Not to go too far off-topic, but my favourite example of this is the arguement that marijuana is a "gateway drug".
The argument goes "almost every heroine addict started off smoking pot, so smoking pot leads to heroine addiction".
Next time you hear this, try swapping "smoking pot" with "drinking breastmilk", and get them to explain why breastmilk isn't a gateway to heroine addiction, homosexuality, violent crime and paedophilia.
"Hard to believe Diamler Chrysler couldn't get it in the top ten of a Google search for Ram."
It's not hard to believe at all - that's a stunning example of empathic myopeia.
Walk up to ten people at random on the street and say "Ram. What am I talking about?".
You'll get answers like "sheep", "computer memory", "to push" and "I don't know - what the fuck are you talking about". I guarantee not one person will say "an obscure model of truck made by Dodge".
Jesus - even if they've ever heard of a Dodge Ram (which most people outside of the US won't have), they won't assume you're talking about that because it's so bloody obscure.
"One must wonder, now that computers are a home appliance for the masses, if the majority of Americans searching for Ram are looking for a truck...."
No, of course the majority of americans won't necessarily associate "ram" with computers. However, I'll bet you the majority of people (not "americans") who own a computer, and are on the internet, and search for "ram" are looking for RAM, and not male sheep or the verb "to push".
It's not hard to add another keyword to increase search specificity. Tell you what - next time people are amazed by search engines' lack of relevence, try thinking what would happen if you asked a random person the same query. Why should a bunch of unintelligent, statistical algorithms be held to a higher standard?
I mean, try to improve the technology, sure, just don't act surprised when it doesn't do freaking telepathy.
"What's Next on the calender? Meth? Rock Music, Dancing? Pool Halls? Bowling?"
Meth? That's "Drugs" - already done that. Rock Music? Never stopped (Elvis, 80s Metal, gangsta rap, Marilyn Manson, Eminem). Dancing? That's so 50s.
Pool Halls and Bowling? Nope, because parents are used to them - they aren't new, and hence scary.
Seriously - every new technology is the focus of loudmouth moralist hysteria. Seriously - the board of Eton college wouldn't let the first robber-baron train magnates lay railway tracks across any Eton-owned property. Not because they didn't want a station near the school, but because they feared (and I quote) "the railway may corrupt the morals of the boys" in some undefinable way. Just worried about those well-known 1800s "Ale 'n' Whores" trains, I guess.
Look at any new technology - popular music, radio, television, the internet, the web - the one thing they all have in common is that they were once new, and they (or the pace of change they implied) scared the shit out of luddites.
And in our molly-coddling society anything that frightens people without real justification has but one battle-cry - "think of t3h kids!!!!11!!1!one".
Notice how worries about the real concerns (war, famine, genetic engineering, the DMCA, economic collapse, the ongoing "difficulties" of the US democratic system) are never framed in terms of children. War is obviously bad - no-one needs to start invoking "the kids" to push buttons and get everyone on-side.
As Bill Hicks famously said, just wave a foetus at people and you can lead them on whatever crusade you like.
In fact, it's getting to the stage where the second a new technology sparks fears which involve kids, I come down bang in favour of it. If it had a real danger the irrational luddites would publicising that - the fact they're relying on ill-supported, zero-evidence emotive bullshit like imagined, potential effects on "the kids" is just evidence there's nothing, in fact, to be worried about.
"Secondly... then at some point on the globe, the sun was overhead, or even starting to set, when it started shining... which means that there was no sun rise on that "day", which means that, for that point on the globe, sunset happened first."
didn't you understand?
We're clearly talking about this from the reference-frame of the earth's surface, so you don't get any points for pointing out that the sun doesn't "really" move.
As an interesting side-exercise, please prove conclusively to me that the earth isn't completely stationery, with the rest of the universe spinning around that point.
Answer: you can't. You can measure earth's motion relative to the rest of the universe but that's just another reference frame, and the question was to prove the reference frame itself isn't moving.
Fro mTFA I don't think they're actually playing the games - just being immersed in the environment.
Strapping someone with PTSD into a VR chair and making them repeatedly kill people isn't going to make them better, but exposing them to the stimuli (environment, sounds, etc) can help them go back through the feelings they had and deal with them.
IIRC, in PTSD these feelings have which have been pushed into the subconscious where they fester and give rise to the disorder. The therapist can dynamically vary the immersiveness of the simulation by phasing in and out things like smoke, impaired vision, gunfire sounds, etc for added or reduced "realism". By allowing the vets to confront the feelings one step at a time, and ramping down the realism before they get distressed, the patient can start to work through the traumas, instead of retreating from them and bottling them up.
It actually sounds like a good idea to me, and it's fascinating that we've actually got the technology to the stage where the brain can be fooled into thinking it's real on a subconscious level.
Immerse them in a high-resolution, millions-of-polygons virtual playground full of tiny kids, and every time they approach one give the vice clamped to their nuts another quick half-turn.
If they don't learn soon the problem's solved either way, isn't it?
"The shuttle may be "flawed" as you put it. Or maybe spaceflight is just dangerous?"
Everything is dangerous, including driving a car or dropping at thousands of miles an hour from orbit to sea-level. However, the purpose of enabling technology (like cars, or the space shuttle) is to protect us from that danger. If we're still dying that indicates the space shuttle isn't doing a good enough job. This could be because of one of two reasons - either (i) safe, reusable orbital insertion and landing is beyond our current level of technology, or (ii) the space-shuttle's crap.
Now, you don't hear much about Soyuz capsules coming apart on re-entry (and they're generally considered lower-tech than the shuttle), so that suggests the task is within the bounds of humanity's ability. Therefore, this suggests the shuttle is crap.
There are two reasons the shuttle could be crap - either it was always a bad design, or it's just been badly-maintained and used wrongly.
I don't know enough to judge if the shuttle was ever a good design, but I certainly don't remember major things always going wrong with it with the current stunning regularity. This (admittedly perceived) lack of regular major incidents in the past compared to the present-day rate suggests that in the past it was at least a bit more reliable.
Therefore, the only conclusion I can come to is that, whether or not the shuttle was ever any good, they aren't now. Whether they were badly-designed in the first place or they've just aged badly and the program's been starved of budget, they just aren't reliable any more.
"Do we really have reason to believe the next generation craft is going to be safer? If so, how much safer?"
Well yes - safety should be priority number one for reusable orbital vehicles. If they produce a ROV that's got a worse safety record than the shuttle I don't think it deserves the moniker "next generation".
"Life is risky you know. Hell, we can hardly build a bridge or a skyscraper without SOMEONE dying."
Yeah, but they tend to die working on it, not driving to the site every morning. And they tend to die singly, often from their own (or a co-worker's) mistake. I think you'll find that if construction workers regularly died in groups of 6-7, and did so because their hammers occasionally exploded and vapourised them, there might be a small public pressure to develop a safer hammer.
The problem is simple - whether or not the shuttle was ever any good, it isn't now. The design is rooted in the '70s, using '70s technology. Look at cars in the '70s, and look at them now - don't tell me we couldn't design a far, far more efficient, safe and cheap method of achieving orbit, even with a smaller budget than the shuttle program enjoyed.
All we can possibly lack is the budget (NASA has to pay through the nose to keep the creakingly ancient shuttle programme running), the will (new research is expensive, patches the holes is cheaper) and the political accord (as I recall, shuttle part maintenance is one big barrel of congressional pork, and intensely political in how it's managed).
