It could be, but I'm operating in the open, under my real name. I leave you to figure out what I could have to gain by echoing any such effort.
On the other hand, Byrne's accusation, at this point, has ballooned to where this Sith Lord is apparently responsible for the global economic crisis, and also has control of the WSJ editorial page, and used it to suppress information that could have led to his being uncovered.
Given that, it seems to me irresponsible for Byrne not to identify this incredibly dangerous individual.
I know who was involved in the discussion that led to it. I don't know who made the call.
As for the transparency, you're shifting the field. Yes - there's a lack of transparency on the level of politics of Wikipedia. But the information presented remains transparent. The identity of the author, if Wikipedia is doing its job right, should be irrelevant to your ability to judge the quality of the information presented.
This may not always be true in practice, but if it is not true in practice the issue is with the article, not with the author.
You'd have to go into a bit more detail on exactly what sorts of arrangements you mean to produce a good answer here, but I can give you a partial answer.
No fake money is created in these situations. Money is just a measurement of value - it's a raw form we can convert assets into. But implicit in its idea is a notion of debt as an asset. If I hold a tag sale and sell some stuff, and I get $50 in cash for it, what is my cash, exactly? It's a sort of free-floating, transferrable debt - it means that somebody gave up something that was considered worth something, and obtained a certain amount of purchasing power. By giving up some books and disused furniture, I've obtained $50 of raw purchasing power. Now, in practice, this money is considered to be backed by the US Government - but that is, in the end, immaterial - all that matters is that the green pieces of paper are considered to have an amount of purchasing power.
The thing is, debts and future predicted events have purchasing power. This is what happens when, for instance, I subscribe to a magazine - I send a company $20, and I get 12 issues of a magazine. But 11 of those issues don't exist when I spend my money - what I'm buying is future magazines. This is why subscriptions are cheaper than newsstand - the publisher likes knowing that they have the next 12 issues sold in advance. But in exchange for the inconvenience of paying out for a product that isn't in existence yet, they give me a steep discount off of what I'd normally pay. What I'm really buying, though, isn't the future magazines - it's an obligation to send me the magazines. It's an intangible good - but it's still a good that has value.
Similarly, I can buy a future debt. Why? Because debt has value. And as long as something has value, it is worth money.
Fake money applies differently to naked short selling because there's deception involved - you sell the stock as though you know you'll have it to deliver, and then go try to deliver it. But the person buying doesn't know that. So there's fraud involved. That's the difference - value is being paid for something that is not what it is thought to be. And there fake money comes into it - because something is being represented as having value that it is known not to have.
Yes. Naked short-selling clearly can be used to manipulate the prices of stocks.
The question is whether it has been used. And that's a far, far murkier issue. There are a bunch of important aspects of it, and particularly of Byrne's claims about it, that are in no way well-established.
1) Was naked short selling used by a specific investor (who Byrne referred to as a "Sith Lord") to drive down Overstock.com's share price? 2) Was naked short selling used to drive down the share prices of financial stocks, hastening the current financial crisis? 3) Was, as Byrne is implying by declaring victory in this affair now that the SEC has cracked down on naked short selling, the person or people responsible for shorting the financial stocks the same person or people who manipulated Overstock's price?
These are big questions that remain totally unanswered. Some scandalous details about sockpuppeting on Wikipedia (brought to you by an editor who was banned from Wikipedia for sockpuppeting) should not distract from those key aspects of Byrne's claims.
Gee, Judd. I wonder why that could be. Might have had something to do with the fact that your definition of "reason to this madness" consisted of abusively using multiple accounts to push your agenda, and launching vicious personal attacks against your opponents.
Come on, Judd. You've got to know you can't actually expect to come to a forum as well-traveled as Slashdot and get away with presenting half the facts like that.
I don't know the truth of the accusations against Gary Weiss.
However, the "investigative journalism" touted by Byrne consists purely of information fed to the Register by Byrne - there are no sources other than Byrne for almost all of the significant claims in the Register article. So what we have is an article that is, for all practical purposes, authored by Byrne that leaves out huge swaths of information that runs counter to his agenda.
