I've also always thought of free software as being an extreme example of a truly free market endeavour, the closest to capitalism you can get. It's a FULLY free "market", anyone can contribute, barriers to entry, control and scarcity are close to NULL
You guys are so weird. Do you call making dinner together with your family "an extreme example of a truly free market endeavour"? How about working together on a class project? Open source is a group project where everyone helps out however they want. That's pretty much all it is. It's not the Platonic Capitalism or Socialism, it's just a voluntary group project.
I think what's really going on is that everyone can see how mind-blowingly cool and powerful open source has become. And since geeks tend to be math/science-minded and wealthier than average, concepts of doctrinaire individualistic market economics are considered cool and self-affirming too.
So the temptation to claim open source as a demonstration of the miracles of the free market is irresistible, even though it ends up looking pretty silly. I'm an anarchist, and I too feel the temptation to say "look, open source is proof that anarchism works!" but I resist this, because I realize that open source isn't any of these things, it's just people working together because they have similar goals and interests.
It blows my mind how many people defend a system that keeps them impoverished, not because they don't understand what it's doing to them and their fellows, but because they think they're going to be the man on the top one of these days and they want to be the beneficiary of all those systematic imbalances.
Funny, that's exactly what critics say about modern capitalism.
The writers know they have something the public wants, but they don't have something that the public needs.
It's not about the public, it's about the owners. The public isn't really affected at all by whether or not writers get a cut of advertising profit. The media owners/producers sure as hell are, though - and they're really the only ones the writers need to convince of anything. I think people are too used to looking at actions like this as a "protest" which is intended to swing public opinion. It's not, it's a "direct action" intended to get a specific group of people who really do depend on their work to agree to their demands.
Without teachers, sanitation workers, or several other key-to-functioning roles in our society, things quickly break down when they go on strike.
Guess we should treat those people well then so they don't strike, huh? There's not really another option in a free society - striking is simply declining to work, and you can't force people to work. That's called slavery, which isn't really viable any more for a variety of reasons. Face it, if you live in modern society, you depend on a lot of other people to survive. You probably have some power over them, but they have power over you, too. If you don't like it, become more self-sufficient.
Perhaps the ISP itself does not agree with the spirit of the censorship, and are merely going through the motions to satisfy the court and cover their asses. Basically, maybe they don't care whether people get around the block.
Notifying the vendor that you are selling off the details to anyone willing to pay is blackmail.
Blackmail involves demanding money from someone in return for keeping secret something you know. It seems like if you wanted to blackmail a company, you'd avoid selling the exploit information to anyone so as to keep it secret, and then tell the company that unless they pay X huge sum, you will release the information to third parties.
That's not what they're doing - they've already released the information to third parties, there is no secret and therefore no possibility for blackmail. They're offering to tell anyone about the exploit, and their condition is you have to be subscribed to their service. It seems like there are only two reasons to possibly object to what they're doing:
A) It's wrong to distribute information about vulnerabilities to anybody who's interested - such information should be restricted to a special class of trusted officials or corporate representatives.
B) It's wrong to make money off of information that could be provided for free. (i.e. intellectual property is wrong)
The researcher REFUSES to provide the information to REAL - it doesn't say whether REAL offered them money or not.
The researcher refuses to make a special exception and give Real the information free just because they're the software manufacturer. I'm sure if Real really wanted the information badly they could sign up for the researcher's service like everyone else does. What, you think they do some deep background check to make sure you're not with Real when you sign up?
Real expected to be treated special since they wrote the software, and when they were rebuffed they complained that the researchers had "refused" to give them the information.
Your metaphor is silly because you presuppose that it's all about one person with a vulnerability, and therefore they're the only one with a right to know about it.
In fact, security vulnerabilities affect a whole lot of people in a lot of different ways, so there's plenty of reason to have a for-pay service which alerts anyone who signs up to vulnerabilities when they exist. What qualification do I need to have to be informed of a RealPlayer vulnerability, swear before a court that I have downloaded and installed RealPlayer?