The irony is that America was the clear winner of the space race, but it took its eye off the ball and stopped developing new enabling technologies. Now, maintaining its creaking infrastructure is so hamstringing any development efforts that you're in grave danger of being leapfrogged by the rest of the world, and are actually in the process of turning to private companies for the future of manned orbital missions...
Could kids in the 1920s do anything as complex as using a computer? How about programming? What games did they play - hopscotch, checkers, tag? Anything even remotely as complex as Tetris, or Puyo Puyo?
Kids these days are sifting, sorting and extracting meaning from games a million times as complex as a game of chess (look at the game-state-space of Civilisation, then chess, then STFU), all in realtime. They shift axiom- and rule-sets within minutes to play wildly different games, and train both their conscious mind and subsconscious mind to learn and react faster and in more complex ways than anything anyone would ever encounter in 1920. And they do it for fun.
Mass-media like TV and the internet haven't destroyed out kids brains - our kids spend their lives immersed in a density of information that would give an elderly person a migraine, and don't even notice it.
Since there is so much more information available, people have self-protectively started to reduce the depth they go into - they learn a little bit about a lot rather than everything about a tiny, tiny fraction of the available fields, then increase their knowledge of a particular field when they need to. We've stopped learning things by rote, and instead we're in the process of keeping most of our knowledge in external media, only loading it in (and often then temporarily) when we need it. How stupid is it for kids to spend a school career learning by rote the date of the Normandy Invasion, when they can hop on the web from their mobile phones and find out it was 1066?
We should be teaching them how to use and understand technology, and how to do research, not reiterating the same educational techniques we used a hundred years ago, before the modern computer or the "information society" was even conceived of.
Look at kids today - people claim they "have no attention span", and yet will still rag on them for "spending hours and hours playing that bloody computer game". Circle the two statements. Compare and contrast.
Us adults have always had a go at the younger generation for being lazy, stupid, inattentive or backward - nostalgia's just not as good as it used to be. Here in the UK A-Level exams have been derided as "easier than they used to be" every single year of my adult life because pass-rates keep going up. Erm, no - kids have been getting more intelligent, generation-on-generation, ever since WWII at least.
You're right, if you measure intelligence by the ability to spell well (when spell-checkers are becoming ever-nearer to ubiquity) or do mental arithmetic (when you're never, and I mean never more than five feet from some kind of calculator).
However, half a century of psychological research seems to be tending away from such stone-age definitions involving specific single skills, and tending more towards general measures of information-sorting capability like progressive matrices tests.
So yeah, sit a modern kid down in a bare room with one from the 1920s and ask them to do a 1920s task like work out 58*468 in their heads, and the 1920s kid will win. But I guarantee you, sit them down with calculators, and the modern kid will be finished before the 1920s kid has finished listening to the question.
And (to be fair), also give them a modern task - sit both kids down in front of a computer and ask them to find out who's the current president of france, and the modern kid will be finished with the job before the 1920s kid has worked out how to use the mouse.
Now granted, there are some skills that we're de-emphasising that I think we should spend more time on, and "reading and writing proper English" is one of them. However, using a single (non-essential) deficiency to claim that "all modern kids are stupid" is rosy-tinted nostalgia-lead BS at best.
Those are very good points, and I've come a long way towards seeing your side of the debate. I still don't buy the whole thing (only 20% her fault? Really?) but the car analogy was (unusually for Slashdot) a good one;-)
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree, but many thanks for explaining the other side of the debate so well - you've certainly set me thinking about it again, and who knows - I may even end up agreeing with you.
I understand what you mean about there being worse examples of frivolour lawsuits, too. Unfortunately, people use examples first that resonate with their audience, and (only second) are actually accurate/fair/true.
So many people have heard (and been outraged by) the five-second version of this story I think you'll just have to resign yourself to nodding and smiling wanly whenever the example is used - it's come to be the popular archetypal for frivolous lawsuitry, so I doubt it's going away any time soon;-)
Once again, many thanks for an interesting debate.
I think there's a fundamental divide in approach here between the pro- and anti- camps. You've explained the pro- camp's position much more persuasively than anyone I've spoken to before. However, as an counterpoint, here's my (still anti-) take:
When I make tea or coffee, it's hot. In fact, when I make coffee (generally instant), I use boiling water.
Boiling water hurts, so I treat my coffee with respect, and if I accidentally spill it on myself I accept the consequences. Basically, I accept that it's potentially dangerous as the price of enjoying a hot, caffeinated pick-me-up.
In fact, I'd prefer to get a cup of the hottest coffee I can hold, since then it'll last longer and I can drink it at my leisure. (Aside: If you'd ever been trapped on a commuter-train first thing in the morning, half-way to london enjoying one of the old British Rail's room-temperature cups of tea, you'll learn to appreciate really hot beverages;-).
Basically, coffee should be hot. I'd always assume coffee is going to be around boiling point, so I'm very careful. Irrespective of precisely how bad the outcome is, if I drop coffee in my lap I'm the sole person to blame.
I can understand your point of view that if you assume the coffee is only going to be "warm" then you might not be as careful (and might get a nasty shock), but coffee is traditionally served hot, and fundamentally it's still your choice to be careless with a hot beverage. Frankly I doubt people are going to go "this coffee will cause third-degree burns so I'll stick it in a cup-holder on the other seat, while this coffee will only cause first-degree burns, so I'll stick it on my lap".
To my mind, hot is hot, and injury is injury. If you deliberately and knowingly put yourself at risk of injury, you only have yourself to blame. I'd consider it dishonest to then sue the person who gave you the coffee because the injury you willingly risked turns out a bit worse than you'd expected. It's not like it dissolved her legs or exploded or killed her or anything - the injury was qualitatively the same, just a bit more serious than she'd (erroneously, carelessly) assumed.
That's basically my position - you do something, you accept the consequences. You take a risk, you don't whinge if the negative outcome was worse than you assumed. Particularly if it's only worse because of a decision that's intended to improve the experience for every other customer.
Wildly generalising, the two sides in the debate seem to break down into "do what you want, and accept all responsibility" and "people must be protected, even from themselves". Although in the US I'd probably be considered a liberal, I'm also great believer in personal responsibility, so I tend to fall on the "your fault, grow up and stop whining" side of the debate:-)
Seconded. In addition, although it's not quite as overt as the other hatchet-jobs she's written, there were still a couple of things in it that made me wonder. For example:
"Microsoft's Latest News about Microsoft Windows commands 65 to 70 percent of the server operating system market, while the Linux Latest News about Linux share stands at 15 to 20 percent."
Is this true? It's very, very different to the figures I normally se quoted - does it take into account the fact that you can generally run many more "servers" on a linux box than a windows box? (Translates into artificially inflated numbers of Windows boxes sold, to run the same number of actual "server" programs).
The article also describes her as "a[sic] SCO whore", and your second quote continues "There really is no such thing as a free lunch. Except for my pussy".
Since this falls slightly short of Wikipedia's normal impartiality I'm guessing some fuckwit's already defaced the article - was the hookah bit really part of the original article, or has it been defaced twice consecutively?
"Yes, but Microsoft has enough of a grip on the industry that anything it does becomes a defacto standard. The situation with IE and IE only web sites is a good indication of this."
Indeed, but that was pretty much the case from the late '90s onwards - I'm talking about more recent history (the last year or two alone), when the "web standards good" meme has penetrated to the point that even Microsoft are at least paying lip-service to it. And (IIRC), IE7 is tipped to have better CSS standards support in the next beta.
