You have to realize that content costs money. Yeah, with Blu-Ray you have the potential to store a lot more content, but who's going to generate the content? It's kind of a separate concern, but aren't video games expensive enough to produce as it is? Furthermore most games that involve massive amounts of content are MMOs anyway - and so by definition you'd be able to download more of the info from the server. That would make the restriction one of hard drive space, I suppose.
In any case, I think that if Blu-ray does end up making better games (and I seriously doubt it will) that the 360 still has nothing to lose. They can develop games that are just as big, and then sell them in both formats. Same game, buy it on HD-DVDs or buy it on a whole collection of DVDs. You're allowing people to choose whether to invest in the new hardware instead of asking everyone to close their eyes and jump with you.
MS has the option of working with next gen DVDs, but they haven't built the cost into their model from day 1. Seems a much smarter route.
That's the beauty of the MS strategy. Sony is making everyone pay for the the Blue-Ray. MS knows that everyone out there just wants to know that they can upgrade the 360 to HD-DVD. You know, if they wanted to. No one likes to say "never" to a possibly cool next-gen idea. But rather than going overboard and forcing everyone to commit, MS just left the door open for everyone.
Even though I doubt many people will buy the HD-DVD accessory, it's critical for xbox 360 sales for people to know they could.
I'm familiar with the concept of the Cathedral vs. the Bazaar, and I certainly think it's relevant, but I'm not sure the analogy works as well with information in general as it does with, say, software or other product development.
The key difference is that I don't want to stress simply the top-down vs. bottom-up approach, I want to highlight how questions of objectivity make dealing with wikipedia a fundamentally different problem than dealing with, say, the linux kernel. In both cases you have a fundamentally bottom-up approach and you have experts that review and control submissions.
The trouble has to do with how much power you give these experts, and how you determine who's an expert. In matters where there are objective, fairly non-controversial criteria (like in dealing with the linux kernel) the matter of picking experts is also largely non-controversial. In matters of politics, religion, and history (all of which are covered by wikipedia) the criteria of being an expert is neither objective nor non-controversial.
For this reason you can get a very bazaar-like system (Citizendium) that is in fact not an open bazaar. It's more like a bazaar with a heavy mafia presence. The ideas are still largely bottom-up, but whoever is in control of the expert-selection process can largely control the final results. It's not quite the same as a cathedral because you can still have most submissions from the teeming, unwashed masses, but it lacks in openness. Not because openness is taken away, but because - due to the controversial nature of criteria - more openness is required in subjective than in objective disciplines.
I don't agree with what you've said, I'm just not sure what you think it has to do with what I said. Nothing in my post is meant to imply that Wikimedia in some way doesn't want to see additional sources of open content out there. In fact, what I'm saying is simply that I'm skeptical that Citizendium will in fact be "open content".
I didn't say you had changed your viewpoint. But you are certainly disavowing your initial comment. Perhaps it was said in haste, perhaps you didn't really mean it. I don't know. But it's telling that while you boldly embark on an effort to defend "what I have previously said", you completely neglect to respond to the very line that is the source of apparent confusion. This would seem to indicate that for you the priority is to save face, or "win" and not to stand behind your own arguments.
It's all well and good to defend what you have said, but to defend a part of it and pretend that you are defending all of it is a waste of time. A waste of your time and mine.
me -> I'm not making any positive claims (e.g. I'm not saying "the us response is rational and justified"), I'm simply pointing out that radicalism in your own argument.
you -> This is simply not true; you do make some positive claims...
me -> Anyone who thinks radical Islam is not a rising global threat clearly has at least one eye closed.
Fair enough. I should have better distinguished between my central thesis (your radicalism) and a tangential claim (the real danger of radical Islam). I can prove the first without the second, and for this reason I stated that I had made no positive claims. What I meant was that no positive claims were required to prove my central thesis. But I did in fact embark on a tangential argument that involved positive claims and thus my statement, unqualified as it is, is incorrect. You see - this is a productive way to respond when you are caught making a logical error or a false statement in an argument. Don't just selectively quote around the issue to save face; own up to your mistakes and see it as an opportunity to clarify a position.
Unless here you are implying that you yourself have 'one eye closed', then you are making the positive claim that radical Islam is a rising global threat.
Yay. You're "winning" the argument. If I'd known this was a game to you, I could have saved myself the trouble of taking you seriously. You can't simultaneously argue with integrity and be willing to engage in cover-up tactics to win. You're doing a great job of scoring points, but in the process you're refusing to own up to your own logical errors and thus merrily marching off the beaten path of reasonable discourse and into the morass of adolescent bickering.
you have devoted a significant portion of your life to making a sport of this and I do not wish to be a further part of it
Clearly you did not actually read the contents of my blog. If you had, you would know how seriously I take internet debate, and how much I am irked by those who see it as a power struggle, a game, etc. This is unmistakable from my first entry where I draw a a distinction between "argument" and "debate". The point of arguing is to win. Something I'm not at all interested in. The point of debating is a kind of evolution of ideas: you refine your good ideas by subjecting them to good-faith criticism while engaging in the same good-faith criticism of others. (It should go without saying that any effort to dodge criticism of your argument while launching spurious attacks on your opponent are not examples of "good faith criticism").
I think it's very telling that in the same post in which you accuse me of playing games that are "so clever" you have utterly refused to own up to your own statements. In addition, you accuse me of playing games only after you've sufficiently exhausted your portrayal of me as dishonest, and you withdraw from the debate (such as it is) only after you've had your little say. Furthermore, and most telling of all, you condemn me on the basis of blog articles which you have manifestly never read.
The fact is that I did make a false statement in my argument. I have no trouble admitting this,
Its ridiculous to compare governments with software
Who said open-source was only about software? Since we're talking about wikipedia as being an open-source encyclopedia, clearly this is not the case.
Home users of software and companies need software to perform a purpose. The idealogical aspect of it is a far second to that.
You didn't pay attention to my post. I said the reason idealogy was relevant was precisely because it can shed light on the ability of software (or something else) to perform a purpose. You call it "idealogy" but a better term would be "principles". Do you think the principles or philosophy of software have nothing to do with performance?
I'm also not knocking Wikipedia, my point is that we need to stop the philosophy of "so what if its bad, its open source!"
I agree 100%. All I'm saying is that you can't always separate principles of open source from performance.
It's not like I've been on the internet with this handle and not had all the ridiculous anti-mormon tripe you can get your hands on thrown at me multiple times already. For what it's worth Mormons, like a lot of Christians, dismiss the idea of "blind faith". If you're curious to actually learn something about Christian theology, I present the following differing views:
In favor of blind faith: Benjamin Franklin - "The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason." Martin Luther - "Faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding." Bertrand Russell - "We may define 'faith' as the firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. Where there is evidence, no one speaks of "faith." We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence." Mark Twain - "Faith is believing what you know ain't so."
Opposed to blind faith: William James - "Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible." Blaise Pascal - "Faith certainly tells us what the senses do not, but not the contrary of what they see; it is above, not against them." Rodney Stark - "Faith in reason is the most significant feature of Western Civilization. In that simple statement lies the key to understanding the evolution of medieval business practices..." Clement of Alexandria - "Do not think that we say that these things are only to be received by faith, but also that they are to be asserted by reason. For indeed it is not safe to commit these things to blind faith without reason, since assuredly truth cannot be without reason"
If you think that the U.S's response to 9/11 was rational and justified
You're missing the point of what I'm saying. I don't claim that the US response was rational justified - and I never have. This thread was started as a discussion of radicalism and it's dangers. I felt that you represented a good example of radicalism. If you'll remember, you didn't start out with the rational and defensible position you're now taking (merely that the US response was out of proportion). You started out with a much more outlandish statement:
what threat from the actions of terrorists?? there is no real threat.
