Correct. The purpose of having experts is to make the article somewhat trustworthy in addition to the sources. Sure, you could check all the sources to see all the facts, or you could check the sticker that says "An expert has vouched for the quality of this article." In an ideal world, you'd check all the sources, but let's face facts: 90% of the people in the world wouldn't bother. Having a trustworthy secondary/tertiary source will be a major boon to people who want to learn something, but don't have all day to do it.
If you read a bit about Citizendium, we do both. We have stable version of articles that are approved and marked stable by verified experts. One of the major complaints from experts who left Wikipedia and came to Citizendium was that once they had an accurate, well-cited article, it could still be changed for the worse as time went on, and they lost patience with guarding it from vandalism or PoV or uncited claims. There's a reason Wikipedia has a set of former featured articles. There are 350 articles on there that people worked hard on to get approved, and then the articles went so far downhill they lost that status. We don't want that to happen at Citizendium.
I'll address your first and third issues, then your second.
On your first point, having a.edu address is not the be-all-end-all of being an expert. Experts can verify themselves by other methods, and other proofs can be required beyond having a.edu address. There's nothing that says you have to be a Ph.D. in a subject. And even if you're not an editor, you can still bring a lot to the table and help with the article. The editors might offer guidance and are ultimately involved in approving the article, but that doesn't mean that they are the only ones who can write the article.
In your second point, you point out that there are some articles where this method doesn't help much. Maybe so. But because we have approved and unapproved articles side-by-side, we can cover those topics in a similar manner to WP, and still approve articles we can approve. We're currently trying to think up methods to get pop culture articles approved. If you have ideas on the subject, join and help us.
The point is that simply if an article has a expert with credentials willing to go on record saying "This exact version is a good version, and I'd gladly point people here as a good resource", then it gains a lot in terms of credibility as a source. It'll probably be better as an article with the expert participation, but even if it's identical to the WP article, it still gets credibility because it's a guy with expertise in the matter staking his name on it.
Well, since people are using real names, they're not gonna get verified unless someone gets through to a professor of that name at the university who says "Yeah, I signed up last week". If the professor says "WTF? Who are you?" then that's a hint that there's a prankster afoot...
Approved articles (even those written by experts) will be subject to peer review before being approved. That doesn't mean that people can't prank the system on unapproved articles, but if an article has the approved sticker on it, we have at least one expert (and usually 2-3) who have gone over it and gone on record as saying "This is a good article".
The answer to that one is simple. Anyone can make that sort of an edit. If they can back it up, they're golden. The editors have the power of "approving" the articles and certifying them. Nothing stops you from making a change to an unapproved page, or the draft of an approved page. If there's a major turn of events, like a living person dying, we'll have the article reapproved in a hurry.
So far as TV plot lines go, it's going to be hard to have approved articles and experts in those sorts of areas. Which is fine by me. As I see it, if we can bring expert verification and editorial assistance to some articles (even if only ones with academic equivalents), without helping pop culture articles about TV shows, well, we've still done a lot of good. We're not limiting our signing of experts or our approvals to only those areas, but we're informally starting there.
If you have ideas about how to work out what I call "the pop culture problem", please join us and help, or at least email me your ideas.
By the way, this isn't a criminal case. As I clearly pointed out earlier, this is illegal, not criminal, and the difference is important.
You said "Find one case of someone going to jail because a judge or legal system clueless about technology sent them there". According to you "jail" implies criminal (or contempt of court). You took a discussion about a civil case and added criminal to the discussion list. What I'm trying to point out is that the legal system can cost you a lot of time and effort in a criminal matter even if a judge dismisses the issue the second they see it. I'm not saying that something like that frequently happens, I'm just saying that negative costs from the legal system arise from situations other than being found guilty. I'm not trying to argue anything relating to the current case of nerd vs. Senator, I'm addressing your post, specifically the part which related to a judge sending you to jail (I don't think that's an inclusive proof being harmed).
"Yes, I get you, you're myopically focussed on a tiny amount of money and personal time."
First of all, if you're middle-class or a student, then losing $500 for a few months is a large deal. If I made $50,000 a year, that's about half a week's salary. Not a deal-breaker, but certainly not "tiny". Now on to your large bold text: I never said it wasn't a price worth paying, I just noted that it was a price, and in some criminal cases, a legitimate harm to people.
