Same here, I had a MegaHAL bot running on a pretty active IRC channel for a few years. The reason the overtraining makes it act strangely is because the algorithm picks a sentence out of several generated with the most information value; that is, the least probable one. MegaHAL also generates as many candidate replies as it can within a preset time frame, so with a faster computer you have a higher probability of getting some of the weird special cases that have accumulated in the model over its lifetime. Changing the function for picking the reply to some sort of gaussian distribution would probably improve it, but I haven't tried.
I did have some fun experimenting with a Python implementation I made, coupled with MontyLingua for adding word classification into the training process. Even then it eventually runs into the obstacle that the Markov model really only puts words into a short context within a sentence; it doesn't "think", nor can it hold topics beyond what the user carries on in his sentences.
That's pretty close to how the Loebner prize competition has turned out as well; most entrants seem to be designed for cheating the Turing test rather than making a genuine effort. It's quite telling that, while ELIZA was written way back in 1966, all the top contestants still work by the same basic principle of static stimulus-response rules. The main difference is that the databases are larger and thus able to cover more cases (and at least one entry could build its database based on user input).
The most interesting entry to me so far has been MegaHAL, which applied Markov chains in modeling language and generating responses. It's definitely not a recipe for intelligent and coherent conversation, but the responses are more original and the approach is closer to what I believe ought to be the right direction. Too bad it didn't seem to stir the other participants enough.
Games and contests might be an entertaining way for demonstrating results of AI research, but seeing as us actual flesh-and-bone people have a habit of bending rules, it probably shouldn't be trusted too much as a platform for inspiring new research.
Aye, as strange as it sounds, the Ubuntu forums are intended for cries of help. It would be far beyond pointless for everyone with a working setup to check in one at a time and announce themselves, each in a separate thread.
It's not surprising either, since Ubuntu is just now getting to the enterprise game. It'll be interesting to see how much impact its explosion in user desktop popularity will have there.
Its funny; Linux lovers bash MS for bloat, than turn around and claim that Linux comes with everything by default.
What's even funnier is I don't ever recall doing that.
I realize that too. I'm not expecting windows xp drivers for my ISA Soundblaster or video card. But for something I bought only a few months ago, I do.
That's because hardware vendors are partly driven by market shares. I have loads of hardware that I wouldn't be able to use in my only PowerPC box simply due to firmware differences, and I don't see that as a particularly huge drawback to MacOS usage either. OSS drivers are not maintained solely by hardware vendors, so they also include the advantages of not being directly connected to some corporate entity's revenue flow.
Also note that I'm not talking about ancient ISA hardware here, but the supposedly idiot-proof hotplug crop of USB devices. Again hardware vendors could take the blame for deciding to go with proprietary protocols.
I do like Linux, and I really wanted it to become my desktop, but the hit or miss hardware support, endless reading piles and piles of documentation, and the KDE rot that seems to occur caused me to dump it.
I take my own medicine too; I've been using Linux as my primary desktop for four years or so. The moments when I dual-boot to Windows now have solely to do with games, and the sad fact that I've yet to find a virtual studio application fully worthy of replacing Jeskola Buzz or FL Studio (though Buzz actually works rather well in what you call "a steaming pile").
I also prefer to use something else than KDE, but that's a completely different topic.
Again, I'm not really sure what you're getting at here. Usually I just insert the disc and install, and my application is up and running.
In Ubuntu I click Applications->Add/Remove, check some boxes, click "OK" and the software gets installed. The default installation isn't just a media player and web browser, either.
I don't need to go to some third party website and download a driver written by Joe Linux Developer.
No, because in a vast majority of cases you have drivers bundled along with the distribution or not available at all. From your tone I presume you've walked into an unfortunate case akin to what I went through with WinModems a few years ago. But as you said, the fact that driver hackers don't have specifications and vendors don't provide their own drivers is hardly something the distribution builder can resolve.
It works the other way around, too: I have a few pieces of just slightly older USB hardware that will never work with 64-bit builds of Windows due to lack of vendor support, but function happily with the default installation of the AMD64 version of Ubuntu.
The fact is that Linux isn't there yet. Trust me, I tried for five years, and while I did see alot of improvement, the fact that I just can't buy a printer without checking some list speaks volumes.
I keep hearing this, and I can't help thinking that by the same general guidelines Windows isn't there yet; the fact that you have to romp through driver discs and various web sites just to get your hardware supported, then go through the same again for applications to actually be able to do something useful speaks volumes of its own. Deployment-wise Linux is already ahead, and usability-wise it's really a matter of training.
