In science, at least, what is considered "correct" is more or less decided through the peer-review process. If something is not described in a citable, peer-reviewed article, it's just not science, and shouldn't be discussed in Wikipedia articles. It might be true, but Wikipedia's not the place to break that new finding. It should go through peer-review first, and then Wikipedia will write about it once it's published.
And of course if you make an edit, saying "I WAS THERE, I SPENT 3 YEARS working with that thingy, I HAVE SIX OF THEM IN MY ATTIC", your edit gets removed within an hour, time and again.
That's what they should do, though! Wikipedia isn't a place to publish your own personal knowledge, but a place to publish information that can be cited, ideally to peer-reviewed articles or books. Half the point of a Wikipedia article is being able to look up the references for further reading, and citation where [3] resolves to "[3] Personal experience of Wikipedia user Ancient_Hacker" just isn't very helpful for that.
Yeah, I would say that on articles that have attracted enough attention to have multiple knowledgeable editors, quality is quite good. Exceptions for some rough spots in very hot-button areas, like Israel-Palestine, where sometimes editors with the wrong motives are attracted.
What I like compared to Britannica is that it's less likely there will be a whopper of an omission in a high-profile article. Some Britannica articles, especially on science/math topics, just have really puzzling stuff missing, or stated incorrectly, while those tend to get found on Wikipedia.
The bill gives the judge discretion to determine if it was a frivolous lawsuit, so if judges use that discretion properly (admittedly, subject to question), people who sue and lose won't be assessed the costs if the suit was at least a reasonable one.
Good point. Given all the bullshit copyright-transfer agreements I've had to sign to get papers published in academic venues, I should've remembered that that kind of thing was necessary.
Kijiji proper doesn't exist outside of Canada. eBay bought it and rolled it into eBay Classifieds, except for the Canadian sites, which were well-established enough that they keep operating them independently as kijiji.ca. Everything else is at a subdomain of ebayclassifieds.com now. That does get some usage, but it's not as popular as Craigslist.
I realize Craigslist is popular because Craigslist is popular, but then again, so was MySpace.
MySpace is an example that such markets can fall out of favor, but it's hard, because the new market isn't useful until a sizable number of people have moved. eBay has been getting worse and worse, and steadily increasing its fees along with it, and yet none of its competitors have caught on. I would guess Craigslist is following an eBay route.
The other part of the equation, imo, is that a large proportion of Craigslist competitors have tried to be too fancy. Craigslist beat newspaper classified ads, and a large proportion of its userbase are non-techies who don't want anything more complex than that. Zoomable maps and drop-down boxes to sort according to criteria and all that Web 2.0 stuff didn't look enough like a classified ad.
True, but that's where a power imbalance typical of network-effects markets appears: any single individual may need Craigslist more than Craigslist needs them.
I think that's probably true of Twitter themselves, too. This is an entertainment tool that succeeds if people pay attention to it, not really based on whether it predicts the election correctly (which nobody expects it to).
It does seem problematic, but I think they're in a better situation than Righthaven was, at least. Righthaven didn't even have the right to publish the content; they were solely given the right to sue for copyright infringement, which the judge ruled was a sham assignment since it didn't even include the right to use the work. Here at least Craigslist has the right to publish the content (and does so), in addition to this purported right to enforce copyrights. Not sure if that's enough.
Two different listings for a $30 mattress that aren't identical would not necessarily be "derivative works" though, just parallel works. I mean, you can't copyright the idea of selling a mattress for $30; the only copyright Craigslist would be gaining would be on the specific text of a specific ad.
It's pretty clearly giving them an exclusive copyright license, with explicit authority to enforce your copyright, probably intended to remove any doubt a judge may have that they're allowed to sue sites that scrape/republish Craigslist. And since it's exclusive, this probably does mean that you're not allowed to copy/paste the same ad onto multiple sites, since you've exclusively licensed your ad to Craigslist. Which is pretty dumb, although I would put good odds on them not enforcing that, since the timing indicates it's aimed at the sites that scrape Craigslist wholesale, not random individuals.