You've gone from dismissing out of hand the threat of terrorism as the conflict between small dispersed groups of poorly equipped Islamists and the world's SUPER power to a much more moderate viewpoint: do you not see the difference between the two? It's disingenuous to start an argument from one viewpoint, then revise your viewpoint in midstream and act as though that's what it has been the entire time. My responses have been to your actual stated position (there's no threat) and not to your freshly concocted response (US response was disproportionate). When I highlight the potential for very real disaster as a result of these "poorly equipped Islamists" my intent is not to prove that these events justify US actions (which had nothing to do with your original statement) but to prove that there is a real danger (which was your originally rejected proposition). My point of view has never been to support or apologize (technical use of the word) for American foreign policy subsequent to 9/11. If you think that's what I'm arguing, it's no wonder you are frustrated. But read your own words! I'm responding to what you wrote, not what you apparently were thinking.
I'm arguing for what I said I was arguing for: the fact that (regardless of your conclusion regarding justifiability of US response) your dismissal of radical Islam as a non-threat is reckless and not substantiated by good research (at least, none that you've provided). Since you're the one ultimately making a positive claim "there is no real threat", you need to supply sufficient evidence for that claim. And you haven't. I'm not making any positive claims (e.g. I'm not saying "the us response is rational and justified"), I'm simp
Open source, in and of itself, is only as good as the quality of products it produces.
That's a debatable issue. You may as well say "a system of gov't is only as good as the quality of products it produces". And yet there are relatively benign dictators with healthy economies (Singapore) and there are radical, violent, crazy elected democracies (see Hamas). So it's probably better to judge system of governments with an eye to the principles and process as well as the historical results. This is especially true when you're talking about a new system of gov't or any new philosophy. I'm not saying you should ignore the actual results, of course you shouldn't. But I think principle is also important to judge which is better for the simple reason that life doesn't afford us the opportunity to run controlled, repeatable experiments on things like capitalism vs. communism, closed-source vs. open-source, etc.
Wikipedia is 'Ok', but it is not accurate enough to use outside of leisure/hobbies.
A lot of the best inventions, theories, etc. have been born out of leisure/hobbies. Providing ample information at that level is not as unimportant as seem to think. It's vitally important to allow all people access to a wealth of information at the leisure/hobby level because that is exactly where all interesting ideas start. That's the birthplace of ideas - and wikipedia is perfect fertilizer. Before you actually take your device/theory/whatever mainstream, you should certainly get into scholarly research and for that reason academic journals are in no way threatened by the existence of wikipedia, but both can play an essential role. Furthermore, we've had academic journals for quite some time now. A free and democratic encyclopedia is new.
Good point. It's a shame you've gotten no response. I'm waiting for mine too.
But Larry is a co-founder, we're just posters. Not that, you know, there's any difference between the two. Just like there won't be any difference between "experts" and "authors".
Why do you think that we should drop the bitterness associated with war?
Because I think it's immature and unhelpful to be bitter about things you can't change. Note that I said if war is inevitable, then we should not be bitter. And personally I don't think anti-war bitterness is what stops us from launching into war at every disagreement. You can really dislike, detest, and want to avoid war without getting bitter about.
You can't deny that the leaders of the fledgling United States sent 'thousands and thousand of common people' off to die for their country. You can't deny they owned slaves.
No, I can't. And I don't want to. But I do want to make two points that I think are relative - even on Slashdot.
1. Is there anything about the fact that they were white or Christian that had anything to do with their negative actions? I don't mind people pointing out that white Christians did awful things, but I get frustrated when those things are then associated with either being white or Christian. Did black Africans not own or sell slaves? Did Muslims not have religious wars? The fact that the early American leaders were white Christians doesn't have anything to do with the things that happened.
2. Was there really another option? To the slavery issue I would "yes, of course there was". Thanks to Christian opposition European slavery was ended by the 10th century. In the 15th century the Spanish restarted the practice. Despite instant condemnation from the Pope (who threatened to excommunicate anybody who didn't immediately return the people of the Canary islands to their freedom and their lands) the practice grew and spread. Despite continual opposition from the Catholic church (the Jesuits were expelled from S. American colonies as a result of their opposition to the practice) the economics of slavery made sense. This didn't make it inevitable, however. Slavery had made sense in Medieval times as well, but religious opposition ended it. There's a current myth that the slave-based agriculture of the US South was already on its way out in the 1860s, but in fact the practice was still quite profitable, and yet (at the cost of a hideous war) the practice was ended there too. So clearly slavery was not inevitable.
As far as warfare goes, however, I'm not sure why you characterize the American Revolution as "leaders of the fledgling United States send[ing] thousand and thousands of common people off to die for their country". First of all, the idea that the intent of fielding an army is to let people die is absurd. You know people will die in war, but the point is to get as few of your own guys killed as possible. Washington's tactics were highlighted by his reluctance to commit his troops to pitched battle, and his efforts to keep the troops alive. Furthermore, the idea that there was no danger to the leaders of the movement is similarly absurd. There was no draft. People who served in the army wanted to serve. If they had decided not to - they would not have had to risk their lives.
Furthermore, the US leaders were the first to risk their lives. By signing the Declaration of Independence every single one of them effectively signed their death sentence if the US didn't managed to secure it's independence. And that was very much in doubt at the time. So yes, George Washington didn't serve in the front ranks, he served in the back. But can you really run an army if you're in the front ranks? Even aside from the chance of getting killed, how do you get messages to the rest of the troops when you're in hand-to-hand combat? That's just the nature of organized combat - some lead and some follow and the risk to those who follow is often greater. I just don't think there's anyway to get around that reality.
So my points are
1 - Lay off white Christians. People are guilty. Races and religions are (usually) not. I apply the same rule to Muslims and Arabs - just to forestall that response. 2 - Don't blame people for things that can't be avoided. Especially don't blame people for risking others lives when a) those people were volunteers and b) the one's giving orders risked their lives first.
In my reply to Larry Sanger (if it really is him) I go into more detail about what's required for something to be open vs. closed source. It comes down to this:
In CS or other hard sciences, it's enough that the content be open because the criteria are relatively objective. In more subjective arenas (history, psychology, etc.) the bar for "open source" is higher, because the criteria themselves are in question. Thus you can't just open-source the info, you have to open-source the criteria. Picking experts would seem to close-source the criteria.
At this point the analogy with OSS breaks down, which is why my analogy didn't really work, but having had time to think about it carefully I think the argument I presented (content vs. criteria) was the source of my original gut-reaction to see the changes as closing a formerly open source initiative.
you accuse me of historical naivety but you seem to forget little footnotes in history like the U.S being the only nation to use atomic weapons in combat. A nation capable of this will have no qualms in taking control of foreign national resources like oil or by dropping another nuke on any country that is getting a bit too big for its boots. It is you that is naive
And yet, strangely enough, we have not nuked anyone for 50 years. Your argument that the us would have "no qualms" in dropping another nuke is ridiculous. If that were true, we would have nuked N. Korea long ago - certainly before they have nukes and the capability to deliver them to us or a strategic ally.
You 'do' know they never found any W.M.D, right?? You do realise this means they were lying, right??
Thanks for another example of zealot-logic. The bad guys are never mistaken, misled, or misinformed. They either tell the truth, or they lie.
We've established that the current threat to Americans from acts of terrorism is less than the chance of being run over when you cross the road.