Here's my own large bold text:
I'M NOT TALKING ABOUT A CIVIL CASE. I'M TALKING ABOUT THE CRIMINAL SITUATIONS YOU TOLD PEOPLE TO FIND EXAMPLES OF. I'M JUST SAYING THAT THERE ARE COSTS TO HAVING TO DEFEND YOURSELF IN A CRIMINAL CASE, EVEN IF YOU ARE FOUND NOT GUILTY. THOSE COSTS CAN INCLUDE MONEY, REPUTATION, TIME, AND A NIGHT IN JAIL. I'M NOT SAYING THAT OUTWEIGHS THE BENEFITS OF A GREAT LEGAL SYSTEM, JUST THAT THOSE COSTS EXIST.
If memory serves, you're the one who mentioned jail time, not me: "Find one case of someone going to jail because a judge or legal system clueless about technology sent them there. It's a myth. It does not happen". I simply pointed out that in a criminal case, there is a non-zero cost of innocence. I didn't claim there would be a conspiracy against this guy, or that he broke any laws. I'm simply saying that getting convicted and serving a full jail sentence are not the only potential downsides to a criminal case. Turning around and saying "that doesn't apply to a civil case" or that I'm not proud of our legal system is not a response. I never tried to discuss a civil law situation, and I certainly am happy about the low mistake rate of our legal system.
Please, in the future, actually read what I write and what you wrote before hitting submit, because you wasted about 5 minutes of your life with your response. Because if you can't bother to post a response that at all deals with what you're responding to, "you will be summarily subjected to laughter and derision."
If you get arrested and spend a night in jail, have to post bail, have to retain an attorney, and take 1+ days off (or at least mornings off) to go to court, you've already lost an assload of time and money and it's a huge hassle. And that assumes you get it dropped in a quick manner as opposed to having to go to trial over it. And that assumes that you don't have to deal with the shame of friends and neighbors learning you were arrested.
One of the most common misconceptions of the legal system is that being found innocent/not-guilty is free. It's not.
No, HP's the one with the sense of entitlement. They agreed to support the hardware. They said nothing about Linux. And now they want to weasel out of replacing the hardware because he installed Linux on it? That's the problem here.
And you have no business defending them saying that it's harder for their tech support people. Just because something isn't on the script doesn't mean that HP doesn't have to support it. This isn't an issue of the customer expecting them to support Linux. This is an issue of expecting the company to support their (apparently defective) hardware.
A most PHP-based sites don't actually store your password, they store a hash of your password. So at a lot of honest sites, this isn't even a concern. This is why they have to reset your password for you instead of just emailing it to you.
If a PC is gonna run a normal OS, there's a serious size limitation. But with custom OSes, possibly even ones that abandon the windows/menus/etc model of UI, you can get pretty small. I mean, if you look at the iPhone, or a Front Row style interface, you can accomplish a lot of the normal PC functions with minimal screen real estate. You could probably do a 4-5 inch screen with near full functionality if you design the OS specifically to handle it. You can keep most of the functionality if you're willing to sacrifice a few minor points and the ability to easily multitask.
In what direction? On the low-end, I work with a group at a university that basically puts on a free event every Friday, and they'll put up a few hundred dollars for small bands, and every once in a while will do a show for about $2000. Then maybe once a semester or so, we wind up with a show for $20000 artist fees. We are currently working on two shows with artist fees in excess of $40000. Admittedly, the bands/artists doing $20k and up shows are generally signed, but I'm just saying that there are definitely venues that will put out a few hundred dollars for a smaller band. That may be because the area I'm in has a lot of competition among music venues for acts, and that might be because of the nature of the group I work with (because we're subsidized, we don't do shows for much, if any, profit), or it might be because I'm at a relatively rich college where the population has that sort of disposable income.
Actually, I think he does. Bands/musicians who can give a good and entertaining performance can easily make $600 on the very low-end for a 60-90 minute show. If they have any sort of following in the area, that could easily jump to $1-2k. If they're very well known in the area, they could get a nice $8-10k show at some venues.
As a guy who works with booking bands, we look at how well liked they are regionally, not how well their CDs sell. If a band gives away their music and has a large following in an area, they'll make more money overall than the band that sells a hundred CDs but has a smaller following. Especially when you figure out that every person they can get into the concert could potentially buy merchandise (which has a large profit margin).