I don't read it as giving them complete exclusivity rights for the underlying rental/sale, though. There isn't any language saying you agree not to list the item on another site simultaneously, so I believe (while obviously IANAL) that you could write up a separate ad for another site if you wanted.
Keller didn't just accidentally end up at Apple as the result of the purchase of PA Semi; the consensus is that PA Semi were specifically bought to acquire the team led by Keller, moreso than Apple caring about the company itself (i.e. it was what startups these days like to call an "acquihire"). Keller headed the A4/A5 design at Apple (the system-on-a-chip in the iPhone and iPad), so there's now a noticeable staffing gap if they plan to continue in-house development of their mobile chips.
This inevitably pops up everywhere, but I think it's more symptomatic of a lack of confidence in post-Jobs Apple, producing a self-fulfilling prophecy, than necessarily an independent assessment. Perceptions of Apple have been so closely tied to Jobs for years that evaluation of how smart decision are are strongly influenced by that. There are things that Apple could do today that will get people kvetching about "ugh, if only Steve Jobs were still here he'd never do that", but if Steve Jobs himself had done the identical thing 5 years ago, people would raise an eyebrow, maybe think it's weird, but give him the benefit of the doubt, assuming he knows what he's doing. Basically, people don't trust Apple knows what they're doing the way they trusted jobs, so even things Jobs would've done get that "if only Jobs..." treatment!
With patent litigation, the direct answer is that we almost never do, and the system isn't really intended to provide an immediate benefit: it's explicitly a temporary monopoly granted to an inventor, and monopolies (even temporary) generally raise prices and reduce options.
The theoretical long-term justification is that a patent system incentivizes both innovation and public disclosure of innovations (vs. keeping them as trade secrets), thereby making us all better off in general, with better, cheaper, technology and more options if you view it over a longer timeframe than the timeframe of any one patent.
I suspect that it often fails to work out that way, though.
It looks like it's a domain used by Thomson Reuters to host investors-relates sites for companies that contract that job out. More info from some blog post.
Their "core defense program" figures seriously undercount the total expense of operating the military, which include a lot of expenses that they pawn off on other agencies. For example, the entire veterans' healthcare system should be counted as military spending: if we had fewer vets, we'd have less VA spending. In addition, a bunch of Department of Energy stuff is military, some of it ongoing research, and some of it cleaning up military-created Superfund messes.
I recall some of these debates around breeder reactors (which also have significant dual-use possibilities), and the arguments there were that, although obviously the U.S. already has nuclear weapons, it should nonetheless not use a dual-use-prone technology for its civilian reactors, because doing so: 1) sets a precedent that this is normal civilian nuclear technology and makes it harder to argue against other countries also using it; and 2) may bring the cost down and improve the practicalities so that it's easier for other countries to get one.
Not sure it's a good argument, but I think the arguments around SILEX would be basically the same.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Facebook community when Limited Run confirmed that Facebook ad effectiveness has dropped yet again, now down to less than 20% legitimate clicks. Coming on the heels of a recent stock crash which plainly indicates that Facebook is losing investors' confidence, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Facebook is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
Good point; that could be interesting. Tolkien has this whole world with backstories, but really only LoTR succeeds in being a compelling narrative that fully uses that world. The Hobbit as written is more of an early story that vaguely hints at a larger world, more in that sense like a lot of other fantasy novels (which typically have less of a deeply fleshed out cosmology than Tolkien's world). There is definitely enough material to produce something of a prequel to LoTR, which The Silmarillion and the LoTR appendices hint at but don't really pull together into a compelling story.
I suppose I'm a bit skeptical that it'll actually happen, because it's nontrivial storytelling work to pull that off. But there is enough material that theoretically a great filmmaker (or novelist, for that matter) could produce the prequel to LoTR that Tolkien himself didn't.
