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I'm thinking Homer made some sort of contribution.

Prepaid data plans are available, however most are not any cheaper than contract plans, so all you gain is not being locked-in for three years.

Hobbits also live a bit longer than H. sapiens. They reach "maturity" in their early 30s and expect to live to 100 (source).

This is not much different from modern (rich world) humans... move out of mom and dads at late twenties (even later in southern Europe... look up the term "milieurista"), expected lifetime in the high 70s, good chance of 100 if you live sensibly.

Hobbits also live a bit longer than H. sapiens. They reach "maturity" in their early 30s and expect to live to 100 (source).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Norris
"William Charles Norris (July 14, 1911 near Red Cloud, Nebraska -- August 21, 2006) was the pioneering CEO of Control Data Corporation, at one time one of the most powerful and respected computer companies in the world. He is famous for taking on IBM in a head-on fight and winning, as well as being a social activist who used Control Data's expansion in the late 1960s to bring jobs and training to inner-cities and disadvantaged communities. ...
    Another CDC project that Norris championed was the PLATO system, an online teaching and instruction system developed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The university developed most of the system on a CDC-1604 machine driving graphics terminals of their own design. In 1974 they reached an agreement with CDC to allow CDC to sell PLATO in exchange for free machines on which to run it. PLATO was released in 1975, but saw almost no use due to its high costs and complex maintenance. In the end PLATO did see some use as an employee training tool in large companies, but was never a success in the original education market."

I corresponded with him for a time around 1991. He sent me a copy of his biography (by James C. Worthy):
http://www.amazon.com/William-C-Norris-Portrait-Maverick/dp/0887300871

He also sent me copies of his essays for CDC publications. I wanted to make them available in OC'd digital form but never quite got approval for that. Here are several of them put up by others though:
http://www.cbi.umn.edu/hostedpublications/NorrisOnTechnology/index.html

A relevant one from there (on education):
http://www.cbi.umn.edu/hostedpublications/NorrisOnTechnology/Norris_2-Education.pdf
"Another problem is pricing. The present method of financing most formal education with tax dollars, contributions, and tuition at lower than cost inhibits improvements in quality, productivity, and availability. It also restricts options that could otherwise be available and maintains the inequality in educational opportunity that results from uneven district-to-district financial resources."

Although I go beyond that here: :-)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html

I met my wife around then so things dropped off, but I had hoped maybe I could have been an intern for free with his foundation to help with advanced manufacturing (or something) or somehow worked with him and learned from him.

William C. Norris was an amazing person. He really is a great role model in many ways, and I'm glad I had the chance to read his biography and correspond with him. I sent him a small donation back then (just a struggling grad student at the time) and he said he used it to take a disadvantaged person to lunch. What a guy! :-)
    http://reddwarf.wikia.com/wiki/Ace_Rimmer

Solving the CAPTCHA doesn't make you think about the reason for the prompt.

Now if they had to retype the e-mail addresses the system thinks are unintended, that could be the potato we need.

lol, aren't they on the same side in Narnia? ;D

http://narnia.wikia.com/wiki/Gryphon
http://narnia.wikia.com/wiki/Unicorn

""not even a king would think of riding a unicorn except in great need." They are almost always loyal to Aslan, and are known to be very wise."

Almost always? Maybe not then, damn unicorns, can't be trusted! ;D

lol, aren't they on the same side in Narnia? ;D

http://narnia.wikia.com/wiki/Gryphon
http://narnia.wikia.com/wiki/Unicorn

""not even a king would think of riding a unicorn except in great need." They are almost always loyal to Aslan, and are known to be very wise."

Almost always? Maybe not then, damn unicorns, can't be trusted! ;D

That thing flying over your head isn't the Millennium Falcon.

So, possibly the Lassiter?

http://firefly.wikia.com/wiki/Lassiter

...Rock-Paper-Scissors which is pretty much known by everyone on the planet by now.

And the Uncharted Territories. From The Farscape Encyclopedia Project:

John Crichton tried to teach Ka D'Argo the game, but D'Argo had problems because he felt that rock should tear through the paper. He finished by telling Crichton that "coma was more entertaining." ("Mind the Baby")

They actually used RPS a lot to settle things...