Given that the entire matter, then, is about Byrne, I think asking pertinent questions about his tactics in his war on naked short selling, and the facts behind one of his biggest and most significant claims about naked short selling is utterly germaine. After all, as it stands, it's Byrne's word against, well, Byrne's record.
No. It's not a great piece of investigative reporting. It's a shit piece of investigative reporting that is held together by insinuation at several key steps, and omits details unfavorable to the argument it's trying to make at other key steps.
Let's go into detail.
"An editor at The Journal asked me to write it, and I told him he wouldn't be allowed to publish it," Byrne says. "He insisted that only he controlled what was printed on the editorial page, so I wrote it. Then, after a few days, he got back to me and said 'It appears I can't run this or anything else you write.'"
This is a serious accusation of editorial malfeasance at another newspaper. No reputable publication would print this without a corroborating source. The lack of any detail whatsoever - and the fact that this is, in and of itself, a wildly bigger claim than any of the stuff about Wikipedia makes it clear that no corroborating source exists. This is Byrne making outlandish claims that are being reported without comment, and endorsed by the Register, which goes on to say "The Journal never changed its stance."
In the wake of the SEC's crackdown, the mainstream financial press has acknowledged that widespread and deliberate naked shorting can artificially deflate stock prices, flooding the market with what amounts to counterfeit shares. But for years, The Journal and so many other news outlets ignored Byrne's warnings, with some journalists - most notably a Forbes.com columnist and former BusinessWeek reporter named Gary Weiss - painting the Overstock CEO as a raving madman.
Well, no wonder. Byrne's claim was always that Overstock was being manipulated - by a specific individual he claimed to know the identity of. That's a far cry from "naked shorting can artificially deflate stock prices." But the article treats them as equivalent claims.
Roger Schneider had recently fired his brother from the Ramsey, New Jersey Nationwide office, and he was sitting on Floyd's work PC - which was packed with several thousand email messages. Patrick Byrne soon paid Roger Schneider a visit, and Schneider gave him the machine. Byrne offered $10,000 in return, but Schneider declined.
This is the extent of the hard evidence presented. Now, as someone familiar with Wikipedia who has looked at the situation, I'll note, I'm wholly convinced Mantanmoreland was using sockpuppets against Wikipedia policy. I'm agnostic on whether he's Gary Weiss, but that's more because I dislike picking into editors' real life identities than anything else.
But this is not evidence. The "investigative journalism" that Byrne is praising here is BYRNE'S OWN ACCOUNT OF BUYING A PC WITH E-MAIL RECORDS ON IT! That's not investigative journalism! That's "Hey, I magically got these e-mails, do you want to report on them?" What steps did the Register take to verify the authenticity of the computer and the e-mails? Did the Register get access to the e-mails on the computer Byrne obtained, or were the e-mails forwarded? Did they get the original e-mail files, or screenshots? All of this is hugely material, and completely left out of this "investigative" piece, leaving it as Byrne reporting claims to the Register, then coming to Slashdot and praising the investigative prowess of the Register in repeating what he said to them verbatim.
"Now, admittedly, we - being Wikipedia as a whole - should have listened to Judd in the first place, but there was a long time where Judd's behavior was counter-productive."
Understatement of the year, but detailing the appalling tactics used by Bagley and Byrne on Wikipedia would undermine the Register's point.
The Register has also reviewed emails in which SlimVirgin indicates that she was a classmate of Byrne's at King's College, Cambridge in the late 80s.
What? Were these emails from the same computer? Or is this the e-mail that Bagley already has posted to antisocialmedia.net about this- an e-mail that's to Bagley, from Byrne, and so continues to not elevate this
Wikipedia doesn't warrant its information on the quality of its editors, and so their identities are immaterial to the trustworthiness of the articles. Wikipedia warrants its information by making the process transparent - you can see how articles evolved, and, in an article that is done right, you can see citations to where all the information came from. When those citations are missing, you are meant to be cautious.
The identities of the editors are immaterial - Wikipedia has never claimed to be trustworthy because of who its editors are. Given that, anonymity is wholly appropriate, and to go out and try to expose somebody is a petty attempt at harassment.