I like The Hobbit, but it's not an epic like The Lord of the Rings is. It's not supposed to be an epic. It's a self-contained, medium-sized story, with a fairly classic narrative arc. It makes no sense to tell the story in installments. The first 1/3 of the Hobbit isn't a film! There is one fairly straightforward journey, a climax, a denouement. The book is circa 300 pages, not circa 1000 like LoTR is.
That's getting pretty close to perfect, but I think some of the tricky part is not just emulating the console hardware, but the interface with the analog world, which you can get even with a literally exact emulation.
For example, one of the most common aesthetic flaws in emulators is audio aliasing. If you take the Atari 2600's sound chip, it outputs square waves directly to line-out, because it's a super-cheap chip that is literally a digital circuit (alternating high and low voltages) plugged into analog audio out. Its operation has been reverse engineered so it's emulated bit- and cycle-perfectly by most Atari emulators. But the sound in most of them is still wrong, because when you generate square waves digitally as PCM audio, as opposed to plugging a circuit directly into an analog line-out, you get pretty bad aliasing. Digitally generating unaliased (band-limited) square waves is actually a fairly complex problem, with a bunch of research papers about it. This guy has been trying to get code into some emulators to do it.
That's just one example, but the observation is that you have to do more than a literal simulation of the original hardware to get it to be a good emulation, sometimes, in this case dealing with the fact that digital simulation of audio-generating chips is inherently different from running those chips to analog audio output.
I do think there are some differences to playing consoles on the original hardware, though. Emulators have been getting better, e.g. improving the fidelity of audio emulation (there are some weird hardware sound chips that are hard to emulate), and in a few emulators, recreating the CRT phosphor decay. But there can still be significant differences.
On the other hand, all you really need for even that is the console itself, since you can get rewritable cartridges to load ROMs onto. If I were putting together an original-console setup, I'd probably do it that way, archiving the consoles physically but the games electronically.
Slashdot Mirror
In science, at least, what is considered "correct" is more or less decided through the peer-review process. If something is not described in a citable, peer-reviewed article, it's just not science, and shouldn't be discussed in Wikipedia articles. It might be true, but Wikipedia's not the place to break that new finding. It should go through peer-review first, and then Wikipedia will write about it once it's published.
Here's a Wikipedia meta-page on that last problem you mention, which they call "fact laundering".
(Incidentally, happens outside Wikipedia too, especially among circularly-referencing newspapers.)
That's what they should do, though! Wikipedia isn't a place to publish your own personal knowledge, but a place to publish information that can be cited, ideally to peer-reviewed articles or books. Half the point of a Wikipedia article is being able to look up the references for further reading, and citation where [3] resolves to "[3] Personal experience of Wikipedia user Ancient_Hacker" just isn't very helpful for that.
Yeah, I would say that on articles that have attracted enough attention to have multiple knowledgeable editors, quality is quite good. Exceptions for some rough spots in very hot-button areas, like Israel-Palestine, where sometimes editors with the wrong motives are attracted.
What I like compared to Britannica is that it's less likely there will be a whopper of an omission in a high-profile article. Some Britannica articles, especially on science/math topics, just have really puzzling stuff missing, or stated incorrectly, while those tend to get found on Wikipedia.
Of course, they're a bit biased with their list, but a few smug Wikipedians actually maintain a list of Britannica errors that Wikipedia has fixed.
The bill gives the judge discretion to determine if it was a frivolous lawsuit, so if judges use that discretion properly (admittedly, subject to question), people who sue and lose won't be assessed the costs if the suit was at least a reasonable one.
Good point. Given all the bullshit copyright-transfer agreements I've had to sign to get papers published in academic venues, I should've remembered that that kind of thing was necessary.
Kijiji proper doesn't exist outside of Canada. eBay bought it and rolled it into eBay Classifieds, except for the Canadian sites, which were well-established enough that they keep operating them independently as kijiji.ca. Everything else is at a subdomain of ebayclassifieds.com now. That does get some usage, but it's not as popular as Craigslist.
