Not for albums. The worst it gets is that someone will leak an album before it's mastered or the final mix. But since the mixing is part of the project, having an alternate mix can be enlightening.

Concert bootlegs, on the other hand, do have that issue. But very often a bootleg is the only way to get a recording of that particular show, depending on whether or not the artist sanctions audience tapers. And for some artists it's the only way to get a live recording, since they might not have released any.

(for the record, I pay for my music)

It's not so much the gum as the amazing comics they come with.

For streaming? I disagree.

If you can make changes to the storage between syncs (or if you're not syncing to a host machine at all) then the database has to be built and indexed on the player, which takes longer. A *lot* longer, which is why I don't use it with Rockbox.

My friend had a Cowon that did something similar and he had nothing good to say about it. He also eventually went the iPod + Rockbox route.

My larger point was that although I generally make sure that gear is open/hackable before I buy it, there are certain things that I appreciate not having to mess with. My phone for one, and as time goes on I am thinking my music player as well. Just a personal preference. I have a few MP3 players but they are all collecting dust because I just don't have time to go through skins, write scripts to sync files, etc.

Information overloaded happened as soon as the first libraries were constructed. We only don't feel it when we're in a library because we already know the system (wing > aisle > shelf, fiction by author, non-fiction by topic, etc).

FWIW I think the various social bookmarking sites, although not always super useful, move the work of filtering information from an algorithm to a groups of people with similar tastes who you can link up with. Not quite the same as a BBS but when combine that with forums, it gets easier to find relevant info.

And I think that what's actually changed is the specialness of the connection itself (I mean the person-to-person connection, not the LAN). I don't have any reason to be in a chat room any more but there was a time when I thought that was the coolest thing ever. I think my generation basically has gone through that. It all happened fast enough that we have one generation that was wowed by being able to download BBS messages and another that is growing up with no notion of a world without Facebook.

Well in this case it's going to be paid for by the tourists who don't know how to spoof a MAC, and the rest of us get free internet!

Though to be fair I guess you could get free health care if you know how to spoof an SSN...

His work is creepy...but seeing it as the 2g1c of the 80s helps me put it into perspective a little.

Not sure why this gets a funny mod? I'm pretty sure obscenity isn't protected as well. Which is really the whole point of being able to label something as 'obscene'...to get around those pesky ideals our founding fathers had.

+1 depressing if anything.

Or people saying "random" when they mean "arbitrary."

It's annoying (although expected) that the words people mix up are the ones that require subtlety in their use. It's as if the more expressive a word or phrase is, the more likely it is to be horribly misused. That's the real story of Babel...some of us want to keep building language into something more expressive, but the higher that tower gets, the easier it is for the DGAS crowd to knock it over.

Especially journalists. They think that they'll sound smarter if they say things like "begs the question." And they do, but only among people who don't know what it means.

How's that for irony?

Sometimes an encyclopedia app you'll use once a year is less important than the pocket space you save every day by giving up expandability.

That said, it would be pretty nice to have an iPod or iPhone with an SD slot. But just regarding the music player side...the players that mix storage either don't use a database or make you wish you hadn't turned it on. And while I know and understand the virtues of having your music files nicely organized in a system you devised yourself, as my music drive climbs towards 100GB I am realizing that screwing around with folders, even though a lot of it's scripted, just takes time away from doing more important things, one of which is actually listening to the stuff. Rockbox has served me well, but I may go with iTunes/iPod soon just so I can spare myself the work. And since AFAIK with iTunes the db is generated on the host machine, being able to add and remove storage from the player without syncing might make things pretty messy.

The trend with Apple, post-Macintosh seems to have always been towards less user expandability. But the approach has its benefits sometimes. My computer I don't mind messing around with. My phone I expect to "just work."

If there is a pattern, it's that the person who put [citation needed] didn't necessarily agree with the preceding statement, but either (a) didn't want it to turn into a conflict or (b) didn't feel like doing the research and (perhaps rightly) decided that the person making the claim should do it.

I think that in the aggregate they turn the tone of WP into something that's very passive-aggressive. But individually they are harmless, just pointing out the obvious ("here is a statement that is unverified").

Where I see lots of [citation needed]s is in articles that tend to be biographical or concerning an artistic work or work of entertainment. Average Pop Star's #1 fan will copy a bunch of stuff from APS-fan-forums.org and someone else will come along and think, "what is all of this (crummy) original research doing here?"

If they deleted the material, other forum members will keep reverting. But if they add [cn], most people know that if they're going to remove that tag then they'd better have a citation handy.

Obviously in very popular or contentious articles, they don't stay there as long, because more people are willing to go out and find citations that match their point of view. The only way to trump someone you disagree with in WP-land is by finding more evidence. Which is exactly how it should be. So despite their passive-aggressive side, I tend to see the [cn] as a sign that the system is working somewhat, albeit slowly.

But seriously I'd nuke half of the articles on WP if I had the authority. WP can take page views away from a site that actually *is* accurate. And there's still copy-paste jobs going on. A WP article, by virtue of being able to draw from multiple sources and have multiple editors, should be more accurate than the sources it draws from. When it's not, it does people a disservice since it's going to show up first in Google whether or not it's any good.

[citation needed] is really the only good defense against weasel words. All one editor that doesn't agree with another can do (that doesn't involve an edit war) is to ask for greater and greater clarification.

Which after a certain point becomes pretty weaselly in and of itself.

(I am not a frequent WP editor and there's a lot about WP that I can't f-n stand. But I think at this point everything noteworthy that could be said about the pros and cons of 'crowdsourcing' the editing of an encyclopedia has been said already, so I'm going to resist getting into it here.)

Me too. Extraordinary claims, extraordinary evidence.

They should pray for thicker skin.

Yes, evolution does not have a goal per se. It is a response to selection pressure. I'm sure the parent understands that. You find me a dog that passes all the theory of mind tests, though. I'll wait.