And furthermore, there's reason to expect that an actual proof-of-concept exploit be a part of that alert, for verification purposes. After all, if I'm going to invest a lot of time and resources in responding to a security alert (especially if I'm responsible for a business or organization), I want to be able to confirm for myself that it's a threat to my particular setup, and that it's not some fuck-up by the researchers.
Here's a solution to that problem: Keep the feedback for a transaction hidden until both parties have given feedback. So if I leave you negative feedback, you don't find out until you've already sent your feedback, or vice-versa. This makes it impossible to retaliate.
Yeah, I should ask that! And hey, I know the answer, so I could even answer myself!
Colleges charge more for out-of-state students because they don't get money from the governments of other states. Put another way, colleges charge less for in-state (or in-country) students because the government in that area pays them to do so. The reason the state government does this is because it wants to increase the standards of that state, and ONLY that state, so it sets up the incentives so only kids in that state can go to school cheap, and only if they go to a school in that state.
The desire to increase education, jobs, etc. is well and good, but the problem is that states are trying to increase those things only for themselves, often at the expense of other states, which means at the expense of the jobs, education of people in other states. And ultimately, there is no rational justification, just an "us vs. them" irrational group mentality. Same thing goes for countries, on a larger and more obvious scale.
You missed my point, but it's admittedly a nuanced one.
If "the band" signs to a label and then sells their album direct to fans without giving the suits a cut, that would be stealing, because according to the deal between band and label, a certain percentage of record sales are due the suits.
However, if a fan gets the music some other way, say by downloading it, and then performs some informal service to the band to show his/her appreciation and support, the band has not stolen anything from the suits, because there's rarely a clause in record contracts which say "we get 75% of every nice thing a fan ever does for your group".
There's no stealing going on in these situations, only the failure of fans to buy a commercial product and instead engage in a kind of gift economy exchange with the artists directly. In order to assert theft, you'd have to take the slightly mad angle of the RIAA, which argues that any time someone doesn't buy one of their albums, whoever "allowed" them to not buy the album has stolen profit from the RIAA. As though record labels have some kind of inalienable right to have everyone buy their product...
Sure, pirating media can be intended to do lots other than provide one with free stuff. I say you're too focused on the market here because there's a lot more to the situation than "buy or don't buy". What if I pirate the music and in exchange send the artist an unasked for $5 donation? What if I pirate the music and in exchange play it out at all my parties to promote the artist? These are the kinds of things that, in many cases, an artist would be more than happy to allow, but the middlemen are not.
Since the only thing the middlemen really control is whether or not you can get a copy of the "official" album, pirating can be a way for the fans to take more direct control of their exchange with the artist - and potentially vice-versa, as we see in cases like Trent Reznor encouraging his fans to pirate even though he can't (or won't) officially release his music free.
Basically, pirating makes it possible to "support the band" in many other ways than buying their album, so a fan is no longer faced with a choice of either "buy and support the band" or "don't buy and don't support the band".
Your argument is effectively that people have a choice whether they buy music or not, so they shouldn't complain when the terms are unfair because they're free to reject those terms.
That's a gross oversimplification, presumably based on the myopic assumption that market forces are the end-all be-all of any socio-economic situation.
Often, fans aren't just buying a CD because the object is worth $x to them, they're also doing it to support the artist. The value in the transaction is not just the object, but the knowledge that the fan has given money to someone they admire, to encourage them to keep creating good art. Considering this, it's very much the fan's concern that pretty much all the money they pay is going to someone other than the artist.
In Russia there was overproduction of highly-educated people.
That right there is probably the main reason the Soviets hated us. Talking about the "production" of people is just creepy and dystopian, no matter what an economic model may say.
Why is a kid who happens to be born in the US more entitled to attend an American college than a kid who happens to be born in China?
Should we only give education to someone on the basis of their likelihood to contribute back to industry wherever the college is located? Should we create a system where if you have the fortune of being born near a good school you're set, and otherwise you're screwed?