"Yes, we, the technical community know better, but the "normal" user just wants to go to a site. If Firefox does not work there, they don't care why, they just want it to work. So they dump Firefox back for IE."
Currently, yes, but in the last year or two alone I've seen a huge upswing in the number of people who know to blame bad websites rather than their non-IE browser. I'm not saying it's anywhere near common enough yet, but (in my experience) it's certainly more than it ever used to be...
"The real challange is to get Web developers to adhere to standards. Then, when IE fails, the average user will scream. THAT will make IE start following the standards, or will drive the Web developer back to IE specific features. But as long as sites work with IE (and IE's quirks), the average user does not care."
You're right, but the web design community's the one driving the adoption of web standards. Sure there'll always be shitty IE-only sites knocked up by some wannabe-1337 W3bM4stX0r in his bedroom, and some companys will (stupidly) settle on an IE-only policy for some time to come, but in general the industry is moving towards standards in a big way, and what "the industry" does now, home users tend towards in a few years time.
"This, of course, does not take into account other issues like the "user experience" and security. These may drive users over, but then Microsoft is (or appears to be) fixing them. For instance tabbed browsing in IE 7."
I wouldn't worry about this too much - Microsoft wants IE to die, and with it the whole web as a user-interface. They won the browser war, and instead of improving the web-browser-as-UI and stealing a march on any future competition they let it stagnate in favour of Avalon.
Read Joel Spolsky's "How Microsoft Lost the API War". It's very interesting, but with hindsight we can see their counter-strategy.
Basically, the web took MS by surprise. They caught up quick with IE3, and included lots of proprietary technology to encourage vendor-lockin on their browser. The trouble is, since HTML, CSS and Javascript are developer tools you have to release the specs/docs/reference materials for them, and then nothing stops someone else deciding to support your proprietary extensions in their browser. Because HTML/CSS/Javascript are open standards, it's also very hard to tie them to a particular platform.
MS tried to solve both these problems with ActiveX, but they bungled the design and implementation so badly that people eventually rejected it. Had ActiveX had a decent security model and lower barrier-to-entry (ie, you didn't have to be a full-on Windows developer to develop for it), it could well have buried "open" alternatives, and locked the web into as much of a Microsoft monopoly as the Office industry (.doc,.xls,.ppt, etc).
(As an aside, this is also the reason Flash and Java applets never took over more of the web - web designers like things that are thought to be secure, but people generally adopt things with a low barrier to entry - why is Visual Basic apparently still the world's most popular programming language? Why have so many more people learned Javascript than Java or C? Why are interpreted scripting languages more popular than compiled programming languages? Anyway...)
This is just more evidence in favour of my own proposal for litigation reform in the US (and increasingly, the UK too). I call for the immediate introduction of the popular-vote plaintiff slap-test.
The procedure is simple - before any civil court case is allowed to proceed, the first stage is a meeting between the judge, plaintiff and defendant. During this meeting all three go out onto the street and randomly pick three passers-by, who are then taken back to the judge's chamber.
Each party then has three minutes to make their case to this "jury" (plaintiff goes first). If, at the end of the three minutes, the majority of the three don't want to slap the living shit out of the plaintiff, the case is allowed to proceed.
Otherwise, and optionally, the jury-members would then be allowed to actually slap the shit out of the plaintiff for a five-minute period.
I think this simple reform would do a great deal to alleviate the massive overload on our judicial system, slow or stem the flow of money from everyone else into the legal industry, promote personal responsibility, discourage frivolous lawsuits and make (some types of) jury duty actually fun.
"I went to McDonalds and thre hot coffee in my lap, and it was hot!". Slap! "I want to sue this guy's company because he used the word 'Olympics', in an Olympic year, in the city where the Olympics were taking place! What a bastard!" Slap!
For people to care about standards support? Maybe.
For alternative browsers to get enough of a hold (in terms of headspace and market share) that people start blaming non-standards-compliant websites instead of standards-complient browser? I don't think so.
Look at how far we've come since 2000 - the dark years of the web, where IE roamed free unfettered, and alternative browsers were nothing more than a token gesture. These days web standards are on the agenda, and I think they're there to stay.
I'd be quite surprised if in five years not supporting standards wasn't the kiss of death, even for a Microsoft product.
Seriously dude, which part of Massively Multiplayer Online RPG did you not understand?
Ok, maybe that's a bit harsh, but did you consider the following points? I don't even play WoW, but I have several friends utterly addicted to it, so I'm pretty well-versed in the mechanics and gameplay.
"I saw the simplicity of Diablo/II in it: easy to play, rich in content, and with a wide world to explore."
To be fair, you can get that in a single-player offline game. That's not why people play MMORPGs. It might be icing on the cake once they are playing, but it's not the fundamental point of the genre.
MMORPGs are about social interaction - what's the only thing (functionally) that separates them from an off-line single player game? The ability to interact with real-live humans from all over the world. If building friendships or co-operating in-game isn't your bag thats too bad, but this is a bit like slating an RTS for having an over-simplified social dimension, or a reflex-based beat-em-up for not supporting internet multiplayer matches.
"But then I got to level 60, and all that ended. Now, instead of being able to do most things alone or with a small group of friends, game accomplishments take a full raid of 40 people? You need someone to plan it all out in advance, you need everyone to agree to common rules and to get along with each other; and you need everyone to be coordinated in order to defeat ridiculous enemies."
Leaving aside the "ridiculous" accusation (to me, a non-player, all enemies in WoW are pretty ridiculous)... welcome to the endgame.
Think about it - by Level 60 you've reached the point that casual or isolated gamers don't tend to reach, at least not nerely so often as the dedicated "social" players. Short of increasing the level cap (which would risk alienating newer players), there's precious little to do - you've maxed out your level and gained all the XP you'll ever need. The only dimension left to drive play is the social aspect.
This also makes the challenge harder, since it's no longer about selfishly wandering about on your own amusing yourself, but rather it forces you to interact (again, the point of an MMORPG) with other players, develop large-scale tactics and work as part of a group. This is clearly demonstrated both in high-level instances and Battlegrounds - indeed, Battlegrounds was designed specifically so that even lower-level players would benefit from social interaction and large-scale teamwork.
Imagine if they gave you what you wanted, and you could get the best drops ploughing through same-old same-old 1-5 player Level 60 instances to get the best drops? What's the point then in getting together a group of 40 and whacking the crap out of Ragnaros?
Basically, once you reach Level 60, 40-man raid instances are harder than 1-5 man ones, and represent the only challenge left the game can offer you.
It also plays into your "character arc" in the game - the bosses get bigger and badder, and the battles you have with them constantly escalate. There's no better way to bore most people than keep everything the same apart from fractionally increasing the number of hitpoints you and the boss have each time you take one on. Large raid groups allow for truly epic battles, with bosses much tougher and more resiliant than normal creatures, and accordingly are much more exciting, both to play and to watch.
"Endgame is a different game, and I don't care for it. It's not the game I bought. Rather, it's the games I declined to buy in the past. Friends of mine who played Everquest and Final Fantasy XI are right at home, but I'm decidedly out of place, and don't really want to invest hours, days of my time on goals with exponentially increasing difficulty and exponentially diminishing rewards."
That's fine - it's your perogative as a player. If you like minimal-interaction or single-player games with massive worlds, where you can wander along not interacting with anyone and still "c
"As you've guessed, IBM's promotion of open source is not altruistic."
Be fair - ultimately you can turn anything into a selfish motive.
IBM donating code to an OSS project? Anti-Microsoft move.