And money, of course. Money to fund the farm, so I can't really help much with that. :(

A wiki scales proportionally to the user base; you wouldn't need more than a cheap VPS or a free EC2 instance until you had a decent number of users, and then you could milk^Wask them for donations.

Personally, I don't really care. I don't mind that they delete the page for every character of Pokemon; there are better places on the web to put those, like the Gaming Wikia. Wikipedia doesn't need to have a copy of all existing information.

Are there abuses? Sure, and they should be dealt with, but having a no-deletions-whatsoever policy only fixes that by introducing a bigger problem.

one really shouldn't expect most people to have genuine romantic feelings for a video game character.

And yet when I played Mass Effect 2 I genuinely got aroused by Tali ( Liz Sroka ). Romantic feelings? Possibly but definitely aroused. I don't know if it is Liz Sroka's voice or the fact that the character has a great profile but you cannot see underneath but there were times I had to stop the game just to...um...cool off.

But it's not the same as when she does it...

"Boy oh boy Mom, you sure know how to hydrate a pizza".

Mynocks

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Mynock

Whereas KDE policy is "If you disKover some empty spaKe, add an useless feature or somethinK very very irritatinK. The iKon must be shiny, rotatinK, and Kontain at least one K.", the GNOME policy is the opposite: "If you find a feature, it might confuse a user, so remove it."

The alpha 3.0 release, Project Topaz, will be the perfect GNOME's desktop, as it will have absolutely Gno features at all. It will simply use excessive amounts of system resources, and do Gnothing but sit there. This final version will contain only a single button. When the user pushes it, it pops up a beautifully anti-aliased text box on a white screen telling the user to use a pen and a piece of paper to do their work and to shut their computer off.

GNOME 2.30 will be renamed to 3.0 because it will require 3GB of RAM and a modern graphics card with OpenGL 3.0 support; the graphical debugger requires a 128-bit processor, which has Gnot yet been invented, and a 3GB video card with optional 5-D rendering capability.

GNOME's logo is a huge footprint, but it is Gnot clearly established whether it is a huge memory footprint or a huge disk footprint.

(from Uncyclopedia)

It's spelled "mitochloroplastondrion", not "midichlorian".

Not according to Wookieepedia.
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Midi-chlorian

When i read plugfest, I was afraid it might be something else entirely.

I thought that thing died-out with Newspapers last decade? Or maybe that was netscape? (shrug). It's time soon will come, and it can join the dustbin of history along with horsewhips, candle trimmers, and steam trains.

Newspapers have been (at least here in Finland) busily expanding into the Web, where they adapt an ad-funded "article and comments" -model (just like Slashdot, execpt the articles are actually edited). They are in no danger of dying out.

Neither is Encyclopedia Britannica. Wikipedia might have a different name, but it's the cultural descendant of EB. The various Wikias might spell doom, except that they link to each other and to Mothership Wikipedia everywhere appropriate.

Frankly, what is really needed is splitting Wikipedia into various Wikia wikis, and reserving Wikipedia solely for summaries. Namespaces are awesome, because they establish the context of what is being discussed; trying to cram everything into a single namespace is probably not a good idea.

Then again, as Google and other AI systems evolve, it probably doesn't matter what is stored where, for the relevant info is found anyway.

Ultimately Wikipedia's greatnest weakness is that it is a single Web site. As such, it must lay on some server somewhere. By contrast, Usenet groups don't lay on any specific server or physical location, and neither freesites. The current centralized design of the Web is an anomaly in the history of the Internet, and it causes constant trouble, both from the resource usage and censorship viewpoints. A future Wikipedia should be distributed and versioned, with the client program putting together a version to use.

http://chdk.wikia.com/

There was a EP of SG1 with some called the link that was like this.
http://stargate.wikia.com/wiki/Revisions

and there was a The Outer Limits EP with some that was like the SG1 link.called

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_of_Consciousness_(The_Outer_Limits)

Don't get me wrong Farscape was my favorite show and I petitioned along with everyone else. I'm sure there were other factors. The makeup for all but Ben and Claudia was probably a nightmare to get into every day. That's why Virginia Hey (Pa'u Zotoh Zhaan) finally left the series. I hated that she left but completely understand why she decided she had to.

