Yes, but this is one area where they have deviated from the common law in a very stupid way. The common law rule is that you do not have the power to sell something that you do not own.
At least in most of the US, and I believe this traces back to the common law, a bona fide purchaser for value who takes without notice of a defect in the chain of title is generally protected; while the fraudulent seller has no "right" to sell the property, the injured owner's recourse is action against the seller, not against the bona fide purchaser. The issue would be establishing whether there was legal notice of the defect.
Had this occurred in most places in the US as described in the article, I don't think the result would have been much different.
Actually, its a lot more like the very long established favoring of a subsequent bona fide purchaser for value in real property law throughout the US than any recent innovation by the Supreme Court (not that the Kelo really was an innovation, just something that a lot of people made political noise over because the same result that occurred to poor people's residences in the 1950s happened to people that weren't poor; of course, the principals it was based on are pretty clear back into the 19th century in the case law of eminent domain; plus, its Justice Souter, and the publicity stunt by a private individual to get his land seized by eminent domain has so far failed when the slate of candidates for local office he picked to get the deed done were defeated, and then his attempt to get it done through a ballot initiative failed as well, so to see that he is "about to get evicted" is quite wrong—and the "by the same law" would be wrong in any case.)
Television would cost more, there would be a penny per search on Google and so on - but the end products I buy would be vastly cheaper as a result.
Particular methods of advertising are done because companies have determined it is the most cost effective way of companies getting the message out about their product. If advertising-supported content in media like TV, radio, internet and print were abolished, other, more expensive for the results, means of getting the message out on products would be resorted to, driving the costs of products up even higher. Or companies would communicate less, settle with smaller regional markets for longer, and less economies of scale, and thus higher prices for the same quality goods in many cases. Most likely, a combination of the two.
Plus, as the collection costs for something like TV or internet searches from a wide array of end-users would be more than the collection costs from a small range of advertisers, the costs would be driven up in many cases from the other end as well.
es, they paid to be connected to a backbone provider. But what about your local broadband provider?
They paid their broadband provider for their bandwidth in each direction.
You pay your provider for your bandwidth in each direction.
Those two direct providers have contracts (which means they've made an exchange for value) covering the exchange of traffic with every provider in between.
Every bit that is transferred over the internet is already paid for in both directions at every transfer (and, yes, unmetered traffic in a contract is still paid for; the provider has just decided its more efficient to charge you a flat rate than a metered rate.)
The reason why cable providers (etc.) want a non-neutral network is all of them have realized that in the long run there is a lot of money to made in content, all of them are already in (or trying to move into) the content space, and the ability to erect focussed fees on competing sources of content in markets where they want to compete is attractive.
Its simply a way to leverage relatively narrow, oligopolistic (and often regionally monopolistic) control of one market (the internets "tubes" in Senator Stevens' language) into similar control without fair competition in another market (internet content).
Yes, and that price has been so far structured on use to date. What happens when the use starts shifting from web browsing and email checking to people *routinely* downloading/obtaining all of their TV shows, movies, and so on, via legal commercial channels?
What happens is that, if utilization goes up faster than providers improve the supply of available bandwidth, prices will naturally rise. Further, as high-traffic users become more common, the cost:benefit ratio of charging users based on capacity used will probably increase—that's actually fairly common for everything but home service now. (Of course, in the long-run, if everyone tends to cluster around the same high usage with very few outliers that don't much affect the providers overall cost, it makes more sense to just have a flat rate again, which may or may not be higher.)
This isn't an argument against neutrality. Its an argument that prices are going to go up for the end-user if the cost of adding capacity is too high to maintain current service costs, no matter whether neutrality is adopted or not. The question is whether that cost is distributed in such a way that it is based primarily on level of use (which is the likely case under neutrality) or whether the cost is distributed in such a way as to maximize the impact on content providers competing in markets where the access providers would like to also become the dominant content providers (which is clearly the goal of non-neutral approaches.) Its no coincidence that the areas the telcos and cable companies have said they want to put surcharges on providers are major portals (Google, Yahoo), and providers of services that competing with non-internet-access offerings of the cable and phone companies (VoIP, downloadable video.) The non-neutral net is simply a barrier internet access providers want to erect to content providers that compete with their content businesses.
