Ok, so I can understand how people can search MySpace for pics, etc, since that is published to all. That's the point and utility of MySpace, so that you can promote yourself. If you are an artist or a band this is extremely useful.
However, I don't understand how people can search Facebook. I don't have a Facebook account as it seems useless unless you are part of an organization that uses it widely. The whole point of it is that it seems to be closed (and thus is useless for promoting your work).
Thus, my question is: how can people search your Facebook profile unless you are stupid enough to allow them to do so as your friend? Presumably, you have to be an especially stupid idiot to have your Facebook profile viewed by someone unintended? Or am I missing something?
While I don't agree with the DCMA, nor most copyright laws in most countries, I do wonder why this hasn't happened before, and indeed is not a regular occurrence. Wikipedia is absolutely full of plagiarized material. Almost every single movie page is more or less ripped verbatim from imdb, just as one small example.
I would have thought that wikipedia was a lawyer's wet dream come true. I mean sure, they don't have a great deal of money (especially since Jimbo keeps dipping his hand in the cash register), but there's still some money to be made there. I really can't understand why Wikipedia has had such a free ride so far.
Could it be that the BBC's slowness to offer HD is related to the fact that most license payers receive their broadcasts via analogue or "Freeview" digital, neither of which currently support it? I guess they have better things to spend their limited budget on.
Who on earth modded that insightful? It makes no sense! It's completely wrong. It has nothing to do with the broadcast format, but the recording format. Using 16mm film is FAR, FAR more expensive than HD video.
It also means that other countries are less likely to buy their output. Thus ending in a downward spiral of quality, due to less money being available for production.
The changeover has nothing to do with cost, and everything to do with resistance to change and a erroneous, misguided elitism that film is better. 35mm might be for some things, but 16mm is dead tech, other than as a training medium for 35mm.
Unfortunately using the new codec will probably not help the BBC much. Once upon a time a BBC camera department training was regarded as being one of the best in the world. BBC cameramen were highly sought after.
Nowadays, you'll be very lucky if any of them know where the iris control or white balance is on a camera. Id guess that at least about 40% of all shots from news or sports footage is overexposed by at least 2 stops.
In addition, they have been very slow to make the change to HD, most other countries' TV companies changed over far faster than they did. Much of their "quality drama" output is still shot on 16mm film rather than 24p HD too -- mainly due to resistance to change from Camera depts, and a lack of talent therein.
Why even bother with a new codec, unless it's cheaper -- no-one in the BBC seems to care a damn about visual quality.
For those unfamiliar with Wikipedia, it's that site run by that foundation that exists solely to create, encourage, and maintain free libraries of free content. If you're looking to get paid for what you write, Wikipedia is really not the place you want to be.
What a naive and idealistic view of Wikipedia. (Yes, I know that is what they claim). Truth is, lots of people are making money out of wikipedia. And it's a great place to do it. Of course, you just don't do it DIRECTLY. However, indirectly...
Firstly, there's answers.com and Jimmy Wales' expense accounts.
Secondly, wikipedia is a fantastic place to promote your product -- especially if you are a large company and can afford plenty of viral marketeers to form a cabal and protect your brand.
Thirdly, a variation on promotion, if you are a band you can have your unwitting sockpuppets, sorry I mean fans, post links to your wikipedia entry on every single tenuous page they can. If you wrote a song about pasta, then make sure there's a mention of it on all the pasta pages for example. Of course your own wikipedia must use your own website, or myspace page, or allmusic page as a primary source, so that you can guarantee that your amazon affiliation links to your cds are only a few clicks away. Easy money my friends. Sure, music is a product just like soap powder, and one promoted by one of the most evil industries on earth, but few people realize that for some strange reason -- honestly, you can make loads of money this way, it's like shooting fish.
Fourthly, make sure your own webpage is linked through as many wikipedia pages as possible - this will help your page rank if nothing else.
etc, etc...
Wikipedia is nothing like as altruistic or idealistic as the foundation would have you believe.
There problem is search. Ironically that's Google.
Any search usually generates a wikipedia result in the top 10. This is, of course, because wikipedia has an inflated pagerank for the site as a whole. In fact many individual pages are very, very poor quality, and if were considered out of context would merit a page rank lower by several orders of magnitude.