I believe the part about jocks hospitalizing middle-eastern looking people right after 9/11. I know students who were hospitalized or raped by fellow students because of their apparent ethnicity in the days following 9/11.
My most generous guess would be that the student's behavior was incorrectly misinterpreted as cheering. More likely, the cheering was fabricated after the fact as a justification for one of the many racist attacks which followed 9/11.
As modern human beings, we live in complex systems which consist of multiple layers. While belief or faith doesn't affect the physics layer, it does have a tangible impact on many of the others.
For example, currency has no absolute value, and therefore there's no single truth about the way the system will react to your currency - it depends on whether people believe it has value. The same thing can be said for political leaders, they have power only to the degree that the people they rule believe they do.
A mass shift in belief changes the reality of the system, and therefore our world.
a climate in which learning is actually perceived as an end in itself instead of the gateway to pots of money and an early retirement with a new wife.
I'm not saying it's a good thing, but the vast majority of Americans seem to see learning exactly as your latter description, and the US seems to be doing ok.
Perhaps it's the reverse. Currently, the only people in most parts of Africa who would bother learning are those who see it as an end in itself. Widespread education happens in the first world as a side effect of people single-mindedly pursuing good jobs and elite careers. Since there are few good jobs and almost no elite careers available in Africa, why would someone waste time educating themselves?
What Africa needs is a whole new ethos. And that ain't going to happen soon.
We all need a new ethos, one where we love our fellow man instead of killing him, one where we cooperate to improve humanity instead of sabotaging each other's efforts. That ain't going to happen soon either. It's kind of a cop-out to just say "if people'd change their attitudes and ideas, everything would be fine". While it's true, it's completely impractical, and it ignores the many practical things that can be done to mitigate a dire situation in the mean time.
If we all need to value education more, and we all need a new ethos, but only Africans are starving...there must be some more substantial differences that we can address through practical means, such as the vast trade imbalance and wealth inequality between the first world and Africa.
Interesting. So basically solar and wind might be able to supply a good amount of power, but they don't have the consistency and predictability that would be needed for running a conventional power grid. Doesn't seem like an insurmountable problem - improved energy storage or transmission media would help greatly - but I can see why it makes those energy sources fairly incompatible with our current electricity infrastructure.
Nuclear power is certainly cheaper (and more reliable!) than wind and solar, both of which are not suitable for providing base-load power either (as the summary mentions).
I noticed this concept of "base-load power" was thrown out rather briefly in the article, without really explaining what's special about it and why solar and wind can't provide it. Can you give more details or offer some other sources that explain why solar and wind are specifically unsuitable for "base-load power"?
fences shouldn't be prosecuted for receipt of stolen goods.
If someone knowingly pays someone for something they obtained by committing a crime, that is and should be illegal. If someone buys child porn from someone who's abusing children to produce it, the purchaser is just as responsible for the abuse as the actual abuser, and in my opinion should be punished accordingly (i.e. severely). But the current laws don't make any distinction - they criminalize the image itself, not the act of child abuse or material support of the act.
In the current legal environment, cops can make a bust of some pervert with a bunch of child porn he downloaded from the internet, and they make big news as heroes, even though they didn't do shit to actually stop child abuse. It's much easier to bust these types of perverts than it is to bust actual child predators, and it makes the same good headlines, so guess who they're going to spend their time on?
Now, I'd even go so far as to say that possession of child porn constitutes probable cause to launch an investigation into someone's activities and contacts, in order to uncover evidence that they or someone they're connected with is involved in abusing children. But if they're not abusing children or providing material support to those who do, they're not hurting anybody. As distasteful and reprehensible as we find it, we can't give in to the puritan mindset of banning things that make us uncomfortable.
If you think images of torture victims should be legal, you too are a nut, since torture is just as twisted, degrading, and distasteful as child molestation. So it follows that images of torture should be illegal as well, yes?