OSS developers working on OSS? Scratching their own itches, so those itches won't annoy them any more.
Giving half your money away to charity? Just making yourself feel good for being generous.
Giving all your money away, dressing in sackcloth and ashes and wandering the world as a holy man? Just a good excuse to not pay taxes and be unbearably smug compared to all the unenlightened people you meet.
Ultimately, any voluntary altrusitic move can be reduced to "behaving in accordance with your beliefs, thereby reassuring yourself that you're a good person".
You just have to look past snide interpretations and value the act for what it is - a generous free donation of functionality that will help Firefox challenge IE in a new area. Anything else is churlish.
That's a good point, but as I see it there are two forces at work:
1) If you reward the spamming company at all, you only encourage more spam. We've seen from the rise of spyware, spam and the like that in a large enough group of people there are always a few willing to piss in the communal well, and it only takes a few to ruin it for everyone.
2) Wikipedia aims to be comprehensive, and to cover as wide a range of subjects as possible.
In the case of the "delete-or-rewrite" choice these two aims are diametrically opposed - either an article is left after the kerfuffle (slightly benefitting the spamming company) or not.
I would argue that if the article is deleted then Wikipedia technically gets a slight temporary setback in terms of currently-available content, but the effect of discouraging spam more than offsets this.
Allowing articles to be merely re-written, in the worst case scenario, encourages companies to put up spam articles without even bothering to make them well-written, since they know someone will rewrite them (and likely, better) when the spam is noticed. In fact, you even get the situation where a company writes lots of quick, crap spam, then deliberately drops themselves in it to get free copyrighting by the Wikipedia community.
Note that I'm not arguing that Wikipedia should never accept an article on a subject that's previously been spammed (which would hurt Wikipedia), only that it's essential to un-link the act of spamming and the appearance of a permanent article.
Alternatively, as you suggest, the new article could (in a non-biased way) make reference to the fact that it was originally a spam, so that Wikipedia still gets the content but the company's image is slightly tarnished (ie, no benefit from the act of spamming). This could be as simple as putting something like "This article was prompted by a spam article posted by company X" at the top of the page, eg for six months. This would probably have to be a database flag (as opposed to part of the article contents), so that it's guaranteed to stay for six months and not get edited out (eg, by the spamming company).
Of course, this raises questions of proof (and libel), so it might even be worth going with a more generic "This article was prompted by a spam article", and leave the implication to the viewer.
This combination of our two positions actually strikes me as the best policy to adopt - Wikipedia doesn't lose content (even temporarily), and in fact gets something positive out of a spamming attempt. Companies who spam derive no direct benefit from the spam (or the well-written article), and indeed the previously-spam warning (for some companies, with some target markets) might even mildly hurt their image.
"Damn, well I guess we can't use wikipedia to try to gain recognition for our product, because if someone notices, our pages will get slashdotted then no one will be able to view them, because too many people will be viewing our product... Oh, wait..."
Yeah - the first few times it happens it'll be News, because it's an overt attack on what aims to be an impartial information resource. After a couple of attempts it'll hopefully cease being news, and each new spam article will just be quietly disposed-of, with no free publicity for the company concerned.
As an aside, this is a general problem of mass-media - you can get famous, easily, for doing something antisocial, so for those who seek fame (advertisers), doing something antisocial is the quickest way to achieve their objectives.
For example, witness the "road rage" craze a few years ago in the UK (possibly elsewhere, too). One guy cut someone up in his car. The other guy chased him down in the car, pulled over to the side of the road and beat him to death with a tyre-iron (or similar). He then jumped in his car and drove off, leaving the dead guy's girlfriend sat traumatised in the car.
The media immediately dubbed this "road rage", and within weeks incidents of roadside beatings were cropping up all over the place. The punch-line of the whole thing is this: when it came to trial, no-one could prove that there was another person involved, and eventually (IIRC) the girlfriend was actually convicted of the murder, having made the entire incident up to cover her murder of her boyfriend.
Nevertheless, "road rage" incidents continued to be reported for years afterwards, eventually dying out to the present once-in-a-blue-moon frequency we have now.
People believe what they're told, and follow the herd. Deny antisocial types like Wiki-spammers the oxygen of publicity, and you remove the single reason for them to do it.
"Despite that, I am still not sure what the big deal was in the first place. It was just good fun, and didn't really harm anyone. What is wrong with a wikipedia page about a fake artist"
Well, the fact that Wikipedia's supposed to be an informative resource, and such things are deliberately misleading. Seriously, there's a place for deadpan humour and there's a place for fact recording. If you really can't see what's wrong with deliberately passing off fantasy as reality then you should seek psychiatric help immediately, or wait until you naturally age past five.
Mixing reality with fantasy is great, as long as you know it's happening (eg, the Illuminatus Trilogy, one of my favourite books). Confusing fantasy with reality when you believe the material to be strictly accurate is extremely dangerous - at best you get a history you can't trust an inch, and at the worst you get religion.
"as far as some people are concerned... there actually is/will be no difference between reality and what is found on the internet, so in those terms the BBC is actually ahead of the game."
Very amusing. So do you seriously not understand the importance of having at least one single accurate record of factual history, or are you just frantically trolling?
FYI, when you're arguing in favour of impartiality and throw terms like "Zionist" around, it becomes very clear that what you mean by "impartiality" is what we mean by "pushing your own agenda, no matter how fringe or extreme it may be"...
s/Wikipedia/Encyclopedia Britannica/ and try again.
Still unknown.
Your point?
At least Wikipedia can be thought of as the average of everyone's prejudices, and with roughly equal amounts on each side it should approach the middle ground. Even traditional encyclopedias are inherently biased in favour of the people, language, country or political system that compiled them.
They may (as they say) attempt to avoid bias wherever possible, but that's what the submitters to Wikipedia generally do, too. The difference is, Wikipedia authors' biases, posting histories and the revision/revert processes are pretty transparent and open to all, whereas those of Britannica are closed, opaque and maintained by an even more select and elitist group.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not accusing Britannica of deliberate bias, but everyone's biased, to some small degree. At least if you have (potentially) everyone on the net involved in the argument you're more likely to cancel out some of it than if the final content is determined solely by a small group of stuffy, elderly academics.
So the solution is what... to let them fuck up again in the hope that a pathetically obscure technical browser issue is the wake-up call that suddenly gets the great unwashed masses picketing their local Copyright Office?
Wake up and smell the coffee - Joe Sixpack isn't remotely technical enough to give a two shits about this kind of thing, and won't be for another 5-10 years.
It's all very well saying "let's just sit back and give them enough rope to hang themselves", but that rather relies on:
1) The public ever considering the problem serious enough to address 2) The public coming to the same conclusion you do (i.e, "anarcho-hippy communist" standards - good, corporate Microsoft with a popular-opinion-influencing marketing budget of billions - bad) 3) The public actually realising (in 5-10 years, when they're ready for it) that there's even an issue to raise, as opposed to just accepting the fait accompli handed to it by the massive software and media companies, who've had that 5-10 years to squish upstart dissenters and consolidate their position as the only option.
Not being funny, but no-one ever won a fight by sitting back, taking no part and waiting for it to sort itself out - that's just laziness talking.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to go too far off-topic, but my favourite example of this is the arguement that marijuana is a "gateway drug".
The argument goes "almost every heroine addict started off smoking pot, so smoking pot leads to heroine addiction".
Next time you hear this, try swapping "smoking pot" with "drinking breastmilk", and get them to explain why breastmilk isn't a gateway to heroine addiction, homosexuality, violent crime and paedophilia.
