Some languages Ubuntu has that Windows doesn't:
Xhosa, Maori, Latin. And many others.
Don't believe all the Ubuntu propaganda. And I'll add, as a suggestion: please don't go around implying that Windows' lack of support for Latin has even the slightest importance. Doing so will discourage your audience from taking seriously anything else you have to say -- even if it's a serious and important point, like your citation of Xhosa.
If Mousavi had won and violent protests had started in the face of electoral fraud,...
Can it not be about both wanting to see a genuine democratic election and wanting to see the slightly-less-evidently-supportive-of-a-fundamentalist-religious-regime guy win?
and the modern idea of a legislated development-free belt around a rapidly expanding city dates to 1930s London (England)
*Ahem* just a minor point, but a prior claim -- Wellington (NZ) Town Belt, 1873 (actually 1840, but that period's a bit more complicated as the land was in corporate hands then after being appropriated from the original Maori owners illegally).
Not to defend the GP, but I take it you never played Basic, eh? Those are the rules that an awful lot of people started off with, in the days when AD&D -- a.k.a. 1st edition -- was a bit beyond the financial means of many teenagers.
Just curious, why is it so bad in the US for two men to hold hands in public ?
Supposedly it's because of the Oscar Wilde trial.
My only reason for thinking that is the quiz show "QI"; I can't provide actual evidence. Reportedly, it used to be just as OK in anglophone countries for men to hold hands as it still is in many non-anglophone countries. Then Oscar Wilde got convicted, and suddenly everyone started avoiding it. Given the UK's absolute cultural preeminence in the anglophone world at the time, I find it easy to imagine that this taboo spread like wildfire.
Remember this is only hearsay. Here's a transcript of the relevant QI episode (scroll down to the mention of the "LabouchÃre Amendment").
I agree to a point: I personally don't think that Microsoft has the domain knowledge to after individual provinces or localities in New Zealand, but then I may be underestimating Microsoft's presence in NZ.
Microsoft NZ is pretty strong, and knows which side its bread is buttered. They're not going away anytime soon. I presume they'll be moving their attention to the next big target: the government of the new "super-city" of Auckland, as there's a big synoecism of separate boroughs going on right now. Small by international standards, but the new city will have about a third of the country's population, so it will most certainly matter to Microsoft NZ.
Red Hat, Novell, Canonical, Mandriva, Sun, IBM, etc. all have marketing budgets. With the sole exception of IBM, none have as large a marketing budget as Microsoft, at least not by themselves.
I suspect the main reason that Red Hat, Mandriva, etc. are not appearing in the news much is because Novell has cornered the market: the State Services Commission has had a deal with them for four years now.
What would put another nail in MS's coffin would be them calling the bluff and forcing NZ to take on quite a bit of Open source software. Once past the "OMG it's different then what we have always used" stage, it might be more then enough to the government agencies and lead to more OSS adoption.
I think that's exactly what has already happened! That seems to me to be exactly the reason why the State Services Commission has taken the position they have.
As the summary points out, the SSC has won one award already from the NZ Open Source Awards; in addition, they've been using SUSE (both server and desktop) since at least 2005, and in 2006 they published a guide on using open source software in government departments. (An early version of the guide, prepared for them by a legal firm that also worked for Microsoft, was discussed on Slashdot and received a lot of flak -- so much that the SSC rewrote the guide themselves as a result.)
I see your Sahih Bukhari and raise you Herodotos. The following is my paraphrase of the story of a man who peeped and... became king. I reckon Herodotos trumps the Sahih al-Bukhari -- Turkey is a secular state, after all, while Herodotos was Anatolian, and writing about an episode in Anatolian history!
King Kandaules of Lydia had a particular favourite, a man named Gyges, and boasted to him of his wife's beauty. "You don't believe me?" said the king. "Well, here's a royal command: hide in my wife's bedroom behind the door and watch her as she undresses. Then you'll see her naked, and then you'll have to believe me."
