The wiki staff told me to "let the community sort it out" but a month later his garbage was still on the page and they wouldn't do anything about it and I still couldn't revert it out over three times.
A fundamental truth of Wikipedia is that A page lock is 9/10 ths of the community consensus.
If you get involved in an edit war, having the page locked when your edit was the last one is an almost sure path to victory. And conversely if the opposing edit was the last one. At the point of a lock, the community strives to build "consensus", something it will never, ever reach on anything. Debates will ensue, not only on the talk page, but on talk pages for rules and cabals. No consensus will be reach and after months of a page lock the prevailing final edit becomes the consensus by virtue of sheer longevity.
The best example I can find comes from the Scientist Infobox page. There was a "religion" field in the infobox, but at some point it became a "religious stance" field, in a fairly transparent attempt to add things like "Atheism" to a religion field. People objected, debates ensued, but it was all for nothing. Despite the fact that 3 people were for and 10 against the field, it remained on the template due to the lock and became canonical thereafter. And yes, I weighed in myself at an even later date to try and excise the weasel word "stance" and return the tag to an honest state. Alas, "consensus" had been reached and I was given the cold shoulder. The tag remains, and will probably remain forever.
This is how things are done at Wikipedia; Duplicitously and underhandedly. Wikipedia has now become a gargantuan bureaucracy that would but any Government office to shame, and is played like a fiddle by those abusing it. Page large and small, important and trivial will, one by one, slowly be dragged under by systematic rot that is now endemic to the entire site.
The country I live in is a former British colony, and the official entry on Wikipedia regarding that country is firmly controlled by the government, and the history portion of the entry blames British for everything, something that is patently false
To be fair, the history section on the page for Ireland only moans on about the British for about 7 paragraphs. After that the page moves on to standard affairs like Politics, Geography, Culture and other things Irish people don't care about.
Prison for drug users is not a nanny state solution, how could anyone consider the idea that preventing someone from using drug by imprisoning them for thirty years or more in harsh, violent and dehumanising institutions is what a nanny would recommend.
Caller: "Hello Lazlow, I'm a first time caller. I recently moved to
Liberty City from Hampshire, in England." Lazlow: "Oh really? How do you like it? I mean, is it hard to get used
to the language? Y-you speak English pretty good." Caller: "Oh thank you Lazlow. Yes, yes I do like it here. There's one
thing though that's very different and rather worrying. When I
was a boy in England, I had a nanny. She was very strict,
Lazlow." Lazlow: "Yeah, well, I mean there's excellent child-care here in
America, eeerr...you know?" Caller: "Well, well I'm sure. But, but the thing is Lazlow, when, when,
when I was a naughty boy, I, I, I...I would get spanked.
N...nanny...nanny would spank me...when I was naughty, and now...now
Freddy needs a nanny, because when Freddy's naughty, he needs to
get spanked." Lazlow: "Well, there's some child psychologists, who'd probably say that
spanking can be harmful to a child's emotional development." Caller: "Ab..ab...absolute rot, Lazlow. It's lovely. Freddy needs a nanny.
He needs a nanny Lazlow, because Freddy's been a very naughty
boy."
This post appears to be complete FUD. The Potato became a staple food in Europe because of the actions of successive governments who promoted its ease of growth and cheapness compared to wheat, not because you could make booze from it. People actually ate potatoes, surprising at they may seem to some. In fact, in many countries, the potato became virtually the only thing people ate, a situation which lead to famines like the Irish potato famine.
As to the alcohol angle, this also appears to be a complete fantasy. Potatoes are used in the making of only two major alcoholic beverages; vodka and poteen/moonshine, and I'm not sure the second one counts as major or ever did.
Most alcoholic beverages, hard and soft, were and still are made from wheat and other grains. Beer, whiskey, etc. The other major contributor is grapes and berries for the making of wine. Any increase in alcohol production or consumption in the 19th century was probably due to the industrialisation of alcohol production, not the advent of the potato. It should also be noted that for most of the 19th century, cities did not have clean water supplies, making alcohol an important potable liquid for many.
