I think Wikipedia is a great thing in theory, and is generally great in practice. However, it's not "blaming Wikipedia" to note that there are aspects of what it is which lend themselves to abuse, and which lend themselves to revising history (albeit generally in small ways). It is absolutely not Wikipedia's "fault" that people reference it without care and consideration. Nor is it Wikipedia's "fault" that faulty information from others practicing unsafe Wiki can end up in other reference material, which is then later used as a primary source for putting the info into Wikipedia, completing the loop. These problems are not the "fault" of Wikipedia, and it's not "blaming" Wikipedia to note that Wikipedia is an essential link in the chain. The blame is entirely attributable to the people who provided and propagated the false information, but it's undeniable that Wikipedia facilitates doing so. Yes, traditional media (books, news, etc) can absolutely be used to propagate false information as well, but the cost is usually higher so fewer people are going to do that sort of social engineering on a whim. Wikipedia didn't cause the problem of false information becoming part of established fact, but it did make it easier and made the problem more visible. The proper response isn't to blame Wikipedia, but to gain a better perspective/skepticism on what "fact" is and on the degree of trust we place in various sources of information. These are things we should have been doing before Wikipedia came along and we need to be doing it now even more. There is probably also work that can be done by Wikipedia to help counter its usefulness to people trying to manipulate the truth, but Wikipedia didn't create the problem and it can't single-handedly solve the problem.
For the most part, I agree with you. However, as has been pointed out by someone else, you have to consider (expect even) that the contamination rate is quite low. How many crimes do you think they used cotton swabs for during this time period? Tens of thousands? Probably several swabs per crime? Very likely. But she was only fingered for 20 crimes. This indicates (but doesn't prove) a very low contamination rate. So...it's possible that they could have had "adequate" quality control sampling in place for their cotton swabs and still missed the contaminated swabs. A better control would perhaps be to clip a piece of each swab before use so that it can be tested along with the used swab. Especially given that in situations like this, a single failure can have serious consequences, a more rigorous testing method like that is probably in order.
I highly recommend "The Symphony for Dot Matrix Printers", by The User. You can find it on eMusic I think (probably elsewhere as well). It's like being in the computer lab of yore, but with style.:)
False exceptionalism of the present
on
Jurassic Web
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· Score: 1
We spent a lot of time in college, in 1996, on the web. We got hardwired connections in the dorms in January 1996. As I recall, we spent a lot of time playing GameZone Spades (I think that's what it was called) back when it was independent instead of a MS property. There was PLENTY to do on the web "back then". Yes, the web is richer in content, but there was far more than you could make use of even then, with new goodies popping up constantly.
As a voter, you, personally, may not get much (any) benefit from any other voting system. As a citizen, it is in your collective's best interest to ensure that voting and counting go smoothly. People writing on paper or punching holes in paper is a system which leads to discrepant results. You can say "fill in the bubble", and the question then becomes, "what percentage of the bubble must be filled in to count?" or "what if another bubble has a mark in it?" or any number of other questions (see the Franken/Coleman recount). And, of course, the infamous hanging chads.... A system which eliminates the variation and which makes it completely clear what votes were and weren't cast is simply superior. The question is, what is that system? Personally, I don't see why this question is so difficult...create electric voting system (yes, there are arguments for different UIs, we'll set those aside). Electric voting system keeps track of vote count. It also prints out human & machine readable paper ballot which citizen places in ballot box (and which has machine's ID # on it for reference). Preliminary results are easily generated from electric vote count. Final results can be determined from scanning paper ballots. Discrepancies lead to audits of the machines which don't match their paper ballots. Personally, I can't imagine why that is not superior to all the voting systems I've had the opportunity to use, but I'm open to other hearing why it isn't.