I say this as someone who edits Wikipedia openly and under my own name. The enemies I've made on Wikipedia have taken active advantage of that, filing spurious reports with my local police to try to subject me to police harassment and intimidation. They openly speculated that they might be able to force me out of my PhD program. That is the price editors pay for giving up anonymity. Judd Bagley openly associates with the editors who tried to subject me to police harassment. Given that, the intentions he has in outing editors should be clear.
In what way? I mean, yes - clearly an edit war went on with nasty and unethical POV pushing on both sides (The article's "world-class" reporting fails to note the extensive sockpuppetry and vicious attacks engaged in by Byrne and Judd Bagley). But... so what? There's not even any smoke here, little yet fire - Wikipedia's view of naked short selling did not reflect Patrick Byrne's view. Byrne, mind you, was a CEO who was publicly accusing a "Sith Lord" of manipulating his company's stock via naked short selling. So, you know, not exactly Captain Credible here either.
But the only grounds the story presents for thinking that this mattered is Byrne's suspicion that some journalists didn't cover the story because they checked and believed Wikipedia. First of all, Byrne has nothing resembling evidence for that. Second of all, how is that Wikipedia's fault? Wikipedia has always been very clear on its own reliability, and I know of no responsible editor of Wikipedia who would advocate its use as a source for journalists.
On top of that, the article presents no actual evidence that the information Weiss was adding was wrong. Yes, it is, at this point, clear that Weiss used sockpuppets to edit Wikipedia. But to date, no evidence whatsoever has been produced that Byrne's claim - that Overstock.com was being manipulated via naked short selling campaigns waged by a "Sith Lord" - was correct, or that, based on the reliable, published sources available at the time that Weiss was editing, the Wikipedia article should have read any different.
The extent of what has been shown here is that there was an edit war over naked short selling a while back, and that both sides acted pathetically during it.
"Major player in the drama" kind of understates Byrne and Overstock's role in this.
So let's delve into that one a little deeper, shall we? Because the "world-class reporting" (I assume Byrne intends that to refer to the lush praise the Register showers him with) doesn't answer some important questions I have about all of this.
1) Byrne's campaign against naked short selling was always based on the accusation that a "Sith Lord" (his actual words) was manipulating the stock price of Overstock. The current crackdown is about naked short-selling of financial stocks. What evidence does Byrne have of a connection here? And, more importantly, is he ready yet to declare who this mysterious Sith Lord is? If he was the one to originally crack the story of financial manipulation that nearly brought down the global economy, I would hope he'd be ready to uncover this shadowy overlord.
2) On a similar note, if Byrne was aware of this "Sith Lord" who was apparently trying to bring down the global economy, what is his justification for keeping that information a secret instead of taking a concrete step to avert this crisis?
3) In the course of his crusade against Weiss, Byrne and his employee Judd Bagley made active efforts to out the identities of numerous Wikipedia editors, including accusing one of them of being a British spy (with no significant evidence whatsoever). No serious attempt has linked these editors to any stock manipulation - they appear to have been editors who believed Weiss's side of the story - reasonable given the rampant sockpuppeting and personal attacks Byrne and Bagley were engaged in. Off Wikipedia, Bagley also attempted to infect the computers of his critics with spyware as part of his crusade against them. The Register piece isn't entirely clear on whether, in Byrne's opinion, all of this was worth it. Was it?
4) Does Byrne really believe anyone is stupid enough to take a Register article seriously on face value?
Sorry - I'm sure all these important details got squeezed out of the "world class reporting" for space reasons, and not because Byrne is a paranoid liar who claimed his company was failing because of eeeeeeeeeeevil stock manipulation, then declared victory when the tactics he accused people of using were banned because of their use on... totally unrelated companies, and because the Register is a sensationalist gossip rag that likes to run any anti-Wikipedia story they can find no matter how tenuous. Perhaps someone can fill in the gaps in comments? I hope so.
Although on the surface this looks like a foolish dumbing down of the grade, the size of the grade range that constitutes an F poses a real problem as a teacher - generally not handing in an assignment devastates a competent student's grade as badly or worse than incompetence devastates an incompetent student's grade.