I wouldn't buy a printer blind even if I were a Windows user. As a Linux user "some list" enables me to vote with my wallet and choose a vendor who sees fit to provide me with service.
Would the '98 user be able to keep running his same version of Quicken (also likely outdated)?
Possibly not, but then again he might be able to use the same data with some other application. Speaking as a person with nil experience about accounting software, here.
Maybe Net2phone will go after AOL and the guy who wrote mIRC, too.
I hate to seem nitpickish, but I guess you mean the guy who first came up with IRC, predating the patent only by about a decade. Not to mention the developers of the predecessors of IRC, and the entire Internet protocol family.
You don't install the entirety of Debian on your hard drive. A lot of that bulk is comprised of mutually redundant, rarely needed and even obsolete applications. You can easily cram a working desktop system in under one gigabyte, and that's "working" as in you could actually do some work with it.
Currently the root filesystem in my Ubuntu installation is filled up to 5 gigabytes, but that includes things like development, image processing and 3D modeling tools, an office suite and a flashy, composited, 3D-accelerated GUI (Xgl and compiz).
Vista isn't exactly up to par if it offers comparatively nothing in twice the space. Won't be even if it contracts to half its current size before release.
Note the wording, up to 30 miles is an estimate, not a definite reading. Making a definite calculation from that starting point would make little sense.
Surely nobody in their right mind would click on a link in just any email message claiming to be from their bank and give away their account information. Surely no-one actually buys those things advertised in spam messages.
People already familiar with how the Internet works will probably be fine; just as well, I wouldn't go out on a limb to presume too much.
Do you see why your lack of logic is so distressing to me?
In a way, but I always find it a bit odd when someone sees fit to attack me instead of confronting the actual subject at hand. If I'm making my point the blind anti-MS rant you appear to suggest, I'd nevertheless like to retain my right to critically examine any counterclaims.
You seem to say that since Microsoft wasn't always the monopoly they are now, what they do now may be examined on terms of what they were back then. I disagree. It's as if you answered to someone blaming a new SUV owner, "it's okay, he used to own a Volvo just like everyone else".
You claim that all problems are only due to greedy OEMs. In a Microsoft world, it's quite obviously beneficial for an OEM to get a deal to exclusively bundle Windows at a lesser price: since nearly everyone takes it anyway, you get a (slight) benefit "for free". For smaller software vendors, an exclusive deal gives them a way to spread their product and gain more share for themselves, and for the OEM to add "value" to their product package. I don't particularly like either case, but it's also a bit too easy to, as you say, yell at Dell and HP, for being the bulk manufacturers that they are.
Of course, the happy fluffy utopian situation would be to have a better level of service and choices available everywhere, but this would again require the bulk masses to educate themselves and not just buy the cheapest damn thing they can get at the local mall.
However these bundling options were not invented by MS, they were entering the game from the old IBM model they were involved in, and picked up what everyone else was doing.
Ya, it is still a crap model, but a LOT of companies do this, it wasn't until Microsoft hit pay dirt of success that it became a problem.
While I appreciate the amount of time you're taking writing that over and over again, I don't see how it changes the fact that it's completely irrelevant how many other companies might do it or not. Microsoft does hold a position which is quite different from any other software vendor at the moment, and which gives it certain authority on the market. Hence, "in context of what it is". Intel used to be in a similar position with their CPUs and I'm rather glad that AMD has managed to balance the scales. That sort of "success" wouldn't be such a problem at all if the "successful" didn't seem to have a knack for attempting to maintain their positions through dirty tricks rather than by being genuinely competitive.
But seeing as this seems to be dragging along, I'd be quite ready to just agree to disagree here.
This is NOT Microsoft's fault. No matter how you want to manipulate reality, they did nothing different than IBM or any other Software vendor has been doing for 30 years.
Pardon me for repeating what others have already said, but that is not a justification to anything, even if I did claim that Microsoft does something which other vendors don't (which I didn't). My beef is more about what Microsoft does in context of what it is.
I was the head of a leading OEM, and we didn't lock our customers into Windows, or MS Office, even though users chose it 99% of the time.
Take into account that not every average customer is an informed and educated consumer when it comes to computers and software; many people might never see anything except for Windows. Lacking understanding about the relations between software components, it's easy to come to think that it's something inseparable. The rest might want to play their favourite games, or peruse their neighbours' software collections (like it or not) or whatever - that all goes under why the needed momentum for a change would be rather huge. "Choice" is a relative concept.