It's also worth noting that the puritans and their ilk were less about striving for the general good as they were about following their own peculiar brand of what Edmund Burke called "Levelling Reason"; a pseudo-intellectual form of reasoning that dismisses all reasonableness, common sense and alternative opinions and proceeds directly from its premise to its conclusion, and hang all the consequences. Burke originally discussed the concept in the context of the French Revolution, but it can be seen running through western society right up to the second world war and unfortunately beyond. It's not a creed an honest person would follow.
No. That's not good enough anymore. With the global reach, massive databases and indexing software available to most companies, it's no longer good enough to say that once your private data slips out that it's fair game for anyone to do whatever they please, whenever they like with it. I don't want Google or Facebook or anyone else spamming people who have just happened to send me an email. I don't want private companies data mining my address book and contacts list.
You say that once my data has become "public", all bets are off. But how many of us have ever, in our lives, made some of our data explicitly "public", for the whole world to view? I gave my data to my ISP and some to Google. I didn't publish it on a big HTML page for the world to gawk at. Where exactly do private companies gain the right to pass that information on to every and any third party they please? From their click through EULAs? That's pushing it.
The real teller here is the balance of power. Facebook can spam your contacts list, but if you somehow managed to get your hands on theirs, legally, and proceeded to spam everyone on it, what fate do you think would await you? You'd be hauled over the coals before the day was out. You don't have high priced lawyers and the ability to file suit in 50 countries. Right now possession of data is 9/10ths of the law, and the other 10% is too expensive for the likes of us.
1) Why is it a problem when Google takes photos of your house?
Because they're going to publish those pictures online for millions, nay, billions of people to gawk at. You forget the scope of this.
(2) What is your expectation of privacy regarding the portions of your property visible from a public street?
My expectation is that only people who are on the street right now, will be able to see those portions. My expectation is that most people are not more than twelve feet tall.
(3) You say it's creepy when individuals put up pictures of your house. Has that happened? Have you tried to find out? If not, can you truly say that it is important to you?
This is Google we're talking about, not your local auctioneer. Their stated objective is to put the entire world up on Street View and danm in they have the ability to do so. Is my house up their? I honestly don't don't know as I've never used the danm thing. But I have seen enough Street View photographs to know that I never want to see my house up there.
You might be OK with the concept and execution of Google Street View. However, a lot of people most certainly are not happy. We don't want our houses plastered up on an easily indexed, location linked, photography database. We don't want twelve foot high cameras taking snapshots over our front lawn hedges.
Either something is viewable from the street and therefore fodder for general photography, or its not.
You're like someone arguing that ice cannot turn into water because you see no change while examining the individual molecules. The issue here has never bee the photographs themselves. It's been what Google is doing with them. You've inductively scaled up individual rights and freedoms into the monstrosity that is Street View. But of your logic here is valid, where is this going to end? What happens when Google decides to put your entire personal public history up on its very own page in the new Google Identity? Is that right?
No. Rights do not scale up. You cannot inductively grant rights, house photograph by house photograph, until someone has an indexed database of every home on earth and proceeds to publish it. True, you cannot find the one house, the one step in the process, where the enterprise became definitely wrong. But the result is wrong all the same. Like a phase change of matter, Google Street view took rights and concepts that were solid, and make them first watery and then entirely vaporous. You can't see this by looking at individual atoms, the houses being added, only by looking at the big picture.
Street View is wrong. Arguing about my house, or your house, is as pointless as arguing about raindrops in a thunderstorm. We are talking about everybody's home now. And no one has the right to do what Google is doing with them.
Google may be 'good' (as we can tell) right now... but money corrupts absolutely at some point.
A-fucking-men.
When Google goes evil, not if, they are going to make Emperor Palpatine look like Barak Obama by comparision. It's going to be apocalyptic. Companies, industries and even nations are going to feel the weight of all their own secrets and knowledge crushing down upon them as it Google squashes all around it into an easily indexed pulp. We are going to see Google Private Eye franchises, Google protection rackets, Google industrial espionage, citizen profiling, financial translation analysis. You name it. Our data will be the end of us all, and Google will be company controlling the databases.
You see when Google turns, not if, It's the not just going to bring the data and apps it currently has to the dark side. It's going to bring a sizeable proportion of its engineers and PhDs with it. And army of Geeks ready willing and able to remould the internet and our very society with the algorithms under their control. There will be no historical precedent for the transition or its ramifications. Microsoft will seem benevolent by comparision.
