Because in a court, you don't know anything like that. You can assume.
What is entirely possible is that they used the same strategy as Microsoft during the antitrust trial - piss off the judge intentionally so that he gets emotionally involved and can't hide his bias behind a seemingly balanced judgement. Of course, the difference being that in this case the judge was already biased beforehand, while in the MS case they made him become biased.
Actually, it was one of the reasons why when trying the game out, I decided very quickly to think about all the other classes but the Jedi. Who wants to be a Jedi if every 12 year old fat kid in his slumhole is?
When you have a 500 lbs gorilla in the room, you don't wrestle with it. Anyone who's trying to do the same thing as WoW does, "just better" will have that experience - as so many already had. WoW is too big to be unlodged by something that does the same thing slightly better, or even considerably better. I dare to say, even a whole lot better.
That's because you have a playerbase that has real-value investments in WoW. Playtime they paid for, and most of them lots of lots of it. To convince them to give that up and start again is not something you do with the same formula and a couple gradual improvements.
A "WoW killer" can only be obviously different in many aspects. The answer to the question "why not just stay with WoW?" has to be blatantly obvious.
Actually, it does not show what the summary title claims.
"Love" is different from sexual arousal, and I mean that in a medical sense. While many details are still unclear, from what we do know, regarding hormones and brain scans (only one of which is covered by this research), there are marked differences, especially regarding long-term love and sex drive.
Just because YOU can afford to put content online for free does not mean EVERYONE can.
No, but it does mean that it's possible, while the GP claimed that the "free web exists [...] because of ads".
Which is simply not true. A free web existed long before ads were common, and it will exist long after we've got rid of them. Some individual sites may not, but many others will take their place.
How much poorer a world we would have if everything only worked one way!
How much richer a world would we have if the media would stop doing everything just to generate more page views? A lot of what's wrong with newspapers, TV, etc. can be explained by this effect of being an ad-based business. Lowest common denominator programming? Bad journalism? Overly dramatic front page news? Generating stories out of nothing? Constantly feeding the public "the sky is falling, run!" messages?
All of that wouldn't be as bad if news media wouldn't require as many eyeballs as possible to generate the most advertising profit.
Same for websites. I have a lot of websites that I've visited for many years and seen their evolution over time. Not one has improved with advertisement, many have gone down the drain once they started being reliant on ads.
Actually, lying and the other stuff would be hard to prove, but a much simpler and more objective rule would hold and eliminate 90% of our current politicians: If you've voted three times for a law later found to be unconstitutional, you're obviously unfit to pass any more laws, and out you go.
but this Internet mob mentality is not the way to go about it.
So, what is?
The lawyer mob mentality? The RIAA/MPAA mob mentality? The "fuck-the-constitution-I'm-the-boss-around-here" Bush mentality?
Or maybe you're advertising the "let's keep quit like nice little sheep" mentality because, you know, throughout history that has ever changed anything.
At least TPB guys have guts. From what I remember about history, it always took someone with guts to start any major change in society. Sometimes it was a Cesar, sometimes a Ghandi. You usually don't know until afterwards. But they have the guts, and a major change in copyright handling is long overdue.
I'd be interested to see how a team harvested from the basements of MIT or Caltech would stack up in a challenge like this, actually.
Get their asses handed to them, essentially.
We all laugh about the military and the secret services, but we forget what an impressive amount of things they do that we do not hear about. Sure, you learn about that double-agent fuckup in the middle east and think "how could anyone be that stupid?" - but you never learn about the other 20 agents that never get caught or uncovered.
MIT is an impressive university, and they can floor Vegas with card counting. But the NSA is the largest employer of mathematicians in the world, and is still several years ahead of the world-wide scientific community in some areas of math research, especially cryptography.
They have their share of fuckups, like every organisation of that size. Wouldn't underestimate them, though.
Long answer: Your users have already opted out by installing AdBlock. Like it or not. This is the Internet, you don't control the client. He wants to filter out content, he can and there's nothing you can do to stop that.
