Funamental shift in Wiki policy..

Wikipedia is considering introducing a form of prior restraint on edits. Last November US politician John Seigenthaler took on Wikipedia over a false and defamatory biography of him that had been posted on the site.

Although, there has been certain controls introduced an year back, a "semi-protection" for pages which were being vandalised, this could be a fundamental change in the way it operates. Now there are suggestions that a new architecture of control will be introduced for Wikipedia as a whole, if it proves successful when it is applied to the German-language site next month, and this could have far wider implications.

Wikipedia is, and will continue to be, a work in progress, a best effort by thousands of people to create an accurate, impartial and useful repository of human knowledge.

Wiki has been a big success, and hope this will make it better..

Related Links:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5286458.stm
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/17/technology/17wiki.h.....

Free Legal music download..

Ya.. thats true.. That is what the people behind this project is planning..



The site is http://www.spiralfrog.com

Now iTunes is charging $0.99 for a song.. Spiralfrog will be offering ad-supported legal downloads of audio and video content licensed from the catalogs of the world’s major and independent record labels. We have to wait and see how effective it will be when it is launched..

The SpiralFrog website will debut in December 2006.

Related Link:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/5294842.stm

The beginning of the end of an Illustrious carrier

This is also a tribute to one of my favorite sports persons..

This year's US Open will be the last time Agassi will be in a court as a professional tennis player.. What a carrier he had.. Just amasing..



He has won eight Grand Slam singles titles and is one of only five players to have won all four Grand Slam singles events during his career. He is considered by many tennis fans to be one of the most complete and natural talents tennis has ever seen. That is a very special tag to have.. Agassi is the only player in the open era to have won every Grand Slam singles title, the Masters, the Davis Cup, and the Olympic Gold medal.





He, with poni tale, was Rebel in the court & "Image is everything" guy in his early carrier. He was married to Brook Shields from '97 to '99..

But then there was a transformation and that was the one that changed him to a legent. He got married to Steffi Graf. Once he even was got out of the first 100 players, but he worked hard on him game and came back strongly to win the hearts and minds of the people..

His father Mike Agassi is an Iranian and has represented Iran in boxing at the 1948 and 1952 Olympic Games before emigrating to the United States. His father directed him to Tennis very early in his childhood. When Andre was five years old, he was already practicing with pros such as Jimmy Connors and Roscoe Tanner. He turned professional at the age of 16. What a professional.

These are some of the aspects that made him a Legend.. But these are not all.

Unknown to many, he was a dropout of eigth-grade and he finished with correspondence classes. He has one of those fellows who gives back to the society thru charitable acts.. Charity and compassion as much a part of player's life as tennis.. And that is why he is special..

For me, as I said, he is one of my role models, in terms of his professionalism, dedication and love for what he did and his generosity as a human being.
The one and only Agassi..

Further Reading : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andre_Agassi

This was interesting..

Its the Sudoku.

Having a got a good link the other day, I started trying to solve.

If you have not heard, which is unlikely, its a puzzle. Its a game that needs bit of logic and patience. Normal game is a 9x9 matrix which is sub-divided into nine 3x3 matrix. The objective is to fill the numbers 1-9 in each cell in such a way that each 3x3 matrix and each row / column will not have any repetetion. Generally the puzzle will be given insuch a way that there is a solution and only one solution which u can reach by logic and not by guessing.



I had already heard abt the game and knew the rules, but just a beginner. Created a login and started trying. I got a couple solved and got excited. And there is this puzzle which I was sure that it was having more than one solution. I took snapshot at each stage to proove to the providers that I have found this out. After a lot of painstaking work, I eneded up finding that I was wrong. I lost the sleep for nothing. :)) But it was fun..

This was the site where I was..
http://number-logic.com/

Interstingly this game has a long history but got popular in Europe recently thanks to the work of Wayne Gould (born 1945 in New Zealand) is a retired Hong Kong judge. He saw this game accidently in Japan and got addicted to it. He worked on it and developed a software for creating the puzzles. He ditributed it for free to the UK Newspapers and it caught up like that..


Further Reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudoku

did u hear!! Pluto is removed from the list of planets

Its a sad day.. They say Pluto is no longer in the list Planets... In fact I should have got half a point more in my 8 class exam.. I was right then :)

For now, membership will be restricted to the eight (not nine, any more)"classical" planets in the solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

Why the fuss.. has pluto changed? no, the rule has...
As a matter of fact, until recently there were no clear definition of a planet.. But now we have!
Hence Pluto is out with a googly and so the little cameo innings of more than 75 years is over..

The new rules for a planet: "a celestial body that is in orbit around the sun, has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a ... nearly round shape, and has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit."

Instead, it will be reclassified in a new category of ex-planets or "dwarf planets" or in another astronomical term, a part of "Trans-Neptunian Objects" (TNOs). The number 1 item in TNOs.

After a tumultuous week of clashing over the essence of the cosmos, the International Astronomical Union stripped Pluto of the planetary status it has held since its discovery by Lowell Observatory astronomer Clyde W. Tombaugh in 1930.

...Astronomical Union stripped Pluto.. Where pluto will go now for justice.. how it will prove that it didnt head-butt anyone or took steroid.. :)

See the fate of NASA's New Horizons spacecraft.. It had started a journey of 9.5 years to the last planet.. but when it reaches there, its no longer a planet!!! It has to be seen if NASA decides to redirect it to the new last planet...

Interestingly, this is not the first time this has happened. The asteroid Ceres was a planet in the 1800s before it got demoted to the dwarf.

But on reflection, its a different feeling to know that the things which we believe fundamental may not be so tomorow.. Advances in technology made us believe that this was a planet and further advance showed us that it is not a plannet.. and what about tomorrow..




Referance & further reading:
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/space/08/24/pluto.ap/index.html
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060825/NEWS05/608250411/-1/BUSINESS07


Footnote:

Thanks to the comment by Vinoo , I came to know about another twist that had happened. An initial proposal by the IAU was to increase the number from 9 to 12, with the additions of (1) earlier demoted Ceres, (2) the moon of Pluto, Charon and (3) the distant world known as 2003 UB313. But it ended up reducing one instead.. Thanks Vinoo..




More on this at..
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/5283956.stm

Whatz in n whatz out..

Here is a list of the COOLEST Sites.. may be u find something interesting..

http://www.time.com/time/2006/50coolest/index.html

of cource, u got at least a couple in your kitty..

I got a couple..
http://www.pandora.com/
http://9.yahoo.com/

Introduction..

I have started my blogging with my collection of videos..
http://special-videos.blogspot.com/

After some time, i felt the need for a more general one and thats why this page..

So here we go..