You can start by explaining how the panel will make their euthanasia decisions. Please summarize the exact process of decision making that Obama has proposed in outline form.
Isn't it obvious? First they'll check if you're a Christian(TM). Then they'll see if you're a Republican(R). Then they'll check if you Love Freedom(c). The second you trigger their commi-socalo-facist True Blue Patriot detector, you'll be as good as dead. I watch Fox News! I listen to conservative radio! I'm a member of the K^CNRA. I know what's going on!! You can't fool me!!! This is socialism!!! SOCALISM!!! Our great nation is being taken over by the Soviets!!!! Pretty soon we'll all be speaking Russian!!!!!!!!!!!!I've got my Rifle and the Lord At My Side!! I'm ready to DEFEND the Homeland!! RONNIE!!!! Can you HEAR meee?!?!?! I'm FIGHTN' For Ya Ronnie!! You and Dick Nixon and George W. Bush!!!!
If you live in a major city (i.e. you live in Dublin), there are several service providers, the best of which is usually a TV cable company. However, if you live in the sticks, (i.e. almost anywhere else) Eircom(previously known as Telecom Eireann, the national telecom company) is generally your only option for high speed internet or frequently any internet at all. Ireland has a very low population density and essentially private industry is utterly incapable of providing any kind of public service in this country outside of Dublin.
If this trial succeeds (Because that's exactly what it is; a trial) I expect Eircom will shortly begin blocking anything and everything else that any belligerent lobby group starts moaning about. By the end of September, I wouldn't be surprised if 4chan and Lisbon Treaty sites were on the blocklist.
Well, the net might interpret it as such, but Eircom is the only broadband internet provider where I live, so things are slightly more complicated on my end.
The average person in their average life does not need privacy. They need discretion from their peers and the public regarding their personal life and laws which protect their right to live how they choose without discrimination.
And the day someone steals a silly video you made, publishes it online a you personally become a worldwide joke, will you still think we don't need privacy then?
People's private habits will always be a source of derision, ridicule and contempt for others, even those with habits of their own. People will used any excuse to laugh at, mock and inflict violence on others. You go find the nicest homosexual couple in your town and put up a big sign outside their house saying "Nicest gay couple in town reside here"; I guarantee you they will be egged, stoned, assaulted or killed with a month, no matter how placid the local populace. Now ask yourself, how easy should it be to put that tag up in Google maps?
Privacy means more than just keeping your private details a secret. It means keeping yourself safe from other human beings. We are social animals, and that means we will gang up and rip someone apart as easily as we gather together and cooperate on anything else. All we need is sufficient excuse.
You say people don't need privacy. Well I think that Max Mosely needed privacy. I think that the Star Wars Kids needs privacy. I think that people who were caught taking photgraphs of themselves in high school need privacy. I think these people were vulnerable and needed our protection from newspapers, databases and the crowing mobs howling with delight at their misfortune. I think they needed it and we let them down. What right should any of use have to any privacy whatsoever if we can't protect the people that need it most?
My experience with using a PS3 in standard def resolution was eye-strain inducing, trying to read many of the text fonts the games would display.
This was precisely my experience before I bought a HD capable monitor. Next gen games are quite simply unplayable on anything less than 720p.
However, the big problem here is that Last gen games are unplayable at anything above 576p! OK slight exaggeration, but old games do look awful on a HD TV. Aliasing everywhere. And therein lies the biggest reason that Sony and Microsoft need to keep up backwards compatibility. I can tell you that PS2 games played on a PS3 instead of a PS2 look a hell of a lot better. It's like night and day. Add to this the convienicen factor, and I'm pretty irritated with Sony for dropping this feature and refusing to reimplement it. There are still loads of fantastic PS2 titles I haven't played, and more are still coming out!
I've read the posting history. It's obvious to me that 'For a Free Internet' is some kind of satirist, with only an outside chance of crackpot. Frankly, the biggest mystery here is what you're taken exception to in their posts.
I've mentioned the sad case of Pidgey before, but considering this milestone, I think it's worth bringing it up again.
