On Mon, 4 Mar 2002, Juergen Specht wrote:
> Mhm, I would be careful...one of the best journalists here
> in Japan with a very deep Keitai related knowledge sometimes
> even relies on information from the Keitai-L archive:
Yes. But to his misfortune, he relies on only some of it. For example,
upon seeing a message stating that the Starbucks/Yahoo! cafe in Harajuku
has a public 802.11 network, he decided to publish a note saying
that they offered public access to it. Well, as I pointed out the
same day, and had probably pointed out two months earlier as well
(search is not working so well for me right now, but that was when I
originally dicovered this), it's not public 802.11: you can only use
their computers with it. If you bring in your own laptop, tough luck.
Now I understand that journalism has its difficulties, perils and
deadlines, but still, if some message on a list posits propostion A,
why are you not reading the messages that refute proposition A? And
then, if there's disagreement, doing your own research? To consider
one item retrieved from a source as fact, and then completely ignore
contradictory items from the same source, smacks of irresponsible
journalism to me.
Not that it's a big deal in this case, but if guy's not researching
such obvious and trivial stuff, how do I have any assurance that he's
researching anything else? Especially when he doesn't seen to consider
publishing counter-factual items any sort of a problem. Say, even worthy
of a retraction in the next issue?
Needless to say, I'm taking this journalist's "information" with
a much larger grain of salt these days.
cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs_at_cynic.net> +81 90 7737 2974 http://www.netbsd.org
Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light. --XTC
Received on Mon Mar 4 19:03:20 2002