Gyges was unwilling, but had to do as the king commanded. He hid as ordered and saw the queen naked. Then he tried to sneak out quietly without being seen. Unfortunately the queen noticed him departing, and began to make plans of her own.
The next morning Gyges was summoned to attend on the queen. "I saw you last night, Gyges," she said, "and you have two choices before you. Either die for having committed the crime of spying on me; or join with me, slay the king, and seize the throne yourself." So Gyges made his choice. At night he followed the queen into the king's bedroom, took the knife she gave him, and murdered the king.
In this way Gyges usurped the throne and married the queen.
Agreed. Even at the time, whenever there was a choice between a 2D platformer or an open-world game, I'd almost invariably prefer the open-world game.
My first gaming was done on an Atari 800, and I can't think of a single 2D platformer that I miss. My preference was for open-world RPGs like the Ultima series or Alternate Reality; open-world simulation games like Star Raiders, Elite, or Rescue on Fractalus. Even among non-open-world games there were plenty of alternatives that I'd take in preference to any 2D platformer: "arena" games like Archon or Wizard of Wor; when I could get onto a terminal at my parents' workplace, I loved Rogue; and there's always text games like Zork and the Infocom adventures.
2D platformers were just horrid. I hated them with a passion, and they have (nearly) died the death that I always wished on them. The advent of 3D games like Doom (and its lesser precursors) and 3D platformers like Tomb Raider was such a big deal because, for me, it was a breath of fresh air after the hell of 2D platformers.
We've had legalized prostitution in New Zealand since 2003.
I agree wholly with your reading of the situation, but one small correction: prostitution hasn't been legalised, it's been decriminalised. As I understand it (IANAL) that means basically that it's unregulated -- no employment or health-and-safety regulations, for example, other than the kind of endangerment and contractual issues that apply to everyone regardless of their line of work.
In some ways I find this a much preferable situation to legalisation, as (a) it's purer capitalism -- less regulation --, and (b) it's not about promulgating an arbitrary set of social values, or protecting an industry, but more about protecting the rights and safety of the sex worker. (There may be unwelcome side effects as well, of course.)
I guess I've been accustomed to thinking about larger dimension numbers than 3 or 4 for a long time.
It's still pretty challenging to play noughts and crosses on higher-dimensional boards, though.
It can be moderately fun, though. Just note that once your board has more than about three dimensions, you have to stop playing to win by seeing who gets three-in-a-row first, and instead play to see who gets the most three-in-a-rows.
It's been a while, but I seem to recall that four dimensions was OK for a fairly short game, but five for a longer haul -- that would last a good while, while still not getting too ludicrously complicated. Six dimensions was a bit much, though.
I also use Tree Style Tab, and I have taken it so much for granted for so long that it took me a fair while to work out what the problem outlined in TFA actually was. My first thought on seeing the headline was that they were going to take away my beloved vertical stack of tabs...
Having said that, grouping tabs by type of activity, as TFA suggests, is either really dumb or thinking too many years ahead. Either no grouping at all, or grouping based on which pages you opened from which other pages (and both options are available in Tree Style Tab), are I think the only approaches that make sense at present.
... where every single person who participated in it is dead.
Do you feel the same way about films? Were The Dambusters, Saving Private Ryan, and Casablanca tasteless for the reason you suggest?
How about novels?
How about "edutainment" documentaries?
How about biographies?
How about historical books?
How about encyclopaedia articles?
What, exactly, is the reason for your drawing the line where you draw it?
In Oceana, crimes included thinking the wrong thing. Britain has not quite yet reached that level (however, given that parliament has absolute sovereignty, there's precious little that can prevent it),
Oh, I'd say it has reached that level all right. It's a country where you can be jailed for things that you see, regardless of intent (e.g. if someone else sends you some child porn in an e-mail and you report it, you will be jailed for having seen it); a country where you can be held in prison indefinitely without trial for refusing to reveal a password that a law enforcement official suspects may be in your head. If you meant that you can't be jailed for political opinions that you never express publically, then that does seem to be the case so far. But to cope with living in the UK you need to use doublethink to a degree that I, personally, find terrifying.
but the level of surveillance by itself wasn't what made the society oppressive.