Pidgey is a Pokemon. In February 2007, Pidgey had his own page at Wikipedia. You could go there and see a small template(since deleted) explaining to you what Pidgey is and various other pieces of information about him. It was objectively a useful resource.
Pidgey no longer has a page. Pidgey has a paragraph. A tragically short and dry affair devoid of even the most basic image. One can learn very little about Pidgey from reading it. And why is this? Why must Pidgey be so excised from the the site? Because he is a Pokemon? Does being a cartoon character or a children's toy or anything else automatically make something unworthy of a few kilobytes of page space on the the supposed repository of all the world's knowledge. The sad fact is that answer to that question is a resounding YES.
"A page for every Pokemon" was once used as a derogatory remark about Wikipedia. Evidently, enough faceless wikicrats took exception to this and decided to purge all mention of Pidgey and all the rest of the Pokemon, beyond the barest minimum of exposure, to make sure Wikipedia was regarded as a "professional" and "encyclopedic" resource. Pidgey and the Pokemon, and countless others have been subjected to the digital equivalent of a book burning by people who held an opinion that certain information was not "worthy" of archival. This from the same crowd of people who think that the Cloud Gate, Wood Badges, Ima Hogg and Books on the psychology of Est are all topics worthy enough to be Featured Articles. Compared to such worthies, perhaps Pidgey, merely part of a 5 billion dollar franchise, does fall a little short. But as short as all that?
Technology is improving, access to knowledge and the cost of providing it are plummeting; Yet Wikipedia's growth is slowing. Pidgey is merely a symptom of the underlying decay present in the online encyclopedia. His purge was less about practicalities than it was about running Wikipedia in a way at odds with it ostensibly free, open and inclusive nature. His fate was the result of all information on Wikipedia that falls under the baleful eyes of those editors with opinions and the power to exercise them.
Pidgey's was not the first page to be purged from Wikipedia, nor the most important. But it will not be the last, or the smallest.
Slashdot Mirror
A fundamental truth of Wikipedia is that A page lock is 9/10 ths of the community consensus.
If you get involved in an edit war, having the page locked when your edit was the last one is an almost sure path to victory. And conversely if the opposing edit was the last one. At the point of a lock, the community strives to build "consensus", something it will never, ever reach on anything. Debates will ensue, not only on the talk page, but on talk pages for rules and cabals. No consensus will be reach and after months of a page lock the prevailing final edit becomes the consensus by virtue of sheer longevity.
The best example I can find comes from the Scientist Infobox page. There was a "religion" field in the infobox, but at some point it became a "religious stance" field, in a fairly transparent attempt to add things like "Atheism" to a religion field. People objected, debates ensued, but it was all for nothing. Despite the fact that 3 people were for and 10 against the field, it remained on the template due to the lock and became canonical thereafter. And yes, I weighed in myself at an even later date to try and excise the weasel word "stance" and return the tag to an honest state. Alas, "consensus" had been reached and I was given the cold shoulder. The tag remains, and will probably remain forever.
This is how things are done at Wikipedia; Duplicitously and underhandedly. Wikipedia has now become a gargantuan bureaucracy that would but any Government office to shame, and is played like a fiddle by those abusing it. Page large and small, important and trivial will, one by one, slowly be dragged under by systematic rot that is now endemic to the entire site.
(cur) (prev) 16:10, 25 August 2009 ObsessiveMathsFreak (talk | contribs) (145 bytes) (Brought statement into line with WP:CONS) (undo)
To be fair, the history section on the page for Ireland only moans on about the British for about 7 paragraphs. After that the page moves on to standard affairs like Politics, Geography, Culture and other things Irish people don't care about.
Caller: "Hello Lazlow, I'm a first time caller. I recently moved to
Liberty City from Hampshire, in England."
Lazlow: "Oh really? How do you like it? I mean, is it hard to get used
to the language? Y-you speak English pretty good."
Caller: "Oh thank you Lazlow. Yes, yes I do like it here. There's one
thing though that's very different and rather worrying. When I
was a boy in England, I had a nanny. She was very strict,
Lazlow."
Lazlow: "Yeah, well, I mean there's excellent child-care here in
America, eeerr...you know?"