Even if these companies wanted to start shipping Linux, what distribution?
Any popular and stable distribution suited for the intended target market? You can't reasonably pick between a chainsaw and a screwdriver before you know what you need to do.
And do you think they want to take on all the support and patches themselves?
Patches come from the distribution vendors just as Windows patches come from Microsoft. As I understand, Microsoft's OEM deals also involve the OEM taking over responsibility of customer support.
Yell at the OEMs, not Microsoft.
As much as this is Slashdot, I don't mean to convey "yelling" or pointing fingers at anyone. I think attempting to analyse things is more interesting, if not as easy.
Through that logic, what exactly do manufacturers seek to gain with a bulk-discounted Windows over, say, a free Ubuntu? Supposing that they are indeed only looking for the obvious quick buck, you'd think you'd see preinstalled Linux all over the place.
Since Windows is right now already pretty much everywhere, by only bundling Linux on consumer boxes you'd probably just attract a long tech support nightmare. On the other hand, by giving up the exclusive Windows deal but still bundling Windows you'd be at a profit disadvantage compared to several of your competitors. So no, nobody's being blatantly forced to anything, but there is that implied gun inside the jacket pocket.
Breaking away from the Windows lockdown could, in a pink rosy ideal world, come through the education of consumers, who'd then be able to make more informed purchase decisions and live with them. More realistically, I figure it'd require enormous coordinated effort from both manufacturers and software vendors, in providing switch-over application and user support, and currently it seems just about as likely to happen.
Why would mass be a problem? Unless I've been horribly misled, people don't simply pop up out of raw energy. Just take what would be Marty's particles and scatter them all around the place, and he'll no longer conceptually exist.
I just can't decide whether I should be laughing at Sony for biting their own feet, or angry about the ethical two-facedness going on in here. Push on with strict laws about "intellectual property" by whining about starving artists, then act like a jerk concerning the actual technological sides of the matter.
Speaking of it, I'm an amateur musician. How do I tag my songs so that, say, they can be copied from iPods to other computers? Or from the cell phones of a certain Korean manufacturer to other cell phones? Who exactly is holding my rights for ransom here?
Seeing as you summon Computer Architecture [sic] onto the field, I'd like to take this chance to remind you about the existence of MMUs and memory mapping. It's not all core memory you see in that address space. Even if that were not the case, 1 GiB of core memory is no longer a rarity, and 2 GiB is getting there as well. It's not difficult to guess the direction from there on.
As for "anyone", there's this bunch of meteorologists, biologists and astrophysicists I'd like you to meet...
Right, then you're just at the whim of bulletin boards, lack of documentation, lack of drivers, lack of vendor support...
Sounds exactly like my experience with Windows XP x64 edition. Contrary to that, everything worked in Linux precisely because driver support isn't at the whim of greedy vendors, who'd rather have you buy new devices by the dozen than spend any workforce in writing/compiling new drivers.
On the other hand, following on the trails of money, some rather rich people have everything to gain through confusing issues. Many respected scientists agree that the data so far does not speak for keeping our CO2 outputs at a high level. Call me naïve if you want, but which one is the safer bet?
Of course, if we go by Bush it may be a lose-lose situation - either the economy collapses in short term, or everything collapses in long term. It may be argued forever that either or both of these are unwarranted hysteria, but I reckon apathy certainly doesn't carry very far.
Convenience. This is likely to be cheaper to implement than, say, fingerprint detection, doesn't add any external breakable parts, and is certainly less intrusive.
You're right. This whole religious thing you guys have about Wikipedia is bullshit. No one is allowed to point out it's flaws without fanatics like you spouting off dogma.
Que hypocrisy: If you disagree with me, you are a fanatic moron.
Now that I checked out the "rathergate" page, it is quite ridiculously broad. On the other hand, what would you yourself propose to resolve the raging debates on the article's Talk page? Hire a "neutral" editor to clean it up? In spirit of the high academic quality you appear to advocate, can you point out examples on a broader scale, to signify that this is not merely an exception, and preferrably refer to actual Wikipedia policies to further back your claim? On the other hand, and I'm very interested to hear, how can information be reliably valued against the social skills of its contributor?
The point is in all respects that Wikipedia is a community-driven effort. This is scary and different, since conventionally article writing involves at most a few people who serve pre-defined roles. There's probably a number of conclusions that can eventually be drawn from it, but it certainly requires more research than finding bad articles and insulting them.