If Wikipedia's goal is to only include information deemed relevant for Brittanica, we can have done and go read Brittanica. The theoretical beauty of WP is that it can effectively catalogue and present a much greater breadth of knowledge than EB can. I go to WP b/c it has information I can not easily access elsewhere. Yes, I'm an inclusionist, and I make no apologies for it. If Wikipedia degrades to being a reworded Brittanica, it will be a tragedy for humanity.
because share price and market cap often act as a collateral of sorts for credit. and without the grease of credit, as you should know by now, the wheels don't turn so well....
since when was the world lacking people willing to take a risk against the odds? some win, some lose, but the possibility to win means there are some who will try, and if they do, it can be doom for a company.
not the mod who did that...but c'mon, you can understand why, if you haven't been to/heard of craphound.com, you could look at that url and think something fishy is going on.... it does make me wonder, though...should a responsible mod try to visit a given link to verify that it is, indeed, a rickroll/malware before modding troll?
i got a bunch of stuff from there quite a while back. it's not exactly hi fi...but it's extremely interesting (if you're into the history of music sort of thing). probably even more than these 78s, though, you have to be aware that turn of the 20th century popular entertainment was often quite racist and bigoted. it's not all like that, but it's a definite presence in the collection.
someone's a bit tetchy today. i don't see anywhere where the gp mentioned churches, the perils of science, etc. so you're pulling a lot of personal baggage into your response that is rather unwarranted....
that said, i'm not a big fan of actions like this either...to the extent that a person is only jeopardizing themselves. there are and should be lines though.... the next-door neighbor likes to cook up nitroglycerin? not cool, for example. and yes, please remove the materials from next to my house. he wants to do it in some shed or barn not in my backyard? by all means. have a blast.
imo, having determined that the materials weren't imminently dangerous, they should have been returned. it's the disregard for property rights that i see most at issue here, not necessarily the concern for hazardous activities in a residential area. now...perhaps the law draws the line a little too far on the "keep people safe" side of things, but the line should be there.
what's sad is that the system is so fscked up that i had to go check that patent number...because it's entirely plausible to me that our glorious patent office would actually pass through a patent like that....
b/c these computers *aren't* getting updates from windows. if they had firewalls turned on and all the latest security updates, they probably wouldn't be part of the botnet to begin with. the problem is so many computers which don't have auto-update turned on *AND* don't have anyone actively managing their patch level. so...odds are microsoft already has the 'patch', but even if they didn't, it wouldn't shut down the botnet if they added it to windows update because the botnet wouldn't be updating from windows update.
meh. why don't you take your suggestion to the logical conclusion? in reality, we should just have a _single_ article telling people to keep an eye on the AP wire, the Reuters wire, any of several major newspapers, CNet, Science, Nature.... i'm sure you can help fill out that list. if only the editors would publish that article, we could just take care of all these other, redundant "articles" polluting the purity which/. should be.
personally, i don't have time to watch every media outlet, which is why i come to sites like slashdot which aggregate content for like-minded people.
your words. i said that i feel "news" is when companies are causing harm. if we wanted to highlight every time a company broke some obscure or insignificant codicil of their policies, we could create another slashdot dedicated to the topic. i haven't heard anyone argue that real harm (from a layperson's perspective) was caused by amazon in this case. privacy policies are completely irrelevant. simply put, don't use a straw-man and think you've said something witty or clever because you haven't made a relevant point at all.
i don't recall mentioning contract. were i in contract law, i might give a rip about the legal definition of harm. however, in my news stories, i prefer people to save their hyperbole for stories where real harm is occurring, not where they got stymied in their attempt to screw a corporation. so, i stand by my statement that no real harm occurred, and that this is not really news. there are enough real examples of corporations causing financial damage and ruin that we need not resort to such trivialities we see highlighted here.
that may be the point, but it's a weak one. is it really news to all of us that sometimes companies don't follow all the steps they say they are? if amazon had charged them, failed to deliver, and "forgotten" about the orders, that would be one thing, but the harm done here is...somewhat minimal. did anyone die b/c they didn't get their fire-sale priced box set? thought not. while i'd certainly be sad if i found out i couldn't get the deal of a lifetime, eh, you don't win the lottery every day.