Shrinking the F range is something I've long considered in my grading (though what I was going to do was make F 0-20, D 21-40, etc.)
You've been able to play new levels of Mega Man for free since Mega Man 3?
Seriously. The game is clearly designed to be playable without sliding and charged shots. Yeah, there are spots where I miss charged shots, and I've encountered so far one bolt that clearly needs sliding to get to it, but you know what? The best game in the series had neither charged shots nor sliding.
You get a fully playable game for $10. It's fun. If you liked MM 1-6, you'll like it. I advise against cutting off your nose to spite your face.
You get, for $10 a game. A perfectly playable, fun game.
For a few dollars here and there, you can, if you choose, get add-ons to the game. But if you do not do any of this, you get a game.
Personally, I bought the game, and I am going to play the game. I probably won't get any of the DLC, though I might snatch up extra levels if the price is right. I have no concept of why this is a problem for people. Do you regularly complain when you buy a season of television on DVD that the subsequent episodes aren't included for free?
The Hubble was designed for the Shuttle. Without the Shuttle it would have been built differently. It can't be linked to the Shuttle in any organic way.
Mir and the ISS are, marginally, a different matter, but I confess to skepticism about them as well.
That's circular though. Yes, the Hubble was designed for the launch capabilities we had. But that's a long way from "the shuttle made the Hubble possible." The Hubble is its own accomplishment, not an accomplishment of the Shuttle.
In other comments I've excepted the Hubble. But the fact of the matter is, spacewalks of the sort needed would be possible with a capsule program. There was no reason to invest in the shuttle to accomplish it.
The capsule is actually cheaper per launch than the reusable vehicle, and it's much easier to design landing capabilities from the Orion than the shuttle, which can't actually take us to anywhere.
Because it's there. It's there, and it's big and unknown, and we're humans. And if we don't explore every bit of space that we can get to, we'll sit around itching to go. We go to space for the same reason we went to the south pole, or why we go up mountains that haven't been climbed yet. Because they're there, and we can.
The insidious lie of the modern space program is that there's more to it than that. That space stations and endless low earth orbit missions provide some sort of useful science, and are worth doing. They're not. The point of space is the unknown. So yes. Take out the solar system. Go to every frozen rock we can reach, and start thinking about the frozen rocks we can't. Because they're there. They're places people have never been. And fundamental to the human spirit is the sense that something that seems utterly crazy and impossible is the most important thing there is to do.
Yeah, 1 in 12. Which, frankly, I'm not that worried about, provided we're honest with the astronauts about the risks.
I mean, seriously. Do you think that NASA would have trouble finding volunteers to go into space if there were a known 10% chance of death? A known 20%? Of course they wouldn't. It's space, and the people who look up into it and feel a genuine, burning need to go there are going to go even if it's dangerous. Hell, if the Apollo program, every time it launched, had a 90% chance of killing all astronauts on board, we still would have had more than enough people who wanted to go to the moon that we could have gotten there.
That's not a reason to take unnecessary risks. And given that the shuttle has no scientific value to speak of, frankly, almost every launch is an unnecessary risk. But we cannot pretend that risk is a deal-breaker. Going into space is dangerous. There are plenty of people willing to go anyway, knowing that. And I'd wager that includes every astronaut the US has ever sent there.
The average joe understood the space program just fine in the 60s when it was about doing something. The problem with justifying funding for the space program is that, frankly, the shuttle didn't justify funding. It did virtually nothing of merit in its entire lifespan. If the space program actually became about doing something - exploring, discovering, and pushing our way out into the universe - then it would be trivial to generate support for it. But short of a pretty-looking launch every month, which understandably got boring after 20+ years, the space shuttle does nothing of interest.
Returning to the moon, or going back to Mars, or making a sustained push to research Io, a moon that likely has liquid water? Any of those things would be trivial to justify to the American people.
Slashdot Mirror
It could be, but I'm operating in the open, under my real name. I leave you to figure out what I could have to gain by echoing any such effort.
On the other hand, Byrne's accusation, at this point, has ballooned to where this Sith Lord is apparently responsible for the global economic crisis, and also has control of the WSJ editorial page, and used it to suppress information that could have led to his being uncovered.