"Hard to believe Diamler Chrysler couldn't get it in the top ten of a Google search for Ram."
It's not hard to believe at all - that's a stunning example of empathic myopeia.
Walk up to ten people at random on the street and say "Ram. What am I talking about?".
You'll get answers like "sheep", "computer memory", "to push" and "I don't know - what the fuck are you talking about". I guarantee not one person will say "an obscure model of truck made by Dodge".
Jesus - even if they've ever heard of a Dodge Ram (which most people outside of the US won't have), they won't assume you're talking about that because it's so bloody obscure.
"One must wonder, now that computers are a home appliance for the masses, if the majority of Americans searching for Ram are looking for a truck...."
No, of course the majority of americans won't necessarily associate "ram" with computers. However, I'll bet you the majority of people (not "americans") who own a computer, and are on the internet, and search for "ram" are looking for RAM, and not male sheep or the verb "to push".
It's not hard to add another keyword to increase search specificity. Tell you what - next time people are amazed by search engines' lack of relevence, try thinking what would happen if you asked a random person the same query. Why should a bunch of unintelligent, statistical algorithms be held to a higher standard?
I mean, try to improve the technology, sure, just don't act surprised when it doesn't do freaking telepathy.
"What's Next on the calender? Meth? Rock Music, Dancing? Pool Halls? Bowling?"
Meth? That's "Drugs" - already done that. Rock Music? Never stopped (Elvis, 80s Metal, gangsta rap, Marilyn Manson, Eminem). Dancing? That's so 50s.
Pool Halls and Bowling? Nope, because parents are used to them - they aren't new, and hence scary.
Seriously - every new technology is the focus of loudmouth moralist hysteria. Seriously - the board of Eton college wouldn't let the first robber-baron train magnates lay railway tracks across any Eton-owned property. Not because they didn't want a station near the school, but because they feared (and I quote) "the railway may corrupt the morals of the boys" in some undefinable way. Just worried about those well-known 1800s "Ale 'n' Whores" trains, I guess.
Look at any new technology - popular music, radio, television, the internet, the web - the one thing they all have in common is that they were once new, and they (or the pace of change they implied) scared the shit out of luddites.
And in our molly-coddling society anything that frightens people without real justification has but one battle-cry - "think of t3h kids!!!!11!!1!one".
Notice how worries about the real concerns (war, famine, genetic engineering, the DMCA, economic collapse, the ongoing "difficulties" of the US democratic system) are never framed in terms of children. War is obviously bad - no-one needs to start invoking "the kids" to push buttons and get everyone on-side.
As Bill Hicks famously said, just wave a foetus at people and you can lead them on whatever crusade you like.
In fact, it's getting to the stage where the second a new technology sparks fears which involve kids, I come down bang in favour of it. If it had a real danger the irrational luddites would publicising that - the fact they're relying on ill-supported, zero-evidence emotive bullshit like imagined, potential effects on "the kids" is just evidence there's nothing, in fact, to be worried about.
Nice try, but no pedant-points. What part of:
"Secondly... then at some point on the globe, the sun was overhead, or even starting to set, when it started shining... which means that there was no sun rise on that "day", which means that, for that point on the globe, sunset happened first."
didn't you understand?
We're clearly talking about this from the reference-frame of the earth's surface, so you don't get any points for pointing out that the sun doesn't "really" move.
As an interesting side-exercise, please prove conclusively to me that the earth isn't completely stationery, with the rest of the universe spinning around that point.
Answer: you can't. You can measure earth's motion relative to the rest of the universe but that's just another reference frame, and the question was to prove the reference frame itself isn't moving.
Nope, sorry - latest news is that "Evil" has been pushed back into a service pack, available some time late 2030.
But Microsoft would like to emphasise that it's still definitely worth buying Vista, for all the... y'know... stuff.
Fro mTFA I don't think they're actually playing the games - just being immersed in the environment.
Strapping someone with PTSD into a VR chair and making them repeatedly kill people isn't going to make them better, but exposing them to the stimuli (environment, sounds, etc) can help them go back through the feelings they had and deal with them.
IIRC, in PTSD these feelings have which have been pushed into the subconscious where they fester and give rise to the disorder. The therapist can dynamically vary the immersiveness of the simulation by phasing in and out things like smoke, impaired vision, gunfire sounds, etc for added or reduced "realism". By allowing the vets to confront the feelings one step at a time, and ramping down the realism before they get distressed, the patient can start to work through the traumas, instead of retreating from them and bottling them up.
It actually sounds like a good idea to me, and it's fascinating that we've actually got the technology to the stage where the brain can be fooled into thinking it's real on a subconscious level.
Why not?
Immerse them in a high-resolution, millions-of-polygons virtual playground full of tiny kids, and every time they approach one give the vice clamped to their nuts another quick half-turn.
If they don't learn soon the problem's solved either way, isn't it?
"The shuttle may be "flawed" as you put it. Or maybe spaceflight is just dangerous?"
Everything is dangerous, including driving a car or dropping at thousands of miles an hour from orbit to sea-level. However, the purpose of enabling technology (like cars, or the space shuttle) is to protect us from that danger. If we're still dying that indicates the space shuttle isn't doing a good enough job. This could be because of one of two reasons - either (i) safe, reusable orbital insertion and landing is beyond our current level of technology, or (ii) the space-shuttle's crap.
Now, you don't hear much about Soyuz capsules coming apart on re-entry (and they're generally considered lower-tech than the shuttle), so that suggests the task is within the bounds of humanity's ability. Therefore, this suggests the shuttle is crap.
There are two reasons the shuttle could be crap - either it was always a bad design, or it's just been badly-maintained and used wrongly.
I don't know enough to judge if the shuttle was ever a good design, but I certainly don't remember major things always going wrong with it with the current stunning regularity. This (admittedly perceived) lack of regular major incidents in the past compared to the present-day rate suggests that in the past it was at least a bit more reliable.
Therefore, the only conclusion I can come to is that, whether or not the shuttle was ever any good, they aren't now. Whether they were badly-designed in the first place or they've just aged badly and the program's been starved of budget, they just aren't reliable any more.
"Do we really have reason to believe the next generation craft is going to be safer? If so, how much safer?"
Well yes - safety should be priority number one for reusable orbital vehicles. If they produce a ROV that's got a worse safety record than the shuttle I don't think it deserves the moniker "next generation".
"Life is risky you know. Hell, we can hardly build a bridge or a skyscraper without SOMEONE dying."
Yeah, but they tend to die working on it, not driving to the site every morning. And they tend to die singly, often from their own (or a co-worker's) mistake. I think you'll find that if construction workers regularly died in groups of 6-7, and did so because their hammers occasionally exploded and vapourised them, there might be a small public pressure to develop a safer hammer.
The problem is simple - whether or not the shuttle was ever any good, it isn't now. The design is rooted in the '70s, using '70s technology. Look at cars in the '70s, and look at them now - don't tell me we couldn't design a far, far more efficient, safe and cheap method of achieving orbit, even with a smaller budget than the shuttle program enjoyed.
All we can possibly lack is the budget (NASA has to pay through the nose to keep the creakingly ancient shuttle programme running), the will (new research is expensive, patches the holes is cheaper) and the political accord (as I recall, shuttle part maintenance is one big barrel of congressional pork, and intensely political in how it's managed).