A failsafe way to prevent piracy? Try never putting it on any form of media readable on a PC then.
Indeed, what's been stunning to me all this time (I live in Finland, btw) is the whole underlying logic in this:
We do not want people to (illegally) copy our trademarked works. Thus we enforce technical copy-protection schemes. But since most of these schemes are trivially broken due to their nature, we want to make breaking them illegal.
Can anyone at all explain to me why we need this extra middle step in the first place?
Slashdot Mirror
Same here, I had a MegaHAL bot running on a pretty active IRC channel for a few years. The reason the overtraining makes it act strangely is because the algorithm picks a sentence out of several generated with the most information value; that is, the least probable one. MegaHAL also generates as many candidate replies as it can within a preset time frame, so with a faster computer you have a higher probability of getting some of the weird special cases that have accumulated in the model over its lifetime. Changing the function for picking the reply to some sort of gaussian distribution would probably improve it, but I haven't tried.
I did have some fun experimenting with a Python implementation I made, coupled with MontyLingua for adding word classification into the training process. Even then it eventually runs into the obstacle that the Markov model really only puts words into a short context within a sentence; it doesn't "think", nor can it hold topics beyond what the user carries on in his sentences.
That's pretty close to how the Loebner prize competition has turned out as well; most entrants seem to be designed for cheating the Turing test rather than making a genuine effort. It's quite telling that, while ELIZA was written way back in 1966, all the top contestants still work by the same basic principle of static stimulus-response rules. The main difference is that the databases are larger and thus able to cover more cases (and at least one entry could build its database based on user input).
The most interesting entry to me so far has been MegaHAL, which applied Markov chains in modeling language and generating responses. It's definitely not a recipe for intelligent and coherent conversation, but the responses are more original and the approach is closer to what I believe ought to be the right direction. Too bad it didn't seem to stir the other participants enough.
Games and contests might be an entertaining way for demonstrating results of AI research, but seeing as us actual flesh-and-bone people have a habit of bending rules, it probably shouldn't be trusted too much as a platform for inspiring new research.
Aye, as strange as it sounds, the Ubuntu forums are intended for cries of help. It would be far beyond pointless for everyone with a working setup to check in one at a time and announce themselves, each in a separate thread.
It's not surprising either, since Ubuntu is just now getting to the enterprise game. It'll be interesting to see how much impact its explosion in user desktop popularity will have there.
What's even funnier is I don't ever recall doing that.
That's because hardware vendors are partly driven by market shares. I have loads of hardware that I wouldn't be able to use in my only PowerPC box simply due to firmware differences, and I don't see that as a particularly huge drawback to MacOS usage either. OSS drivers are not maintained solely by hardware vendors, so they also include the advantages of not being directly connected to some corporate entity's revenue flow.
Also note that I'm not talking about ancient ISA hardware here, but the supposedly idiot-proof hotplug crop of USB devices. Again hardware vendors could take the blame for deciding to go with proprietary protocols.
I take my own medicine too; I've been using Linux as my primary desktop for four years or so. The moments when I dual-boot to Windows now have solely to do with games, and the sad fact that I've yet to find a virtual studio application fully worthy of replacing Jeskola Buzz or FL Studio (though Buzz actually works rather well in what you call "a steaming pile").
I also prefer to use something else than KDE, but that's a completely different topic.
In Ubuntu I click Applications->Add/Remove, check some boxes, click "OK" and the software gets installed. The default installation isn't just a media player and web browser, either.
No, because in a vast majority of cases you have drivers bundled along with the distribution or not available at all. From your tone I presume you've walked into an unfortunate case akin to what I went through with WinModems a few years ago. But as you said, the fact that driver hackers don't have specifications and vendors don't provide their own drivers is hardly something the distribution builder can resolve.
It works the other way around, too: I have a few pieces of just slightly older USB hardware that will never work with 64-bit builds of Windows due to lack of vendor support, but function happily with the default installation of the AMD64 version of Ubuntu.
I keep hearing this, and I can't help thinking that by the same general guidelines Windows isn't there yet; the fact that you have to romp through driver discs and various web sites just to get your hardware supported, then go through the same again for applications to actually be able to do something useful speaks volumes of its own. Deployment-wise Linux is already ahead, and usability-wise it's really a matter of training.
I wouldn't buy a printer blind even if I were a Windows user. As a Linux user "some list" enables me to vote with my wallet and choose a vendor who sees fit to provide me with service.