Slashdot Mirror
I think Wikipedia is a great thing in theory, and is generally great in practice. However, it's not "blaming Wikipedia" to note that there are aspects of what it is which lend themselves to abuse, and which lend themselves to revising history (albeit generally in small ways). It is absolutely not Wikipedia's "fault" that people reference it without care and consideration. Nor is it Wikipedia's "fault" that faulty information from others practicing unsafe Wiki can end up in other reference material, which is then later used as a primary source for putting the info into Wikipedia, completing the loop. These problems are not the "fault" of Wikipedia, and it's not "blaming" Wikipedia to note that Wikipedia is an essential link in the chain. The blame is entirely attributable to the people who provided and propagated the false information, but it's undeniable that Wikipedia facilitates doing so. Yes, traditional media (books, news, etc) can absolutely be used to propagate false information as well, but the cost is usually higher so fewer people are going to do that sort of social engineering on a whim. Wikipedia didn't cause the problem of false information becoming part of established fact, but it did make it easier and made the problem more visible. The proper response isn't to blame Wikipedia, but to gain a better perspective/skepticism on what "fact" is and on the degree of trust we place in various sources of information. These are things we should have been doing before Wikipedia came along and we need to be doing it now even more. There is probably also work that can be done by Wikipedia to help counter its usefulness to people trying to manipulate the truth, but Wikipedia didn't create the problem and it can't single-handedly solve the problem.
For the most part, I agree with you. However, as has been pointed out by someone else, you have to consider (expect even) that the contamination rate is quite low. How many crimes do you think they used cotton swabs for during this time period? Tens of thousands? Probably several swabs per crime? Very likely. But she was only fingered for 20 crimes. This indicates (but doesn't prove) a very low contamination rate. So...it's possible that they could have had "adequate" quality control sampling in place for their cotton swabs and still missed the contaminated swabs. A better control would perhaps be to clip a piece of each swab before use so that it can be tested along with the used swab. Especially given that in situations like this, a single failure can have serious consequences, a more rigorous testing method like that is probably in order.
Maybe you weren't here for last year's post on the topic. Interesting it may be, but "news" it sure ain't.
I highly recommend "The Symphony for Dot Matrix Printers", by The User. You can find it on eMusic I think (probably elsewhere as well). It's like being in the computer lab of yore, but with style. :)
We spent a lot of time in college, in 1996, on the web. We got hardwired connections in the dorms in January 1996. As I recall, we spent a lot of time playing GameZone Spades (I think that's what it was called) back when it was independent instead of a MS property. There was PLENTY to do on the web "back then". Yes, the web is richer in content, but there was far more than you could make use of even then, with new goodies popping up constantly.
As a voter, you, personally, may not get much (any) benefit from any other voting system. As a citizen, it is in your collective's best interest to ensure that voting and counting go smoothly. People writing on paper or punching holes in paper is a system which leads to discrepant results. You can say "fill in the bubble", and the question then becomes, "what percentage of the bubble must be filled in to count?" or "what if another bubble has a mark in it?" or any number of other questions (see the Franken/Coleman recount). And, of course, the infamous hanging chads.... A system which eliminates the variation and which makes it completely clear what votes were and weren't cast is simply superior. The question is, what is that system? Personally, I don't see why this question is so difficult...create electric voting system (yes, there are arguments for different UIs, we'll set those aside). Electric voting system keeps track of vote count. It also prints out human & machine readable paper ballot which citizen places in ballot box (and which has machine's ID # on it for reference). Preliminary results are easily generated from electric vote count. Final results can be determined from scanning paper ballots. Discrepancies lead to audits of the machines which don't match their paper ballots. Personally, I can't imagine why that is not superior to all the voting systems I've had the opportunity to use, but I'm open to other hearing why it isn't.
If Wikipedia's goal is to only include information deemed relevant for Brittanica, we can have done and go read Brittanica. The theoretical beauty of WP is that it can effectively catalogue and present a much greater breadth of knowledge than EB can. I go to WP b/c it has information I can not easily access elsewhere. Yes, I'm an inclusionist, and I make no apologies for it. If Wikipedia degrades to being a reworded Brittanica, it will be a tragedy for humanity.
because share price and market cap often act as a collateral of sorts for credit. and without the grease of credit, as you should know by now, the wheels don't turn so well....
since when was the world lacking people willing to take a risk against the odds? some win, some lose, but the possibility to win means there are some who will try, and if they do, it can be doom for a company.