Given that, it seems to me irresponsible for Byrne not to identify this incredibly dangerous individual.
I know who was involved in the discussion that led to it. I don't know who made the call.
As for the transparency, you're shifting the field. Yes - there's a lack of transparency on the level of politics of Wikipedia. But the information presented remains transparent. The identity of the author, if Wikipedia is doing its job right, should be irrelevant to your ability to judge the quality of the information presented.
This may not always be true in practice, but if it is not true in practice the issue is with the article, not with the author.
At least I put my name to what I say, and make specific claims that can be followed up on instead of vague insinuations.
You'd have to go into a bit more detail on exactly what sorts of arrangements you mean to produce a good answer here, but I can give you a partial answer.
No fake money is created in these situations. Money is just a measurement of value - it's a raw form we can convert assets into. But implicit in its idea is a notion of debt as an asset. If I hold a tag sale and sell some stuff, and I get $50 in cash for it, what is my cash, exactly? It's a sort of free-floating, transferrable debt - it means that somebody gave up something that was considered worth something, and obtained a certain amount of purchasing power. By giving up some books and disused furniture, I've obtained $50 of raw purchasing power. Now, in practice, this money is considered to be backed by the US Government - but that is, in the end, immaterial - all that matters is that the green pieces of paper are considered to have an amount of purchasing power.
The thing is, debts and future predicted events have purchasing power. This is what happens when, for instance, I subscribe to a magazine - I send a company $20, and I get 12 issues of a magazine. But 11 of those issues don't exist when I spend my money - what I'm buying is future magazines. This is why subscriptions are cheaper than newsstand - the publisher likes knowing that they have the next 12 issues sold in advance. But in exchange for the inconvenience of paying out for a product that isn't in existence yet, they give me a steep discount off of what I'd normally pay. What I'm really buying, though, isn't the future magazines - it's an obligation to send me the magazines. It's an intangible good - but it's still a good that has value.
Similarly, I can buy a future debt. Why? Because debt has value. And as long as something has value, it is worth money.
Fake money applies differently to naked short selling because there's deception involved - you sell the stock as though you know you'll have it to deliver, and then go try to deliver it. But the person buying doesn't know that. So there's fraud involved. That's the difference - value is being paid for something that is not what it is thought to be. And there fake money comes into it - because something is being represented as having value that it is known not to have.
Yes. Naked short-selling clearly can be used to manipulate the prices of stocks.
The question is whether it has been used. And that's a far, far murkier issue. There are a bunch of important aspects of it, and particularly of Byrne's claims about it, that are in no way well-established.
1) Was naked short selling used by a specific investor (who Byrne referred to as a "Sith Lord") to drive down Overstock.com's share price?
2) Was naked short selling used to drive down the share prices of financial stocks, hastening the current financial crisis?
3) Was, as Byrne is implying by declaring victory in this affair now that the SEC has cracked down on naked short selling, the person or people responsible for shorting the financial stocks the same person or people who manipulated Overstock's price?
These are big questions that remain totally unanswered. Some scandalous details about sockpuppeting on Wikipedia (brought to you by an editor who was banned from Wikipedia for sockpuppeting) should not distract from those key aspects of Byrne's claims.
Gee, Judd. I wonder why that could be. Might have had something to do with the fact that your definition of "reason to this madness" consisted of abusively using multiple accounts to push your agenda, and launching vicious personal attacks against your opponents.
Come on, Judd. You've got to know you can't actually expect to come to a forum as well-traveled as Slashdot and get away with presenting half the facts like that.
I don't know the truth of the accusations against Gary Weiss.
However, the "investigative journalism" touted by Byrne consists purely of information fed to the Register by Byrne - there are no sources other than Byrne for almost all of the significant claims in the Register article. So what we have is an article that is, for all practical purposes, authored by Byrne that leaves out huge swaths of information that runs counter to his agenda.
Given that the entire matter, then, is about Byrne, I think asking pertinent questions about his tactics in his war on naked short selling, and the facts behind one of his biggest and most significant claims about naked short selling is utterly germaine. After all, as it stands, it's Byrne's word against, well, Byrne's record.