What about DSL providers whose operations may largely be supported by telephone business? What happens if they lose a quarter, third, or half of their paying $30/month landline customers to VoIP? You might argue they're already losing them to cell phones, and so on, and I'd agree. But the bottom line is, they're looking for ways to continue to support their operations five years down the road. If charging large source providers (like a forthcoming iTunes Movie Store) or "taxing" VoIP traffic are ways to continue to do it, is it surprising that they're trying to explore that avenue?
Of course its not "surprising" that access providers are trying to implement a pricing model that allows them to create focus
The gist is $100 laptops to go to developing countries for each school child TO REPLACE TEXTBOOKS among other things. One of the highly touted ideas is to include a copy of the Wikipedia so the students have access to a wealth of information. . Think about that for a second. Imagine that the Wikipedia is quite possibly YOUR ONLY SOURCE OF INFO about practically everything in the world.
The computer may be to replace textbooks, but the idea is not to use Wikipedia to replace textbooks. Its to have electronic texts delivered to the computer to replace dead-tree textbooks; Wikipedia is one idea to provide general reference material with the computer that would be better than the current general reference material (i.e., nothing) many of the students receiving it would have, not an idea for a one-stop replacement for textbooks and classroom instruction.
Wikipedia is broken. Funamentally broken. You see, Wikipedia is incapable of arriving at the truth. It is only able to arrive at content that appears true.
Inasmuch as this is true (and it would be better phrased as "disinformation is possible via Wikipedia"), this is a problem of "humanity" not "wikipedia". The same effect you describe has been done through traditional, professionally edited, information sources throughout the entire history of information.
But the problem is that in some cases, it does replace "traditional" encyclopedias, news articles, and research in general.
Why is that a problem, where it is a problem at all, with Wikipedia? People that lack the understanding to select a proper source for the use they are using will tend to select improper sources no matter what the array of sources available is. This is not a problem with the source they choose to use, its a problem with the people choosing to use the wrong source (and, in many cases, the educational system that failed to teach them properly.)
It's bad enough, imo when people use a single source, esp. a secondary or teriary source as their only source in a serious report.
Yes, it is. But it is not the single sources fault.
Worse still is when they trust the accuracy of people who don't leave their names or list credentials,
No, I really don't think this is "worse still". Putting a name and claiming credentials does not itself justify trust.
which means that there is no chance of determining whether or not the person behind the page (or in the case of Wpedia) has any actual knowledge of the subject, has an agenda, or is a 12-year old having fun by reversing terms in that math equation.
If they aren't going to verify the identity and credentials, then the mere fact that they are asserted provides no benefit in terms of that. And I don't think many people lazy or ill-trained in research enough to cite a single source, and an encyclopedia at that, in a "serious report" are also doing research about the bias of the authors of the source, even when they are identified and claim credentials.
Wpedia may be OK if you're using it to find related terms so that you can look up articles and technical material in professional journals or even news articles to confirm what Wpedia says. Or if you're looking up something that just doesn't matter much (say Jedi fighting styles for an internet Star Wars debate). But if you're doing something like writing a report (for school or business) or researching because you want to understand an issue, Wpedia isn't a good enough source to be the main source. Most webpages aren't and those that are, in general are the online versions of offline magazines and journals or newspapers.
Wikipedia is useful for a lot more than that; I find its particularly useful as a refresher for material I'm basically familiar with but don't have the details at hand (like, say, a lot of basic algorithms). In fact, I find its generally useful (unsurprisingly) for the exact kind of things an encyclopedia should be used for, and its limitations basically come in areas where you shouldn't be relying on an encyclopedia in the first place.
(OTOH, most technical journals online—but not free—versions are perfectly good sources: they tend to contain the same content as the dead-tree versions, at least IME.)