Outlawing talking about or depicting something horrible doesn't prevent the thing itself, it just allows us to more easily convince ourselves it isn't happening. It's a band-aid solution to keep us from having to think or deal with the problem. And band-aid solutions to child sexual assault are absolutely unacceptable.
That's linked to on every freaking page of the encyclopedia. Everybody knows what Wikipedia is, because the media and people like you can't shut up about how unreliable it is. But the official look and tone of much of the content - and the fact that the vast majority of it is accurate - fools many people into thinking it's the Word of God.
That's the people's fault, not Wikipedia's. It's not the project's responsibility to hold everyone's hand and constantly remind them at every turn. "Lincoln was born in 1809, but remember, sometimes strangers on the internet might say something that isn't true! So maybe he wasn't born in 1809! We make no claim to the validity of that statement! Ok, anyway, he was the 16th president of the United States...but maybe not!" If someone's idea of researching a topic is to look on the internet and take the first thing they read as gospel, or to only be skeptical when a disclaimer instructs them to, they've lost already, no matter what Wikipedia says or does. I can sort out fact from opinion, I can do my own research. Leave the fucking content alone and trust me to figure it out for myself.
And I really don't see how putting the disclaimer at the top of the page will somehow make there be "a lot less vandalism and a lot less cabal manipulation".
I'm pretty sure, though not totally confident, that "common carrier" isn't an official bureaucratic status, like something you have to apply for or be a certain type of business for. It's simply a legal category to describe a technology which indiscriminately relays information that anyone puts on it.
For example, if you operated a hobby radio repeater and someone broadcasted a bomb threat to town hall through your radio repeater, you wouldn't be liable because you're a common carrier - your technology relays anyone's information. Of course, this still doesn't get you off the hook if you use your own repeater to send in a bomb threat yourself, just protects you from being punished for traffic that didn't originate from you.
I'd be glad to hear from someone who knows more about it though.
Slashdot Mirror
I've also always thought of free software as being an extreme example of a truly free market endeavour, the closest to capitalism you can get. It's a FULLY free "market", anyone can contribute, barriers to entry, control and scarcity are close to NULL
You guys are so weird. Do you call making dinner together with your family "an extreme example of a truly free market endeavour"? How about working together on a class project? Open source is a group project where everyone helps out however they want. That's pretty much all it is. It's not the Platonic Capitalism or Socialism, it's just a voluntary group project.
I think what's really going on is that everyone can see how mind-blowingly cool and powerful open source has become. And since geeks tend to be math/science-minded and wealthier than average, concepts of doctrinaire individualistic market economics are considered cool and self-affirming too.
So the temptation to claim open source as a demonstration of the miracles of the free market is irresistible, even though it ends up looking pretty silly. I'm an anarchist, and I too feel the temptation to say "look, open source is proof that anarchism works!" but I resist this, because I realize that open source isn't any of these things, it's just people working together because they have similar goals and interests.
It blows my mind how many people defend a system that keeps them impoverished, not because they don't understand what it's doing to them and their fellows, but because they think they're going to be the man on the top one of these days and they want to be the beneficiary of all those systematic imbalances.
Funny, that's exactly what critics say about modern capitalism.
The writers know they have something the public wants, but they don't have something that the public needs.
It's not about the public, it's about the owners. The public isn't really affected at all by whether or not writers get a cut of advertising profit. The media owners/producers sure as hell are, though - and they're really the only ones the writers need to convince of anything. I think people are too used to looking at actions like this as a "protest" which is intended to swing public opinion. It's not, it's a "direct action" intended to get a specific group of people who really do depend on their work to agree to their demands.
Without teachers, sanitation workers, or several other key-to-functioning roles in our society, things quickly break down when they go on strike.
Guess we should treat those people well then so they don't strike, huh? There's not really another option in a free society - striking is simply declining to work, and you can't force people to work. That's called slavery, which isn't really viable any more for a variety of reasons. Face it, if you live in modern society, you depend on a lot of other people to survive. You probably have some power over them, but they have power over you, too. If you don't like it, become more self-sufficient.