The irony is that America was the clear winner of the space race, but it took its eye off the ball and stopped developing new enabling technologies. Now, maintaining its creaking infrastructure is so hamstringing any development efforts that you're in grave danger of being leapfrogged by the rest of the world, and are actually in the process of turning to private companies for the future of manned orbital missions...
Pfffft. I call BS on that one right out the gate.
Could kids in the 1920s do anything as complex as using a computer? How about programming? What games did they play - hopscotch, checkers, tag? Anything even remotely as complex as Tetris, or Puyo Puyo?
Kids these days are sifting, sorting and extracting meaning from games a million times as complex as a game of chess (look at the game-state-space of Civilisation, then chess, then STFU), all in realtime. They shift axiom- and rule-sets within minutes to play wildly different games, and train both their conscious mind and subsconscious mind to learn and react faster and in more complex ways than anything anyone would ever encounter in 1920. And they do it for fun.
Mass-media like TV and the internet haven't destroyed out kids brains - our kids spend their lives immersed in a density of information that would give an elderly person a migraine, and don't even notice it.
Since there is so much more information available, people have self-protectively started to reduce the depth they go into - they learn a little bit about a lot rather than everything about a tiny, tiny fraction of the available fields, then increase their knowledge of a particular field when they need to. We've stopped learning things by rote, and instead we're in the process of keeping most of our knowledge in external media, only loading it in (and often then temporarily) when we need it. How stupid is it for kids to spend a school career learning by rote the date of the Normandy Invasion, when they can hop on the web from their mobile phones and find out it was 1066?
We should be teaching them how to use and understand technology, and how to do research, not reiterating the same educational techniques we used a hundred years ago, before the modern computer or the "information society" was even conceived of.
Look at kids today - people claim they "have no attention span", and yet will still rag on them for "spending hours and hours playing that bloody computer game". Circle the two statements. Compare and contrast.
Us adults have always had a go at the younger generation for being lazy, stupid, inattentive or backward - nostalgia's just not as good as it used to be. Here in the UK A-Level exams have been derided as "easier than they used to be" every single year of my adult life because pass-rates keep going up. Erm, no - kids have been getting more intelligent, generation-on-generation, ever since WWII at least.
You're right, if you measure intelligence by the ability to spell well (when spell-checkers are becoming ever-nearer to ubiquity) or do mental arithmetic (when you're never, and I mean never more than five feet from some kind of calculator).
However, half a century of psychological research seems to be tending away from such stone-age definitions involving specific single skills, and tending more towards general measures of information-sorting capability like progressive matrices tests.
So yeah, sit a modern kid down in a bare room with one from the 1920s and ask them to do a 1920s task like work out 58*468 in their heads, and the 1920s kid will win. But I guarantee you, sit them down with calculators, and the modern kid will be finished before the 1920s kid has finished listening to the question.
And (to be fair), also give them a modern task - sit both kids down in front of a computer and ask them to find out who's the current president of france, and the modern kid will be finished with the job before the 1920s kid has worked out how to use the mouse.
Now granted, there are some skills that we're de-emphasising that I think we should spend more time on, and "reading and writing proper English" is one of them. However, using a single (non-essential) deficiency to claim that "all modern kids are stupid" is rosy-tinted nostalgia-lead BS at best.
Those are very good points, and I've come a long way towards seeing your side of the debate. I still don't buy the whole thing (only 20% her fault? Really?) but the car analogy was (unusually for Slashdot) a good one ;-)
;-)
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree, but many thanks for explaining the other side of the debate so well - you've certainly set me thinking about it again, and who knows - I may even end up agreeing with you.
I understand what you mean about there being worse examples of frivolour lawsuits, too. Unfortunately, people use examples first that resonate with their audience, and (only second) are actually accurate/fair/true.
So many people have heard (and been outraged by) the five-second version of this story I think you'll just have to resign yourself to nodding and smiling wanly whenever the example is used - it's come to be the popular archetypal for frivolous lawsuitry, so I doubt it's going away any time soon
Once again, many thanks for an interesting debate.
I think there's a fundamental divide in approach here between the pro- and anti- camps. You've explained the pro- camp's position much more persuasively than anyone I've spoken to before. However, as an counterpoint, here's my (still anti-) take:
;-).
:-)
When I make tea or coffee, it's hot. In fact, when I make coffee (generally instant), I use boiling water.
Boiling water hurts, so I treat my coffee with respect, and if I accidentally spill it on myself I accept the consequences. Basically, I accept that it's potentially dangerous as the price of enjoying a hot, caffeinated pick-me-up.
In fact, I'd prefer to get a cup of the hottest coffee I can hold, since then it'll last longer and I can drink it at my leisure. (Aside: If you'd ever been trapped on a commuter-train first thing in the morning, half-way to london enjoying one of the old British Rail's room-temperature cups of tea, you'll learn to appreciate really hot beverages
Basically, coffee should be hot. I'd always assume coffee is going to be around boiling point, so I'm very careful. Irrespective of precisely how bad the outcome is, if I drop coffee in my lap I'm the sole person to blame.
I can understand your point of view that if you assume the coffee is only going to be "warm" then you might not be as careful (and might get a nasty shock), but coffee is traditionally served hot, and fundamentally it's still your choice to be careless with a hot beverage. Frankly I doubt people are going to go "this coffee will cause third-degree burns so I'll stick it in a cup-holder on the other seat, while this coffee will only cause first-degree burns, so I'll stick it on my lap".
To my mind, hot is hot, and injury is injury. If you deliberately and knowingly put yourself at risk of injury, you only have yourself to blame. I'd consider it dishonest to then sue the person who gave you the coffee because the injury you willingly risked turns out a bit worse than you'd expected. It's not like it dissolved her legs or exploded or killed her or anything - the injury was qualitatively the same, just a bit more serious than she'd (erroneously, carelessly) assumed.
That's basically my position - you do something, you accept the consequences. You take a risk, you don't whinge if the negative outcome was worse than you assumed. Particularly if it's only worse because of a decision that's intended to improve the experience for every other customer.
Wildly generalising, the two sides in the debate seem to break down into "do what you want, and accept all responsibility" and "people must be protected, even from themselves". Although in the US I'd probably be considered a liberal, I'm also great believer in personal responsibility, so I tend to fall on the "your fault, grow up and stop whining" side of the debate
Seconded. In addition, although it's not quite as overt as the other hatchet-jobs she's written, there were still a couple of things in it that made me wonder. For example:
"Microsoft's Latest News about Microsoft Windows commands 65 to 70 percent of the server operating system market, while the Linux Latest News about Linux share stands at 15 to 20 percent."
Is this true? It's very, very different to the figures I normally se quoted - does it take into account the fact that you can generally run many more "servers" on a linux box than a windows box? (Translates into artificially inflated numbers of Windows boxes sold, to run the same number of actual "server" programs).
Maybe I'm being astonishingly naive, but I thought it was obvious that the article had been defaced since the Slashdot story was posted.
Or do you seriously reckon something so downright and obviously biased would have survived long on Wikipedia?
The article also describes her as "a[sic] SCO whore", and your second quote continues "There really is no such thing as a free lunch. Except for my pussy".
Since this falls slightly short of Wikipedia's normal impartiality I'm guessing some fuckwit's already defaced the article - was the hookah bit really part of the original article, or has it been defaced twice consecutively?
"Yes, but Microsoft has enough of a grip on the industry that anything it does becomes a defacto standard. The situation with IE and IE only web sites is a good indication of this."
.xls, .ppt, etc).