Most "magazines and newspapers", especially used as a single source, are generally fairly unreliable sources, though for current-events coverage they may be all that is available. The online versions, even there, are often not much, if any, worse than the dead-tree versions (they sometimes include fewer articles, but usually the articles are fairly complete), and its a lot more practical to get wide coverage from different news sources online than in dead tree form.
computershave "forced" the start sounder for like 20 years and I have never seen a complaint, why is it ok for Apple and not for Windows?
I've seen plenty of complaints; OTOH, even were that not true, "a competitor that has never acheived a substantial fraction of the market we have has users that are used to not having control over the startup sound and don't complain" isn't really a good reason to delete a function that is in Windows and which Windows users have been used to having.
I mean, its not like not having control of the startup sound is somehow a MacOS feature that Windows users have been crying out for, or that has led users to switch to MacOS. Change—especially changes that removes functionality that the user has access to—should have a positive reason, and I've seen nothing convincing offered for this change.
Poring thru books, learning context, background and "side knowledge" gives you a fuller grasp of the subject.
Really? A better grasp than poring through web-pages, following links to related external resources immediately rather than having to trudge back to a catalog, hope the library has the related source, and trudge back to the stacks to find it? I don't think that's really that true.
OTOH, Googling + "copy and paste" is just lazy.
Yes, so is copying verbatim from dead tree sources, which was fairly common for students when I was in school before anyone had Google. And Google plus copy and paste is probably far easier for a teacher to detect.
And that's bad for students.
Yeah, lazy is bad for students. That's why teachers, regardless of the technology available, need to be on the lookout for plagiarism and need to come down hard on it. But that's true if the papers are being written by hand from research using dead-tree sources or done on a computer from online sources, or any combination.
I'm not sure I've ever seen a valid use of that stuff -- if you have an interesting point to make about your embedded CPU board, say it; the pixellated picture of the board flying around on the page does not help, even if it took two days of tweaking to get it to look cool!
I've always thought the point of the animations was to cover for the absence of having an interesting, meaningful point.
Not true. Nature cooked the books [theregister.co.uk].
An opinion piece repeating uncritically the claims in Britannica's response and ignoring Nature's counter to Britannica's response. Proves...someone at the Register has an opinion, and not much else.
I've lost count of the number of times this canard has been repeated on Slashdot.
Soon, I'll lose track of the times this false rebuttal has been posted in this thread on Slashdot.
Of course, the Wiki-boosters mantra "anyone can fix it" is ridiculous, as there's no value proposition in correcting sloppily written articles when you know that some "administrator" with a fifth-grade reading level is going to revert the article as soon as you've cleaned it up.
I've seen plenty of cleanups and corrections made (including the one I've made myself) that weren't reverted, either immediately or later, by an illiterate administrator or anyone else.
If you have a particular problem with all of your "corrections" being reverted, it might be something about your "corrections".
Of course, this is the same group (Wiki-boosters) who sincerely believe that giving every child in Africa a laptop with the Wikipedia on it is the sure cure of all that continent's ills.
I've never seen anyone suggest anything like that. You seem to confusing the overlapping sets of wikiboosters and OLPC boosters, and then ridiculously exaggerating what either believes about the thing they support before combining them to create a giant distortion that's irrelevant to the actual quality or utility of Wikipedia to attempt to discredit Wikipedia by creating a false image of its supporters.
Look at it this way, practically anyone can vandalize the Wikipedia, but over time it tends to "self heal". Great. But that means that on any given day a certain percentage of it is in need of "healing". Someone could say that Christopher Columbus was a dirty who had a tiny and who definitively proved that the earth was . It is all well and good that someone will repair that, but if Johnny writes his paper based on what it said when he last looked at it, then Johnny's going to repeat 5th grade (and possibly land in counciling).
I think I was taught at the time I was assigned my first "research paper" in elementary school that general encyclopedia entries were not generally acceptable sources.
If I were a teacher I would not allow a student to use Wikipedia as a reference for a paper. Why?
Because its an encyclopedia?
Let's say little Johnny cited the Wikipedia in his Columbus the Dirty paper. When I go to check the little nimrod's reference, it doesn't say that any more. Great it got cleaned up, but how can you cite a reference to a moving target?