Don't like it? Tough luck. I'd also like to be paid twice as much as I am, but you know, life doesn't always work to your personal specifications.
I don't use ad blockers because I realize that the free web exists as it is because of ads.
That's one of the most irritating postings I've seen in a long time.
Click on my.sig - free online game, running for over 8 years now, never had a single paid advertisement on the site. Same with my personal site (which is still on the 1st Google page for some of the topics it contains, and has been for years).
A lot of people put content online for free, and your posting is an insult to all of us who have reasons beyond greed.
The hell they don't. You're visiting their web site hosted on their hardware, at their expense, and maintained with their time/money.
Which they've put online in the Internet, which was developed with my tax money, is running on the telco lines put in the ground with my tax money, and which I'm accessing through my DSL line that I pay for.
I figure it equals out. If they don't want people visiting their site they don't have to put it online, you know?
There are laws in most civilized countries preventing commercial entities from certain filtering mechanisms with respect to their customers. For example, it would be illegal for any US store to put up a sign that says "no niggers allowed inside", or to enforce such a door policy, with or without the sign.
Commercial interests are a part of the bigger whole, which is society and culture. They should stop pretending that they are the big picture and everything else has to run according to their rules.
One of the rules of the Internet is: You are the server, you don't control the client. You decide what information you send, the client decides how to process it. If for some reason the client turns all your tags into tags before displaying them, that's how it is, like it or not. If he doesn't want to display pictures, or titles, or navigation bars, or advertisement, then that's how it is. You don't control the client. Like it or leave it.
What's this nonsense of "choice"? I've already made a choice by installing AdBlock. How much clearer can the "I don't want to see your stupid ads" message be?
What they've done is invent the double-opt-out.
Fuck you. If I care, I'll opt-in. I have yet to see a single case where opt-out was the adequate procedure. It really is that simple, just like firewall rules. DEFAULT DENY and then go from there is the only reasonable route.
So, the fact that you can't opt-out because they don't ask you in the first place is why I installed AdBlock. I see no reason whatsoever to opt out again, nor do I want to be asked if I want to opt-in. If I wanted to, I'd disable AdBlock.
Whatever state it's in, I hope they release it anyways. Just so us who've actually been waiting the whole time (ok, "were around when DNF was first announced and didn't entirely forget about it over the years" is probably closer) can get closure.
It looks playable, if that's actual gameplay footage. And if I have to load each level via console, and half the guns aren't working properly, and whatever else is missing - I'd still want to play it, at least once.
"Open Source" isn't a magic word. The failure rate of Open Source / Free Software projects is certainly on par with that of closed source projects. More importantly, a game needs a game designer. It needs vision and a driving force, and you can not get that by democratically agree-upon compromise solutions.
Would Duke be as politically incorrect as he is if the project had been created in a multi-national fluid group? I doubt that.
My company, and probably almost every other company like it, is suffering tremendously from the stupid, idiotic, short-sighted, totally impractical meeting scheduling that's built into Outlook.
The simple fact that Outlook not only allows, but encourages you to plan a meeting on the 2nd floor from 9 to 10 and a meeting on the 6th floor from 10 to 11 - that fact alone guarantees that people will be late for the 2nd meeting.
A good meeting schedule - and everyone who's done his homework regarding productive meetings knows that - absolutely must include times for preparation, times for finishing up and time to transition between meetings, including a short stop at the desk to check if any urgent things have come up.
Here's what I think a useable meeting scheduler should work like:
* Know in rough outlines the distance (in minutes of travel) between meeting rooms * Have in addition to "length of meeting" also "time for preparation" and "time after meeting" fields * Never, ever, allow a 2nd meeting to start the same minute that a 1st meeting ends
For the past few years, I've been leading negotiations. For a short while, I've manually added 15 minutes before and after each negotiation round as briefing and debriefing times for my team. It worked great - we were always on time, together, for each negotiation round, and we could always sum up and report on the results. Unfortunately, with the current tools available, it's a major hassle to do this, especially if you're also taking invitations from other people (who will book you right after another meeting).