You missed the WW2 analogy completely. Because something is not dangerous now doesn't mean we shouldn't react to it based on potential for future harm.
surely the burden of proof is on you to establish to me that this is a realistic possibility?
You are quite right to point this out. The burden does indeed rest on those who wish to insist that radical Islam presents a dangerous threat - either now or in the future - to the US or it's strategic interests. I would have thought that having the potential for radical islam to cut off oil supplies to the US would be just such an example. Or, in addition, the potential for radical islam to ally with America's other enemies (Chavez, for one) to even more powerfully leverage oil against us. We also know that N. Korea is developing nukes and that Iran may be developing nukes. I've stated all these before. Do you find these very real possibilities lacking in either realism (chance of them happening) or severity?
Regardless of any explanation is the fact that your arguments so far have been peppered with 'ifs' and 'coulds', a litany of paranoid possibilities.
All discussions of future events will be based on "if" and "could". That is a result of the nature of probabilistic uncertainty, not paranoia. Can you not tell the difference? Anyone who discusses future events in terms of "will" is far more suspicious to me in terms of grasp on reality.
I find it suprising that you demand evidence of my arguments when all you have provided me is conjecture and poor analogies.
This demonstrates your own inability to argue cogently. Your arguments are based on present or past events/facts. Therefore you should be able to address them with proof. My arguments are generally based on future possibilities extrapolated from current knowledge. As you have not challenged my statements regarding what is true now, it seems strange that you would instead attack my possible disaster scenarios not based on chance of happening or on severity, but on the fact that I speak of future events as possibilities. That's what, by definition, future events are.
I use analogies to make points, not to make arguments. If you have a problem with the analogy, you need to specify why it does not hold. Merely saying "your argument uses analogies" doesn't get us very far.
You think intelligence agencies weren't on to Al Qaeda b4 9/11 even tho they had attacked the very same building in 1993???
Of course some people in those intelligence agencies were, but I do not feel that we, as a nation, were paying attention to it. You seem to think that the entire CIA and FBI was braced and vigilant for an attack, and that only Bush and Cheney were clueless. I'll read your documents, but from my own research this is not supported. In hindsight, surprise attacks always seem obvious. Again with Pearl Harbor.
Forgive me if I react with skepticism to your Orwellian phrase "gentle guidance". I mean Orwellian in the sense that it sounds like a euphemism. Without actually seeing the specifics of how Citizendium is going to operate, I of course can't determine whether or not it's really a euphemism.
Nonetheless, a name doesn't determine the nature of an object. Calling it Citizendium, even cleverly bolding the part of the word you want to emphasize, is not really going to make anyone feel better about the project. I want to know exactly what power experts have, and who determines who an expert is. I also want to know who resolves disputes between so-called-experts.
Whether or not Citizendium is, in fact, closed to the general public is something that remains an open question, in my opinion. If you effectively divide the contributors into the teeming, anonymous masses and the "gentle" overlords who will ever-so-gently "guide" the contributions than you've effectively got a closed system. Subjecting the contributions of the teeming masses subject to review, edit, deletion, etc. by some group that is fundamentally distinct and superior to those teeming masses makes the submissions less than full submissions, don't you think?
The big OSS projects all have groups of senior developers who weed through the submissions from the rank-and-file. Why doesn't anyone scream bloody murder about that?
The fact that you can sincerely ask such a question makes me really question your attitude towards information. Are you honestly saying you don't see a difference between big OSS projects and, say, the nature of Lucifer/Satan? Any college undergrad will be happy to tell you about the differences between math - where answers are generally right or wrong - and literature - where the grading is much more subjective.
Of course there's a degree of subjectivity in coding. There's also a degree of subjectivity in upper-level math where factors like elegance and completeness of a proof are not entirely objective criteria. But the hard sciences have the advantage of being married to rigorous and objective logical structures. In OSS you have objective measures like: Does it compile? Does it crash? How much resources does it take? As long as these are the criteria by which contributions are weeded out, of course no one cries bloody murder! But exactly when you do see bloody murder cried in the OSS is when the debate turns to more subjective matters. Anything from DRM to "where to put taskbar" will result in all sorts of bloody murder.
If your Citizendium was a compilation of math, physics, engineering, and so on, then no one would care if it was vetted by experts. The trouble is that Citizendium will also be covering religion, philosophy, and history. If you think that picking and choosing experts and submissions in these fields is non-controversial, than you're far more naive than I would have expected.
It's just completely wrong to say that CZ is in any sense "closed source."
Again, this will have to wait until details of the operating procedures are known. I'm well aware that, by direct analogy, as long as you allow anyone to submit and make all info public, it's "open source". The question is whether there's a deeper philosophical underpinning to open vs. closed source. I think there is. I think open source is really just an expression of the democratization of knowledge and development. In the hard sciences there's no trouble with the standard procedure of letting everyone submit, and then winnowing out the bad submissions because the criteria for "bad" is not generally itself a subject of much debate.
However, when you move to arenas where the criteria itself is in question, then it is simply not enough to open-source the content. You also need to open-source the criteria. In that sense, it is quite possible that citizendium will simply not exist as a truly open-source project, but only as an imitation of one.
Final note: I'm not stating that citizendium is closed-source. I'm stating that, from the description so far, it sounds like it could be. I can't imagine a system of selecting experts that would leave the system truly open source, but perhaps you can.
No. Because the primary purpose of Wikipedia is to be a great encyclopedia. If Larry's new experiment surpasses Wikipedia, true Wikipedians will rejoice.
Nice argument by definition. If a "true Wikipedian" is defined as you say: having no philosophical leanings about information whatsoever, then you are right. However, like all arguments from definition, it hinges on whether or not your definition is valid.
Personally, I think a characterization of "true Wikipedians" as only caring about a good encyclopedia and nothing else is patently false. The idea wasn't just to make a better encyclopedia, the idea was that there's a different way of cataloging information.
Perhaps "true encyclopedians" will be happy to see Larry's new experiment, but wikipedia has always been about more than just making a good encyclopedia and damn the methodology.
Except, a lot of that information is false. How many Wikipedia articles are outright advertisements engineered by the subject of the topic?
I've never come across an advertisement while using Wikipedia. I've also never come across something outright false. True, when researching things I know nothing about, I'd have no idea if it was true or false. But I also keep an eye on the few specialties I am qualified to know something about, and I always find the information first rate.
The internet was supposed to be the hallmark of the Information Age, and yet trying to find useful information online can be like pulling teeth. Compared to the rest of the ineternet, Wikipedia is a cornucopia of useful information. And, as the Nature article indicated, it's actually pretty accurate too.
I think reports of Wikipedia hijackings are overblown. They tend to be much more rare than you'd think, and when they are common (e.g. congressional aids doctoring entries on their boss) they are exploitations of entries that don't even exist in mainstream encyclopedias.
There's no way you can realistically say wikipedia is "tripe". It's not perfect, but it's an awfully long way from tripe.
I meant stealing, but I didn't mean it in the legal sense. I wasn't making a judgment one way or the other about the legality of what they were doing.
It does seem to have the spirit of theft, however, to the extent that the new citipenium (or whatever) will be a closed system instead of an open one. It's kind of like making a closed-source "fork" of linux. Which, come to think of it, probably would violate the license.
I think it depends on how you define "expert". With the linux kernel being an expert is mostly value-neutral. They don't care what your opinion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is. Can you code? If yes, you're an expert.
The trouble is that in academia there are a lot of sacred cows that change like slow-motion fashion. Want to start a class on Islam these days? You'll have full support. Want to start a class on Mormonism? It's a joke. This is just an off-the-cuff example.