Possibly not, but then again he might be able to use the same data with some other application. Speaking as a person with nil experience about accounting software, here.
Nice troll, especially considering the hidden assumption that Windows 98 would only be dragged along to support some legacy proprietary application.
Of course, likewise to how my fingernail clippings and stray hair are obvious specimen of the species Homo sapiens. Brilliant thinking.
I hate to seem nitpickish, but I guess you mean the guy who first came up with IRC, predating the patent only by about a decade. Not to mention the developers of the predecessors of IRC, and the entire Internet protocol family.
You don't install the entirety of Debian on your hard drive. A lot of that bulk is comprised of mutually redundant, rarely needed and even obsolete applications. You can easily cram a working desktop system in under one gigabyte, and that's "working" as in you could actually do some work with it.
Currently the root filesystem in my Ubuntu installation is filled up to 5 gigabytes, but that includes things like development, image processing and 3D modeling tools, an office suite and a flashy, composited, 3D-accelerated GUI (Xgl and compiz).
Vista isn't exactly up to par if it offers comparatively nothing in twice the space. Won't be even if it contracts to half its current size before release.
Note the wording, up to 30 miles is an estimate, not a definite reading. Making a definite calculation from that starting point would make little sense.
Surely nobody in their right mind would click on a link in just any email message claiming to be from their bank and give away their account information. Surely no-one actually buys those things advertised in spam messages.
People already familiar with how the Internet works will probably be fine; just as well, I wouldn't go out on a limb to presume too much.
Do you see why your lack of logic is so distressing to me?
In a way, but I always find it a bit odd when someone sees fit to attack me instead of confronting the actual subject at hand. If I'm making my point the blind anti-MS rant you appear to suggest, I'd nevertheless like to retain my right to critically examine any counterclaims.
You seem to say that since Microsoft wasn't always the monopoly they are now, what they do now may be examined on terms of what they were back then. I disagree. It's as if you answered to someone blaming a new SUV owner, "it's okay, he used to own a Volvo just like everyone else".
You claim that all problems are only due to greedy OEMs. In a Microsoft world, it's quite obviously beneficial for an OEM to get a deal to exclusively bundle Windows at a lesser price: since nearly everyone takes it anyway, you get a (slight) benefit "for free". For smaller software vendors, an exclusive deal gives them a way to spread their product and gain more share for themselves, and for the OEM to add "value" to their product package. I don't particularly like either case, but it's also a bit too easy to, as you say, yell at Dell and HP, for being the bulk manufacturers that they are.
Of course, the happy fluffy utopian situation would be to have a better level of service and choices available everywhere, but this would again require the bulk masses to educate themselves and not just buy the cheapest damn thing they can get at the local mall.
However these bundling options were not invented by MS, they were entering the game from the old IBM model they were involved in, and picked up what everyone else was doing.
Ya, it is still a crap model, but a LOT of companies do this, it wasn't until Microsoft hit pay dirt of success that it became a problem.
While I appreciate the amount of time you're taking writing that over and over again, I don't see how it changes the fact that it's completely irrelevant how many other companies might do it or not. Microsoft does hold a position which is quite different from any other software vendor at the moment, and which gives it certain authority on the market. Hence, "in context of what it is". Intel used to be in a similar position with their CPUs and I'm rather glad that AMD has managed to balance the scales. That sort of "success" wouldn't be such a problem at all if the "successful" didn't seem to have a knack for attempting to maintain their positions through dirty tricks rather than by being genuinely competitive.
But seeing as this seems to be dragging along, I'd be quite ready to just agree to disagree here.
This is NOT Microsoft's fault. No matter how you want to manipulate reality, they did nothing different than IBM or any other Software vendor has been doing for 30 years.
Pardon me for repeating what others have already said, but that is not a justification to anything, even if I did claim that Microsoft does something which other vendors don't (which I didn't). My beef is more about what Microsoft does in context of what it is.
I was the head of a leading OEM, and we didn't lock our customers into Windows, or MS Office, even though users chose it 99% of the time.
Take into account that not every average customer is an informed and educated consumer when it comes to computers and software; many people might never see anything except for Windows. Lacking understanding about the relations between software components, it's easy to come to think that it's something inseparable. The rest might want to play their favourite games, or peruse their neighbours' software collections (like it or not) or whatever - that all goes under why the needed momentum for a change would be rather huge. "Choice" is a relative concept.
Even if these companies wanted to start shipping Linux, what distribution?