I figured it would look like this.

The Ravenclaw sequence didn't really bother me - I had heard it was supposed to be really scary - but most of the rest of the levels did.

Yeah, Ravenclaw is quite tame. Now Slytherin, that's a scary level! Unless you meant Ravenholm.

You're just using it wrong:

http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/HowTo:Play_Conservatroll

I think it's adapted from a really big Jello mold: http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Episode_215:_Power_Erupts

Naval artillery and missiles can shoot over the horizon. Lasers have to be in line of sight.

True, which is why you make them orbital lasers.

Even better is if you make them orbital mind-control lasers!

The guy should have reached out to this Facebook group... http://assassinscreed.wikia.com/wiki/Assassin's_Creed:_Project_Legacy

You spelled Mortal Combat wrong. Just found it funny. But yeah, compared to the wars we fought and still fighting now, games looks kiddish. I just finished watching "The Pacific" and I believe that to be a close representation of what the guys been through in the war.

And here the armchair pirates are concerning about games we play. pfft.

Not to be pedantic, but Endor was the gas giant orbited by "The Forest Moon of Endor" or "The Sanctuary Moon"

Not to be pedantic, but Endor was the gas giant orbited by "The Forest Moon of Endor" or "The Sanctuary Moon"

Yeah, what could possibly go wrong with letting the average folks design their own products?

What I'm curious about, is can you combine eight of them together to form a Tactical Fusion Cube?

Nah, there's a lot of stuff that could be there but isn't. Go check any anime related wiki and compare with the Wikipedia version. With anything but main characters, the difference gets more dramatic.

Now that might seem like a silly subject, and it is a silly subject. But there's a lot of that stuff migrating to other wikis. And while stuff like that isn't as important as say, WWII, my lunch conversations are more likely to include the Ginyu Force (wikipedia version), than Josef Mengele.

The reason for the difference isn't that the article would be empty, or that it's badly written. Apparently it's that somebody got upset that the article on Pikachu got longer than whatever subject they care about, and the solution to that is removing perfectly well written content from the disliked page, instead of finding something to add to the one they care about. I find that quite bizarre.

Nah, there's a lot of stuff that could be there but isn't. Go check any anime related wiki and compare with the Wikipedia version. With anything but main characters, the difference gets more dramatic.

Now that might seem like a silly subject, and it is a silly subject. But there's a lot of that stuff migrating to other wikis. And while stuff like that isn't as important as say, WWII, my lunch conversations are more likely to include the Ginyu Force (wikipedia version), than Josef Mengele.

The reason for the difference isn't that the article would be empty, or that it's badly written. Apparently it's that somebody got upset that the article on Pikachu got longer than whatever subject they care about, and the solution to that is removing perfectly well written content from the disliked page, instead of finding something to add to the one they care about. I find that quite bizarre.

I have found an article that may be of interest to you. I found an essay on a related topic that you might want to look into as further reading.

Are we really sure that it is not the mice doing the experimenting?

Add an entry to the Codex!

This. Sort of. I find just adding "wiki" tends to give the same results. You occasionally get a wiki other than wikipedia, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. E.g. "wiki Bad Wolf" gives results at wikipedia, but also at tardis.wikia.com.

That's a point that has been nearly ignored in science fiction. Except for Robert Forward's "Dragon Egg" I don't remember any story where the aliens' minds operated on a significantly different time scale from ours.

As much as I am loathe to compliment it, Star Control 3's Xchaggers were an example of this, although it was poorly done; the player seemed to speak with one being, but they explained that a new speaker replaced the old one every minute as a new dynasty rose and fell.