Indeed, but that was pretty much the case from the late '90s onwards - I'm talking about more recent history (the last year or two alone), when the "web standards good" meme has penetrated to the point that even Microsoft are at least paying lip-service to it. And (IIRC), IE7 is tipped to have better CSS standards support in the next beta.
"Yes, we, the technical community know better, but the "normal" user just wants to go to a site. If Firefox does not work there, they don't care why, they just want it to work. So they dump Firefox back for IE."
Currently, yes, but in the last year or two alone I've seen a huge upswing in the number of people who know to blame bad websites rather than their non-IE browser. I'm not saying it's anywhere near common enough yet, but (in my experience) it's certainly more than it ever used to be...
"The real challange is to get Web developers to adhere to standards. Then, when IE fails, the average user will scream. THAT will make IE start following the standards, or will drive the Web developer back to IE specific features. But as long as sites work with IE (and IE's quirks), the average user does not care."
You're right, but the web design community's the one driving the adoption of web standards. Sure there'll always be shitty IE-only sites knocked up by some wannabe-1337 W3bM4stX0r in his bedroom, and some companys will (stupidly) settle on an IE-only policy for some time to come, but in general the industry is moving towards standards in a big way, and what "the industry" does now, home users tend towards in a few years time.
"This, of course, does not take into account other issues like the "user experience" and security. These may drive users over, but then Microsoft is (or appears to be) fixing them. For instance tabbed browsing in IE 7."
I wouldn't worry about this too much - Microsoft wants IE to die, and with it the whole web as a user-interface. They won the browser war, and instead of improving the web-browser-as-UI and stealing a march on any future competition they let it stagnate in favour of Avalon.
Read Joel Spolsky's "How Microsoft Lost the API War". It's very interesting, but with hindsight we can see their counter-strategy.
Basically, the web took MS by surprise. They caught up quick with IE3, and included lots of proprietary technology to encourage vendor-lockin on their browser. The trouble is, since HTML, CSS and Javascript are developer tools you have to release the specs/docs/reference materials for them, and then nothing stops someone else deciding to support your proprietary extensions in their browser. Because HTML/CSS/Javascript are open standards, it's also very hard to tie them to a particular platform.
MS tried to solve both these problems with ActiveX, but they bungled the design and implementation so badly that people eventually rejected it. Had ActiveX had a decent security model and lower barrier-to-entry (ie, you didn't have to be a full-on Windows developer to develop for it), it could well have buried "open" alternatives, and locked the web into as much of a Microsoft monopoly as the Office industry (.doc,
(As an aside, this is also the reason Flash and Java applets never took over more of the web - web designers like things that are thought to be secure, but people generally adopt things with a low barrier to entry - why is Visual Basic apparently still the world's most popular programming language? Why have so many more people learned Javascript than Java or C? Why are interpreted scripting languages more popular than compiled programming languages? Anyway...)
DHTML/CSS/Javascript is beginning to turn in
This is just more evidence in favour of my own proposal for litigation reform in the US (and increasingly, the UK too). I call for the immediate introduction of the popular-vote plaintiff slap-test.
The procedure is simple - before any civil court case is allowed to proceed, the first stage is a meeting between the judge, plaintiff and defendant. During this meeting all three go out onto the street and randomly pick three passers-by, who are then taken back to the judge's chamber.
Each party then has three minutes to make their case to this "jury" (plaintiff goes first). If, at the end of the three minutes, the majority of the three don't want to slap the living shit out of the plaintiff, the case is allowed to proceed.
Otherwise, and optionally, the jury-members would then be allowed to actually slap the shit out of the plaintiff for a five-minute period.
I think this simple reform would do a great deal to alleviate the massive overload on our judicial system, slow or stem the flow of money from everyone else into the legal industry, promote personal responsibility, discourage frivolous lawsuits and make (some types of) jury duty actually fun.
"I went to McDonalds and thre hot coffee in my lap, and it was hot!". Slap!
"I want to sue this guy's company because he used the word 'Olympics', in an Olympic year, in the city where the Olympics were taking place! What a bastard!" Slap!
Who's with me? Write your congressman.
For people to care about standards support? Maybe.
For alternative browsers to get enough of a hold (in terms of headspace and market share) that people start blaming non-standards-compliant websites instead of standards-complient browser? I don't think so.
Look at how far we've come since 2000 - the dark years of the web, where IE roamed free unfettered, and alternative browsers were nothing more than a token gesture. These days web standards are on the agenda, and I think they're there to stay.
I'd be quite surprised if in five years not supporting standards wasn't the kiss of death, even for a Microsoft product.
Seriously dude, which part of Massively Multiplayer Online RPG did you not understand?
Ok, maybe that's a bit harsh, but did you consider the following points? I don't even play WoW, but I have several friends utterly addicted to it, so I'm pretty well-versed in the mechanics and gameplay.
"I saw the simplicity of Diablo/II in it: easy to play, rich in content, and with a wide world to explore."
To be fair, you can get that in a single-player offline game. That's not why people play MMORPGs. It might be icing on the cake once they are playing, but it's not the fundamental point of the genre.
MMORPGs are about social interaction - what's the only thing (functionally) that separates them from an off-line single player game? The ability to interact with real-live humans from all over the world. If building friendships or co-operating in-game isn't your bag thats too bad, but this is a bit like slating an RTS for having an over-simplified social dimension, or a reflex-based beat-em-up for not supporting internet multiplayer matches.
"But then I got to level 60, and all that ended. Now, instead of being able to do most things alone or with a small group of friends, game accomplishments take a full raid of 40 people? You need someone to plan it all out in advance, you need everyone to agree to common rules and to get along with each other; and you need everyone to be coordinated in order to defeat ridiculous enemies."
Leaving aside the "ridiculous" accusation (to me, a non-player, all enemies in WoW are pretty ridiculous)... welcome to the endgame.
Think about it - by Level 60 you've reached the point that casual or isolated gamers don't tend to reach, at least not nerely so often as the dedicated "social" players. Short of increasing the level cap (which would risk alienating newer players), there's precious little to do - you've maxed out your level and gained all the XP you'll ever need. The only dimension left to drive play is the social aspect.
This also makes the challenge harder, since it's no longer about selfishly wandering about on your own amusing yourself, but rather it forces you to interact (again, the point of an MMORPG) with other players, develop large-scale tactics and work as part of a group. This is clearly demonstrated both in high-level instances and Battlegrounds - indeed, Battlegrounds was designed specifically so that even lower-level players would benefit from social interaction and large-scale teamwork.
Imagine if they gave you what you wanted, and you could get the best drops ploughing through same-old same-old 1-5 player Level 60 instances to get the best drops? What's the point then in getting together a group of 40 and whacking the crap out of Ragnaros?
Basically, once you reach Level 60, 40-man raid instances are harder than 1-5 man ones, and represent the only challenge left the game can offer you.
It also plays into your "character arc" in the game - the bosses get bigger and badder, and the battles you have with them constantly escalate. There's no better way to bore most people than keep everything the same apart from fractionally increasing the number of hitpoints you and the boss have each time you take one on. Large raid groups allow for truly epic battles, with bosses much tougher and more resiliant than normal creatures, and accordingly are much more exciting, both to play and to watch.
"Endgame is a different game, and I don't care for it. It's not the game I bought. Rather, it's the games I declined to buy in the past. Friends of mine who played Everquest and Final Fantasy XI are right at home, but I'm decidedly out of place, and don't really want to invest hours, days of my time on goals with exponentially increasing difficulty and exponentially diminishing rewards."