So the choice of "experts" for working on the linux kernel isn't really based on authority. It's based on quantitative measures. E.g. "how many bugs does your code have?" But the decision on who is or is not an "expert" for academic topics in general will be much more arbitrary. And based on authority.
They may look the same, but they couldn't be more different.
I'm an outsider to the Wikipedia community. I read the site avidly - looking up everything from gas-turbines to the history of afghanistan - but I only rarely post to articles and when I do I'm generally just fixing typos. I do have an account on wikipedia, but I've never started my own entry or contributed significantly to one that already existed. Nor do I go to conferences, or know any of the serious wikipedia contributors.
It does seem to me, however, that this is an overreaction to some of the bad press that Wikipedia has gotten over the last year or so. If you listen to the news media, wikipedia is an untrustworthy haven for trolls, flamers, liers, Colbert-elephant vandals, and so on. While it is true that Wikipedia isn't perfect and no one should base a research paper on it, in my experience the quality of information has actually been quite good. So I don't think there's really a huge problem to be addressed. Which means there's not much to gain by forking it. (I assume by "fork" they mean "we're going to steal all the hard work that's been denoted so far so that our new product doesn't have to start from scratch.")
On the other hand, what do we have to lose with the new version of wikipedia? To my mind, the most important aspect of Wikipedia was transparency in contradistinction to authority. Instead of being based on authority (e.g. if it's in Britannica, it's in true because it's Britannica and presented with a set of polished, edited, and reviewed "facts", when you look up something on Wikipedia you get the whole process. You see the front page, the article itself, but also have access to the discussions that go into that page. If something is controversial you see the controversy. This affords a kind of meta-information every article that opened up a whole new kind of information from enyclopedias. No longer just a static repository for authoritative information, it became a dynamic view into the process of cataloging information.
The new citipendium or whatever (clumsy name) threatens to reverse all of that. What made wikipedia revolutionary was it's rejection of "experts" (e.g. authority) in favor of democracy. Clearly the initial anarchy had to be toned down. Instituting onymity may be a great advancement. But closing it to "experts" is a huge step back.
It seems like a repudiation of the very heart of the open philosophy. Isn't this move akin to someone taking Linux and "forking" it into closed source OS? No matter how good the resulting OS could be, haven't you torpedoed the philosophical basis of Linux by doing so?
If you only care about a good OS (or, by analogy, a good encyclopedia) then I guess there's no reason to be worried. But if you care about the open source movement, then this is cause for grave concern indeed.
The only thing that's absurd is your belief in the supremacy of the USA. All the greatest empires in the world look to far outweigh their eventual successors at one time. Consider the disregard the Romans had for their barbarian neighbors. And yet with sufficient internal weakness leading to the decline of Roman military power, those pathetic barbarians sacked Rome.
Iran is a nation state run by religious fundamentalists and even the smallest attempt by them to build even the pre-cursors to serious weapons has been smacked down.
Iran's nuclear program - peaceful or otherwise - has not been smacked down. It is in progress unchecked.
That is direct evidence of G.W/Cheney/Rove creating a completely fabricated threat (Saddam) in order to pursue their illegitimate goals and you dont even have a plausible argument as to how your belief in the 'potential' threat of radical islam could get to the point where it could pose a legitimate threat let-alone evidence that it currently is a threat.
Don't tell me "there is evidence". Show it to me. Cite it. Otherwise you're likely going to be 'mistaken' for a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist. Are you honestly saying there was no possibility of a threat from Saddam? A man who routinely shot at US fighters, who developed and used chemical weapons on his own people, and who tried to assassinate a US president? Again, your faith in the eternal supremacy of the US is cute, but historically naive. No one thought a 9/11-like attack was possible until it happened. If Saddam has managed to re-develop his WMD program, what would have stopped a WMD-based attack on LA? Our vaunted intelligence agencies? Clearly Saddam was not a threat, but that's not the same thing as saying he could not have been a threat. Clearly the intelligence against him was, on purpose or not, flawed. But just because Saddam was not the danger he was portrayed to be doesn't mean he couldn't have been. Remember, no nation seriously opposed the US intelligence leading up to the war, just the US policy. The intelligence was clearly plausible, even if false.
Oh and as for your 'they can just cut off the oil' argument....um what do you think one of the benefits (or potentially the main purpose) of invading Iraq was???
That explains the crude flowing directly from Iraq to the US. And it explains the way we completely ignore sectarian violence in Baghdad and station troops all along the oil pipelines. You know, to protect the oil flowing to the US from Iraq.
Was oil a consideration for the invasion of Iraq? Of course it was. Was it the reason for the invasion? Again, only wide-eyed conspiracy theorists who ignore current events think that. Besides which, even if we did control Iraqi oil (which we don't now and never will), that would not prevent Iran, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, or some combination thereof of wrecking our economy. You don't have to cut off 50% of our oil to do that. 10 or 20% would probably do it.
I note also that you failed to counter my argument that...
"Before the events of september 11 there were perfectly adequate governmental methods to "avoid getting eaten". The only thing that changed was that Bush/Cheney/Rove et al chose to ignore the advice given to them by the people/organisations who handle these threats, ie the intelligence agencies.
and you can't counter it because it is fact.
I didn't counter it because I think most people would have a hard time taking it seriously. Most people would say 9/11 was good evidence that our measures were insufficient. Maybe you consider 9/11 "acceptable losses", but I don't. That's like saying our military readiness in 1941 was fine before Pearl Harbor. Guess what - the Japanese forces were just as tough before Dec 7 as after. Their power and tactics didn't change. So what did? Oh yeah - they were at war with us after Dec 7.
I work with a mish-mash of.NET, VBA, vanilla java, etc. And I've aslo used C, C++, and even a bit of assembly in the past. So it's not really a language - just pseudo-code (not even formal pseudo-code) that most nerds will be able to follow.
My problem isn't with people, such as yourself, that are opposed to Bush or MS because they screw up so often. It's with people who respond to the topic, and not TFA.
We can argue politics, philosophy, etc., (I don't agree that "reality has a liberal bias") and that's one thing, but people who are using the articles as just another excuse to vent their opinions without regard to if those opinions are actually relevant to the article, are what I think we can all agree are annoying.
Did you ever think about how its only humans that do INhuman things to each other.
Other than being a semantic trick, I don't see the point you're making here. Monkeys can be pretty savage too - killing each other and eating each other's eyeballs and stuff. I can't tell if you're just playing with words, or if you actually think animals are less violent than humans.
I say agriculture is the culprit, it allows human populations to grow beyong the prehistoric levels and then large groups inevitably conflict with each others
So now that you've made the observation you have two options. Do you want to go back to Eden (no agriculture) or do you want to work with what we've got? I find that people tend to be a lot better at pointing out the negative than the positive. Shouldn't you consider all that is good that has resulted from agriculture and advancing human society? And if so, then doesn't it make more sense to minimize the negative impacts while accentuating the positives, as opposed to simply complaining about the negatives?
Those in charge have regularly throughout history played one group against another in order to benifit themselves.
Have "those in charge" not also done good things throughout history?
I'm not sure that I'm disagreeing with anything you've said head-on. But I think that it's really important to have a sense of context and balance. If war is really inevitable (and I'm not sure that I believe that) then we should drop the bitterness associated with it. It seems to me that people tend to not have their cake nor eat it. They complain about war being inevitable AND about how guilty leaders are. You can't have both!