No. It's not a great piece of investigative reporting. It's a shit piece of investigative reporting that is held together by insinuation at several key steps, and omits details unfavorable to the argument it's trying to make at other key steps.
Let's go into detail.
"An editor at The Journal asked me to write it, and I told him he wouldn't be allowed to publish it," Byrne says. "He insisted that only he controlled what was printed on the editorial page, so I wrote it. Then, after a few days, he got back to me and said 'It appears I can't run this or anything else you write.'"
This is a serious accusation of editorial malfeasance at another newspaper. No reputable publication would print this without a corroborating source. The lack of any detail whatsoever - and the fact that this is, in and of itself, a wildly bigger claim than any of the stuff about Wikipedia makes it clear that no corroborating source exists. This is Byrne making outlandish claims that are being reported without comment, and endorsed by the Register, which goes on to say "The Journal never changed its stance."
In the wake of the SEC's crackdown, the mainstream financial press has acknowledged that widespread and deliberate naked shorting can artificially deflate stock prices, flooding the market with what amounts to counterfeit shares. But for years, The Journal and so many other news outlets ignored Byrne's warnings, with some journalists - most notably a Forbes.com columnist and former BusinessWeek reporter named Gary Weiss - painting the Overstock CEO as a raving madman.
Well, no wonder. Byrne's claim was always that Overstock was being manipulated - by a specific individual he claimed to know the identity of. That's a far cry from "naked shorting can artificially deflate stock prices." But the article treats them as equivalent claims.
Roger Schneider had recently fired his brother from the Ramsey, New Jersey Nationwide office, and he was sitting on Floyd's work PC - which was packed with several thousand email messages. Patrick Byrne soon paid Roger Schneider a visit, and Schneider gave him the machine. Byrne offered $10,000 in return, but Schneider declined.
This is the extent of the hard evidence presented. Now, as someone familiar with Wikipedia who has looked at the situation, I'll note, I'm wholly convinced Mantanmoreland was using sockpuppets against Wikipedia policy. I'm agnostic on whether he's Gary Weiss, but that's more because I dislike picking into editors' real life identities than anything else.
But this is not evidence. The "investigative journalism" that Byrne is praising here is BYRNE'S OWN ACCOUNT OF BUYING A PC WITH E-MAIL RECORDS ON IT! That's not investigative journalism! That's "Hey, I magically got these e-mails, do you want to report on them?" What steps did the Register take to verify the authenticity of the computer and the e-mails? Did the Register get access to the e-mails on the computer Byrne obtained, or were the e-mails forwarded? Did they get the original e-mail files, or screenshots? All of this is hugely material, and completely left out of this "investigative" piece, leaving it as Byrne reporting claims to the Register, then coming to Slashdot and praising the investigative prowess of the Register in repeating what he said to them verbatim.
"Now, admittedly, we - being Wikipedia as a whole - should have listened to Judd in the first place, but there was a long time where Judd's behavior was counter-productive."
Understatement of the year, but detailing the appalling tactics used by Bagley and Byrne on Wikipedia would undermine the Register's point.
The Register has also reviewed emails in which SlimVirgin indicates that she was a classmate of Byrne's at King's College, Cambridge in the late 80s.
What? Were these emails from the same computer? Or is this the e-mail that Bagley already has posted to antisocialmedia.net about this- an e-mail that's to Bagley, from Byrne, and so continues to not elevate this
Wikipedia doesn't warrant its information on the quality of its editors, and so their identities are immaterial to the trustworthiness of the articles. Wikipedia warrants its information by making the process transparent - you can see how articles evolved, and, in an article that is done right, you can see citations to where all the information came from. When those citations are missing, you are meant to be cautious.
The identities of the editors are immaterial - Wikipedia has never claimed to be trustworthy because of who its editors are. Given that, anonymity is wholly appropriate, and to go out and try to expose somebody is a petty attempt at harassment.