So anything that automates this process, something as simple as automatic buffer times like mine above, would do wonders for productivity.
Yes, another fine product of the current german government. And yes, I am german, so I'm allowed to whine (and yes, I'm trying to change things).
The problem is that the current government in Germany is made up of people who are either incompetent or insane, and sometimes both. And when I say "insane", I actually do mean that in a clinical psychological sense. Our minister of the interior, who is pushing law after law which are almost all later found to be unconstitutional, is suffering from PTSD. His medical records are kept a secret. This is the same guy who says that if you've got nothing to hide, you couldn't possibly be opposed to all the new surveilance measures. Go figure.
Our (female) minister for family, education, etc. is the bitch behind the "STOP" sign and DNS redirection to fight child porn. You know, the thing that does absolutely nothhing against actual child abuse, but only tries very weakly to stop the display of pictures of same (i.e. at least two layers of abstraction away from the actual event). If you've followed her story even a little, you also have to doubt whether she's perfectly sane or not.
The list goes on with ministers of finance who were personally involved with some banks that crashed and likely prevented investigations until liabilities for the former owners (their friends) had expired, a minister of transportation who's trying to sell the state train system, at about 10% of its estimated worth, and a prime minister who very strongly stands for... nothing. I don't think anyone on the streets of Germany could tell you what she stands for, what her policies are, or what the heck she's doing at all.
So that's Germany in 2009. Not so much different from the US in 2008, even to the point that it is election year. Except that we don't have an Obama to promise change. So elections will be very interesting.
most of us have gotten accustomed to the idea of one Internet connection per household, shared with a wireless router.
Yes, and so what?
You may not have noticed if you've been living under the rock these past few years, but Apple's biggest success is in the notebook market. The MacBook Pro was even lauded as "the best windows notebook on the market today" when it came out.
If you have a notebook, it makes a lot of sense to have a 3G connection built-in. Those USB dongles are a pain, and as with most additional stuff, you just want less of it to lug around all the time. That's for when you are away from home, you know?
As for the "3G router" - in some areas that would indeed be a market (some of Scandinavia has better wireless than wired connections, as does much of Africa) but it would very likely not be a new product, but more of an additional option for the Airport Extreme.
As for "additional telco costs" - bullshit with cream. Just because you have the hardware built-in doesn't mean you have to have a contract. When you buy an UMTS package today, they'll gladly sell you additional hardware (those USB dongles, etc.) but you can already buy both hardware and contract alone.
Finally, home PC security will be taken seriously.
Come on, we know it works like that. Nobody takes the common flu seriously, because most of the time it doesn't hurt much - did you know that the common flu kills many thousands every year? More people died from flu in 2001 in the USA than from the 9/11 terror attacks.
But when swine flu shows up, or bird flu, or whatever this years influenza variant is, that is frontpage news.
Welcome to the 21st century, glad you could finally make it.
You see, the list of "rights" has changed a lot during the history of mankind. A thousand years ago, "freedom" wasn't on it, nowadays we could not imagine doing without. The "pursuit of happiness" would've sounded like a load of hogwash to most early middle ages peasants, who had a whole load of more pressing matters on their hands, like not starving or how to explain the noble lord that ius primae noctis meant only the first night, no matter how beautiful your new wife is.
So, with the realization that in modern life there's a whole lot you simply can't do very well without Internet, especially now that government have begun to put a lot of their citizen information and public services online as well (and reduced their physical presence to save costs), we've put Internet access on that list. More or less, depending on your country. In most of Europe, for example, you already do have a right of "informational freedom", which guarantees your free access to information such as newspapers, libraries and the Internet.
Still, it does show that there's a problem, somewhere. Especially because it's been done before, there is no excuse this time. It's not an innovative, new idea that these poor journalists could have no idea could happen.