With the manga fanatics on Wikipedia. And the Star Wars nutjobs (myself included). And you know, I have to agree with Wikipedia on this one and I would suggest for gamers to go to Wikia and get a specific wiki on there going with the deleted pages from Wikipedia's history. There are already tons of game specific wikis on there and very successful ones like Wookiepedia and Mangawiki. I don't understand why people have a problem with this, Wikipedia is for the normal populace -- not the hardcore fans of specific interests. So either throw in your lot with MUD wiki or make a new MUDpedia or something and move on. You'll get a link in on the history of gaming page at the real wikipedia and you can go crazy nuts in your own little specific area.

With the manga fanatics on Wikipedia. And the Star Wars nutjobs (myself included). And you know, I have to agree with Wikipedia on this one and I would suggest for gamers to go to Wikia and get a specific wiki on there going with the deleted pages from Wikipedia's history. There are already tons of game specific wikis on there and very successful ones like Wookiepedia and Mangawiki. I don't understand why people have a problem with this, Wikipedia is for the normal populace -- not the hardcore fans of specific interests. So either throw in your lot with MUD wiki or make a new MUDpedia or something and move on. You'll get a link in on the history of gaming page at the real wikipedia and you can go crazy nuts in your own little specific area.

With the manga fanatics on Wikipedia. And the Star Wars nutjobs (myself included). And you know, I have to agree with Wikipedia on this one and I would suggest for gamers to go to Wikia and get a specific wiki on there going with the deleted pages from Wikipedia's history. There are already tons of game specific wikis on there and very successful ones like Wookiepedia and Mangawiki. I don't understand why people have a problem with this, Wikipedia is for the normal populace -- not the hardcore fans of specific interests. So either throw in your lot with MUD wiki or make a new MUDpedia or something and move on. You'll get a link in on the history of gaming page at the real wikipedia and you can go crazy nuts in your own little specific area.

With the manga fanatics on Wikipedia. And the Star Wars nutjobs (myself included). And you know, I have to agree with Wikipedia on this one and I would suggest for gamers to go to Wikia and get a specific wiki on there going with the deleted pages from Wikipedia's history. There are already tons of game specific wikis on there and very successful ones like Wookiepedia and Mangawiki. I don't understand why people have a problem with this, Wikipedia is for the normal populace -- not the hardcore fans of specific interests. So either throw in your lot with MUD wiki or make a new MUDpedia or something and move on. You'll get a link in on the history of gaming page at the real wikipedia and you can go crazy nuts in your own little specific area.

"Equal parts excitement and antipathy"

You're not, by chance, Elcor, are you?

And who said transparent aluminum was composed entirely of aluminum?

Certainly not Scotty:

http://images.wikia.com/memoryalpha/en/images/4/4a/MacintoshPlus.jpg

The concept isn't necessarily that there's stuff up there and that's incredibly valuable (say, unobtainium). It's also that there's more common ores that are not stuck at the bottom of a deep gravity well.

The general idea is to build big spaceships in Earth orbit. But the raw materials still have to come from Earth, which means they're going to be expensive to get up into orbit (assuming you use rockets to get them up there). But you can get the same raw materials from the Moon, it's much less expensive to get them from the Moon to the Earth than it is to bring them up from the Earth.

Xbox 360 I've seen shortened as X360, or simply 360

Everyone knows where Microsoft really got the name of the X Square Circle.

I think Wikileak should plead guilty and be willing to provide the man with proper equipment to make sure he can live peacefully from now on.

This is exactly the same thing that happened to Homer's internet company, Compu-global-hyper-mega-net. From: http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net is Homer's Internet company. The company's headquarters is the dining room of 742 Evergreen Terrace. It is never made clear what the company sells or offers, however Microsoft's Bill Gates still buys out the company. After Homer received the wrong mail that was meant to go to Flanders since he started an online Internet service homer read and researched the "Internet" he told Marge they were behind in the world of tech and they started a computer company that was destroyed by billionaire Bill Gates when he said "Well I don't get rich by writing a lot of checks," then he told his goons to "buy him out boys" but when Homer got his hopes up the goons started smashing everything and he and Marge were trapped in the corner of their living room as people destroyed everything they worked for.