I say this as someone who edits Wikipedia openly and under my own name. The enemies I've made on Wikipedia have taken active advantage of that, filing spurious reports with my local police to try to subject me to police harassment and intimidation. They openly speculated that they might be able to force me out of my PhD program. That is the price editors pay for giving up anonymity. Judd Bagley openly associates with the editors who tried to subject me to police harassment. Given that, the intentions he has in outing editors should be clear.
In what way? I mean, yes - clearly an edit war went on with nasty and unethical POV pushing on both sides (The article's "world-class" reporting fails to note the extensive sockpuppetry and vicious attacks engaged in by Byrne and Judd Bagley). But... so what? There's not even any smoke here, little yet fire - Wikipedia's view of naked short selling did not reflect Patrick Byrne's view. Byrne, mind you, was a CEO who was publicly accusing a "Sith Lord" of manipulating his company's stock via naked short selling. So, you know, not exactly Captain Credible here either.
But the only grounds the story presents for thinking that this mattered is Byrne's suspicion that some journalists didn't cover the story because they checked and believed Wikipedia. First of all, Byrne has nothing resembling evidence for that. Second of all, how is that Wikipedia's fault? Wikipedia has always been very clear on its own reliability, and I know of no responsible editor of Wikipedia who would advocate its use as a source for journalists.
On top of that, the article presents no actual evidence that the information Weiss was adding was wrong. Yes, it is, at this point, clear that Weiss used sockpuppets to edit Wikipedia. But to date, no evidence whatsoever has been produced that Byrne's claim - that Overstock.com was being manipulated via naked short selling campaigns waged by a "Sith Lord" - was correct, or that, based on the reliable, published sources available at the time that Weiss was editing, the Wikipedia article should have read any different.
The extent of what has been shown here is that there was an edit war over naked short selling a while back, and that both sides acted pathetically during it.
"Major player in the drama" kind of understates Byrne and Overstock's role in this.
So let's delve into that one a little deeper, shall we? Because the "world-class reporting" (I assume Byrne intends that to refer to the lush praise the Register showers him with) doesn't answer some important questions I have about all of this.
1) Byrne's campaign against naked short selling was always based on the accusation that a "Sith Lord" (his actual words) was manipulating the stock price of Overstock. The current crackdown is about naked short-selling of financial stocks. What evidence does Byrne have of a connection here? And, more importantly, is he ready yet to declare who this mysterious Sith Lord is? If he was the one to originally crack the story of financial manipulation that nearly brought down the global economy, I would hope he'd be ready to uncover this shadowy overlord.
2) On a similar note, if Byrne was aware of this "Sith Lord" who was apparently trying to bring down the global economy, what is his justification for keeping that information a secret instead of taking a concrete step to avert this crisis?
3) In the course of his crusade against Weiss, Byrne and his employee Judd Bagley made active efforts to out the identities of numerous Wikipedia editors, including accusing one of them of being a British spy (with no significant evidence whatsoever). No serious attempt has linked these editors to any stock manipulation - they appear to have been editors who believed Weiss's side of the story - reasonable given the rampant sockpuppeting and personal attacks Byrne and Bagley were engaged in. Off Wikipedia, Bagley also attempted to infect the computers of his critics with spyware as part of his crusade against them. The Register piece isn't entirely clear on whether, in Byrne's opinion, all of this was worth it. Was it?
4) Does Byrne really believe anyone is stupid enough to take a Register article seriously on face value?
Sorry - I'm sure all these important details got squeezed out of the "world class reporting" for space reasons, and not because Byrne is a paranoid liar who claimed his company was failing because of eeeeeeeeeeevil stock manipulation, then declared victory when the tactics he accused people of using were banned because of their use on... totally unrelated companies, and because the Register is a sensationalist gossip rag that likes to run any anti-Wikipedia story they can find no matter how tenuous. Perhaps someone can fill in the gaps in comments? I hope so.
Yeah, I just figured that out. I hadn't gotten Hornet man yet. :)
Which means the game is clearly designed to be played without sliding. So I'm kind of unimpressed with the idea that it's a missing feature.
Although on the surface this looks like a foolish dumbing down of the grade, the size of the grade range that constitutes an F poses a real problem as a teacher - generally not handing in an assignment devastates a competent student's grade as badly or worse than incompetence devastates an incompetent student's grade.