I disagree with that. Surveillance that can be used for good will definitely also be used for evil. If the certainty of evil outweighs the potential for good -- and that is definitely the case in the UK, given that the public is severely constrained, while the major police forces are not accountable to anyone at all -- I'd say it's not just an important component of an oppressive society, it's a sufficient cause in and of itself to lead to the development of very severe oppression.
Alas, no. The library at Alexandria probably faded gradually rather than being destroyed in one fell swoop, so its contents were presumably dispersed in an untraceable fashion. Even more of a problem is that the site of the library has been underwater for most of the time since antiquity.
Bits & pieces of the Catalog of Womenor Eoiai have been around a long time for example.
Fragments of that poem have indeed been around for a long time, but there were only a couple of dozen lines before papyri started to be published a bit over a century ago. I overstated the case when I said that about 1000 lines have been found from Oxyrhynchos; in fact probably only about 500-700 are from there (I'm too lazy to count right now).
Unfortunately, the stream of new finds of that particular text is gradually drying up; personally I doubt we'll ever find more than another 200 lines or so. Which is a shame, since the number of finds suggests that it was the third most widely read text in Hellenistic Egypt, right behind the Homeric epics.
I don't know about the GP, but sir, I would be honoured and delighted to meet the CS student who can not only (a) find the time in between learning CS to get their ancient Greek good enough, but also (b) come up with a working OCR-and-translation implementation for fragmentary texts -- i.e. where half of the words are half-missing. (Actually I did have a CS major among my Greek students a few years ago, and he was planning on coming up with a parsing tool which, alas, never materialised -- though such tools have since appeared from other sources. There's only one FOSS one that I know of; it's in perl, which from what I hear about perl sounds like it might be quite fitting.)
There was a rather nice bit in A Canticle for Leibowitz about one of the monks who had come up with an algorithm for reconstructing the lost right-hand part of a page of text; IIRC it took decades to reconstruct the first page, but only a few years to do the second page. Personally I'd love to see such an algorithm come to life!
In addition to Oxyrhynchus, significant finds have been made at Herculaneum and Pompeii.
If those ones take your fancy more than the ones from Oxyrhynchos -- and there are some good reasons why they might -- you might find it useful to have these links at your disposal:
Oxyrhynchos papyri site (Oxford) -- here's some info on the imaging process, but I think it's rather out-of-date and only covers basic photography in the visible spectrum
more up-to-date info on more advanced imaging techniques, with regard to papyri from Bubastos
the Philodemus Project, dedicated to the most important ancient author to be discovered from carbonised books found at Herculaneum
For texts, the Big Two sites are Oxyrhynchos and Herculaneum (though, IIRC, the idea of using multispectral imaging for damaged manuscripts was first got from trying to decipher the Dead Sea scrolls).
What's distinctive about Herculaneum is the finding of the works of the philosopher Philodemos, as noted above. Editions have started to appear in the last two decades; I think there's at least one translation available. Oxyrhynchos is overall much more important, though. Oxyrhynchos doesn't have a Philodemos, but that's more than compensated for by the sheer quantity of papyri -- in the first century of publication only about 1-5% have been edited and published so far, and that isn't because they've been slacking off. No complete literary works have emerged from Oxyrhynchos -- but we do have gajillions of letters to a relative who lives in the next town over, contracts, land deeds, shipping lists, shopping lists; but also a few bits of literary stuff -- tiny bits of lost plays, about a thousand lines of an otherwise lost epic called the Catalogue of Women, heaps of pieces of texts of which we already had complete copies, and other odds and ends. And yes, in response to the sibling post, ancient porn too. (Well, I know of one sex manual by Philainis, at least.)