Succinctly, wikipedia's search results are effectively no more than pagerank spam, just as much as any SEO black hat attempt to skew search results.
This makes it very difficult for sites like Knol or Citizendium, which in all probability have much more authoritative, or qualitatively better pages than their wikipedia equivalent. However, wikipedia results will come much higher in search results due to their skewed pagerank.
This is a serious problem that Google should address. It also shows how urgent the need for competition in search really is. Search has much, much room for improvement, and Google does not seem to be leading the charge towards improvements.
Wikipedia is trying to catalog the world as a general encyclopedia. But paradoxically they edit out things from the world.
The result? A reason to post elsewhere.
Amen. Mod parent insightful. It really is time that Wikipedia gets kicked out of its bloated, overrated pagerank. They are stealing focus from many, many better sites.
They're not formally linked, but they're headed by the same guy and much of the same staff.
Sure, legally and fiscally they are apparently separate entities. They key word there is "apparently". The reality is somewhat different. Nefarious? In the opinion of many, most likely.
Another project that's related to Wikipedia through the founder Jimmy Wales is Wikia
If there was ever a good reason to avoid something, the ownership of "Honest Jimbo" Wales, is as good as it gets on the web. I do hope he fills out his expense reports correctly for Wikia, and I wonder which firms he sells the info to from that site.
Is there an extremist right-wing Ayn Rand Wikia site?
That's a surprisingly low number. I think it's out by at least an order of magnitude. These guys need to try a lot harder. So, so many more pages to delete...
You can start with almost every single music entry -- virtually all are spam or fansites to some degree.
"A Pirate Party spokesman said, 'Some of our officials seem to want to install the Big Brother state without the knowledge of the public."
In this they are incorrect. The beauty of the Orwellification of the Western world right now is that it is with the full co-operation of the general public.
Step 1. Create imaginary bogeymen -- "terrorists", "pedophiles"
Step 2. Create hysteria that gives the false impression that said bogeymen are common, rather than, in reality, very rare.
Step 3. Create economic crisis to fan the flames of hatred and jealousy.
And viola, the general public will help you light the gas ovens.
We have learned nothing whatsoever from history. Nothing. Not. One. Thing.
"If it says Idle... don't read it? Why do people complain?
Because not EVERYONE can see it IS idle. If you use the/. RSS feed you do NOT know if something is "idle" or not.
If/. must persist with this digg-based, lowbrow "idle" crap -- despite a large number of users complaining -- then they should at least remove the titles from the main RSS feed or put "IDLE:" at the beginning of every article title.
Then, those of us who do not wish to read this shit can avoid it. That seems fair, does it not?
While I believe that it could be a mistake on their part. The fact that it was "an oversight" doesn't make sense to me.
Yes, I agree. Google employs many lawyers. One of them MUST have signed off on the TOS before it went live. This was a conscious decision. Corporations just don't copy and past legal stuff -- EVER. Someone in Google liked the original TOS.
I think his point, and a valid one, is that while Joss Whedon's creations have many fervent fans, there are also very many people who find him overrated. I'm on the fence -- I like Firefly, don't care for Buffy. (Although I do think the episodes he personally wrote were very good, but some of the others left much to be desired.)
I would have thought this was a commercial risk. Buffy and Firefly were not / are not nearly as commercially successful as most of the fans would have you believe.
I completely agree. Concepts of love have varied greatly from culture to culture and historically throughout the same culture.
The Hollywood/Hallmark monogamous view of love is a relatively modern invention. Historically people have tended to marry for practical reasons, and dowry was a big factor in the west (and still is in many cultures). Marriage has historically been a business transaction, not an emotional one.
This "study" is just yet another example of correlation-does-not-equal-causation -- an ever more frequent trend in so-called "science" research.
Absolutely... a total non-story. And quite typical of a UK citizen to think that because something happens there it happens everywhere. Britons need to get out more, then they might release how unique (and overpriced) their experience is for many things.
The editors accepting this is just part of the recent decrease in quality of/. Welcome to Diggocracy! Bring on the lolcats.
I think you have just shown a perfect example of why we need television that isn't funded by advertisers. PBS can air the show because they aren't driven by profit and aren't beholden to those corporations (although even that is starting to change with corporate sponsorship of PBS). While you can argue that public television is beholden to the government, at least it is beholden to a (slightly) different power.