There are more efficient (in entertainment/dollar) things to buy than CDs. In addition to reducing the spending money people has, this also lowers their "demand" for entertainment. Even if money was not a factor, the emergence of "other stuff to do" results in people not wanting to consume as much music.
Congress didn't write the law, the IP barons did. They were the ones who set up the system and got it passed by WIPO and Congress. They came up with the idea of the "safe harbor" provision in the first place to try to make ISPs cooperative, and it's now biting them in the ass.
This and the net neutrality fight tell us something - the ISPs are not prepared for a large surge in bandwidth. Despite having about 10 years notice and charging up the ying-yang in many places, they're still not ready to provide the necessary speed to even those areas of the country they currently cover. When ISPs tell customers "5 Mb/s", they really mean "5 Mb/s, once in a blue moon, otherwise 512 kb/s normally and maybe a 2-3 Mb/s burst at times". 250 GB a month is only about 756 kbps. When customers realize this, there's gonna be a problem.
250 GB/month is not going to sound excessive when we start rolling out movie downloads in HD (that's 12 movies), or Steam-like solutions take off, or people start using things like Skype. Nowadays, your game console, your HD-DVD player, and your DVR/cable box want Internet access to get patches or content, and these massive numbers are getting more and more reasonable. This shouldn't be a sign to Comcast that users should download less, it should be a sign that they need to upgrade their networks drastically and fast.
Slashdot Mirror
Correct. The purpose of having experts is to make the article somewhat trustworthy in addition to the sources. Sure, you could check all the sources to see all the facts, or you could check the sticker that says "An expert has vouched for the quality of this article." In an ideal world, you'd check all the sources, but let's face facts: 90% of the people in the world wouldn't bother. Having a trustworthy secondary/tertiary source will be a major boon to people who want to learn something, but don't have all day to do it.
Zach Pruckowski - Citizendium Executive Committee
If you read a bit about Citizendium, we do both. We have stable version of articles that are approved and marked stable by verified experts. One of the major complaints from experts who left Wikipedia and came to Citizendium was that once they had an accurate, well-cited article, it could still be changed for the worse as time went on, and they lost patience with guarding it from vandalism or PoV or uncited claims. There's a reason Wikipedia has a set of former featured articles. There are 350 articles on there that people worked hard on to get approved, and then the articles went so far downhill they lost that status. We don't want that to happen at Citizendium.
Zach Pruckowski - Citizendium Executive Committee
I'll address your first and third issues, then your second.
.edu address is not the be-all-end-all of being an expert. Experts can verify themselves by other methods, and other proofs can be required beyond having a .edu address. There's nothing that says you have to be a Ph.D. in a subject. And even if you're not an editor, you can still bring a lot to the table and help with the article. The editors might offer guidance and are ultimately involved in approving the article, but that doesn't mean that they are the only ones who can write the article.
On your first point, having a
In your second point, you point out that there are some articles where this method doesn't help much. Maybe so. But because we have approved and unapproved articles side-by-side, we can cover those topics in a similar manner to WP, and still approve articles we can approve. We're currently trying to think up methods to get pop culture articles approved. If you have ideas on the subject, join and help us.
Zach Pruckowski - Citizendium Executive Committee
The point is that simply if an article has a expert with credentials willing to go on record saying "This exact version is a good version, and I'd gladly point people here as a good resource", then it gains a lot in terms of credibility as a source. It'll probably be better as an article with the expert participation, but even if it's identical to the WP article, it still gets credibility because it's a guy with expertise in the matter staking his name on it.
Well, since people are using real names, they're not gonna get verified unless someone gets through to a professor of that name at the university who says "Yeah, I signed up last week". If the professor says "WTF? Who are you?" then that's a hint that there's a prankster afoot...
Approved articles (even those written by experts) will be subject to peer review before being approved. That doesn't mean that people can't prank the system on unapproved articles, but if an article has the approved sticker on it, we have at least one expert (and usually 2-3) who have gone over it and gone on record as saying "This is a good article".
Zach Pruckowski - Citizendium Executive Committee
The answer to that one is simple. Anyone can make that sort of an edit. If they can back it up, they're golden. The editors have the power of "approving" the articles and certifying them. Nothing stops you from making a change to an unapproved page, or the draft of an approved page. If there's a major turn of events, like a living person dying, we'll have the article reapproved in a hurry.