Do ten seconds' googling and you'll find it was done long ago (notice the turn-of-the-century character of the website; believe me, it used to be worse).
Well, it's been partly done. That link only gives digitised images of the papyri that have been published in hardcopy so far -- i.e. the first hundred-odd years of publications. It'll take another few hundred years to finish publishing the Oxyrhynchos papyri.
On the other hand, actually reading the material -- here's a sample of someone practising their handwriting, see how you get on with reading it -- will still be considerably more trouble than it would be if you simply went to a library and looked at a printed text.
Either way, of course, you'll have to learn ancient Greek first. Alas, if you want a translation, you're out of luck. I'm sure Oxford University would be glad if you want to donate the millions of pounds it would require to translate the entire corpus,... translation isn't cheap. It's simply more economical to impose an entry requirement for studying the material, viz. a knowledge of ancient Greek (and of Hellenistic palaeography), than it would be to find non-existent funding for a translation.
And if it's good enough to fool a curator, then it's good enough to display in a museum.
While I'm basically in agreement with the rest of your post, I am completely at a loss to understand the rationale behind this sentiment. You don't display things in a museum for fun. A museum stores and preserves objects for their historical value, of which intrinsic/artistic value is a very tiny component. To the extent that it fails to live up to that function, it fails to be a museum.
If someone forges a pretty starscape in Photoshop, does it get published as fact in the Journal of Cosmology? Like hell it does. Forgeries don't just undermine the historical significance of genuine articles, they take the merest hope of ever making sense of historical data, tear it to shreds, and turn the remains into papier mache. They're wholly evil.
Slashdot Mirror
Some languages Ubuntu has that Windows doesn't: Xhosa, Maori, Latin. And many others.
Don't believe all the Ubuntu propaganda. And I'll add, as a suggestion: please don't go around implying that Windows' lack of support for Latin has even the slightest importance. Doing so will discourage your audience from taking seriously anything else you have to say -- even if it's a serious and important point, like your citation of Xhosa.
If Mousavi had won and violent protests had started in the face of electoral fraud, ...
Can it not be about both wanting to see a genuine democratic election and wanting to see the slightly-less-evidently-supportive-of-a-fundamentalist-religious-regime guy win?
and the modern idea of a legislated development-free belt around a rapidly expanding city dates to 1930s London (England)
*Ahem* just a minor point, but a prior claim -- Wellington (NZ) Town Belt, 1873 (actually 1840, but that period's a bit more complicated as the land was in corporate hands then after being appropriated from the original Maori owners illegally).
Looks like I crossed the memes.
You fool! You'll kill us all!
There aren't any racial levels in "Dwarf."
Not to defend the GP, but I take it you never played Basic, eh? Those are the rules that an awful lot of people started off with, in the days when AD&D -- a.k.a. 1st edition -- was a bit beyond the financial means of many teenagers.
Are commercial pressures catching up with one of our most inventive movie companies?
No. Disney has caught up with them.
Just curious, why is it so bad in the US for two men to hold hands in public ?
Supposedly it's because of the Oscar Wilde trial.
My only reason for thinking that is the quiz show "QI"; I can't provide actual evidence. Reportedly, it used to be just as OK in anglophone countries for men to hold hands as it still is in many non-anglophone countries. Then Oscar Wilde got convicted, and suddenly everyone started avoiding it. Given the UK's absolute cultural preeminence in the anglophone world at the time, I find it easy to imagine that this taboo spread like wildfire.
Remember this is only hearsay. Here's a transcript of the relevant QI episode (scroll down to the mention of the "LabouchÃre Amendment").
Guybrush: Ha! Those guys wouldn't know a good story if they paid fifty bucks for it.
I agree to a point: I personally don't think that Microsoft has the domain knowledge to after individual provinces or localities in New Zealand, but then I may be underestimating Microsoft's presence in NZ.