Slashdot Mirror
You have to realize that content costs money. Yeah, with Blu-Ray you have the potential to store a lot more content, but who's going to generate the content? It's kind of a separate concern, but aren't video games expensive enough to produce as it is? Furthermore most games that involve massive amounts of content are MMOs anyway - and so by definition you'd be able to download more of the info from the server. That would make the restriction one of hard drive space, I suppose.
In any case, I think that if Blu-ray does end up making better games (and I seriously doubt it will) that the 360 still has nothing to lose. They can develop games that are just as big, and then sell them in both formats. Same game, buy it on HD-DVDs or buy it on a whole collection of DVDs. You're allowing people to choose whether to invest in the new hardware instead of asking everyone to close their eyes and jump with you.
MS has the option of working with next gen DVDs, but they haven't built the cost into their model from day 1. Seems a much smarter route.
-stormin
That's the beauty of the MS strategy. Sony is making everyone pay for the the Blue-Ray. MS knows that everyone out there just wants to know that they can upgrade the 360 to HD-DVD. You know, if they wanted to. No one likes to say "never" to a possibly cool next-gen idea. But rather than going overboard and forcing everyone to commit, MS just left the door open for everyone.
Even though I doubt many people will buy the HD-DVD accessory, it's critical for xbox 360 sales for people to know they could.
-stormin
I will be here yesterday with the same intention I had the day before
Ahahahahahaha. Got a little carried away there didn't I? Should be:
I will be here tomorrow with the same intention I had the day before.
Oh well. Funny posting mistakes FTW!!!
-stormin
I'm familiar with the concept of the Cathedral vs. the Bazaar, and I certainly think it's relevant, but I'm not sure the analogy works as well with information in general as it does with, say, software or other product development.
The key difference is that I don't want to stress simply the top-down vs. bottom-up approach, I want to highlight how questions of objectivity make dealing with wikipedia a fundamentally different problem than dealing with, say, the linux kernel. In both cases you have a fundamentally bottom-up approach and you have experts that review and control submissions.
The trouble has to do with how much power you give these experts, and how you determine who's an expert. In matters where there are objective, fairly non-controversial criteria (like in dealing with the linux kernel) the matter of picking experts is also largely non-controversial. In matters of politics, religion, and history (all of which are covered by wikipedia) the criteria of being an expert is neither objective nor non-controversial.
For this reason you can get a very bazaar-like system (Citizendium) that is in fact not an open bazaar. It's more like a bazaar with a heavy mafia presence. The ideas are still largely bottom-up, but whoever is in control of the expert-selection process can largely control the final results. It's not quite the same as a cathedral because you can still have most submissions from the teeming, unwashed masses, but it lacks in openness. Not because openness is taken away, but because - due to the controversial nature of criteria - more openness is required in subjective than in objective disciplines.
-stormin
I don't agree with what you've said, I'm just not sure what you think it has to do with what I said. Nothing in my post is meant to imply that Wikimedia in some way doesn't want to see additional sources of open content out there. In fact, what I'm saying is simply that I'm skeptical that Citizendium will in fact be "open content".
-stormin
I didn't say you had changed your viewpoint. But you are certainly disavowing your initial comment. Perhaps it was said in haste, perhaps you didn't really mean it. I don't know. But it's telling that while you boldly embark on an effort to defend "what I have previously said", you completely neglect to respond to the very line that is the source of apparent confusion. This would seem to indicate that for you the priority is to save face, or "win" and not to stand behind your own arguments.
It's all well and good to defend what you have said, but to defend a part of it and pretend that you are defending all of it is a waste of time. A waste of your time and mine.
Fair enough. I should have better distinguished between my central thesis (your radicalism) and a tangential claim (the real danger of radical Islam). I can prove the first without the second, and for this reason I stated that I had made no positive claims. What I meant was that no positive claims were required to prove my central thesis. But I did in fact embark on a tangential argument that involved positive claims and thus my statement, unqualified as it is, is incorrect. You see - this is a productive way to respond when you are caught making a logical error or a false statement in an argument. Don't just selectively quote around the issue to save face; own up to your mistakes and see it as an opportunity to clarify a position.
Unless here you are implying that you yourself have 'one eye closed', then you are making the positive claim that radical Islam is a rising global threat.
Yay. You're "winning" the argument. If I'd known this was a game to you, I could have saved myself the trouble of taking you seriously. You can't simultaneously argue with integrity and be willing to engage in cover-up tactics to win. You're doing a great job of scoring points, but in the process you're refusing to own up to your own logical errors and thus merrily marching off the beaten path of reasonable discourse and into the morass of adolescent bickering.
you have devoted a significant portion of your life to making a sport of this and I do not wish to be a further part of it
Clearly you did not actually read the contents of my blog. If you had, you would know how seriously I take internet debate, and how much I am irked by those who see it as a power struggle, a game, etc. This is unmistakable from my first entry where I draw a a distinction between "argument" and "debate". The point of arguing is to win. Something I'm not at all interested in. The point of debating is a kind of evolution of ideas: you refine your good ideas by subjecting them to good-faith criticism while engaging in the same good-faith criticism of others. (It should go without saying that any effort to dodge criticism of your argument while launching spurious attacks on your opponent are not examples of "good faith criticism").
I think it's very telling that in the same post in which you accuse me of playing games that are "so clever" you have utterly refused to own up to your own statements. In addition, you accuse me of playing games only after you've sufficiently exhausted your portrayal of me as dishonest, and you withdraw from the debate (such as it is) only after you've had your little say. Furthermore, and most telling of all, you condemn me on the basis of blog articles which you have manifestly never read.
The fact is that I did make a false statement in my argument. I have no trouble admitting this,
Its ridiculous to compare governments with software
Who said open-source was only about software? Since we're talking about wikipedia as being an open-source encyclopedia, clearly this is not the case.
Home users of software and companies need software to perform a purpose. The idealogical aspect of it is a far second to that.
You didn't pay attention to my post. I said the reason idealogy was relevant was precisely because it can shed light on the ability of software (or something else) to perform a purpose. You call it "idealogy" but a better term would be "principles". Do you think the principles or philosophy of software have nothing to do with performance?
I'm also not knocking Wikipedia, my point is that we need to stop the philosophy of "so what if its bad, its open source!"
I agree 100%. All I'm saying is that you can't always separate principles of open source from performance.
-stormin
It's not like I've been on the internet with this handle and not had all the ridiculous anti-mormon tripe you can get your hands on thrown at me multiple times already. For what it's worth Mormons, like a lot of Christians, dismiss the idea of "blind faith". If you're curious to actually learn something about Christian theology, I present the following differing views:
In favor of blind faith:
Benjamin Franklin - "The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason."
Martin Luther - "Faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding."
Bertrand Russell - "We may define 'faith' as the firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. Where there is evidence, no one speaks of "faith." We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence."
Mark Twain - "Faith is believing what you know ain't so."
Opposed to blind faith:
William James - "Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible."
Blaise Pascal - "Faith certainly tells us what the senses do not, but not the contrary of what they see; it is above, not against them."
Rodney Stark - "Faith in reason is the most significant feature of Western Civilization. In that simple statement lies the key to understanding the evolution of medieval business practices..."
Clement of Alexandria - "Do not think that we say that these things are only to be received by faith, but also that they are to be asserted by reason. For indeed it is not safe to commit these things to blind faith without reason, since assuredly truth cannot be without reason"
If you think that the U.S's response to 9/11 was rational and justified
You're missing the point of what I'm saying. I don't claim that the US response was rational justified - and I never have. This thread was started as a discussion of radicalism and it's dangers. I felt that you represented a good example of radicalism. If you'll remember, you didn't start out with the rational and defensible position you're now taking (merely that the US response was out of proportion). You started out with a much more outlandish statement:
what threat from the actions of terrorists?? there is no real threat.