Perhaps the ISP itself does not agree with the spirit of the censorship, and are merely going through the motions to satisfy the court and cover their asses. Basically, maybe they don't care whether people get around the block.
Notifying the vendor that you are selling off the details to anyone willing to pay is blackmail.
Blackmail involves demanding money from someone in return for keeping secret something you know. It seems like if you wanted to blackmail a company, you'd avoid selling the exploit information to anyone so as to keep it secret, and then tell the company that unless they pay X huge sum, you will release the information to third parties.
That's not what they're doing - they've already released the information to third parties, there is no secret and therefore no possibility for blackmail. They're offering to tell anyone about the exploit, and their condition is you have to be subscribed to their service. It seems like there are only two reasons to possibly object to what they're doing:
A) It's wrong to distribute information about vulnerabilities to anybody who's interested - such information should be restricted to a special class of trusted officials or corporate representatives.
B) It's wrong to make money off of information that could be provided for free. (i.e. intellectual property is wrong)
The researcher REFUSES to provide the information to REAL - it doesn't say whether REAL offered them money or not.
The researcher refuses to make a special exception and give Real the information free just because they're the software manufacturer. I'm sure if Real really wanted the information badly they could sign up for the researcher's service like everyone else does. What, you think they do some deep background check to make sure you're not with Real when you sign up?
Real expected to be treated special since they wrote the software, and when they were rebuffed they complained that the researchers had "refused" to give them the information.
Your metaphor is silly because you presuppose that it's all about one person with a vulnerability, and therefore they're the only one with a right to know about it.
In fact, security vulnerabilities affect a whole lot of people in a lot of different ways, so there's plenty of reason to have a for-pay service which alerts anyone who signs up to vulnerabilities when they exist. What qualification do I need to have to be informed of a RealPlayer vulnerability, swear before a court that I have downloaded and installed RealPlayer?
And furthermore, there's reason to expect that an actual proof-of-concept exploit be a part of that alert, for verification purposes. After all, if I'm going to invest a lot of time and resources in responding to a security alert (especially if I'm responsible for a business or organization), I want to be able to confirm for myself that it's a threat to my particular setup, and that it's not some fuck-up by the researchers.
Here's a solution to that problem: Keep the feedback for a transaction hidden until both parties have given feedback. So if I leave you negative feedback, you don't find out until you've already sent your feedback, or vice-versa. This makes it impossible to retaliate.
Yeah, I should ask that! And hey, I know the answer, so I could even answer myself!
Colleges charge more for out-of-state students because they don't get money from the governments of other states. Put another way, colleges charge less for in-state (or in-country) students because the government in that area pays them to do so. The reason the state government does this is because it wants to increase the standards of that state, and ONLY that state, so it sets up the incentives so only kids in that state can go to school cheap, and only if they go to a school in that state.
The desire to increase education, jobs, etc. is well and good, but the problem is that states are trying to increase those things only for themselves, often at the expense of other states, which means at the expense of the jobs, education of people in other states. And ultimately, there is no rational justification, just an "us vs. them" irrational group mentality. Same thing goes for countries, on a larger and more obvious scale.
You missed my point, but it's admittedly a nuanced one.
If "the band" signs to a label and then sells their album direct to fans without giving the suits a cut, that would be stealing, because according to the deal between band and label, a certain percentage of record sales are due the suits.
However, if a fan gets the music some other way, say by downloading it, and then performs some informal service to the band to show his/her appreciation and support, the band has not stolen anything from the suits, because there's rarely a clause in record contracts which say "we get 75% of every nice thing a fan ever does for your group".
There's no stealing going on in these situations, only the failure of fans to buy a commercial product and instead engage in a kind of gift economy exchange with the artists directly. In order to assert theft, you'd have to take the slightly mad angle of the RIAA, which argues that any time someone doesn't buy one of their albums, whoever "allowed" them to not buy the album has stolen profit from the RIAA. As though record labels have some kind of inalienable right to have everyone buy their product...