MySpace is an example that such markets can fall out of favor, but it's hard, because the new market isn't useful until a sizable number of people have moved. eBay has been getting worse and worse, and steadily increasing its fees along with it, and yet none of its competitors have caught on. I would guess Craigslist is following an eBay route.
The other part of the equation, imo, is that a large proportion of Craigslist competitors have tried to be too fancy. Craigslist beat newspaper classified ads, and a large proportion of its userbase are non-techies who don't want anything more complex than that. Zoomable maps and drop-down boxes to sort according to criteria and all that Web 2.0 stuff didn't look enough like a classified ad.
True, but that's where a power imbalance typical of network-effects markets appears: any single individual may need Craigslist more than Craigslist needs them.
I think that's probably true of Twitter themselves, too. This is an entertainment tool that succeeds if people pay attention to it, not really based on whether it predicts the election correctly (which nobody expects it to).
It does seem problematic, but I think they're in a better situation than Righthaven was, at least. Righthaven didn't even have the right to publish the content; they were solely given the right to sue for copyright infringement, which the judge ruled was a sham assignment since it didn't even include the right to use the work. Here at least Craigslist has the right to publish the content (and does so), in addition to this purported right to enforce copyrights. Not sure if that's enough.
Two different listings for a $30 mattress that aren't identical would not necessarily be "derivative works" though, just parallel works. I mean, you can't copyright the idea of selling a mattress for $30; the only copyright Craigslist would be gaining would be on the specific text of a specific ad.
It's pretty clearly giving them an exclusive copyright license, with explicit authority to enforce your copyright, probably intended to remove any doubt a judge may have that they're allowed to sue sites that scrape/republish Craigslist. And since it's exclusive, this probably does mean that you're not allowed to copy/paste the same ad onto multiple sites, since you've exclusively licensed your ad to Craigslist. Which is pretty dumb, although I would put good odds on them not enforcing that, since the timing indicates it's aimed at the sites that scrape Craigslist wholesale, not random individuals.
I don't read it as giving them complete exclusivity rights for the underlying rental/sale, though. There isn't any language saying you agree not to list the item on another site simultaneously, so I believe (while obviously IANAL) that you could write up a separate ad for another site if you wanted.
Keller didn't just accidentally end up at Apple as the result of the purchase of PA Semi; the consensus is that PA Semi were specifically bought to acquire the team led by Keller, moreso than Apple caring about the company itself (i.e. it was what startups these days like to call an "acquihire"). Keller headed the A4/A5 design at Apple (the system-on-a-chip in the iPhone and iPad), so there's now a noticeable staffing gap if they plan to continue in-house development of their mobile chips.
This inevitably pops up everywhere, but I think it's more symptomatic of a lack of confidence in post-Jobs Apple, producing a self-fulfilling prophecy, than necessarily an independent assessment. Perceptions of Apple have been so closely tied to Jobs for years that evaluation of how smart decision are are strongly influenced by that. There are things that Apple could do today that will get people kvetching about "ugh, if only Steve Jobs were still here he'd never do that", but if Steve Jobs himself had done the identical thing 5 years ago, people would raise an eyebrow, maybe think it's weird, but give him the benefit of the doubt, assuming he knows what he's doing. Basically, people don't trust Apple knows what they're doing the way they trusted jobs, so even things Jobs would've done get that "if only Jobs..." treatment!
"How do we, as consumers, benefit from all this?"
With patent litigation, the direct answer is that we almost never do, and the system isn't really intended to provide an immediate benefit: it's explicitly a temporary monopoly granted to an inventor, and monopolies (even temporary) generally raise prices and reduce options.
The theoretical long-term justification is that a patent system incentivizes both innovation and public disclosure of innovations (vs. keeping them as trade secrets), thereby making us all better off in general, with better, cheaper, technology and more options if you view it over a longer timeframe than the timeframe of any one patent.
I suspect that it often fails to work out that way, though.