You've gone from dismissing out of hand the threat of terrorism as the conflict between small dispersed groups of poorly equipped Islamists and the world's SUPER power to a much more moderate viewpoint: do you not see the difference between the two? It's disingenuous to start an argument from one viewpoint, then revise your viewpoint in midstream and act as though that's what it has been the entire time. My responses have been to your actual stated position (there's no threat) and not to your freshly concocted response (US response was disproportionate). When I highlight the potential for very real disaster as a result of these "poorly equipped Islamists" my intent is not to prove that these events justify US actions (which had nothing to do with your original statement) but to prove that there is a real danger (which was your originally rejected proposition). My point of view has never been to support or apologize (technical use of the word) for American foreign policy subsequent to 9/11. If you think that's what I'm arguing, it's no wonder you are frustrated. But read your own words! I'm responding to what you wrote, not what you apparently were thinking.
I'm arguing for what I said I was arguing for: the fact that (regardless of your conclusion regarding justifiability of US response) your dismissal of radical Islam as a non-threat is reckless and not substantiated by good research (at least, none that you've provided). Since you're the one ultimately making a positive claim "there is no real threat", you need to supply sufficient evidence for that claim. And you haven't. I'm not making any positive claims (e.g. I'm not saying "the us response is rational and justified"), I'm simp
Open source, in and of itself, is only as good as the quality of products it produces.
That's a debatable issue. You may as well say "a system of gov't is only as good as the quality of products it produces". And yet there are relatively benign dictators with healthy economies (Singapore) and there are radical, violent, crazy elected democracies (see Hamas). So it's probably better to judge system of governments with an eye to the principles and process as well as the historical results. This is especially true when you're talking about a new system of gov't or any new philosophy. I'm not saying you should ignore the actual results, of course you shouldn't. But I think principle is also important to judge which is better for the simple reason that life doesn't afford us the opportunity to run controlled, repeatable experiments on things like capitalism vs. communism, closed-source vs. open-source, etc.
Wikipedia is 'Ok', but it is not accurate enough to use outside of leisure/hobbies.
A lot of the best inventions, theories, etc. have been born out of leisure/hobbies. Providing ample information at that level is not as unimportant as seem to think. It's vitally important to allow all people access to a wealth of information at the leisure/hobby level because that is exactly where all interesting ideas start. That's the birthplace of ideas - and wikipedia is perfect fertilizer. Before you actually take your device/theory/whatever mainstream, you should certainly get into scholarly research and for that reason academic journals are in no way threatened by the existence of wikipedia, but both can play an essential role. Furthermore, we've had academic journals for quite some time now. A free and democratic encyclopedia is new.
-stormin
Good point. It's a shame you've gotten no response. I'm waiting for mine too.
But Larry is a co-founder, we're just posters. Not that, you know, there's any difference between the two. Just like there won't be any difference between "experts" and "authors".
-stormin
Everyone always cheat, and we will always find a way to do it.
And yet, not everyone cheats.
Strange.
On another note, did you guys read the forum posts following the article? I particularly enjoyed the furor subsequent to the "Cheaters_Mother" posts.
-stormin
Another slashdot story about a team-up that is not beyond the realm of feasible possibility.
Hooray.
-stormin
Why do you think that we should drop the bitterness associated with war?
Because I think it's immature and unhelpful to be bitter about things you can't change. Note that I said if war is inevitable, then we should not be bitter. And personally I don't think anti-war bitterness is what stops us from launching into war at every disagreement. You can really dislike, detest, and want to avoid war without getting bitter about.
You can't deny that the leaders of the fledgling United States sent 'thousands and thousand of common people' off to die for their country. You can't deny they owned slaves.
No, I can't. And I don't want to. But I do want to make two points that I think are relative - even on Slashdot.
1. Is there anything about the fact that they were white or Christian that had anything to do with their negative actions? I don't mind people pointing out that white Christians did awful things, but I get frustrated when those things are then associated with either being white or Christian. Did black Africans not own or sell slaves? Did Muslims not have religious wars? The fact that the early American leaders were white Christians doesn't have anything to do with the things that happened.
2. Was there really another option? To the slavery issue I would "yes, of course there was". Thanks to Christian opposition European slavery was ended by the 10th century. In the 15th century the Spanish restarted the practice. Despite instant condemnation from the Pope (who threatened to excommunicate anybody who didn't immediately return the people of the Canary islands to their freedom and their lands) the practice grew and spread. Despite continual opposition from the Catholic church (the Jesuits were expelled from S. American colonies as a result of their opposition to the practice) the economics of slavery made sense. This didn't make it inevitable, however. Slavery had made sense in Medieval times as well, but religious opposition ended it. There's a current myth that the slave-based agriculture of the US South was already on its way out in the 1860s, but in fact the practice was still quite profitable, and yet (at the cost of a hideous war) the practice was ended there too. So clearly slavery was not inevitable.
As far as warfare goes, however, I'm not sure why you characterize the American Revolution as "leaders of the fledgling United States send[ing] thousand and thousands of common people off to die for their country". First of all, the idea that the intent of fielding an army is to let people die is absurd. You know people will die in war, but the point is to get as few of your own guys killed as possible. Washington's tactics were highlighted by his reluctance to commit his troops to pitched battle, and his efforts to keep the troops alive. Furthermore, the idea that there was no danger to the leaders of the movement is similarly absurd. There was no draft. People who served in the army wanted to serve. If they had decided not to - they would not have had to risk their lives.
Furthermore, the US leaders were the first to risk their lives. By signing the Declaration of Independence every single one of them effectively signed their death sentence if the US didn't managed to secure it's independence. And that was very much in doubt at the time. So yes, George Washington didn't serve in the front ranks, he served in the back. But can you really run an army if you're in the front ranks? Even aside from the chance of getting killed, how do you get messages to the rest of the troops when you're in hand-to-hand combat? That's just the nature of organized combat - some lead and some follow and the risk to those who follow is often greater. I just don't think there's anyway to get around that reality.
So my points are
1 - Lay off white Christians. People are guilty. Races and religions are (usually) not. I apply the same rule to Muslims and Arabs - just to forestall that response.
2 - Don't blame people for things that can't be avoided. Especially don't blame people for risking others lives when a) those people were volunteers and b) the one's giving orders risked their lives first.
-stormin
In my reply to Larry Sanger (if it really is him) I go into more detail about what's required for something to be open vs. closed source. It comes down to this:
In CS or other hard sciences, it's enough that the content be open because the criteria are relatively objective. In more subjective arenas (history, psychology, etc.) the bar for "open source" is higher, because the criteria themselves are in question. Thus you can't just open-source the info, you have to open-source the criteria. Picking experts would seem to close-source the criteria.
At this point the analogy with OSS breaks down, which is why my analogy didn't really work, but having had time to think about it carefully I think the argument I presented (content vs. criteria) was the source of my original gut-reaction to see the changes as closing a formerly open source initiative.
-stormin
you accuse me of historical naivety but you seem to forget little footnotes in history like the U.S being the only nation to use atomic weapons in combat. A nation capable of this will have no qualms in taking control of foreign national resources like oil or by dropping another nuke on any country that is getting a bit too big for its boots. It is you that is naive
And yet, strangely enough, we have not nuked anyone for 50 years. Your argument that the us would have "no qualms" in dropping another nuke is ridiculous. If that were true, we would have nuked N. Korea long ago - certainly before they have nukes and the capability to deliver them to us or a strategic ally.