Microsoft NZ is pretty strong, and knows which side its bread is buttered. They're not going away anytime soon. I presume they'll be moving their attention to the next big target: the government of the new "super-city" of Auckland, as there's a big synoecism of separate boroughs going on right now. Small by international standards, but the new city will have about a third of the country's population, so it will most certainly matter to Microsoft NZ.
Red Hat, Novell, Canonical, Mandriva, Sun, IBM, etc. all have marketing budgets. With the sole exception of IBM, none have as large a marketing budget as Microsoft, at least not by themselves.
I suspect the main reason that Red Hat, Mandriva, etc. are not appearing in the news much is because Novell has cornered the market: the State Services Commission has had a deal with them for four years now.
What would put another nail in MS's coffin would be them calling the bluff and forcing NZ to take on quite a bit of Open source software. Once past the "OMG it's different then what we have always used" stage, it might be more then enough to the government agencies and lead to more OSS adoption.
I think that's exactly what has already happened! That seems to me to be exactly the reason why the State Services Commission has taken the position they have.
As the summary points out, the SSC has won one award already from the NZ Open Source Awards; in addition, they've been using SUSE (both server and desktop) since at least 2005, and in 2006 they published a guide on using open source software in government departments. (An early version of the guide, prepared for them by a legal firm that also worked for Microsoft, was discussed on Slashdot and received a lot of flak -- so much that the SSC rewrote the guide themselves as a result.)
So yes, I think this is the nail.
I see your Sahih Bukhari and raise you Herodotos. The following is my paraphrase of the story of a man who peeped and ... became king. I reckon Herodotos trumps the Sahih al-Bukhari -- Turkey is a secular state, after all, while Herodotos was Anatolian, and writing about an episode in Anatolian history!
King Kandaules of Lydia had a particular favourite, a man named Gyges, and boasted to him of his wife's beauty. "You don't believe me?" said the king. "Well, here's a royal command: hide in my wife's bedroom behind the door and watch her as she undresses. Then you'll see her naked, and then you'll have to believe me."
Gyges was unwilling, but had to do as the king commanded. He hid as ordered and saw the queen naked. Then he tried to sneak out quietly without being seen. Unfortunately the queen noticed him departing, and began to make plans of her own.
The next morning Gyges was summoned to attend on the queen. "I saw you last night, Gyges," she said, "and you have two choices before you. Either die for having committed the crime of spying on me; or join with me, slay the king, and seize the throne yourself." So Gyges made his choice. At night he followed the queen into the king's bedroom, took the knife she gave him, and murdered the king.
In this way Gyges usurped the throne and married the queen.
Agreed. Even at the time, whenever there was a choice between a 2D platformer or an open-world game, I'd almost invariably prefer the open-world game.
My first gaming was done on an Atari 800, and I can't think of a single 2D platformer that I miss. My preference was for open-world RPGs like the Ultima series or Alternate Reality; open-world simulation games like Star Raiders, Elite, or Rescue on Fractalus. Even among non-open-world games there were plenty of alternatives that I'd take in preference to any 2D platformer: "arena" games like Archon or Wizard of Wor; when I could get onto a terminal at my parents' workplace, I loved Rogue; and there's always text games like Zork and the Infocom adventures.
2D platformers were just horrid. I hated them with a passion, and they have (nearly) died the death that I always wished on them. The advent of 3D games like Doom (and its lesser precursors) and 3D platformers like Tomb Raider was such a big deal because, for me, it was a breath of fresh air after the hell of 2D platformers.
We've had legalized prostitution in New Zealand since 2003.
I agree wholly with your reading of the situation, but one small correction: prostitution hasn't been legalised, it's been decriminalised. As I understand it (IANAL) that means basically that it's unregulated -- no employment or health-and-safety regulations, for example, other than the kind of endangerment and contractual issues that apply to everyone regardless of their line of work.