Proper citations of web pages, including citing dates for sources that aren't stable, are part of most guides to citations. Teachers should be teaching students to cite them properly, and to create printed copies of any material they cite showing the date and URL. (Of course, material produced by web applications that you can't navigate to by a URL is a problem, but generally that's not something you'll want to cite, at least in an elementary/middle-school paper.)
Of course this implies that some group of people with the interest and ability to do so would actually get involved. The task of editing all of Wikipedia would be gargantuan.
No, it would be entirely unmanageable without killing Wikipedia; Wikipedia is bigger than most encyclopedias and adding new material at a rate that no practical review process would ever catch up. There's plenty of professionally edited general encyclopedias, both in dead tree versions and online. Wikipedias unique value is in not being like them.
An opinion piece which basically just repeats the claims in Britannica's self-interested attack on the study (but ignores Nature's response to those attacks) doesn't show that anything is a "falsehood".
Learning to communicate effectively is important, but manipulating a Powerpoint presentation is not learning to communicate effectively. It starts with content; embellishments come later. "Empowering" a student with a laptop suddenly shifts the focus from content to presentation.
Well, with PowerPoint. Using (e.g.) LaTeX with the Beamer package might actually help turn the focus a way from the mechanics of presentation (a problem that exists as much with hand-made visual aids as with PowerPoint presentation) to organizing content, while still familiarizing students with the computer medium of presentation.
I seriously hate to say it, but in today's business climate knowing PowerPoint is one of the basics. Maybe not for 6-8th graders, but at some point many, many people need to use PowerPoint.
6th-8th graders really should be considered with the business climate a decade from now (and beyond): they should be learning the fundamentals (what makes good communication in terms of content, and different modes of presentation), not specializing on facility with particular current tools for producing presentations in one medium.
That's always been the case though: the vast majority of teachers and schools not only don't encourage students to experiment with computers, they actively discourage (and sometimes punish) for it.
Well, yeah. I suspect, based on my own experience, that is because the vast majority of teachers and schools don't understand computers, don't have a clue what is safe and what isn't, and fear what they don't understand.
I remember a school report I got, I was furious about it at the time and I'm still annoyed by what the teacher wrote -- "books must be opened, not computers turned on". The teacher simply couldn't recognise I was actually learning lots of useful things - genuinely useful things - (and given the fact that I was and still am very lazy) was a GOOD thing. I may not have been learning his irrelevant subject - but I'm glad I ignored that school report because I much prefer my career in computing compared to what he'd rather have me do.
While I've been through quite a few similar things, you can't really blame a teacher for thinking the subject he was responsible for teaching was more important, in the context of grading a paper on that subject, than your other interests.
I mean, I don't regret getting a D in my computer/typing class in eighth grade because I often spent the half of the class I was supposed to be banging away on a manual typewriter learning more on the Apple IIe's either by experimentation or by reinforcing my own knowledge by teaching other students; but I don't blame the teacher for repeatedly trying to get me to adhere to the format of the class, and ultimately grading me down accordingly.
There is this concept known as a "joke". One frequent basis for a "joke" is intentional misreading of words taking a legitimate definition other than the one the speaker intended, but that has some application to the forum or subject matter.
Any student not yet in college should be able to complete school work in note pad or its equivalent.
Hmm. LaTeX's focus on structural markup might give it some utility here, while producing nicer-looking output (someone's got to read those assignments, you know.)
The current issues would be solved by the state just creating its own network, purchasing globally accessible content for it, letting schools create locally-accessible content for their own students, and creating a simple process for control and review of locally-created, globally-accessible content, and just having computers in the schools connect only to the state schools network.
Students in primary school, at least, and perhaps up until senior high school no more need access to the general internet than they need unsupervised access to telephones to call whoever they want in class.
You can learn about computers and using network resources in an academic environment without access to the public internet, and filtering software is a backwards approach to the school's responsibility to control the curriculum (which anything the students have access to in class ought to be part of.)
Setting it up so that the kids depend on these computers for their classes means they'll be afraid to break anything, which means they won't get anything out of them other than the typical office-worker knowledge, which isn't very deep or useful.