If they still fall for it, it shows that there's something seriously wrong, somewhere.
And without further studies, you can't say that "somewhere" might not be Wikipedia. It's certainly in part the journalists, but are your really, absolutely certain that it is 100% the journalists and nothing else?
Putting a "do not create hoaxes" sign up is a cuddly symbolic gesture, but if at the same time you make it absolutely trivial to do so, it might not be enough. Kind of like "don't walk on grass" signs when there's no reasonable other way.
use your shit to debunk other (actually factual) shit in Wikipedia because another "not-Wikipedia" site says Wikipedia is wrong.
Actually, you don't have to go that far.
What I've learned on Wikipedia is this: False is more important than true.
Put doubt on something written in an article, and the guy who wrote it will be asked for sources, not you. The article will be marked as "needs citation", and in some cases will be deleted simply because you claimed it's all wrong, with no evidence, and nobody else bothered enough to provide said evidence.
If you add something, you'll be asked for proof, and all kinds of proof will not count. Essentially, even if you are the primary source, you'll not count unless you've got it written up on some other website that you can point to. Heck, if you're a second-rate actor and your Wikipedia article suddenly claims you're dead, starting an edit-war with the hoaxer is your best bet in getting that removed. (Wikipedia has a special contact address if you are the subject of an article - according to my own personal experience, the reaction time of that address is about two weeks.)
So in summary: Vandalism is easier than adding something truthful but imperfectly documented. And then people are surprised there's so much crap on Wikipedia.
Slashdot Mirror
Because in a court, you don't know anything like that. You can assume.
What is entirely possible is that they used the same strategy as Microsoft during the antitrust trial - piss off the judge intentionally so that he gets emotionally involved and can't hide his bias behind a seemingly balanced judgement. Of course, the difference being that in this case the judge was already biased beforehand, while in the MS case they made him become biased.
Actually, it was one of the reasons why when trying the game out, I decided very quickly to think about all the other classes but the Jedi. Who wants to be a Jedi if every 12 year old fat kid in his slumhole is?
Well, yes of course.
When you have a 500 lbs gorilla in the room, you don't wrestle with it. Anyone who's trying to do the same thing as WoW does, "just better" will have that experience - as so many already had. WoW is too big to be unlodged by something that does the same thing slightly better, or even considerably better. I dare to say, even a whole lot better.
That's because you have a playerbase that has real-value investments in WoW. Playtime they paid for, and most of them lots of lots of it. To convince them to give that up and start again is not something you do with the same formula and a couple gradual improvements.
A "WoW killer" can only be obviously different in many aspects. The answer to the question "why not just stay with WoW?" has to be blatantly obvious.
Is it a game, or is it real?
I think the "or double-click to teleport anywhere in the world" part kind of gives it away... :-)
Actually, it does not show what the summary title claims.
"Love" is different from sexual arousal, and I mean that in a medical sense. While many details are still unclear, from what we do know, regarding hormones and brain scans (only one of which is covered by this research), there are marked differences, especially regarding long-term love and sex drive.
Just because YOU can afford to put content online for free does not mean EVERYONE can.
No, but it does mean that it's possible, while the GP claimed that the "free web exists [...] because of ads".
Which is simply not true. A free web existed long before ads were common, and it will exist long after we've got rid of them. Some individual sites may not, but many others will take their place.
How much poorer a world we would have if everything only worked one way!
How much richer a world would we have if the media would stop doing everything just to generate more page views? A lot of what's wrong with newspapers, TV, etc. can be explained by this effect of being an ad-based business. Lowest common denominator programming? Bad journalism? Overly dramatic front page news? Generating stories out of nothing? Constantly feeding the public "the sky is falling, run!" messages?
All of that wouldn't be as bad if news media wouldn't require as many eyeballs as possible to generate the most advertising profit.
Same for websites. I have a lot of websites that I've visited for many years and seen their evolution over time. Not one has improved with advertisement, many have gone down the drain once they started being reliant on ads.