You 'do' know they never found any W.M.D, right?? You do realise this means they were lying, right??
Thanks for another example of zealot-logic. The bad guys are never mistaken, misled, or misinformed. They either tell the truth, or they lie.
We've established that the current threat to Americans from acts of terrorism is less than the chance of being run over when you cross the road.
You missed the WW2 analogy completely. Because something is not dangerous now doesn't mean we shouldn't react to it based on potential for future harm.
surely the burden of proof is on you to establish to me that this is a realistic possibility?
You are quite right to point this out. The burden does indeed rest on those who wish to insist that radical Islam presents a dangerous threat - either now or in the future - to the US or it's strategic interests. I would have thought that having the potential for radical islam to cut off oil supplies to the US would be just such an example. Or, in addition, the potential for radical islam to ally with America's other enemies (Chavez, for one) to even more powerfully leverage oil against us. We also know that N. Korea is developing nukes and that Iran may be developing nukes. I've stated all these before. Do you find these very real possibilities lacking in either realism (chance of them happening) or severity?
Regardless of any explanation is the fact that your arguments so far have been peppered with 'ifs' and 'coulds', a litany of paranoid possibilities.
All discussions of future events will be based on "if" and "could". That is a result of the nature of probabilistic uncertainty, not paranoia. Can you not tell the difference? Anyone who discusses future events in terms of "will" is far more suspicious to me in terms of grasp on reality.
I find it suprising that you demand evidence of my arguments when all you have provided me is conjecture and poor analogies.
This demonstrates your own inability to argue cogently. Your arguments are based on present or past events/facts. Therefore you should be able to address them with proof. My arguments are generally based on future possibilities extrapolated from current knowledge. As you have not challenged my statements regarding what is true now, it seems strange that you would instead attack my possible disaster scenarios not based on chance of happening or on severity, but on the fact that I speak of future events as possibilities. That's what, by definition, future events are.
I use analogies to make points, not to make arguments. If you have a problem with the analogy, you need to specify why it does not hold. Merely saying "your argument uses analogies" doesn't get us very far.
You think intelligence agencies weren't on to Al Qaeda b4 9/11 even tho they had attacked the very same building in 1993???
Of course some people in those intelligence agencies were, but I do not feel that we, as a nation, were paying attention to it. You seem to think that the entire CIA and FBI was braced and vigilant for an attack, and that only Bush and Cheney were clueless. I'll read your documents, but from my own research this is not supported. In hindsight, surprise attacks always seem obvious. Again with Pearl Harbor.
Forgive me if I react with skepticism to your Orwellian phrase "gentle guidance". I mean Orwellian in the sense that it sounds like a euphemism. Without actually seeing the specifics of how Citizendium is going to operate, I of course can't determine whether or not it's really a euphemism.
Nonetheless, a name doesn't determine the nature of an object. Calling it Citizendium, even cleverly bolding the part of the word you want to emphasize, is not really going to make anyone feel better about the project. I want to know exactly what power experts have, and who determines who an expert is. I also want to know who resolves disputes between so-called-experts.
Whether or not Citizendium is, in fact, closed to the general public is something that remains an open question, in my opinion. If you effectively divide the contributors into the teeming, anonymous masses and the "gentle" overlords who will ever-so-gently "guide" the contributions than you've effectively got a closed system. Subjecting the contributions of the teeming masses subject to review, edit, deletion, etc. by some group that is fundamentally distinct and superior to those teeming masses makes the submissions less than full submissions, don't you think?
The big OSS projects all have groups of senior developers who weed through the submissions from the rank-and-file. Why doesn't anyone scream bloody murder about that?
The fact that you can sincerely ask such a question makes me really question your attitude towards information. Are you honestly saying you don't see a difference between big OSS projects and, say, the nature of Lucifer/Satan? Any college undergrad will be happy to tell you about the differences between math - where answers are generally right or wrong - and literature - where the grading is much more subjective.
Of course there's a degree of subjectivity in coding. There's also a degree of subjectivity in upper-level math where factors like elegance and completeness of a proof are not entirely objective criteria. But the hard sciences have the advantage of being married to rigorous and objective logical structures. In OSS you have objective measures like: Does it compile? Does it crash? How much resources does it take? As long as these are the criteria by which contributions are weeded out, of course no one cries bloody murder! But exactly when you do see bloody murder cried in the OSS is when the debate turns to more subjective matters. Anything from DRM to "where to put taskbar" will result in all sorts of bloody murder.
If your Citizendium was a compilation of math, physics, engineering, and so on, then no one would care if it was vetted by experts. The trouble is that Citizendium will also be covering religion, philosophy, and history. If you think that picking and choosing experts and submissions in these fields is non-controversial, than you're far more naive than I would have expected.
It's just completely wrong to say that CZ is in any sense "closed source."
Again, this will have to wait until details of the operating procedures are known. I'm well aware that, by direct analogy, as long as you allow anyone to submit and make all info public, it's "open source". The question is whether there's a deeper philosophical underpinning to open vs. closed source. I think there is. I think open source is really just an expression of the democratization of knowledge and development. In the hard sciences there's no trouble with the standard procedure of letting everyone submit, and then winnowing out the bad submissions because the criteria for "bad" is not generally itself a subject of much debate.
However, when you move to arenas where the criteria itself is in question, then it is simply not enough to open-source the content. You also need to open-source the criteria. In that sense, it is quite possible that citizendium will simply not exist as a truly open-source project, but only as an imitation of one.
Final note: I'm not stating that citizendium is closed-source. I'm stating that, from the description so far, it sounds like it could be. I can't imagine a system of selecting experts that would leave the system truly open source, but perhaps you can.
-stormin
No. Because the primary purpose of Wikipedia is to be a great encyclopedia. If Larry's new experiment surpasses Wikipedia, true Wikipedians will rejoice.
Nice argument by definition. If a "true Wikipedian" is defined as you say: having no philosophical leanings about information whatsoever, then you are right. However, like all arguments from definition, it hinges on whether or not your definition is valid.
Personally, I think a characterization of "true Wikipedians" as only caring about a good encyclopedia and nothing else is patently false. The idea wasn't just to make a better encyclopedia, the idea was that there's a different way of cataloging information.
Perhaps "true encyclopedians" will be happy to see Larry's new experiment, but wikipedia has always been about more than just making a good encyclopedia and damn the methodology.
-stormin
Except, a lot of that information is false. How many Wikipedia articles are outright advertisements engineered by the subject of the topic?
I've never come across an advertisement while using Wikipedia. I've also never come across something outright false. True, when researching things I know nothing about, I'd have no idea if it was true or false. But I also keep an eye on the few specialties I am qualified to know something about, and I always find the information first rate.
The internet was supposed to be the hallmark of the Information Age, and yet trying to find useful information online can be like pulling teeth. Compared to the rest of the ineternet, Wikipedia is a cornucopia of useful information. And, as the Nature article indicated, it's actually pretty accurate too.
I think reports of Wikipedia hijackings are overblown. They tend to be much more rare than you'd think, and when they are common (e.g. congressional aids doctoring entries on their boss) they are exploitations of entries that don't even exist in mainstream encyclopedias.
There's no way you can realistically say wikipedia is "tripe". It's not perfect, but it's an awfully long way from tripe.
-stormin
I meant stealing, but I didn't mean it in the legal sense. I wasn't making a judgment one way or the other about the legality of what they were doing.
It does seem to have the spirit of theft, however, to the extent that the new citipenium (or whatever) will be a closed system instead of an open one. It's kind of like making a closed-source "fork" of linux. Which, come to think of it, probably would violate the license.