It looks like it's a domain used by Thomson Reuters to host investors-relates sites for companies that contract that job out. More info from some blog post.
Their "core defense program" figures seriously undercount the total expense of operating the military, which include a lot of expenses that they pawn off on other agencies. For example, the entire veterans' healthcare system should be counted as military spending: if we had fewer vets, we'd have less VA spending. In addition, a bunch of Department of Energy stuff is military, some of it ongoing research, and some of it cleaning up military-created Superfund messes.
You only need to stop smiling if you want to stop it from shooting, i.e. are no longer pleased with that activity...
I recall some of these debates around breeder reactors (which also have significant dual-use possibilities), and the arguments there were that, although obviously the U.S. already has nuclear weapons, it should nonetheless not use a dual-use-prone technology for its civilian reactors, because doing so: 1) sets a precedent that this is normal civilian nuclear technology and makes it harder to argue against other countries also using it; and 2) may bring the cost down and improve the practicalities so that it's easier for other countries to get one.
Not sure it's a good argument, but I think the arguments around SILEX would be basically the same.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Facebook community when Limited Run confirmed that Facebook ad effectiveness has dropped yet again, now down to less than 20% legitimate clicks. Coming on the heels of a recent stock crash which plainly indicates that Facebook is losing investors' confidence, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Facebook is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
Good point; that could be interesting. Tolkien has this whole world with backstories, but really only LoTR succeeds in being a compelling narrative that fully uses that world. The Hobbit as written is more of an early story that vaguely hints at a larger world, more in that sense like a lot of other fantasy novels (which typically have less of a deeply fleshed out cosmology than Tolkien's world). There is definitely enough material to produce something of a prequel to LoTR, which The Silmarillion and the LoTR appendices hint at but don't really pull together into a compelling story.
I suppose I'm a bit skeptical that it'll actually happen, because it's nontrivial storytelling work to pull that off. But there is enough material that theoretically a great filmmaker (or novelist, for that matter) could produce the prequel to LoTR that Tolkien himself didn't.
I like The Hobbit, but it's not an epic like The Lord of the Rings is. It's not supposed to be an epic. It's a self-contained, medium-sized story, with a fairly classic narrative arc. It makes no sense to tell the story in installments. The first 1/3 of the Hobbit isn't a film! There is one fairly straightforward journey, a climax, a denouement. The book is circa 300 pages, not circa 1000 like LoTR is.
Ah yeah, I remember that story; found this Slashdot post about it from last year.
That's getting pretty close to perfect, but I think some of the tricky part is not just emulating the console hardware, but the interface with the analog world, which you can get even with a literally exact emulation.
For example, one of the most common aesthetic flaws in emulators is audio aliasing. If you take the Atari 2600's sound chip, it outputs square waves directly to line-out, because it's a super-cheap chip that is literally a digital circuit (alternating high and low voltages) plugged into analog audio out. Its operation has been reverse engineered so it's emulated bit- and cycle-perfectly by most Atari emulators. But the sound in most of them is still wrong, because when you generate square waves digitally as PCM audio, as opposed to plugging a circuit directly into an analog line-out, you get pretty bad aliasing. Digitally generating unaliased (band-limited) square waves is actually a fairly complex problem, with a bunch of research papers about it. This guy has been trying to get code into some emulators to do it.
That's just one example, but the observation is that you have to do more than a literal simulation of the original hardware to get it to be a good emulation, sometimes, in this case dealing with the fact that digital simulation of audio-generating chips is inherently different from running those chips to analog audio output.
Collector instinct I guess.
I do think there are some differences to playing consoles on the original hardware, though. Emulators have been getting better, e.g. improving the fidelity of audio emulation (there are some weird hardware sound chips that are hard to emulate), and in a few emulators, recreating the CRT phosphor decay. But there can still be significant differences.
On the other hand, all you really need for even that is the console itself, since you can get rewritable cartridges to load ROMs onto. If I were putting together an original-console setup, I'd probably do it that way, archiving the consoles physically but the games electronically.