So far as TV plot lines go, it's going to be hard to have approved articles and experts in those sorts of areas. Which is fine by me. As I see it, if we can bring expert verification and editorial assistance to some articles (even if only ones with academic equivalents), without helping pop culture articles about TV shows, well, we've still done a lot of good. We're not limiting our signing of experts or our approvals to only those areas, but we're informally starting there.
If you have ideas about how to work out what I call "the pop culture problem", please join us and help, or at least email me your ideas.
Zach Pruckowski - Citizendium Executive Committee.
By the way, this isn't a criminal case. As I clearly pointed out earlier, this is illegal, not criminal, and the difference is important.
You said "Find one case of someone going to jail because a judge or legal system clueless about technology sent them there". According to you "jail" implies criminal (or contempt of court). You took a discussion about a civil case and added criminal to the discussion list. What I'm trying to point out is that the legal system can cost you a lot of time and effort in a criminal matter even if a judge dismisses the issue the second they see it. I'm not saying that something like that frequently happens, I'm just saying that negative costs from the legal system arise from situations other than being found guilty. I'm not trying to argue anything relating to the current case of nerd vs. Senator, I'm addressing your post, specifically the part which related to a judge sending you to jail (I don't think that's an inclusive proof being harmed).
"Yes, I get you, you're myopically focussed on a tiny amount of money and personal time."
First of all, if you're middle-class or a student, then losing $500 for a few months is a large deal. If I made $50,000 a year, that's about half a week's salary. Not a deal-breaker, but certainly not "tiny". Now on to your large bold text: I never said it wasn't a price worth paying, I just noted that it was a price, and in some criminal cases, a legitimate harm to people.
Here's my own large bold text:
I'M NOT TALKING ABOUT A CIVIL CASE. I'M TALKING ABOUT THE CRIMINAL SITUATIONS YOU TOLD PEOPLE TO FIND EXAMPLES OF. I'M JUST SAYING THAT THERE ARE COSTS TO HAVING TO DEFEND YOURSELF IN A CRIMINAL CASE, EVEN IF YOU ARE FOUND NOT GUILTY. THOSE COSTS CAN INCLUDE MONEY, REPUTATION, TIME, AND A NIGHT IN JAIL. I'M NOT SAYING THAT OUTWEIGHS THE BENEFITS OF A GREAT LEGAL SYSTEM, JUST THAT THOSE COSTS EXIST.
If memory serves, you're the one who mentioned jail time, not me: "Find one case of someone going to jail because a judge or legal system clueless about technology sent them there. It's a myth. It does not happen". I simply pointed out that in a criminal case, there is a non-zero cost of innocence. I didn't claim there would be a conspiracy against this guy, or that he broke any laws. I'm simply saying that getting convicted and serving a full jail sentence are not the only potential downsides to a criminal case. Turning around and saying "that doesn't apply to a civil case" or that I'm not proud of our legal system is not a response. I never tried to discuss a civil law situation, and I certainly am happy about the low mistake rate of our legal system.
Please, in the future, actually read what I write and what you wrote before hitting submit, because you wasted about 5 minutes of your life with your response. Because if you can't bother to post a response that at all deals with what you're responding to, "you will be summarily subjected to laughter and derision."
If you get arrested and spend a night in jail, have to post bail, have to retain an attorney, and take 1+ days off (or at least mornings off) to go to court, you've already lost an assload of time and money and it's a huge hassle. And that assumes you get it dropped in a quick manner as opposed to having to go to trial over it. And that assumes that you don't have to deal with the shame of friends and neighbors learning you were arrested.
One of the most common misconceptions of the legal system is that being found innocent/not-guilty is free. It's not.
No, HP's the one with the sense of entitlement. They agreed to support the hardware. They said nothing about Linux. And now they want to weasel out of replacing the hardware because he installed Linux on it? That's the problem here.
And you have no business defending them saying that it's harder for their tech support people. Just because something isn't on the script doesn't mean that HP doesn't have to support it. This isn't an issue of the customer expecting them to support Linux. This is an issue of expecting the company to support their (apparently defective) hardware.