Caller: "Well, well I'm sure. But, but the thing is Lazlow, when, when,
when I was a naughty boy, I, I, I...I would get spanked.
N...nanny...nanny would spank me...when I was naughty, and now...now
Freddy needs a nanny, because when Freddy's naughty, he needs to
get spanked."
Lazlow: "Well, there's some child psychologists, who'd probably say that
spanking can be harmful to a child's emotional development."
Caller: "Ab..ab...absolute rot, Lazlow. It's lovely. Freddy needs a nanny.
He needs a nanny Lazlow, because Freddy's been a very naughty
boy."
This post appears to be complete FUD. The Potato became a staple food in Europe because of the actions of successive governments who promoted its ease of growth and cheapness compared to wheat, not because you could make booze from it. People actually ate potatoes, surprising at they may seem to some. In fact, in many countries, the potato became virtually the only thing people ate, a situation which lead to famines like the Irish potato famine.
As to the alcohol angle, this also appears to be a complete fantasy. Potatoes are used in the making of only two major alcoholic beverages; vodka and poteen/moonshine, and I'm not sure the second one counts as major or ever did.
Most alcoholic beverages, hard and soft, were and still are made from wheat and other grains. Beer, whiskey, etc. The other major contributor is grapes and berries for the making of wine. Any increase in alcohol production or consumption in the 19th century was probably due to the industrialisation of alcohol production, not the advent of the potato. It should also be noted that for most of the 19th century, cities did not have clean water supplies, making alcohol an important potable liquid for many.
It's also worth noting that the puritans and their ilk were less about striving for the general good as they were about following their own peculiar brand of what Edmund Burke called "Levelling Reason"; a pseudo-intellectual form of reasoning that dismisses all reasonableness, common sense and alternative opinions and proceeds directly from its premise to its conclusion, and hang all the consequences. Burke originally discussed the concept in the context of the French Revolution, but it can be seen running through western society right up to the second world war and unfortunately beyond. It's not a creed an honest person would follow.
No. That's not good enough anymore. With the global reach, massive databases and indexing software available to most companies, it's no longer good enough to say that once your private data slips out that it's fair game for anyone to do whatever they please, whenever they like with it. I don't want Google or Facebook or anyone else spamming people who have just happened to send me an email. I don't want private companies data mining my address book and contacts list.
You say that once my data has become "public", all bets are off. But how many of us have ever, in our lives, made some of our data explicitly "public", for the whole world to view? I gave my data to my ISP and some to Google. I didn't publish it on a big HTML page for the world to gawk at. Where exactly do private companies gain the right to pass that information on to every and any third party they please? From their click through EULAs? That's pushing it.
The real teller here is the balance of power. Facebook can spam your contacts list, but if you somehow managed to get your hands on theirs, legally, and proceeded to spam everyone on it, what fate do you think would await you? You'd be hauled over the coals before the day was out. You don't have high priced lawyers and the ability to file suit in 50 countries. Right now possession of data is 9/10ths of the law, and the other 10% is too expensive for the likes of us.
Given their diets and lifestyle, I suspect many Slashdotters are keenly aware of this fact.
You would burn the abomination as it is a perversion in the eyes of the Lord, duh!
Because they're going to publish those pictures online for millions, nay, billions of people to gawk at. You forget the scope of this.
My expectation is that only people who are on the street right now, will be able to see those portions. My expectation is that most people are not more than twelve feet tall.
This is Google we're talking about, not your local auctioneer. Their stated objective is to put the entire world up on Street View and danm in they have the ability to do so. Is my house up their? I honestly don't don't know as I've never used the danm thing. But I have seen enough Street View photographs to know that I never want to see my house up there.
You might be OK with the concept and execution of Google Street View. However, a lot of people most certainly are not happy. We don't want our houses plastered up on an easily indexed, location linked, photography database. We don't want twelve foot high cameras taking snapshots over our front lawn hedges.
You're like someone arguing that ice cannot turn into water because you see no change while examining the individual molecules. The issue here has never bee the photographs themselves. It's been what Google is doing with them. You've inductively scaled up individual rights and freedoms into the monstrosity that is Street View. But of your logic here is valid, where is this going to end? What happens when Google decides to put your entire personal public history up on its very own page in the new Google Identity? Is that right?