In some ways I find this a much preferable situation to legalisation, as (a) it's purer capitalism -- less regulation --, and (b) it's not about promulgating an arbitrary set of social values, or protecting an industry, but more about protecting the rights and safety of the sex worker. (There may be unwelcome side effects as well, of course.)
I guess I've been accustomed to thinking about larger dimension numbers than 3 or 4 for a long time.
It's still pretty challenging to play noughts and crosses on higher-dimensional boards, though.
It can be moderately fun, though. Just note that once your board has more than about three dimensions, you have to stop playing to win by seeing who gets three-in-a-row first, and instead play to see who gets the most three-in-a-rows.
It's been a while, but I seem to recall that four dimensions was OK for a fairly short game, but five for a longer haul -- that would last a good while, while still not getting too ludicrously complicated. Six dimensions was a bit much, though.
I also use Tree Style Tab, and I have taken it so much for granted for so long that it took me a fair while to work out what the problem outlined in TFA actually was. My first thought on seeing the headline was that they were going to take away my beloved vertical stack of tabs ...
Having said that, grouping tabs by type of activity, as TFA suggests, is either really dumb or thinking too many years ahead. Either no grouping at all, or grouping based on which pages you opened from which other pages (and both options are available in Tree Style Tab), are I think the only approaches that make sense at present.
... where every single person who participated in it is dead.
Do you feel the same way about films? Were The Dambusters, Saving Private Ryan, and Casablanca tasteless for the reason you suggest?
How about novels?
How about "edutainment" documentaries?
How about biographies?
How about historical books?
How about encyclopaedia articles?
What, exactly, is the reason for your drawing the line where you draw it?
Can somebody tell me how to search for results that were indexed between a set of dates?
You're right it's not obvious, but it is there. The key is the "Show options" link near the top. The URL syntax, in case you want to customise it to a Firefox keyword or something like that, is http://www.google.co.nz/search?q=Linux+multitasking&tbo=1&tbs=tl:1,tll:2003,tlh:2005 (removing "tbo=1&" will hide the options sidebar).
In Oceana, crimes included thinking the wrong thing. Britain has not quite yet reached that level (however, given that parliament has absolute sovereignty, there's precious little that can prevent it),
Oh, I'd say it has reached that level all right. It's a country where you can be jailed for things that you see, regardless of intent (e.g. if someone else sends you some child porn in an e-mail and you report it, you will be jailed for having seen it); a country where you can be held in prison indefinitely without trial for refusing to reveal a password that a law enforcement official suspects may be in your head. If you meant that you can't be jailed for political opinions that you never express publically, then that does seem to be the case so far. But to cope with living in the UK you need to use doublethink to a degree that I, personally, find terrifying.
but the level of surveillance by itself wasn't what made the society oppressive.
I disagree with that. Surveillance that can be used for good will definitely also be used for evil. If the certainty of evil outweighs the potential for good -- and that is definitely the case in the UK, given that the public is severely constrained, while the major police forces are not accountable to anyone at all -- I'd say it's not just an important component of an oppressive society, it's a sufficient cause in and of itself to lead to the development of very severe oppression.
Alas, no. The library at Alexandria probably faded gradually rather than being destroyed in one fell swoop, so its contents were presumably dispersed in an untraceable fashion. Even more of a problem is that the site of the library has been underwater for most of the time since antiquity.
Bits & pieces of the Catalog of Womenor Eoiai have been around a long time for example.
Fragments of that poem have indeed been around for a long time, but there were only a couple of dozen lines before papyri started to be published a bit over a century ago. I overstated the case when I said that about 1000 lines have been found from Oxyrhynchos; in fact probably only about 500-700 are from there (I'm too lazy to count right now).
Unfortunately, the stream of new finds of that particular text is gradually drying up; personally I doubt we'll ever find more than another 200 lines or so. Which is a shame, since the number of finds suggests that it was the third most widely read text in Hellenistic Egypt, right behind the Homeric epics.
