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maderlock

Listed below are comments made by maderlock between Thursday, 7th August 2008 and Friday, 19th September 2008.

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YouTube, Cat Stevens and me 2:39pm on 19 Sep 2008 Firstly, illuminatusmagister - this is nothing like usury in the slightest. Usury is lending money and receiving interest or getting a loan and paying interest. In what way is being paid for work you've done like either of those situations? Only very tenuously I would argue.

Secondly, MusicMan80 is in the right here - just because you buy a CD doesn't mean that you can redistribute the music to anyone. That doesn't really come under the heading of "fair use".

Universal seems to me to be taking a very sensible line; you can use the music without paying us for the rights, but we have the right to get royalties some other way such as adverts. Who loses out here? Um... well not the artist I would have thought. If they are taking this money in lieu of royalties then I would hope they are treated the same way in that the artist gets a cut. If not, then it's time to get up on your high horse.
Credible news - who decides? 09:52am on 21 Aug 2008 ...I realise now that you actually suggested that the community flag them as being dodgy, which makes more sense in some ways.

The real question is this one of balance. Just voting for or against articles relies on the assumption that most of your users are rational and unbiased, NOT that they average each other out. Lots of biased people do not average out to make an unbiased opinion unless you further assume that the number of people biased against or for something is in proportion to its worth. I doubt this is the case.

To be more positive, something like Wikipedia is able to be almost completely open because rants and bias can be checked for objective truth. Thus, the way for news to be correctly voted as credible would require voters to give an objective reason why they think something is not credible. But I guess that rules out "because I just don't trust them," which newscred seem to think worthy.
Credible news - who decides? 09:41am on 21 Aug 2008 CrimsonBlack, while this sounds like a good idea (and I understand the intention behind it), it sadly would not work.

It is not possible to both have users rate the credibility of articles and then use these ratings to decide who is a trustworthy user, as any pattern that users have of rating articles might be accurate. So they mark everything they read as poor credibility? Perhaps they are right.

The only way to decide if that user is biased is to know for certain how credible some articles are, except that breaks the fundamental aim of the site. One can't even take the majority vote for an article and say that is the ground truth to check users' bias against, as it may be a large number of biased users making that one unbiased user look bad.

I can't really see a win for this approach.
Caption Competition 6:05pm on 07 Aug 2008 This was much better! The tandem had been a little cramped.

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