Sure, pirating media can be intended to do lots other than provide one with free stuff. I say you're too focused on the market here because there's a lot more to the situation than "buy or don't buy". What if I pirate the music and in exchange send the artist an unasked for $5 donation? What if I pirate the music and in exchange play it out at all my parties to promote the artist? These are the kinds of things that, in many cases, an artist would be more than happy to allow, but the middlemen are not.
Since the only thing the middlemen really control is whether or not you can get a copy of the "official" album, pirating can be a way for the fans to take more direct control of their exchange with the artist - and potentially vice-versa, as we see in cases like Trent Reznor encouraging his fans to pirate even though he can't (or won't) officially release his music free.
Basically, pirating makes it possible to "support the band" in many other ways than buying their album, so a fan is no longer faced with a choice of either "buy and support the band" or "don't buy and don't support the band".
Your argument is effectively that people have a choice whether they buy music or not, so they shouldn't complain when the terms are unfair because they're free to reject those terms.
That's a gross oversimplification, presumably based on the myopic assumption that market forces are the end-all be-all of any socio-economic situation.
Often, fans aren't just buying a CD because the object is worth $x to them, they're also doing it to support the artist. The value in the transaction is not just the object, but the knowledge that the fan has given money to someone they admire, to encourage them to keep creating good art. Considering this, it's very much the fan's concern that pretty much all the money they pay is going to someone other than the artist.
In Russia there was overproduction of highly-educated people.
That right there is probably the main reason the Soviets hated us. Talking about the "production" of people is just creepy and dystopian, no matter what an economic model may say.
lol@nationalism
Why is a kid who happens to be born in the US more entitled to attend an American college than a kid who happens to be born in China?
Should we only give education to someone on the basis of their likelihood to contribute back to industry wherever the college is located? Should we create a system where if you have the fortune of being born near a good school you're set, and otherwise you're screwed?
I believe the part about jocks hospitalizing middle-eastern looking people right after 9/11. I know students who were hospitalized or raped by fellow students because of their apparent ethnicity in the days following 9/11.
My most generous guess would be that the student's behavior was incorrectly misinterpreted as cheering. More likely, the cheering was fabricated after the fact as a justification for one of the many racist attacks which followed 9/11.
As modern human beings, we live in complex systems which consist of multiple layers. While belief or faith doesn't affect the physics layer, it does have a tangible impact on many of the others.
For example, currency has no absolute value, and therefore there's no single truth about the way the system will react to your currency - it depends on whether people believe it has value. The same thing can be said for political leaders, they have power only to the degree that the people they rule believe they do.
A mass shift in belief changes the reality of the system, and therefore our world.
a climate in which learning is actually perceived as an end in itself instead of the gateway to pots of money and an early retirement with a new wife.
I'm not saying it's a good thing, but the vast majority of Americans seem to see learning exactly as your latter description, and the US seems to be doing ok.
Perhaps it's the reverse. Currently, the only people in most parts of Africa who would bother learning are those who see it as an end in itself. Widespread education happens in the first world as a side effect of people single-mindedly pursuing good jobs and elite careers. Since there are few good jobs and almost no elite careers available in Africa, why would someone waste time educating themselves?
What Africa needs is a whole new ethos. And that ain't going to happen soon.
We all need a new ethos, one where we love our fellow man instead of killing him, one where we cooperate to improve humanity instead of sabotaging each other's efforts. That ain't going to happen soon either. It's kind of a cop-out to just say "if people'd change their attitudes and ideas, everything would be fine". While it's true, it's completely impractical, and it ignores the many practical things that can be done to mitigate a dire situation in the mean time.
If we all need to value education more, and we all need a new ethos, but only Africans are starving...there must be some more substantial differences that we can address through practical means, such as the vast trade imbalance and wealth inequality between the first world and Africa.