That all sounds nice in theory. However, the People's Democratic Republic of (formerly Great) Britain has the BBC -- it's funded through a license fee, and has a very strict code preventing it from carrying advertising.
It's mostly a government propaganda tool and it carries large amounts of viral marketing and product placement every single day. It appears to be wholly corrupt.
It is in NO WAY an organ of truth nor democracy. It is very much a tool of plutocracy. And yet it remains, misguidedly, a respected and popular organization.
At least Fox News is fairly honest about its bias, the BBC is much more clandestine about its.
That's ridiculous and patronizing. It's also symptomatic of the reason why the Internet is the way it is -- people like you just shrugging their shoulders and not trying to make things better. So fine, live smeared in crap if you wish. I don't want to.
Slashdot used to be a relatively safe haven from the mass stupidity of the Internet. But recently that has changed -- that's the point. Something, presumably greed and retarded marketing droids (same thing really) has caused this change on Slashdot.
Now we have the Idiocracy of Idle, dear Taco, and reviews that are just juvenile ways of insulting people. It doesn't need to be this way. The whole world is dumbing down, but it's reasonable to expect Slashdot to have standards -- based on 10 years of seemingly having them.
I KNOW what the url to DIGG is. If I wanted braindead lolcat crap I'd go there.
You are seriously destroying the integrity of Slashdot with Idle, the reader's mail garbage, and now this book review drivel.
Is it driving up your hits? Perhaps it is, perhaps it is also making you more money. Are you so greedy that you are willing to cheapen yourselves in this way? Why not just get into the spam industry if that's the case?
There is no value in this. It detracts from otherwise good content. You can see perfectly well that there are already many complaining. Do you not care about this site any more?
I'm impressed with what I've seen so far. At the moment though it seems to be very USA-centric.
I live in a country (the UK) that does not have much in the way of unbiased, free and fair media. The BBC is government run and notoriously a vehicle of propaganda, most other media is to some degree or other run by Rupert Murdoch, and the remainder by similar plutocrats. It would be great if you can establish connections to similar journalists in the UK, so that fair, free reports can be published about what's going on here.
I'd welcome any opportunity to have a free press that can begin to try to re-establish democracy in the UK.
... that UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown-shirt just came in his pants on hearing this development.
It's like fascism-in-a-can.
Now if they can only develop a way of this system generating a data cd, and automatically losing that on a train seat, it will meet all UK requirements.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, so I can understand how people can search MySpace for pics, etc, since that is published to all. That's the point and utility of MySpace, so that you can promote yourself. If you are an artist or a band this is extremely useful.
However, I don't understand how people can search Facebook. I don't have a Facebook account as it seems useless unless you are part of an organization that uses it widely. The whole point of it is that it seems to be closed (and thus is useless for promoting your work).
Thus, my question is: how can people search your Facebook profile unless you are stupid enough to allow them to do so as your friend? Presumably, you have to be an especially stupid idiot to have your Facebook profile viewed by someone unintended? Or am I missing something?
While I don't agree with the DCMA, nor most copyright laws in most countries, I do wonder why this hasn't happened before, and indeed is not a regular occurrence. Wikipedia is absolutely full of plagiarized material. Almost every single movie page is more or less ripped verbatim from imdb, just as one small example.
I would have thought that wikipedia was a lawyer's wet dream come true. I mean sure, they don't have a great deal of money (especially since Jimbo keeps dipping his hand in the cash register), but there's still some money to be made there. I really can't understand why Wikipedia has had such a free ride so far.
Who on earth modded that insightful? It makes no sense! It's completely wrong. It has nothing to do with the broadcast format, but the recording format. Using 16mm film is FAR, FAR more expensive than HD video.
It also means that other countries are less likely to buy their output. Thus ending in a downward spiral of quality, due to less money being available for production.
The changeover has nothing to do with cost, and everything to do with resistance to change and a erroneous, misguided elitism that film is better. 35mm might be for some things, but 16mm is dead tech, other than as a training medium for 35mm.
Unfortunately using the new codec will probably not help the BBC much. Once upon a time a BBC camera department training was regarded as being one of the best in the world. BBC cameramen were highly sought after.
