt on the data and thus require further research. Especially when it comes to release dates it shouldn't be that hard to verify, there should after all be a plenty of magazines from back then that printed something about it.
Anyway, the real crux here isn't so much the policy itself, but the reaction to your request on the Talk page, which basically starts with "...Wikipedia's verifiability policy requires...". That might be all correct, but it also kind of misses the point, since the interesting part isn't what Wikipedia requires, but what the actual facts are. Way to much time is wasted in such discussions about policy instead about worrying how one could verify the actual data in better way. Now sure, the reply in the Talk page was a very mild one, one that I normally wouldn't even complain about, but in many cases, especially when it comes to deletions and larger edits, such discussions can get extremely annoying and unproductive, because one party just misses common sense and throws mindlessly some Wikipedia rules around (which aren't really hard rules in the first place, but just guidelines) while the other tries to get some fact figured out. And well, in the end the party that cares about the fact is just pissed of and no further research is done on the topic and that is really a thing that needs to change.
But we're going to run out of the ability to manage articles that grow even more and more.
If Wikipedia wouldn't scare of the people actually writing and editing the articles it wouldn't have a problem with maintaining them.
I could easily see some articles become novel length piles of garbage if people were allowed to run free with them.
If an article is of bad quality you mark it with one of those 'citation missing', 'npov' and whatever markers to give it a chance of improvement. If there are too many of those articles, Wikipedia is free to move them to an unstable/unreviewed/whatever branch. "Fixing" the problem of to many articles by deletion is doing far more harm then good, because it pissed of everyone that actually cared about the article.
How useful would an article be if people could just endlessly add every piece of trivia or original thought they had about a subject to it.
Much more useful then a non-existent article. When you don't run out of paper there just isn't a reason to restrict the information you want to collect, one might argue about reorganizing stuff, about splitting articles of and such, but just deleting the information really doesn't accomplish anything useful.
Deletionist cause far more harm then vandals ever did.
Such stuff would be easy to figure out, because you wouldn't only have to fake the fact, but month or years of blog posts and comments that make your blog believable.
The most elegant way to fake facts of course is to simply edit Wikipedia, wait till a ton of newspapers just code Wikipedia and then take in turn use that to justify the original edit, fun stuff, that nicely demonstrates of trustworthy paper publications are.
And there are only so many editors at any given time.
Well, yeah, because the rest of them got annoyed over that deletionism and just isn't contributing to Wikipedia any more. The whole problem with deletions is that they happen without a valid logical reason, they happen in a non-democratic manner (i.e. number of people writing the article doesn't help against a single admin wanting to delete it) and they quite often happen on articles that are quite useful.
I have stumbled across interesting articles that got deleted later on far more often then about articles being vandalized.
Articles are meant to provide all the information the average person would find useful about a subject.
By that argument most articles about physics and math could be deleted, because they are pretty much completly useless for somebody not working in that field.
An encyclopedia is a concept that is based around the limitations of paper, Wikipedia isn't printed on paper and therefore should not follow the same restrictions.
My problem is that many Wikipedia admins seem to interpret verifiability as in "was printed on paper somewhere", instead of just as what the word says. There are plenty of topics where a blog or another Wiki is a much more trustworthy and much easier to verify then mainstream press (homebrew software on consoles for example), yet linking them as source gets dismissed or articles even deleted.
Openssl developers screwed up by not giving proper guidance, period.
It is not the job of the OpenSSL developers to babysit Debian people that don't know what the fuck they are doing. And its especially not Debian jobs to fiddle in code that they don't have a clue about. If the Debian people think their patch is useful, they should have submitted it upstream for proper review and wait till it got applied to the upstream branch, not casually asking on the mailing list and then just moving ahead with applying a debugging hack to a production software.
All that aside however, the very simple fact that this patch never got a proper review from other Debian people nicely illustrates that security in Debian is something that mostly works by blind luck, not by well thought out procedure.
What part of "If it helps with debugging," don't you understand? They never got an 'ok' to include it in a production release or a proper review of the patch. The Debian person that took the think out just didn't know what he was doing and that alone makes it very questionable why that person was allowed to make such a change in the first place.
until you realized that even with the umpteen thousands of packages included with Sarge,
And thats exactly the problem. You can run an old Windows release with brand new applications without a problem, you can't really do that with a Linux distribution unless you pretty much bypass everything the distribution provides and compile everything yourself, but then whats the point of having a distribution in the first place?
