Thanks, I had read otherwise, but your source seems more reliable. I guess polar bears aren't color-blind, though there's still some question whether they can distinguish neon green from white.

Throwing around the term "terrorist" when referring to groups like Greenpeace doesn't help anyone. It trivializes terrorism and demonizes Greenpeace through the use of a popular buzzword for "evil". If you have any legitimate reason to claim Greenpeace is a terrorist organization, though, please present it.

Bears, like most carnivores, are color-blind, and therefore unable to distinguish between white and bright green. While Greenpeace did spray seals with paint, it did not endanger the seals. Whatever you think of their politics, they're not morons. They have plenty of scientists and researchers involved in their work, and they've probably thought about the impact of their actions a lot more than you.

Please elaborate. In what way is Greenpeace "terrorists"?

Yeah, I mean the atmosphere is being altered to the point that it threatens world-changing shifts in climate and weather patterns and widespread famine, but let's try to keep some perspective here: people's view of a national monument was partially obscured for hours!

Greenpeace wants to dictate how people live, and make a huge fuss about any resistance, even if it is relatively minor.

Ok, Greenpeace isn't the government, they can't force anyone to do anything. In fact, they're not even a particularly influential NGO - they have difficulty even pressuring people to do anything. So the force thing is a red herring.

All they're really doing is "making a huge fuss", as you observed. And is that really such a problem? Would you really preclude people from making a fuss about important issues like the environment, just because it's annoying to read about it? Sometimes making a fuss can be both annoying and effective, they're not mutually exclusive. Greenpeace isn't necessarily trying to make everyone love Greenpeace, they're trying to draw attention to issues of environmental damage and start conversations about them. Seems to me they're pretty effective at that.

Rather than referring vaguely to this "personal firsthand experience" of being "shouted down", tell us what actually happened. How were you shouted down by groups like Greenpeace? Personally, I doubt you were, but I'm willing to listen.

Trusting the client allows cheating, whether it's open source or not. I don't need to hack assembly to cheat at a client-trusted game, I can just tamper with my outgoing network stream. I don't necessarily even need to look at the binary.

I dunno if Alien Arena implements trusts the client or not, but the point is that security in games has nothing to do with whether the software is open source.

As far as I can tell, you're saying that democratic institutions should be democratic because they're supposed to be, and authoritarian institutions shouldn't be democratic because they're not supposed to be. Maybe I'm missing something, but it sounds like a tautology.

I don't own the country I work for, but I damn well expect to be represented and have a vote. That's because I'm a contributing member of the institution. The government depends on me for support, so it behooves them to give me representation. Similarly, the investors of a corporation are able to vote on corporate decisions and representation. This is because they contribute to the institution and are affected by the corp's decisions.

However, for some reason you find it unthinkable that this same premise of representation which we see in most other aspects of life - public and private - should be applied to the employees of a corporation. Employees contribute to the institution and are affected by its decisions. Why shouldn't they expect to be represented the same way investors are?

Similarly, if you don't like the country you live in, go live somewhere else, or start your own country. What's all this "representation" and "voting" crap people seem to think they're entitled to?

There is no analogy: workplaces are literally dictatorships, with a top-down hierarchy based around obeying your superiors and gaining obedience from your subordinates. Workplaces where the employees get to choose their boss are very, very rare, despite our profound commitment to exactly that process in politics.

tomhudson suggested that such an organization is democratic because, after all, you can leave if you want to. That reflects a pretty profound misunderstanding of what democracy is.

Really? You don't have a vote into whether you have to stay there? Usually, your boss has a vote on it, and you do. You want to leave, your vote overrides his. He wants to fire you, his vote overrides yours.

So a government like Franco's Spain or Mao's China could be considered democratic as long as you had the right to leave your own country or the government could throw you out?

I think you have a different idea about "democracy" than most people.

First of all, there's a huge technical challenge to what you're suggesting. Namely: how do you verify someone's identity? Considering how hard people take it when there's a mistake on their Wikipedia article, can you imagine what an uproar there'd be if a vandal was able to officially impersonate some famous person on Wikipedia?

It'd be a big deal, therefore the verification system would need to be pretty strong. That kind of system is very labor intensive and fairly bureaucratic, and not at all the kind of work you can get volunteers for, meaning it'd be expensive too. Basically, it's completely unfeasible for Wikipedia to do that - they can barely afford to keep running as is.

Secondly, you tout the "right of reply" like it's some enshrined rule of free speech that you get to write your comments on any web page that talks about you. Certainly people deserve the right to present their own subjective perspective on any matter, but there's a place for that - a separate web site.

Third-party websites play exactly the role you describe very easily, and a decent autobiographical site /will/ probably end up being referenced in a comprehensive Wikipedia article. Not as fact, of course, but as the claims of the site. This means there ends up being a citation link to a site where the subject of the article can write whatever they want, with no restrictions on verifiability or relevance. And those looking to Wikipedia for an encyclopedia rather than an autobiography can skip the link. Everybody's happy, right?

Newspapers aren't expected to cite their sources because traditionally, they take responsibility internally for fact-checking everything and backing up whatever they print with their institutional reputation.

The problem is that not having to cite sources and having the authority of a huge, trusted institution behind them has made journalists very lazy. They can write almost anything they want, and it will be taken at face value.

Wikipedia allows newspapers to be used as reliable sources because of the traditional expectation that a newspaper will be accountable for its mistake should it print something wrong. Unfortunately, it seems that this expectation is too optimistic.

First of all, chill. Nobody's stealing from Joss Wheedon on Wikipedia - synopses and frame grabs are so solidly fair use it's not even debatable. Well...maybe by the MPAA...

Secondly, Wikipedia is /very/ against infringing on the copyright of other sources. They're kind of paranoid about it, if you ask me. If you see non-fair use content that's from a copyrighted source and it upsets you (as it clearly does), just leave a note on the talk page pointing out the violation.

Keep in mind, of course, that it's possible permission for the copy has been granted. But if not, Wikipedia editors will remove it.