I don't know about the GP, but sir, I would be honoured and delighted to meet the CS student who can not only (a) find the time in between learning CS to get their ancient Greek good enough, but also (b) come up with a working OCR-and-translation implementation for fragmentary texts -- i.e. where half of the words are half-missing. (Actually I did have a CS major among my Greek students a few years ago, and he was planning on coming up with a parsing tool which, alas, never materialised -- though such tools have since appeared from other sources. There's only one FOSS one that I know of; it's in perl, which from what I hear about perl sounds like it might be quite fitting.)
There was a rather nice bit in A Canticle for Leibowitz about one of the monks who had come up with an algorithm for reconstructing the lost right-hand part of a page of text; IIRC it took decades to reconstruct the first page, but only a few years to do the second page. Personally I'd love to see such an algorithm come to life!
In addition to Oxyrhynchus, significant finds have been made at Herculaneum and Pompeii.
If those ones take your fancy more than the ones from Oxyrhynchos -- and there are some good reasons why they might -- you might find it useful to have these links at your disposal:
For texts, the Big Two sites are Oxyrhynchos and Herculaneum (though, IIRC, the idea of using multispectral imaging for damaged manuscripts was first got from trying to decipher the Dead Sea scrolls).
What's distinctive about Herculaneum is the finding of the works of the philosopher Philodemos, as noted above. Editions have started to appear in the last two decades; I think there's at least one translation available. Oxyrhynchos is overall much more important, though. Oxyrhynchos doesn't have a Philodemos, but that's more than compensated for by the sheer quantity of papyri -- in the first century of publication only about 1-5% have been edited and published so far, and that isn't because they've been slacking off. No complete literary works have emerged from Oxyrhynchos -- but we do have gajillions of letters to a relative who lives in the next town over, contracts, land deeds, shipping lists, shopping lists; but also a few bits of literary stuff -- tiny bits of lost plays, about a thousand lines of an otherwise lost epic called the Catalogue of Women, heaps of pieces of texts of which we already had complete copies, and other odds and ends. And yes, in response to the sibling post, ancient porn too. (Well, I know of one sex manual by Philainis, at least.)
Good, now put them online.
Do ten seconds' googling and you'll find it was done long ago (notice the turn-of-the-century character of the website; believe me, it used to be worse).
Well, it's been partly done. That link only gives digitised images of the papyri that have been published in hardcopy so far -- i.e. the first hundred-odd years of publications. It'll take another few hundred years to finish publishing the Oxyrhynchos papyri.
On the other hand, actually reading the material -- here's a sample of someone practising their handwriting, see how you get on with reading it -- will still be considerably more trouble than it would be if you simply went to a library and looked at a printed text.
Either way, of course, you'll have to learn ancient Greek first. Alas, if you want a translation, you're out of luck. I'm sure Oxford University would be glad if you want to donate the millions of pounds it would require to translate the entire corpus, ... translation isn't cheap. It's simply more economical to impose an entry requirement for studying the material, viz. a knowledge of ancient Greek (and of Hellenistic palaeography), than it would be to find non-existent funding for a translation.
The press is lazy, always have been. Nothing like sourcing your story in a few keystrokes.
Wikipedia is lazy, always has been. Nothing like sourcing your story in a few keystrokes.
Cuts both ways, doesn't it.
And if it's good enough to fool a curator, then it's good enough to display in a museum.
While I'm basically in agreement with the rest of your post, I am completely at a loss to understand the rationale behind this sentiment. You don't display things in a museum for fun. A museum stores and preserves objects for their historical value, of which intrinsic/artistic value is a very tiny component. To the extent that it fails to live up to that function, it fails to be a museum.
If someone forges a pretty starscape in Photoshop, does it get published as fact in the Journal of Cosmology? Like hell it does. Forgeries don't just undermine the historical significance of genuine articles, they take the merest hope of ever making sense of historical data, tear it to shreds, and turn the remains into papier mache. They're wholly evil.