That's fine - it's your perogative as a player. If you like minimal-interaction or single-player games with massive worlds, where you can wander along not interacting with anyone and still "c
"As you've guessed, IBM's promotion of open source is not altruistic."
Be fair - ultimately you can turn anything into a selfish motive.
IBM donating code to an OSS project? Anti-Microsoft move.
OSS developers working on OSS? Scratching their own itches, so those itches won't annoy them any more.
Giving half your money away to charity? Just making yourself feel good for being generous.
Giving all your money away, dressing in sackcloth and ashes and wandering the world as a holy man? Just a good excuse to not pay taxes and be unbearably smug compared to all the unenlightened people you meet.
Ultimately, any voluntary altrusitic move can be reduced to "behaving in accordance with your beliefs, thereby reassuring yourself that you're a good person".
You just have to look past snide interpretations and value the act for what it is - a generous free donation of functionality that will help Firefox challenge IE in a new area. Anything else is churlish.
That's a good point, but as I see it there are two forces at work:
1) If you reward the spamming company at all, you only encourage more spam. We've seen from the rise of spyware, spam and the like that in a large enough group of people there are always a few willing to piss in the communal well, and it only takes a few to ruin it for everyone.
2) Wikipedia aims to be comprehensive, and to cover as wide a range of subjects as possible.
In the case of the "delete-or-rewrite" choice these two aims are diametrically opposed - either an article is left after the kerfuffle (slightly benefitting the spamming company) or not.
I would argue that if the article is deleted then Wikipedia technically gets a slight temporary setback in terms of currently-available content, but the effect of discouraging spam more than offsets this.
Allowing articles to be merely re-written, in the worst case scenario, encourages companies to put up spam articles without even bothering to make them well-written, since they know someone will rewrite them (and likely, better) when the spam is noticed. In fact, you even get the situation where a company writes lots of quick, crap spam, then deliberately drops themselves in it to get free copyrighting by the Wikipedia community.
Note that I'm not arguing that Wikipedia should never accept an article on a subject that's previously been spammed (which would hurt Wikipedia), only that it's essential to un-link the act of spamming and the appearance of a permanent article.
Alternatively, as you suggest, the new article could (in a non-biased way) make reference to the fact that it was originally a spam, so that Wikipedia still gets the content but the company's image is slightly tarnished (ie, no benefit from the act of spamming). This could be as simple as putting something like "This article was prompted by a spam article posted by company X" at the top of the page, eg for six months. This would probably have to be a database flag (as opposed to part of the article contents), so that it's guaranteed to stay for six months and not get edited out (eg, by the spamming company).
Of course, this raises questions of proof (and libel), so it might even be worth going with a more generic "This article was prompted by a spam article", and leave the implication to the viewer.
This combination of our two positions actually strikes me as the best policy to adopt - Wikipedia doesn't lose content (even temporarily), and in fact gets something positive out of a spamming attempt. Companies who spam derive no direct benefit from the spam (or the well-written article), and indeed the previously-spam warning (for some companies, with some target markets) might even mildly hurt their image.
See, to be really funny you should have waited four years before you said it.
"Damn, well I guess we can't use wikipedia to try to gain recognition for our product, because if someone notices, our pages will get slashdotted then no one will be able to view them, because too many people will be viewing our product... Oh, wait..."
Yeah - the first few times it happens it'll be News, because it's an overt attack on what aims to be an impartial information resource. After a couple of attempts it'll hopefully cease being news, and each new spam article will just be quietly disposed-of, with no free publicity for the company concerned.
As an aside, this is a general problem of mass-media - you can get famous, easily, for doing something antisocial, so for those who seek fame (advertisers), doing something antisocial is the quickest way to achieve their objectives.
For example, witness the "road rage" craze a few years ago in the UK (possibly elsewhere, too). One guy cut someone up in his car. The other guy chased him down in the car, pulled over to the side of the road and beat him to death with a tyre-iron (or similar). He then jumped in his car and drove off, leaving the dead guy's girlfriend sat traumatised in the car.
The media immediately dubbed this "road rage", and within weeks incidents of roadside beatings were cropping up all over the place. The punch-line of the whole thing is this: when it came to trial, no-one could prove that there was another person involved, and eventually (IIRC) the girlfriend was actually convicted of the murder, having made the entire incident up to cover her murder of her boyfriend.
Nevertheless, "road rage" incidents continued to be reported for years afterwards, eventually dying out to the present once-in-a-blue-moon frequency we have now.
People believe what they're told, and follow the herd. Deny antisocial types like Wiki-spammers the oxygen of publicity, and you remove the single reason for them to do it.
"Despite that, I am still not sure what the big deal was in the first place. It was just good fun, and didn't really harm anyone. What is wrong with a wikipedia page about a fake artist"
Well, the fact that Wikipedia's supposed to be an informative resource, and such things are deliberately misleading. Seriously, there's a place for deadpan humour and there's a place for fact recording. If you really can't see what's wrong with deliberately passing off fantasy as reality then you should seek psychiatric help immediately, or wait until you naturally age past five.
Mixing reality with fantasy is great, as long as you know it's happening (eg, the Illuminatus Trilogy, one of my favourite books). Confusing fantasy with reality when you believe the material to be strictly accurate is extremely dangerous - at best you get a history you can't trust an inch, and at the worst you get religion.
"as far as some people are concerned... there actually is/will be no difference between reality and what is found on the internet, so in those terms the BBC is actually ahead of the game."
Very amusing. So do you seriously not understand the importance of having at least one single accurate record of factual history, or are you just frantically trolling?
FYI, when you're arguing in favour of impartiality and throw terms like "Zionist" around, it becomes very clear that what you mean by "impartiality" is what we mean by "pushing your own agenda, no matter how fringe or extreme it may be"...
HTH
s/Wikipedia/Encyclopedia Britannica/ and try again.
Still unknown.
Your point?
At least Wikipedia can be thought of as the average of everyone's prejudices, and with roughly equal amounts on each side it should approach the middle ground. Even traditional encyclopedias are inherently biased in favour of the people, language, country or political system that compiled them.
They may (as they say) attempt to avoid bias wherever possible, but that's what the submitters to Wikipedia generally do, too. The difference is, Wikipedia authors' biases, posting histories and the revision/revert processes are pretty transparent and open to all, whereas those of Britannica are closed, opaque and maintained by an even more select and elitist group.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not accusing Britannica of deliberate bias, but everyone's biased, to some small degree. At least if you have (potentially) everyone on the net involved in the argument you're more likely to cancel out some of it than if the final content is determined solely by a small group of stuffy, elderly academics.
So the solution is what... to let them fuck up again in the hope that a pathetically obscure technical browser issue is the wake-up call that suddenly gets the great unwashed masses picketing their local Copyright Office?
Wake up and smell the coffee - Joe Sixpack isn't remotely technical enough to give a two shits about this kind of thing, and won't be for another 5-10 years.
It's all very well saying "let's just sit back and give them enough rope to hang themselves", but that rather relies on:
1) The public ever considering the problem serious enough to address
2) The public coming to the same conclusion you do (i.e, "anarcho-hippy communist" standards - good, corporate Microsoft with a popular-opinion-influencing marketing budget of billions - bad)
3) The public actually realising (in 5-10 years, when they're ready for it) that there's even an issue to raise, as opposed to just accepting the fait accompli handed to it by the massive software and media companies, who've had that 5-10 years to squish upstart dissenters and consolidate their position as the only option.
Not being funny, but no-one ever won a fight by sitting back, taking no part and waiting for it to sort itself out - that's just laziness talking.