Any popular and stable distribution suited for the intended target market? You can't reasonably pick between a chainsaw and a screwdriver before you know what you need to do.
And do you think they want to take on all the support and patches themselves?
Patches come from the distribution vendors just as Windows patches come from Microsoft. As I understand, Microsoft's OEM deals also involve the OEM taking over responsibility of customer support.
Yell at the OEMs, not Microsoft.
As much as this is Slashdot, I don't mean to convey "yelling" or pointing fingers at anyone. I think attempting to analyse things is more interesting, if not as easy.
Through that logic, what exactly do manufacturers seek to gain with a bulk-discounted Windows over, say, a free Ubuntu? Supposing that they are indeed only looking for the obvious quick buck, you'd think you'd see preinstalled Linux all over the place.
Since Windows is right now already pretty much everywhere, by only bundling Linux on consumer boxes you'd probably just attract a long tech support nightmare. On the other hand, by giving up the exclusive Windows deal but still bundling Windows you'd be at a profit disadvantage compared to several of your competitors. So no, nobody's being blatantly forced to anything, but there is that implied gun inside the jacket pocket.
Breaking away from the Windows lockdown could, in a pink rosy ideal world, come through the education of consumers, who'd then be able to make more informed purchase decisions and live with them. More realistically, I figure it'd require enormous coordinated effort from both manufacturers and software vendors, in providing switch-over application and user support, and currently it seems just about as likely to happen.
Why would mass be a problem? Unless I've been horribly misled, people don't simply pop up out of raw energy. Just take what would be Marty's particles and scatter them all around the place, and he'll no longer conceptually exist.
I just can't decide whether I should be laughing at Sony for biting their own feet, or angry about the ethical two-facedness going on in here. Push on with strict laws about "intellectual property" by whining about starving artists, then act like a jerk concerning the actual technological sides of the matter.
Speaking of it, I'm an amateur musician. How do I tag my songs so that, say, they can be copied from iPods to other computers? Or from the cell phones of a certain Korean manufacturer to other cell phones? Who exactly is holding my rights for ransom here?
Seeing as you summon Computer Architecture [sic] onto the field, I'd like to take this chance to remind you about the existence of MMUs and memory mapping. It's not all core memory you see in that address space. Even if that were not the case, 1 GiB of core memory is no longer a rarity, and 2 GiB is getting there as well. It's not difficult to guess the direction from there on.
As for "anyone", there's this bunch of meteorologists, biologists and astrophysicists I'd like you to
meet...
Sounds exactly like my experience with Windows XP x64 edition. Contrary to that, everything worked in Linux precisely because driver support isn't at the whim of greedy vendors, who'd rather have you buy new devices by the dozen than spend any workforce in writing/compiling new drivers.
On the other hand, following on the trails of money, some rather rich people have everything to gain through confusing issues. Many respected scientists agree that the data so far does not speak for keeping our CO2 outputs at a high level. Call me naïve if you want, but which one is the safer bet?
Of course, if we go by Bush it may be a lose-lose situation - either the economy collapses in short term, or everything collapses in long term. It may be argued forever that either or both of these are unwarranted hysteria, but I reckon apathy certainly doesn't carry very far.
Convenience. This is likely to be cheaper to implement than, say, fingerprint detection, doesn't add any external breakable parts, and is certainly less intrusive.
Que hypocrisy: If you disagree with me, you are a fanatic moron.
Now that I checked out the "rathergate" page, it is quite ridiculously broad. On the other hand, what would you yourself propose to resolve the raging debates on the article's Talk page? Hire a "neutral" editor to clean it up? In spirit of the high academic quality you appear to advocate, can you point out examples on a broader scale, to signify that this is not merely an exception, and preferrably refer to actual Wikipedia policies to further back your claim? On the other hand, and I'm very interested to hear, how can information be reliably valued against the social skills of its contributor?
The point is in all respects that Wikipedia is a community-driven effort. This is scary and different, since conventionally article writing involves at most a few people who serve pre-defined roles. There's probably a number of conclusions that can eventually be drawn from it, but it certainly requires more research than finding bad articles and insulting them.
Indeed, what's been stunning to me all this time (I live in Finland, btw) is the whole underlying logic in this:
We do not want people to (illegally) copy our trademarked works. Thus we enforce technical copy-protection schemes. But since most of these schemes are trivially broken due to their nature, we want to make breaking them illegal.
Can anyone at all explain to me why we need this extra middle step in the first place?