It is possible to learn quite a bit about computers without substantial risk of breaking anything. Though the fact that most of the teachers at the 6th-8th grade level probably don't have any more than "typical office-worker" knowledge about computers makes it unlikely that the students will learn more than that except by chance and/or on their own initiative.
'the laptop has helped her twelve-year-old son master critical professional skills like how to compile a PowerPoint presentation
Heck, I've been making PowerPoint presentations for years, and I didn't even know there was a compiler available. I've been stuck using lousy interpreted presentations.
Actually, the most striking feature of Wikipedia today is that it's done. Very few new articles are on substantative subjects.
The former is not really an indicator of the latter (I disagree that it is accurate either; while the proportion of new articles addressing what I would consider substantive topics is low, the absolute number is not.) Most new (particulary on substantive topics) articles are stubs or not much more than stubs; development is not limited to new articles, but improvement of existing articles.
And substantive new knowledge is being developed all the time, so if there weren't new substantive articles on Wikipedia, it wouldn't be evidence that Wikipedia was done, but that it was getting progressively less done.
Yes, and this is why (despite having not much greater overall accuracy, and much less scope of coverage, generally), commercial encyclopedias charge money for their flagship products, while Wikipedia is free.
You can't have the top-down control (and the benefits it brings, which are real though perhaps not all that cost-effective) of a traditional publication, and the distributed, informal, open nature (which has its own benefits) of Wikipedia.
Given what encyclopedias are generally good for, at least to me, I think Wikipedia has generally the better, more effective model. I've certainly found more useful coverage for things that actually concern me through Wikipedia than through traditional encyclopedias.
Maybe -- and this is a stretch, stay with me on this one -- he just wants to consult an encyclopedia and get some geo-political information without the risk that it has somehow been altered by a twelve year-old on a dare made in the back of a school bus?
Then he should use, say, Encyclopedia Britannica. I mean, no one is forcing anyone to use Wikipedia. Of course, Britannica—while there is no risk of it being altered as you describe—when examined turns out not to be much more accurate than Wikipedia where they both cover the same topics, and Britannica has far less coverage in a lot of areas, but if your concern is only that you don't want to look at an encyclopedia that anyone can edit, then Wikipedia isn't the online encyclopedia for you.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, its a lot more like the very long established favoring of a subsequent bona fide purchaser for value in real property law throughout the US than any recent innovation by the Supreme Court (not that the Kelo really was an innovation, just something that a lot of people made political noise over because the same result that occurred to poor people's residences in the 1950s happened to people that weren't poor; of course, the principals it was based on are pretty clear back into the 19th century in the case law of eminent domain; plus, its Justice Souter, and the publicity stunt by a private individual to get his land seized by eminent domain has so far failed when the slate of candidates for local office he picked to get the deed done were defeated, and then his attempt to get it done through a ballot initiative failed as well, so to see that he is "about to get evicted" is quite wrong—and the "by the same law" would be wrong in any case.)
Particular methods of advertising are done because companies have determined it is the most cost effective way of companies getting the message out about their product. If advertising-supported content in media like TV, radio, internet and print were abolished, other, more expensive for the results, means of getting the message out on products would be resorted to, driving the costs of products up even higher. Or companies would communicate less, settle with smaller regional markets for longer, and less economies of scale, and thus higher prices for the same quality goods in many cases. Most likely, a combination of the two.
Plus, as the collection costs for something like TV or internet searches from a wide array of end-users would be more than the collection costs from a small range of advertisers, the costs would be driven up in many cases from the other end as well.
They paid their broadband provider for their bandwidth in each direction.
You pay your provider for your bandwidth in each direction.
Those two direct providers have contracts (which means they've made an exchange for value) covering the exchange of traffic with every provider in between.
Every bit that is transferred over the internet is already paid for in both directions at every transfer (and, yes, unmetered traffic in a contract is still paid for; the provider has just decided its more efficient to charge you a flat rate than a metered rate.)
The reason why cable providers (etc.) want a non-neutral network is all of them have realized that in the long run there is a lot of money to made in content, all of them are already in (or trying to move into) the content space, and the ability to erect focussed fees on competing sources of content in markets where they want to compete is attractive.