Shrinking the F range is something I've long considered in my grading (though what I was going to do was make F 0-20, D 21-40, etc.)
I've played it. A ROM hack has nothing on a new game.
You've been able to play new levels of Mega Man for free since Mega Man 3?
Seriously. The game is clearly designed to be playable without sliding and charged shots. Yeah, there are spots where I miss charged shots, and I've encountered so far one bolt that clearly needs sliding to get to it, but you know what? The best game in the series had neither charged shots nor sliding.
You get a fully playable game for $10. It's fun. If you liked MM 1-6, you'll like it. I advise against cutting off your nose to spite your face.
You get, for $10 a game. A perfectly playable, fun game.
For a few dollars here and there, you can, if you choose, get add-ons to the game. But if you do not do any of this, you get a game.
Personally, I bought the game, and I am going to play the game. I probably won't get any of the DLC, though I might snatch up extra levels if the price is right. I have no concept of why this is a problem for people. Do you regularly complain when you buy a season of television on DVD that the subsequent episodes aren't included for free?
The Hubble was designed for the Shuttle. Without the Shuttle it would have been built differently. It can't be linked to the Shuttle in any organic way.
Mir and the ISS are, marginally, a different matter, but I confess to skepticism about them as well.
Space is for exploring, not for chillaxing in.
That's circular though. Yes, the Hubble was designed for the launch capabilities we had. But that's a long way from "the shuttle made the Hubble possible." The Hubble is its own accomplishment, not an accomplishment of the Shuttle.
In other comments I've excepted the Hubble. But the fact of the matter is, spacewalks of the sort needed would be possible with a capsule program. There was no reason to invest in the shuttle to accomplish it.
The capsule is actually cheaper per launch than the reusable vehicle, and it's much easier to design landing capabilities from the Orion than the shuttle, which can't actually take us to anywhere.
Crud. Yes, I was. Thanks for the catch.
There are worse things for the ISS to do than fall out of the sky. Staying up in it may well be one of them.
Because it's there. It's there, and it's big and unknown, and we're humans. And if we don't explore every bit of space that we can get to, we'll sit around itching to go. We go to space for the same reason we went to the south pole, or why we go up mountains that haven't been climbed yet. Because they're there, and we can.
The insidious lie of the modern space program is that there's more to it than that. That space stations and endless low earth orbit missions provide some sort of useful science, and are worth doing. They're not. The point of space is the unknown. So yes. Take out the solar system. Go to every frozen rock we can reach, and start thinking about the frozen rocks we can't. Because they're there. They're places people have never been. And fundamental to the human spirit is the sense that something that seems utterly crazy and impossible is the most important thing there is to do.
Yeah, 1 in 12. Which, frankly, I'm not that worried about, provided we're honest with the astronauts about the risks.
I mean, seriously. Do you think that NASA would have trouble finding volunteers to go into space if there were a known 10% chance of death? A known 20%? Of course they wouldn't. It's space, and the people who look up into it and feel a genuine, burning need to go there are going to go even if it's dangerous. Hell, if the Apollo program, every time it launched, had a 90% chance of killing all astronauts on board, we still would have had more than enough people who wanted to go to the moon that we could have gotten there.
That's not a reason to take unnecessary risks. And given that the shuttle has no scientific value to speak of, frankly, almost every launch is an unnecessary risk. But we cannot pretend that risk is a deal-breaker. Going into space is dangerous. There are plenty of people willing to go anyway, knowing that. And I'd wager that includes every astronaut the US has ever sent there.
The average joe understood the space program just fine in the 60s when it was about doing something. The problem with justifying funding for the space program is that, frankly, the shuttle didn't justify funding. It did virtually nothing of merit in its entire lifespan. If the space program actually became about doing something - exploring, discovering, and pushing our way out into the universe - then it would be trivial to generate support for it. But short of a pretty-looking launch every month, which understandably got boring after 20+ years, the space shuttle does nothing of interest.
Returning to the moon, or going back to Mars, or making a sustained push to research Io, a moon that likely has liquid water? Any of those things would be trivial to justify to the American people.