Actually, lying and the other stuff would be hard to prove, but a much simpler and more objective rule would hold and eliminate 90% of our current politicians: If you've voted three times for a law later found to be unconstitutional, you're obviously unfit to pass any more laws, and out you go.
but this Internet mob mentality is not the way to go about it.
So, what is?
The lawyer mob mentality? The RIAA/MPAA mob mentality? The "fuck-the-constitution-I'm-the-boss-around-here" Bush mentality?
Or maybe you're advertising the "let's keep quit like nice little sheep" mentality because, you know, throughout history that has ever changed anything.
At least TPB guys have guts. From what I remember about history, it always took someone with guts to start any major change in society. Sometimes it was a Cesar, sometimes a Ghandi. You usually don't know until afterwards. But they have the guts, and a major change in copyright handling is long overdue.
I'd be interested to see how a team harvested from the basements of MIT or Caltech would stack up in a challenge like this, actually.
Get their asses handed to them, essentially.
We all laugh about the military and the secret services, but we forget what an impressive amount of things they do that we do not hear about. Sure, you learn about that double-agent fuckup in the middle east and think "how could anyone be that stupid?" - but you never learn about the other 20 agents that never get caught or uncovered.
MIT is an impressive university, and they can floor Vegas with card counting. But the NSA is the largest employer of mathematicians in the world, and is still several years ahead of the world-wide scientific community in some areas of math research, especially cryptography.
They have their share of fuckups, like every organisation of that size. Wouldn't underestimate them, though.
The NSA decided, many years ago, that hardening Linux would be the better route, and they released SELinux to the world.
You can read up their reasoning, history, etc. on nsa.gov/selinux, at least you could last time I checked. Otherwise, ask Google.
Short answer: No.
Long answer: Your users have already opted out by installing AdBlock. Like it or not. This is the Internet, you don't control the client. He wants to filter out content, he can and there's nothing you can do to stop that.
Don't like it? Tough luck. I'd also like to be paid twice as much as I am, but you know, life doesn't always work to your personal specifications.
I don't use ad blockers because I realize that the free web exists as it is because of ads.
That's one of the most irritating postings I've seen in a long time.
Click on my .sig - free online game, running for over 8 years now, never had a single paid advertisement on the site. Same with my personal site (which is still on the 1st Google page for some of the topics it contains, and has been for years).
A lot of people put content online for free, and your posting is an insult to all of us who have reasons beyond greed.
The hell they don't. You're visiting their web site hosted on their hardware, at their expense, and maintained with their time/money.
Which they've put online in the Internet, which was developed with my tax money, is running on the telco lines put in the ground with my tax money, and which I'm accessing through my DSL line that I pay for.
I figure it equals out. If they don't want people visiting their site they don't have to put it online, you know?
There are laws in most civilized countries preventing commercial entities from certain filtering mechanisms with respect to their customers. For example, it would be illegal for any US store to put up a sign that says "no niggers allowed inside", or to enforce such a door policy, with or without the sign.
Commercial interests are a part of the bigger whole, which is society and culture. They should stop pretending that they are the big picture and everything else has to run according to their rules.
One of the rules of the Internet is: You are the server, you don't control the client. You decide what information you send, the client decides how to process it. If for some reason the client turns all your tags into tags before displaying them, that's how it is, like it or not. If he doesn't want to display pictures, or titles, or navigation bars, or advertisement, then that's how it is. You don't control the client. Like it or leave it.
A button in Adblock would be cool to show seldom in one corner of the website to say "Support this site".
An approach less focused on a business model that requires you to annoy people in order to survive would also be cool.
What's this nonsense of "choice"? I've already made a choice by installing AdBlock. How much clearer can the "I don't want to see your stupid ads" message be?
What they've done is invent the double-opt-out.