No. Rights do not scale up. You cannot inductively grant rights, house photograph by house photograph, until someone has an indexed database of every home on earth and proceeds to publish it. True, you cannot find the one house, the one step in the process, where the enterprise became definitely wrong. But the result is wrong all the same. Like a phase change of matter, Google Street view took rights and concepts that were solid, and make them first watery and then entirely vaporous. You can't see this by looking at individual atoms, the houses being added, only by looking at the big picture.
Street View is wrong. Arguing about my house, or your house, is as pointless as arguing about raindrops in a thunderstorm. We are talking about everybody's home now. And no one has the right to do what Google is doing with them.
A-fucking-men.
When Google goes evil, not if, they are going to make Emperor Palpatine look like Barak Obama by comparision. It's going to be apocalyptic. Companies, industries and even nations are going to feel the weight of all their own secrets and knowledge crushing down upon them as it Google squashes all around it into an easily indexed pulp. We are going to see Google Private Eye franchises, Google protection rackets, Google industrial espionage, citizen profiling, financial translation analysis. You name it. Our data will be the end of us all, and Google will be company controlling the databases.
You see when Google turns, not if, It's the not just going to bring the data and apps it currently has to the dark side. It's going to bring a sizeable proportion of its engineers and PhDs with it. And army of Geeks ready willing and able to remould the internet and our very society with the algorithms under their control. There will be no historical precedent for the transition or its ramifications. Microsoft will seem benevolent by comparision.
It's coming. Humans don't stay angels forever.
Do you mean open as in free, or open as in venus fly trap?
Isn't it obvious? First they'll check if you're a Christian(TM). Then they'll see if you're a Republican(R). Then they'll check if you Love Freedom(c). The second you trigger their commi-socalo-facist True Blue Patriot detector, you'll be as good as dead. I watch Fox News! I listen to conservative radio! I'm a member of the K^CNRA. I know what's going on!! You can't fool me!!! This is socialism!!! SOCALISM!!! Our great nation is being taken over by the Soviets!!!! Pretty soon we'll all be speaking Russian!!!!!!!!!!!! I've got my Rifle and the Lord At My Side!! I'm ready to DEFEND the Homeland!! RONNIE!!!! Can you HEAR meee?!?!?! I'm FIGHTN' For Ya Ronnie!! You and Dick Nixon and George W. Bush!!!!
GOD SAVE FREEDOM!!!!!!111
WWWOOOOOOSSSHHHHHHHHHH!!!!
That may be true. But as anyone who uses public transport knows, bus and train timetables are clearly creative works of fiction!
We prefer to call them, "Physical Realignment Therapy Sessions".
Haruumpph! Only if Obama's death panels didn't decide to euthanise him first!!
And Microsoft knew they would be, yet obviously didn't factor that into their product design.
Yes and no.
If you live in a major city (i.e. you live in Dublin), there are several service providers, the best of which is usually a TV cable company. However, if you live in the sticks, (i.e. almost anywhere else) Eircom(previously known as Telecom Eireann, the national telecom company) is generally your only option for high speed internet or frequently any internet at all. Ireland has a very low population density and essentially private industry is utterly incapable of providing any kind of public service in this country outside of Dublin.
If this trial succeeds (Because that's exactly what it is; a trial) I expect Eircom will shortly begin blocking anything and everything else that any belligerent lobby group starts moaning about. By the end of September, I wouldn't be surprised if 4chan and Lisbon Treaty sites were on the blocklist.
Well, the net might interpret it as such, but Eircom is the only broadband internet provider where I live, so things are slightly more complicated on my end.
And the day a national newspaper publishes pictures of your private sexual encounters for millions of perverts to salivate over, will you still think we don't need privacy then?
And the day someone steals a silly video you made, publishes it online a you personally become a worldwide joke, will you still think we don't need privacy then?
And the day you are arrested for urinating behind a bush and are now subject to the all prying eyes of termagants and vigilantes the world over, will you still think we don't need privacy then?