if it tastes even a little bit like marmite, no thanks!
not the mod who did that...but c'mon, you can understand why, if you haven't been to/heard of craphound.com, you could look at that url and think something fishy is going on.... it does make me wonder, though...should a responsible mod try to visit a given link to verify that it is, indeed, a rickroll/malware before modding troll?
why was the last one not posted on Ask Slashdot? Clearly it belongs there, not under idle. At least the discussion would be interesting....
check out the Cylinder Preservation Project: http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/
i got a bunch of stuff from there quite a while back. it's not exactly hi fi...but it's extremely interesting (if you're into the history of music sort of thing). probably even more than these 78s, though, you have to be aware that turn of the 20th century popular entertainment was often quite racist and bigoted. it's not all like that, but it's a definite presence in the collection.
someone's a bit tetchy today. i don't see anywhere where the gp mentioned churches, the perils of science, etc. so you're pulling a lot of personal baggage into your response that is rather unwarranted....
that said, i'm not a big fan of actions like this either...to the extent that a person is only jeopardizing themselves. there are and should be lines though.... the next-door neighbor likes to cook up nitroglycerin? not cool, for example. and yes, please remove the materials from next to my house. he wants to do it in some shed or barn not in my backyard? by all means. have a blast.
imo, having determined that the materials weren't imminently dangerous, they should have been returned. it's the disregard for property rights that i see most at issue here, not necessarily the concern for hazardous activities in a residential area. now...perhaps the law draws the line a little too far on the "keep people safe" side of things, but the line should be there.
Fertile soil?
what's sad is that the system is so fscked up that i had to go check that patent number...because it's entirely plausible to me that our glorious patent office would actually pass through a patent like that....
sounds like the perfect lighting material if you're a manufacturer...a nice guarantee that your customer will come back over and over and over....
b/c these computers *aren't* getting updates from windows. if they had firewalls turned on and all the latest security updates, they probably wouldn't be part of the botnet to begin with. the problem is so many computers which don't have auto-update turned on *AND* don't have anyone actively managing their patch level. so...odds are microsoft already has the 'patch', but even if they didn't, it wouldn't shut down the botnet if they added it to windows update because the botnet wouldn't be updating from windows update.
nonono....as every veteran slashdotter knows, all physics is the result of the electric universe.... particle physics ppffftt!
you have apparently forgotten the joys of the dot matrix printer.
meh. why don't you take your suggestion to the logical conclusion? in reality, we should just have a _single_ article telling people to keep an eye on the AP wire, the Reuters wire, any of several major newspapers, CNet, Science, Nature.... i'm sure you can help fill out that list. if only the editors would publish that article, we could just take care of all these other, redundant "articles" polluting the purity which /. should be.
personally, i don't have time to watch every media outlet, which is why i come to sites like slashdot which aggregate content for like-minded people.
or were you just here for the discussion?
your words. i said that i feel "news" is when companies are causing harm. if we wanted to highlight every time a company broke some obscure or insignificant codicil of their policies, we could create another slashdot dedicated to the topic. i haven't heard anyone argue that real harm (from a layperson's perspective) was caused by amazon in this case. privacy policies are completely irrelevant. simply put, don't use a straw-man and think you've said something witty or clever because you haven't made a relevant point at all.
i don't recall mentioning contract. were i in contract law, i might give a rip about the legal definition of harm. however, in my news stories, i prefer people to save their hyperbole for stories where real harm is occurring, not where they got stymied in their attempt to screw a corporation. so, i stand by my statement that no real harm occurred, and that this is not really news. there are enough real examples of corporations causing financial damage and ruin that we need not resort to such trivialities we see highlighted here.
and if someone enters it in incorrectly the first time?
that may be the point, but it's a weak one. is it really news to all of us that sometimes companies don't follow all the steps they say they are? if amazon had charged them, failed to deliver, and "forgotten" about the orders, that would be one thing, but the harm done here is...somewhat minimal. did anyone die b/c they didn't get their fire-sale priced box set? thought not. while i'd certainly be sad if i found out i couldn't get the deal of a lifetime, eh, you don't win the lottery every day.