Debian or Linux distributions in general would really benefit a lot when they would start decoupling the base system form the end user applications, so that the base can be kept stable, while the applications can stay new and fresh. And just for the record, the whole "stable" thing is really overrated anyway, since many of the 'stable' applications are really just obsolete, meaning they won't see any security updates from upstream ever again, since upstream has already moved on.
Exactly, and a simple look at Windows gaming should tell us that this isn't going to change anytime soon, since the PC in general just isn't much of an gaming attractive platform, the Linux-PC even less so. Consoles are where the money is made these days.
Only hope I would see for Linux gaming would be if Valve did a native port for Steam and their games, but if or when that ever happens nobody knows.
On the other side Wine is much more solid today then it was back in early 2000, so from a gamers point of view, Linux is actually useful for at least some games.
Yes, and that seems to be you.
Hint: Just because vector graphics might have been used in production doesn't mean they will end up in the game, in this case its all pixel textures.
That will change the resolution, however the graphics seems to be build for 800x600, which means everything is going to look quite pixelated at 1680x1050, which especially with the vector-graphics look is a little annoying.
Other then that however, very well done game.
Feel free to use the Free Software alternatives instead:
http://www.nongnu.org/construo/
Of course that lacks all the polish and advanced physics of World of Goo.
By making it a requirement for entering a public school for example.
Herd immunity, if you get enough people vaccinated, even those few without protection, are protected and you can basically force a disease into non-existence, if on the other side you don't get enough people vaccinated herd immunity no longer works and people will die as a result of that.
Its also questionable if freedom should allow you to let your child suffer and possibly die if a cure exists.
Yes, very true. However its really not so much about games being art or not, since that is a very theoretical and pointless discussion, but about games getting respect from mainstream news, politicians and such and that just isn't going to happen as long as games are mainly about saving the world by shooting zombies/aliens/whatever.
I can't think of any game on par with The Lord of the Rings
If am to believe Wikipedia, Lord of the Ring took around 12 years to write and that is without ever having to think about gameplay, technology or other stuff that games have to worry about. The game industry just hasn't existed long enough and technology hasn't been stable enough to allow any work of such proportions to exist (aside from Duke Nukem Forever of course). But we still have games like The Longest Journey, it might not be Lord of the Rings, but its 'close enough' to at least demonstrate that such a thing would possible in gaming, someday.
Games are some of highest forms of art in existence as they include:
Games also include tons of mindless shooting, monsters and other random just-for-entertainment crap. There have been quite a few good games that told an interesting story (The Longest Journey, Planscape Tourment, Grim Fandango, etc.), but more often then not they are over 10 years old and their genres no longer deemed fit for todays game console generation. If mainstream gaming wants to be taken serious it has to try to be more then a gameified version of a monster b-movie. Heck, even highly acclaimed games like Bioshock are really nothing more then a glorified zombie shooter.
I think the real problem is that gaming hasn't figured out how to create artistic/emotional depths trough gameplay. Even if you look at the good games of the past, more often then not the depth is created in cutscenes, not trough gameplay. NPC interaction sadly hasn't really improved much in the last 20 years, its still either a short sequence of predefined sentences or just the random "shot him till he is dead" thing, since you don't have a talk-button to begin with. And until that is solved gaming will always come in second to movies and books when it comes to handle serious topics, because quite todays game simply have no mechanics to handle such topics.
Is a monopoly even possible for an open source company?
Just because another company can rebundle open source software doesn't mean that they can make money with it, after all its hard to compete with a product that costs $0. So its completly possible to run all the competition into the ground with an open source product. That of course doesn't mean that your monopoly will run forever, when it gets to bad somebody might create a better fork, but that can take years. And the chance of starting a completly new product with similar goals is also rather smallish, since most of the community will go to the already existing one, so nobody is left starting a new one.
It would of course be a very different kind of monopole then in classic commercial software development, but still very much monopoly like since you wouldn't have that much alternatives left to go to. Luckily there exist enough alternatives to most Open Source products, so that you can chose between Abiword or OpenOffice, Linux or BSD, KDE or Gnome, Gimp or Krita, etc. so only very few, if any, real 'open source monopoly' exist.