People's private habits will always be a source of derision, ridicule and contempt for others, even those with habits of their own. People will used any excuse to laugh at, mock and inflict violence on others. You go find the nicest homosexual couple in your town and put up a big sign outside their house saying "Nicest gay couple in town reside here"; I guarantee you they will be egged, stoned, assaulted or killed with a month, no matter how placid the local populace. Now ask yourself, how easy should it be to put that tag up in Google maps?
Privacy means more than just keeping your private details a secret. It means keeping yourself safe from other human beings. We are social animals, and that means we will gang up and rip someone apart as easily as we gather together and cooperate on anything else. All we need is sufficient excuse.
You say people don't need privacy. Well I think that Max Mosely needed privacy. I think that the Star Wars Kids needs privacy. I think that people who were caught taking photgraphs of themselves in high school need privacy. I think these people were vulnerable and needed our protection from newspapers, databases and the crowing mobs howling with delight at their misfortune. I think they needed it and we let them down. What right should any of use have to any privacy whatsoever if we can't protect the people that need it most?
This was precisely my experience before I bought a HD capable monitor. Next gen games are quite simply unplayable on anything less than 720p.
However, the big problem here is that Last gen games are unplayable at anything above 576p! OK slight exaggeration, but old games do look awful on a HD TV. Aliasing everywhere. And therein lies the biggest reason that Sony and Microsoft need to keep up backwards compatibility. I can tell you that PS2 games played on a PS3 instead of a PS2 look a hell of a lot better. It's like night and day. Add to this the convienicen factor, and I'm pretty irritated with Sony for dropping this feature and refusing to reimplement it. There are still loads of fantastic PS2 titles I haven't played, and more are still coming out!
'Baths is unhygienic,' Granny declared. 'You know I've never agreed with baths. Sittin' around in your own dirt like that.'
'What do you do, then?' said Magrat.
'I just washes,' said Granny. 'All the bits. You know. As and when they becomes available.'
--Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad
I've read the posting history. It's obvious to me that 'For a Free Internet' is some kind of satirist, with only an outside chance of crackpot. Frankly, the biggest mystery here is what you're taken exception to in their posts.
I'm not sure I've ever seen a joke go so quickly over someone's head. Are you from Vulcan?
I've mentioned the sad case of Pidgey before, but considering this milestone, I think it's worth bringing it up again.
Pidgey is a Pokemon. In February 2007, Pidgey had his own page at Wikipedia. You could go there and see a small template(since deleted) explaining to you what Pidgey is and various other pieces of information about him. It was objectively a useful resource.
Pidgey no longer has a page. Pidgey has a paragraph. A tragically short and dry affair devoid of even the most basic image. One can learn very little about Pidgey from reading it. And why is this? Why must Pidgey be so excised from the the site? Because he is a Pokemon? Does being a cartoon character or a children's toy or anything else automatically make something unworthy of a few kilobytes of page space on the the supposed repository of all the world's knowledge. The sad fact is that answer to that question is a resounding YES.
"A page for every Pokemon" was once used as a derogatory remark about Wikipedia. Evidently, enough faceless wikicrats took exception to this and decided to purge all mention of Pidgey and all the rest of the Pokemon, beyond the barest minimum of exposure, to make sure Wikipedia was regarded as a "professional" and "encyclopedic" resource. Pidgey and the Pokemon, and countless others have been subjected to the digital equivalent of a book burning by people who held an opinion that certain information was not "worthy" of archival. This from the same crowd of people who think that the Cloud Gate, Wood Badges, Ima Hogg and Books on the psychology of Est are all topics worthy enough to be Featured Articles. Compared to such worthies, perhaps Pidgey, merely part of a 5 billion dollar franchise, does fall a little short. But as short as all that?
Technology is improving, access to knowledge and the cost of providing it are plummeting; Yet Wikipedia's growth is slowing. Pidgey is merely a symptom of the underlying decay present in the online encyclopedia. His purge was less about practicalities than it was about running Wikipedia in a way at odds with it ostensibly free, open and inclusive nature. His fate was the result of all information on Wikipedia that falls under the baleful eyes of those editors with opinions and the power to exercise them.
Pidgey's was not the first page to be purged from Wikipedia, nor the most important. But it will not be the last, or the smallest.
They're holding out for more cash later on.