Fuck you. If I care, I'll opt-in. I have yet to see a single case where opt-out was the adequate procedure. It really is that simple, just like firewall rules. DEFAULT DENY and then go from there is the only reasonable route.
So, the fact that you can't opt-out because they don't ask you in the first place is why I installed AdBlock. I see no reason whatsoever to opt out again, nor do I want to be asked if I want to opt-in. If I wanted to, I'd disable AdBlock.
Geesh. Got it? It's not that difficult.
Because you don't?
What makes you think everyone has a 3G phone, much less one that makes tethering possible, and a mobile contract that allows that?
By my estimate, a lot less than "everyone".
Whatever state it's in, I hope they release it anyways. Just so us who've actually been waiting the whole time (ok, "were around when DNF was first announced and didn't entirely forget about it over the years" is probably closer) can get closure.
It looks playable, if that's actual gameplay footage. And if I have to load each level via console, and half the guns aren't working properly, and whatever else is missing - I'd still want to play it, at least once.
And you think that would work, why?
"Open Source" isn't a magic word. The failure rate of Open Source / Free Software projects is certainly on par with that of closed source projects. More importantly, a game needs a game designer. It needs vision and a driving force, and you can not get that by democratically agree-upon compromise solutions.
Would Duke be as politically incorrect as he is if the project had been created in a multi-national fluid group? I doubt that.
Ok, the patent madness aside - yes, please.
My company, and probably almost every other company like it, is suffering tremendously from the stupid, idiotic, short-sighted, totally impractical meeting scheduling that's built into Outlook.
The simple fact that Outlook not only allows, but encourages you to plan a meeting on the 2nd floor from 9 to 10 and a meeting on the 6th floor from 10 to 11 - that fact alone guarantees that people will be late for the 2nd meeting.
A good meeting schedule - and everyone who's done his homework regarding productive meetings knows that - absolutely must include times for preparation, times for finishing up and time to transition between meetings, including a short stop at the desk to check if any urgent things have come up.
Here's what I think a useable meeting scheduler should work like:
* Know in rough outlines the distance (in minutes of travel) between meeting rooms
* Have in addition to "length of meeting" also "time for preparation" and "time after meeting" fields
* Never, ever, allow a 2nd meeting to start the same minute that a 1st meeting ends
For the past few years, I've been leading negotiations. For a short while, I've manually added 15 minutes before and after each negotiation round as briefing and debriefing times for my team. It worked great - we were always on time, together, for each negotiation round, and we could always sum up and report on the results.
Unfortunately, with the current tools available, it's a major hassle to do this, especially if you're also taking invitations from other people (who will book you right after another meeting).
So anything that automates this process, something as simple as automatic buffer times like mine above, would do wonders for productivity.
Yes, another fine product of the current german government. And yes, I am german, so I'm allowed to whine (and yes, I'm trying to change things).
The problem is that the current government in Germany is made up of people who are either incompetent or insane, and sometimes both. And when I say "insane", I actually do mean that in a clinical psychological sense. Our minister of the interior, who is pushing law after law which are almost all later found to be unconstitutional, is suffering from PTSD. His medical records are kept a secret. This is the same guy who says that if you've got nothing to hide, you couldn't possibly be opposed to all the new surveilance measures. Go figure.
Our (female) minister for family, education, etc. is the bitch behind the "STOP" sign and DNS redirection to fight child porn. You know, the thing that does absolutely nothhing against actual child abuse, but only tries very weakly to stop the display of pictures of same (i.e. at least two layers of abstraction away from the actual event). If you've followed her story even a little, you also have to doubt whether she's perfectly sane or not.
The list goes on with ministers of finance who were personally involved with some banks that crashed and likely prevented investigations until liabilities for the former owners (their friends) had expired, a minister of transportation who's trying to sell the state train system, at about 10% of its estimated worth, and a prime minister who very strongly stands for ... nothing. I don't think anyone on the streets of Germany could tell you what she stands for, what her policies are, or what the heck she's doing at all.
