Exactly. People who dismiss Wikipedia because of its inaccuracies often forget about what we usually did *before* Wikipedia existed: We made stuff up based on our intuitions, *maybe* talked about it at a coffee shop with a small number of our friends, and believed it as fact. Sure, if we were doing academic research, we were more rigorous (and that's improved, too, IMHO), but how often did that happen? Now, with portable devices that can access the WWW, our first reponse when we're not sure about something is often to look it up.

I can't emphasize this enough: Instant access to the web is resulting in a culture shift from making stuff up to looking it up, and Wikipedia is the most important place where people go to do that.

So, yes, even though Wikipedia is a repository of groupthink (and the critics are right that we mustn't forget that), it's groupthink that takes into account the views of a much larger number of contributors, and is much more accurate than the groupthink of a small, isolated group of people.

They just dumped those chemicals very quickly.

*correctly

No, people say the right thing. I've never heard anyone verbally confuse lose and loose. They just fail to transcribe it correct. Hence, it's a spelling mistake.

Exactly.

It's not just revisionist, it's obviously false. He's acting as if those documents were transmitted in secret to the Taliban, and that if it weren't for him, nobody else would know about it. In reality, Wikileaks published the documents, so those Afghan people already had just as much warning, regardless of Lamo's involvement.

I agree, but we'll have to wait for XP to die to switch everyone over to IPv6, too. :)

Great Scott! What's in New York? WALL STREET! They're afraid of higher taxes, so they pre-emptively orchestrated this FAKE "DISASTER" in order to get us to send MONEY their way!

Sheeple! Wake up!

Maybe, but I see it as more of an online payments system that scales down to micropayments and up to large, multi-million dollar transactions.

I'm not sure about images, but mutt has a really fantastic auto_view feature, which will automatically decode HTML email, PDFs, Word documents, etc into text and display it inline in your viewer. When people email me PDFs, I can not only view them without spawning an external viewer, but the PDF/MSWord text gets included in the quoted text when I hit "reply", so I can just reply to their PDF/MSWord text in-line.

Indeed. Firewalls break end-to-end connectivity, and incentivise a protocol-encapsulation arms race that is bad for the Internet. It's 2012; You have no business writing more code that speaks the Internet Protocol unless it can actually handle being on the Internet.

You seem to misunderstand what DRM, a.k.a. "copy protection", is advertised to do. It's about preventing copies of the content that is "protected" by DRM from becoming widely available to non-paying users.

The negative effects of implementing DRM systems, which is that users' devices remain out of their control (for most users), are alive and well. That doesn't mean that DRM is accomplishing its stated purpose.

What has been seen cannot be unseen.

The first Humble Bundle was advertised as DRM-free, and with a portion going to the EFF. So were several subsequent ones. It shouldn't be a surprise that people are pissed now.

You think you're safe, eh? Consider that Canada's Thanksgiving is *on a completely different day* from U.S. Thanksgiving, and yet somehow, Black Friday still happened in Canada on Nov 23.

No one is safe.