Nowadays, you'll be very lucky if any of them know where the iris control or white balance is on a camera. Id guess that at least about 40% of all shots from news or sports footage is overexposed by at least 2 stops.
In addition, they have been very slow to make the change to HD, most other countries' TV companies changed over far faster than they did. Much of their "quality drama" output is still shot on 16mm film rather than 24p HD too -- mainly due to resistance to change from Camera depts, and a lack of talent therein.
Why even bother with a new codec, unless it's cheaper -- no-one in the BBC seems to care a damn about visual quality.
What a naive and idealistic view of Wikipedia. (Yes, I know that is what they claim). Truth is, lots of people are making money out of wikipedia. And it's a great place to do it. Of course, you just don't do it DIRECTLY. However, indirectly...
Firstly, there's answers.com and Jimmy Wales' expense accounts.
Secondly, wikipedia is a fantastic place to promote your product -- especially if you are a large company and can afford plenty of viral marketeers to form a cabal and protect your brand.
Thirdly, a variation on promotion, if you are a band you can have your unwitting sockpuppets, sorry I mean fans, post links to your wikipedia entry on every single tenuous page they can. If you wrote a song about pasta, then make sure there's a mention of it on all the pasta pages for example. Of course your own wikipedia must use your own website, or myspace page, or allmusic page as a primary source, so that you can guarantee that your amazon affiliation links to your cds are only a few clicks away. Easy money my friends. Sure, music is a product just like soap powder, and one promoted by one of the most evil industries on earth, but few people realize that for some strange reason -- honestly, you can make loads of money this way, it's like shooting fish.
Fourthly, make sure your own webpage is linked through as many wikipedia pages as possible - this will help your page rank if nothing else.
etc, etc...
Wikipedia is nothing like as altruistic or idealistic as the foundation would have you believe.
There problem is search. Ironically that's Google.
Any search usually generates a wikipedia result in the top 10. This is, of course, because wikipedia has an inflated pagerank for the site as a whole. In fact many individual pages are very, very poor quality, and if were considered out of context would merit a page rank lower by several orders of magnitude.
Succinctly, wikipedia's search results are effectively no more than pagerank spam, just as much as any SEO black hat attempt to skew search results.
This makes it very difficult for sites like Knol or Citizendium, which in all probability have much more authoritative, or qualitatively better pages than their wikipedia equivalent. However, wikipedia results will come much higher in search results due to their skewed pagerank.
This is a serious problem that Google should address. It also shows how urgent the need for competition in search really is. Search has much, much room for improvement, and Google does not seem to be leading the charge towards improvements.
On behalf of the Intergalactic Whaling Commission I wish to protest!
Amen. Mod parent insightful. It really is time that Wikipedia gets kicked out of its bloated, overrated pagerank. They are stealing focus from many, many better sites.
Sure, legally and fiscally they are apparently separate entities. They key word there is "apparently". The reality is somewhat different. Nefarious? In the opinion of many, most likely.
If there was ever a good reason to avoid something, the ownership of "Honest Jimbo" Wales, is as good as it gets on the web. I do hope he fills out his expense reports correctly for Wikia, and I wonder which firms he sells the info to from that site.
Is there an extremist right-wing Ayn Rand Wikia site?
That's a surprisingly low number. I think it's out by at least an order of magnitude. These guys need to try a lot harder. So, so many more pages to delete...
You can start with almost every single music entry -- virtually all are spam or fansites to some degree.
In this they are incorrect. The beauty of the Orwellification of the Western world right now is that it is with the full co-operation of the general public.
Step 1. Create imaginary bogeymen -- "terrorists", "pedophiles"
Step 2. Create hysteria that gives the false impression that said bogeymen are common, rather than, in reality, very rare.
Step 3. Create economic crisis to fan the flames of hatred and jealousy.
And viola, the general public will help you light the gas ovens.
We have learned nothing whatsoever from history. Nothing. Not. One. Thing.
Because not EVERYONE can see it IS idle. If you use the /. RSS feed you do NOT know if something is "idle" or not.
/. must persist with this digg-based, lowbrow "idle" crap -- despite a large number of users complaining -- then they should at least remove the titles from the main RSS feed or put "IDLE:" at the beginning of every article title.