So that's Germany in 2009. Not so much different from the US in 2008, even to the point that it is election year. Except that we don't have an Obama to promise change. So elections will be very interesting.
most of us have gotten accustomed to the idea of one Internet connection per household, shared with a wireless router.
Yes, and so what?
You may not have noticed if you've been living under the rock these past few years, but Apple's biggest success is in the notebook market. The MacBook Pro was even lauded as "the best windows notebook on the market today" when it came out.
If you have a notebook, it makes a lot of sense to have a 3G connection built-in. Those USB dongles are a pain, and as with most additional stuff, you just want less of it to lug around all the time. That's for when you are away from home, you know?
As for the "3G router" - in some areas that would indeed be a market (some of Scandinavia has better wireless than wired connections, as does much of Africa) but it would very likely not be a new product, but more of an additional option for the Airport Extreme.
As for "additional telco costs" - bullshit with cream. Just because you have the hardware built-in doesn't mean you have to have a contract. When you buy an UMTS package today, they'll gladly sell you additional hardware (those USB dongles, etc.) but you can already buy both hardware and contract alone.
Finally, home PC security will be taken seriously.
Come on, we know it works like that. Nobody takes the common flu seriously, because most of the time it doesn't hurt much - did you know that the common flu kills many thousands every year? More people died from flu in 2001 in the USA than from the 9/11 terror attacks.
But when swine flu shows up, or bird flu, or whatever this years influenza variant is, that is frontpage news.
Why should computer viruses be any different?
There is no "right" to internet access
Welcome to the 21st century, glad you could finally make it.
You see, the list of "rights" has changed a lot during the history of mankind. A thousand years ago, "freedom" wasn't on it, nowadays we could not imagine doing without. The "pursuit of happiness" would've sounded like a load of hogwash to most early middle ages peasants, who had a whole load of more pressing matters on their hands, like not starving or how to explain the noble lord that ius primae noctis meant only the first night, no matter how beautiful your new wife is.
So, with the realization that in modern life there's a whole lot you simply can't do very well without Internet, especially now that government have begun to put a lot of their citizen information and public services online as well (and reduced their physical presence to save costs), we've put Internet access on that list. More or less, depending on your country. In most of Europe, for example, you already do have a right of "informational freedom", which guarantees your free access to information such as newspapers, libraries and the Internet.
All true.
Still, it does show that there's a problem, somewhere. Especially because it's been done before, there is no excuse this time. It's not an innovative, new idea that these poor journalists could have no idea could happen.
If they still fall for it, it shows that there's something seriously wrong, somewhere.
And without further studies, you can't say that "somewhere" might not be Wikipedia. It's certainly in part the journalists, but are your really, absolutely certain that it is 100% the journalists and nothing else?
Putting a "do not create hoaxes" sign up is a cuddly symbolic gesture, but if at the same time you make it absolutely trivial to do so, it might not be enough. Kind of like "don't walk on grass" signs when there's no reasonable other way.
use your shit to debunk other (actually factual) shit in Wikipedia because another "not-Wikipedia" site says Wikipedia is wrong.
Actually, you don't have to go that far.
What I've learned on Wikipedia is this: False is more important than true.
Put doubt on something written in an article, and the guy who wrote it will be asked for sources, not you. The article will be marked as "needs citation", and in some cases will be deleted simply because you claimed it's all wrong, with no evidence, and nobody else bothered enough to provide said evidence.
If you add something, you'll be asked for proof, and all kinds of proof will not count. Essentially, even if you are the primary source, you'll not count unless you've got it written up on some other website that you can point to. Heck, if you're a second-rate actor and your Wikipedia article suddenly claims you're dead, starting an edit-war with the hoaxer is your best bet in getting that removed. (Wikipedia has a special contact address if you are the subject of an article - according to my own personal experience, the reaction time of that address is about two weeks.)
So in summary: Vandalism is easier than adding something truthful but imperfectly documented. And then people are surprised there's so much crap on Wikipedia.