Interesting. So basically solar and wind might be able to supply a good amount of power, but they don't have the consistency and predictability that would be needed for running a conventional power grid. Doesn't seem like an insurmountable problem - improved energy storage or transmission media would help greatly - but I can see why it makes those energy sources fairly incompatible with our current electricity infrastructure.
Nuclear power is certainly cheaper (and more reliable!) than wind and solar, both of which are not suitable for providing base-load power either (as the summary mentions).
I noticed this concept of "base-load power" was thrown out rather briefly in the article, without really explaining what's special about it and why solar and wind can't provide it. Can you give more details or offer some other sources that explain why solar and wind are specifically unsuitable for "base-load power"?
fences shouldn't be prosecuted for receipt of stolen goods.
If someone knowingly pays someone for something they obtained by committing a crime, that is and should be illegal. If someone buys child porn from someone who's abusing children to produce it, the purchaser is just as responsible for the abuse as the actual abuser, and in my opinion should be punished accordingly (i.e. severely). But the current laws don't make any distinction - they criminalize the image itself, not the act of child abuse or material support of the act.
In the current legal environment, cops can make a bust of some pervert with a bunch of child porn he downloaded from the internet, and they make big news as heroes, even though they didn't do shit to actually stop child abuse. It's much easier to bust these types of perverts than it is to bust actual child predators, and it makes the same good headlines, so guess who they're going to spend their time on?
Now, I'd even go so far as to say that possession of child porn constitutes probable cause to launch an investigation into someone's activities and contacts, in order to uncover evidence that they or someone they're connected with is involved in abusing children. But if they're not abusing children or providing material support to those who do, they're not hurting anybody. As distasteful and reprehensible as we find it, we can't give in to the puritan mindset of banning things that make us uncomfortable.
If you think images of torture victims should be legal, you too are a nut, since torture is just as twisted, degrading, and distasteful as child molestation. So it follows that images of torture should be illegal as well, yes?
Outlawing talking about or depicting something horrible doesn't prevent the thing itself, it just allows us to more easily convince ourselves it isn't happening. It's a band-aid solution to keep us from having to think or deal with the problem. And band-aid solutions to child sexual assault are absolutely unacceptable.
Yeah well, you know, that's just like, your opinion, man.
my bad, that was supposed to be Wikipedia:General Disclaimer
Wikipedia:General Disclaimer
That's linked to on every freaking page of the encyclopedia. Everybody knows what Wikipedia is, because the media and people like you can't shut up about how unreliable it is. But the official look and tone of much of the content - and the fact that the vast majority of it is accurate - fools many people into thinking it's the Word of God.
That's the people's fault, not Wikipedia's. It's not the project's responsibility to hold everyone's hand and constantly remind them at every turn. "Lincoln was born in 1809, but remember, sometimes strangers on the internet might say something that isn't true! So maybe he wasn't born in 1809! We make no claim to the validity of that statement! Ok, anyway, he was the 16th president of the United States...but maybe not!" If someone's idea of researching a topic is to look on the internet and take the first thing they read as gospel, or to only be skeptical when a disclaimer instructs them to, they've lost already, no matter what Wikipedia says or does. I can sort out fact from opinion, I can do my own research. Leave the fucking content alone and trust me to figure it out for myself.
And I really don't see how putting the disclaimer at the top of the page will somehow make there be "a lot less vandalism and a lot less cabal manipulation".
I'm pretty sure, though not totally confident, that "common carrier" isn't an official bureaucratic status, like something you have to apply for or be a certain type of business for. It's simply a legal category to describe a technology which indiscriminately relays information that anyone puts on it.
For example, if you operated a hobby radio repeater and someone broadcasted a bomb threat to town hall through your radio repeater, you wouldn't be liable because you're a common carrier - your technology relays anyone's information. Of course, this still doesn't get you off the hook if you use your own repeater to send in a bomb threat yourself, just protects you from being punished for traffic that didn't originate from you.
I'd be glad to hear from someone who knows more about it though.