Its simply a way to leverage relatively narrow, oligopolistic (and often regionally monopolistic) control of one market (the internets "tubes" in Senator Stevens' language) into similar control without fair competition in another market (internet content).
What happens is that, if utilization goes up faster than providers improve the supply of available bandwidth, prices will naturally rise. Further, as high-traffic users become more common, the cost:benefit ratio of charging users based on capacity used will probably increase—that's actually fairly common for everything but home service now. (Of course, in the long-run, if everyone tends to cluster around the same high usage with very few outliers that don't much affect the providers overall cost, it makes more sense to just have a flat rate again, which may or may not be higher.)
This isn't an argument against neutrality. Its an argument that prices are going to go up for the end-user if the cost of adding capacity is too high to maintain current service costs, no matter whether neutrality is adopted or not. The question is whether that cost is distributed in such a way that it is based primarily on level of use (which is the likely case under neutrality) or whether the cost is distributed in such a way as to maximize the impact on content providers competing in markets where the access providers would like to also become the dominant content providers (which is clearly the goal of non-neutral approaches.) Its no coincidence that the areas the telcos and cable companies have said they want to put surcharges on providers are major portals (Google, Yahoo), and providers of services that competing with non-internet-access offerings of the cable and phone companies (VoIP, downloadable video.) The non-neutral net is simply a barrier internet access providers want to erect to content providers that compete with their content businesses.
Of course its not "surprising" that access providers are trying to implement a pricing model that allows them to create focus
Why is that a problem, where it is a problem at all, with Wikipedia? People that lack the understanding to select a proper source for the use they are using will tend to select improper sources no matter what the array of sources available is. This is not a problem with the source they choose to use, its a problem with the people choosing to use the wrong source (and, in many cases, the educational system that failed to teach them properly.)
Yes, it is. But it is not the single sources fault.
No, I really don't think this is "worse still". Putting a name and claiming credentials does not itself justify trust.
If they aren't going to verify the identity and credentials, then the mere fact that they are asserted provides no benefit in terms of that. And I don't think many people lazy or ill-trained in research enough to cite a single source, and an encyclopedia at that, in a "serious report" are also doing research about the bias of the authors of the source, even when they are identified and claim credentials.
Wikipedia is useful for a lot more than that; I find its particularly useful as a refresher for material I'm basically familiar with but don't have the details at hand (like, say, a lot of basic algorithms). In fact, I find its generally useful (unsurprisingly) for the exact kind of things an encyclopedia should be used for, and its limitations basically come in areas where you shouldn't be relying on an encyclopedia in the first place.
(OTOH, most technical journals online—but not free—versions are perfectly good sources: they tend to contain the same content as the dead-tree versions, at least IME.)
Most "magazines and newspapers", especially used as a single source, are generally fairly unreliable sources, though for current-events coverage they may be all that is available. The online versions, even there, are often not much, if any, worse than the dead-tree versions (they sometimes include fewer articles, but usually the articles are fairly complete), and its a lot more practical to get wide coverage from different news sources online than in dead tree form.
I've seen plenty of complaints; OTOH, even were that not true, "a competitor that has never acheived a substantial fraction of the market we have has users that are used to not having control over the startup sound and don't complain" isn't really a good reason to delete a function that is in Windows and which Windows users have been used to having.
I mean, its not like not having control of the startup sound is somehow a MacOS feature that Windows users have been crying out for, or that has led users to switch to MacOS. Change—especially changes that removes functionality that the user has access to—should have a positive reason, and I've seen nothing convincing offered for this change.
Really? A better grasp than poring through web-pages, following links to related external resources immediately rather than having to trudge back to a catalog, hope the library has the related source, and trudge back to the stacks to find it? I don't think that's really that true.
Yes, so is copying verbatim from dead tree sources, which was fairly common for students when I was in school before anyone had Google. And Google plus copy and paste is probably far easier for a teacher to detect.