If
Then, those of us who do not wish to read this shit can avoid it. That seems fair, does it not?
Yes, I agree. Google employs many lawyers. One of them MUST have signed off on the TOS before it went live. This was a conscious decision. Corporations just don't copy and past legal stuff -- EVER. Someone in Google liked the original TOS.
I think his point, and a valid one, is that while Joss Whedon's creations have many fervent fans, there are also very many people who find him overrated. I'm on the fence -- I like Firefly, don't care for Buffy. (Although I do think the episodes he personally wrote were very good, but some of the others left much to be desired.)
I would have thought this was a commercial risk. Buffy and Firefly were not / are not nearly as commercially successful as most of the fans would have you believe.
I completely agree. Concepts of love have varied greatly from culture to culture and historically throughout the same culture.
The Hollywood/Hallmark monogamous view of love is a relatively modern invention. Historically people have tended to marry for practical reasons, and dowry was a big factor in the west (and still is in many cultures). Marriage has historically been a business transaction, not an emotional one.
This "study" is just yet another example of correlation-does-not-equal-causation -- an ever more frequent trend in so-called "science" research.
I don't believe a word of it either.
Welcome to the Diggocracy.
/. readers don't want this crap.
Bow to your lolcat overlords.
Here's just yet another libelous juvenile review. This, despite the overwhelming evidence that
When will it all end?
Absolutely... a total non-story. And quite typical of a UK citizen to think that because something happens there it happens everywhere. Britons need to get out more, then they might release how unique (and overpriced) their experience is for many things.
/. Welcome to Diggocracy! Bring on the lolcats.
The editors accepting this is just part of the recent decrease in quality of
Let's hope they don't follow Roland.
That all sounds nice in theory. However, the People's Democratic Republic of (formerly Great) Britain has the BBC -- it's funded through a license fee, and has a very strict code preventing it from carrying advertising.
It's mostly a government propaganda tool and it carries large amounts of viral marketing and product placement every single day. It appears to be wholly corrupt. It is in NO WAY an organ of truth nor democracy. It is very much a tool of plutocracy. And yet it remains, misguidedly, a respected and popular organization.
At least Fox News is fairly honest about its bias, the BBC is much more clandestine about its.
In South Korea only old people route web traffic through the US.
That's ridiculous and patronizing. It's also symptomatic of the reason why the Internet is the way it is -- people like you just shrugging their shoulders and not trying to make things better. So fine, live smeared in crap if you wish. I don't want to.
Slashdot used to be a relatively safe haven from the mass stupidity of the Internet. But recently that has changed -- that's the point. Something, presumably greed and retarded marketing droids (same thing really) has caused this change on Slashdot.
Now we have the Idiocracy of Idle, dear Taco, and reviews that are just juvenile ways of insulting people. It doesn't need to be this way. The whole world is dumbing down, but it's reasonable to expect Slashdot to have standards -- based on 10 years of seemingly having them.
Listen Editors, listen Taco, please listen hard...
I KNOW what the url to DIGG is. If I wanted braindead lolcat crap I'd go there.
You are seriously destroying the integrity of Slashdot with Idle, the reader's mail garbage, and now this book review drivel.
Is it driving up your hits? Perhaps it is, perhaps it is also making you more money. Are you so greedy that you are willing to cheapen yourselves in this way? Why not just get into the spam industry if that's the case?
There is no value in this. It detracts from otherwise good content. You can see perfectly well that there are already many complaining. Do you not care about this site any more?
Enough is enough
I'm impressed with what I've seen so far. At the moment though it seems to be very USA-centric.
I live in a country (the UK) that does not have much in the way of unbiased, free and fair media. The BBC is government run and notoriously a vehicle of propaganda, most other media is to some degree or other run by Rupert Murdoch, and the remainder by similar plutocrats. It would be great if you can establish connections to similar journalists in the UK, so that fair, free reports can be published about what's going on here.
I'd welcome any opportunity to have a free press that can begin to try to re-establish democracy in the UK.
... that UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown-shirt just came in his pants on hearing this development.
It's like fascism-in-a-can.
Now if they can only develop a way of this system generating a data cd, and automatically losing that on a train seat, it will meet all UK requirements.