-stormin
I think it depends on how you define "expert". With the linux kernel being an expert is mostly value-neutral. They don't care what your opinion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is. Can you code? If yes, you're an expert.
The trouble is that in academia there are a lot of sacred cows that change like slow-motion fashion. Want to start a class on Islam these days? You'll have full support. Want to start a class on Mormonism? It's a joke. This is just an off-the-cuff example.
So the choice of "experts" for working on the linux kernel isn't really based on authority. It's based on quantitative measures. E.g. "how many bugs does your code have?" But the decision on who is or is not an "expert" for academic topics in general will be much more arbitrary. And based on authority.
They may look the same, but they couldn't be more different.
-stormin
I'm an outsider to the Wikipedia community. I read the site avidly - looking up everything from gas-turbines to the history of afghanistan - but I only rarely post to articles and when I do I'm generally just fixing typos. I do have an account on wikipedia, but I've never started my own entry or contributed significantly to one that already existed. Nor do I go to conferences, or know any of the serious wikipedia contributors.
It does seem to me, however, that this is an overreaction to some of the bad press that Wikipedia has gotten over the last year or so. If you listen to the news media, wikipedia is an untrustworthy haven for trolls, flamers, liers, Colbert-elephant vandals, and so on. While it is true that Wikipedia isn't perfect and no one should base a research paper on it, in my experience the quality of information has actually been quite good. So I don't think there's really a huge problem to be addressed. Which means there's not much to gain by forking it. (I assume by "fork" they mean "we're going to steal all the hard work that's been denoted so far so that our new product doesn't have to start from scratch.")
On the other hand, what do we have to lose with the new version of wikipedia? To my mind, the most important aspect of Wikipedia was transparency in contradistinction to authority. Instead of being based on authority (e.g. if it's in Britannica, it's in true because it's Britannica and presented with a set of polished, edited, and reviewed "facts", when you look up something on Wikipedia you get the whole process. You see the front page, the article itself, but also have access to the discussions that go into that page. If something is controversial you see the controversy. This affords a kind of meta-information every article that opened up a whole new kind of information from enyclopedias. No longer just a static repository for authoritative information, it became a dynamic view into the process of cataloging information.
The new citipendium or whatever (clumsy name) threatens to reverse all of that. What made wikipedia revolutionary was it's rejection of "experts" (e.g. authority) in favor of democracy. Clearly the initial anarchy had to be toned down. Instituting onymity may be a great advancement. But closing it to "experts" is a huge step back.
It seems like a repudiation of the very heart of the open philosophy. Isn't this move akin to someone taking Linux and "forking" it into closed source OS? No matter how good the resulting OS could be, haven't you torpedoed the philosophical basis of Linux by doing so?
If you only care about a good OS (or, by analogy, a good encyclopedia) then I guess there's no reason to be worried. But if you care about the open source movement, then this is cause for grave concern indeed.
-stormin
Iran is a nation state run by religious fundamentalists and even the smallest attempt by them to build even the pre-cursors to serious weapons has been smacked down.
Iran's nuclear program - peaceful or otherwise - has not been smacked down. It is in progress unchecked.
That is direct evidence of G.W/Cheney/Rove creating a completely fabricated threat (Saddam) in order to pursue their illegitimate goals and you dont even have a plausible argument as to how your belief in the 'potential' threat of radical islam could get to the point where it could pose a legitimate threat let-alone evidence that it currently is a threat.
Don't tell me "there is evidence". Show it to me. Cite it. Otherwise you're likely going to be 'mistaken' for a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist. Are you honestly saying there was no possibility of a threat from Saddam? A man who routinely shot at US fighters, who developed and used chemical weapons on his own people, and who tried to assassinate a US president? Again, your faith in the eternal supremacy of the US is cute, but historically naive. No one thought a 9/11-like attack was possible until it happened. If Saddam has managed to re-develop his WMD program, what would have stopped a WMD-based attack on LA? Our vaunted intelligence agencies? Clearly Saddam was not a threat, but that's not the same thing as saying he could not have been a threat. Clearly the intelligence against him was, on purpose or not, flawed. But just because Saddam was not the danger he was portrayed to be doesn't mean he couldn't have been. Remember, no nation seriously opposed the US intelligence leading up to the war, just the US policy. The intelligence was clearly plausible, even if false.
Oh and as for your 'they can just cut off the oil' argument....um what do you think one of the benefits (or potentially the main purpose) of invading Iraq was???
That explains the crude flowing directly from Iraq to the US. And it explains the way we completely ignore sectarian violence in Baghdad and station troops all along the oil pipelines. You know, to protect the oil flowing to the US from Iraq.
Was oil a consideration for the invasion of Iraq? Of course it was. Was it the reason for the invasion? Again, only wide-eyed conspiracy theorists who ignore current events think that. Besides which, even if we did control Iraqi oil (which we don't now and never will), that would not prevent Iran, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, or some combination thereof of wrecking our economy. You don't have to cut off 50% of our oil to do that. 10 or 20% would probably do it.
I note also that you failed to counter my argument that...
and you can't counter it because it is fact.
I didn't counter it because I think most people would have a hard time taking it seriously. Most people would say 9/11 was good evidence that our measures were insufficient. Maybe you consider 9/11 "acceptable losses", but I don't. That's like saying our military readiness in 1941 was fine before Pearl Harbor. Guess what - the Japanese forces were just as tough before Dec 7 as after. Their power and tactics didn't change. So what did? Oh yeah - they were at war with us after Dec 7.
Same thing applies here. Sure, terroris
Wow. That was a convincing argument.
Oh wait, never mind, it wasn't an argument. It was another AC calling me names. Boo hoo.
-stormin
I work with a mish-mash of .NET, VBA, vanilla java, etc. And I've aslo used C, C++, and even a bit of assembly in the past. So it's not really a language - just pseudo-code (not even formal pseudo-code) that most nerds will be able to follow.
My problem isn't with people, such as yourself, that are opposed to Bush or MS because they screw up so often. It's with people who respond to the topic, and not TFA.
We can argue politics, philosophy, etc., (I don't agree that "reality has a liberal bias") and that's one thing, but people who are using the articles as just another excuse to vent their opinions without regard to if those opinions are actually relevant to the article, are what I think we can all agree are annoying.
-stormin
Did you ever think about how its only humans that do INhuman things to each other.
Other than being a semantic trick, I don't see the point you're making here. Monkeys can be pretty savage too - killing each other and eating each other's eyeballs and stuff. I can't tell if you're just playing with words, or if you actually think animals are less violent than humans.
I say agriculture is the culprit, it allows human populations to grow beyong the prehistoric levels and then large groups inevitably conflict with each others
So now that you've made the observation you have two options. Do you want to go back to Eden (no agriculture) or do you want to work with what we've got? I find that people tend to be a lot better at pointing out the negative than the positive. Shouldn't you consider all that is good that has resulted from agriculture and advancing human society? And if so, then doesn't it make more sense to minimize the negative impacts while accentuating the positives, as opposed to simply complaining about the negatives?
Those in charge have regularly throughout history played one group against another in order to benifit themselves.
Have "those in charge" not also done good things throughout history?
I'm not sure that I'm disagreeing with anything you've said head-on. But I think that it's really important to have a sense of context and balance. If war is really inevitable (and I'm not sure that I believe that) then we should drop the bitterness associated with it. It seems to me that people tend to not have their cake nor eat it. They complain about war being inevitable AND about how guilty leaders are. You can't have both!
-stormin