Yeah, lazy is bad for students. That's why teachers, regardless of the technology available, need to be on the lookout for plagiarism and need to come down hard on it. But that's true if the papers are being written by hand from research using dead-tree sources or done on a computer from online sources, or any combination.
I think I was taught at the time I was assigned my first "research paper" in elementary school that general encyclopedia entries were not generally acceptable sources.
Because its an encyclopedia?
Proper citations of web pages, including citing dates for sources that aren't stable, are part of most guides to citations. Teachers should be teaching students to cite them properly, and to create printed copies of any material they cite showing the date and URL. (Of course, material produced by web applications that you can't navigate to by a URL is a problem, but generally that's not something you'll want to cite, at least in an elementary/middle-school paper.)
No, it would be entirely unmanageable without killing Wikipedia; Wikipedia is bigger than most encyclopedias and adding new material at a rate that no practical review process would ever catch up. There's plenty of professionally edited general encyclopedias, both in dead tree versions and online. Wikipedias unique value is in not being like them.
An opinion piece which basically just repeats the claims in Britannica's self-interested attack on the study (but ignores Nature's response to those attacks) doesn't show that anything is a "falsehood".
Well, yeah. I suspect, based on my own experience, that is because the vast majority of teachers and schools don't understand computers, don't have a clue what is safe and what isn't, and fear what they don't understand.
While I've been through quite a few similar things, you can't really blame a teacher for thinking the subject he was responsible for teaching was more important, in the context of grading a paper on that subject, than your other interests.
I mean, I don't regret getting a D in my computer/typing class in eighth grade because I often spent the half of the class I was supposed to be banging away on a manual typewriter learning more on the Apple IIe's either by experimentation or by reinforcing my own knowledge by teaching other students; but I don't blame the teacher for repeatedly trying to get me to adhere to the format of the class, and ultimately grading me down accordingly.
There is this concept known as a "joke". One frequent basis for a "joke" is intentional misreading of words taking a legitimate definition other than the one the speaker intended, but that has some application to the forum or subject matter.
The current issues would be solved by the state just creating its own network, purchasing globally accessible content for it, letting schools create locally-accessible content for their own students, and creating a simple process for control and review of locally-created, globally-accessible content, and just having computers in the schools connect only to the state schools network.
Students in primary school, at least, and perhaps up until senior high school no more need access to the general internet than they need unsupervised access to telephones to call whoever they want in class.
You can learn about computers and using network resources in an academic environment without access to the public internet, and filtering software is a backwards approach to the school's responsibility to control the curriculum (which anything the students have access to in class ought to be part of.)
Heck, I've been making PowerPoint presentations for years, and I didn't even know there was a compiler available. I've been stuck using lousy interpreted presentations.
I'm so far behind the curve...
The former is not really an indicator of the latter (I disagree that it is accurate either; while the proportion of new articles addressing what I would consider substantive topics is low, the absolute number is not.) Most new (particulary on substantive topics) articles are stubs or not much more than stubs; development is not limited to new articles, but improvement of existing articles.
And substantive new knowledge is being developed all the time, so if there weren't new substantive articles on Wikipedia, it wouldn't be evidence that Wikipedia was done, but that it was getting progressively less done.
Yes, and this is why (despite having not much greater overall accuracy, and much less scope of coverage, generally), commercial encyclopedias charge money for their flagship products, while Wikipedia is free.
You can't have the top-down control (and the benefits it brings, which are real though perhaps not all that cost-effective) of a traditional publication, and the distributed, informal, open nature (which has its own benefits) of Wikipedia.
Given what encyclopedias are generally good for, at least to me, I think Wikipedia has generally the better, more effective model. I've certainly found more useful coverage for things that actually concern me through Wikipedia than through traditional encyclopedias.
Then he should use, say, Encyclopedia Britannica. I mean, no one is forcing anyone to use Wikipedia. Of course, Britannica—while there is no risk of it being altered as you describe—when examined turns out not to be much more accurate than Wikipedia where they both cover the same topics, and Britannica has far less coverage in a lot of areas, but if your concern is only that you don't want to look at an encyclopedia that anyone can edit, then Wikipedia isn't the online encyclopedia for you.