A most PHP-based sites don't actually store your password, they store a hash of your password. So at a lot of honest sites, this isn't even a concern. This is why they have to reset your password for you instead of just emailing it to you.
If a PC is gonna run a normal OS, there's a serious size limitation. But with custom OSes, possibly even ones that abandon the windows/menus/etc model of UI, you can get pretty small. I mean, if you look at the iPhone, or a Front Row style interface, you can accomplish a lot of the normal PC functions with minimal screen real estate. You could probably do a 4-5 inch screen with near full functionality if you design the OS specifically to handle it. You can keep most of the functionality if you're willing to sacrifice a few minor points and the ability to easily multitask.
In what direction? On the low-end, I work with a group at a university that basically puts on a free event every Friday, and they'll put up a few hundred dollars for small bands, and every once in a while will do a show for about $2000. Then maybe once a semester or so, we wind up with a show for $20000 artist fees. We are currently working on two shows with artist fees in excess of $40000. Admittedly, the bands/artists doing $20k and up shows are generally signed, but I'm just saying that there are definitely venues that will put out a few hundred dollars for a smaller band. That may be because the area I'm in has a lot of competition among music venues for acts, and that might be because of the nature of the group I work with (because we're subsidized, we don't do shows for much, if any, profit), or it might be because I'm at a relatively rich college where the population has that sort of disposable income.
Actually, I think he does. Bands/musicians who can give a good and entertaining performance can easily make $600 on the very low-end for a 60-90 minute show. If they have any sort of following in the area, that could easily jump to $1-2k. If they're very well known in the area, they could get a nice $8-10k show at some venues.
As a guy who works with booking bands, we look at how well liked they are regionally, not how well their CDs sell. If a band gives away their music and has a large following in an area, they'll make more money overall than the band that sells a hundred CDs but has a smaller following. Especially when you figure out that every person they can get into the concert could potentially buy merchandise (which has a large profit margin).
There are more efficient (in entertainment/dollar) things to buy than CDs. In addition to reducing the spending money people has, this also lowers their "demand" for entertainment. Even if money was not a factor, the emergence of "other stuff to do" results in people not wanting to consume as much music.
Actually, most of the Linux security update notices I get clearly say who found the bug/exploit.
Missing Option: You got to use linked lists? Back in my day, we had to tie the punch cards together with string, and we liked it!
Congress didn't write the law, the IP barons did. They were the ones who set up the system and got it passed by WIPO and Congress. They came up with the idea of the "safe harbor" provision in the first place to try to make ISPs cooperative, and it's now biting them in the ass.
He got off easy. The original settlement required that he be sodomized by a Clydesdale.
No Clydesdales were willing to go near him. Even with blinders on. It's the smell, apparently.
I'm gonna guess you live in a city. The amount of work Verizon and Comcast put in is directly related to population density.
This and the net neutrality fight tell us something - the ISPs are not prepared for a large surge in bandwidth. Despite having about 10 years notice and charging up the ying-yang in many places, they're still not ready to provide the necessary speed to even those areas of the country they currently cover. When ISPs tell customers "5 Mb/s", they really mean "5 Mb/s, once in a blue moon, otherwise 512 kb/s normally and maybe a 2-3 Mb/s burst at times". 250 GB a month is only about 756 kbps. When customers realize this, there's gonna be a problem.
250 GB/month is not going to sound excessive when we start rolling out movie downloads in HD (that's 12 movies), or Steam-like solutions take off, or people start using things like Skype. Nowadays, your game console, your HD-DVD player, and your DVR/cable box want Internet access to get patches or content, and these massive numbers are getting more and more reasonable. This shouldn't be a sign to Comcast that users should download less, it should be a sign that they need to upgrade their networks drastically and fast.
Regrettably, /. dropped the sarcasm tags.
- An OS that hasn't be updated in forever
- Absolutely no native software
- A decent chance of being sued by SCO for no real reason.
- A decent chance of being sued by IBM or someone in the Linux world for using software that SCO distributed in violation of the GPL
- An absolute lack of techies with experience in your platform
- The 50% "conscience" bonus you need to pay your admins to work with SCO
I'm moving my servers to SCO today!!According to Wikipedia, that goal of 5% will triple in the next six months.
FYI, that's a Colbert reference. He tried to have mentions of the white elephant population tripling in 6 months added randomly to WP.