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most of the cameras are in the city centre. The TARDIS keeps appearing in the bay (here) which is about 2-3 miles away. It's an absolute sham really, the bay is totally unrepresentative of the city and I wish the BBC weather would stop using it when they go to look at the weather in Cardiff.

I mean, come on folks, this technology has been around for decades: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thum b/1/14/High_power_torch.jpg/250px-High_power_torch .jpg

The Wikimedia Commons is a source of free (as in freedom) images. 1,279,467 categorised media files, perfectly suited to mocking up websites. If the client isn't happy with images from the Commons, then they can go and buy something from Corbis.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2007 /proposals#WiXi
will turn wikipedia (and mediawiki sites) into a useful language
learning interface a.) people can use to teach/learn language and
b.) machines can use to improve statistical machine translation

Check out Wikimedia's open list for the Summer of Code '07. Some great stuff there. All you wiki-fanatics out there can do both SoC and wiki stuff at the same time.

Part of the reason that software development is getting worse is because of all the layering that is being done these days.

Yes, some degree of abstraction and layering is necessary when developing software. But it must be kept to a sane level. These layers must be developed, ideally, by the very same people or project group, to help ensure a certain level of quality. And sometimes when our layering tower gets too tall, we need to kick out the middle.

Take a typical Web site today. It involves HTML and JavaScript, which is displayed by a web browser. If you're using a browser like Firefox, your web page is in turn displayed via XUL. XUL runs on top of the Gecko rendering engine. Gecko runs on top of a toolkit like GTK+. GTK+ runs on top of GDK and GLib. GDK runs on top of Xlib. Xlib runs on top of C standard library and the underlying operating system. Only now do we get anywhere near the actual hardware.

So we end up with an extremely tall serial tower, where failure occurs if even just one component runs into trouble. The Semantic Web is partially susceptible to this sort of a problem, too. Look at its technology stack. If any one of the libraries that implements such functionality fails, your whole Semantic Web stack fails.

Another problem is that we hear nothing but hype about the Semantic Web. Here on Slashdot, there's some fellow named Hal Porter who will always go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on about how great the Semantic Web is. But all it is so far is hype. We see little in the way of tangible results.

But you're completely correct about complexity being a problem. I mean, look at the Semantic Web stack. It'll take most developers years to become suitably familiar with even a small portion of those technologies. And by the time they've managed to get even just a minimal grasp of such technologies, there's no doubt such knowledge will be completely outdated.

It isn't that thin. It is on the order of manuvering in the stratosphere, and due to the much lower gravity on Mars the atmosphere doesn't thin out as you gain altitude to the degree that it does on the Earth. At some of the lower altitudes on Mars (like at the bottom of Hellas Basin or Valles Marineris), all you would need to survive there as a human is good winter clothing (like being in Antarctica) and an oxygen mask. The atmospheric pressure there is similar to being at the top of Mt. Everest... and people have climbed that mountain without even using an oxygen mask (the atmosphere of Mars has different composition of atmospheric gasses... so the need for an oxygen mask is clearly more critical).

Commercial passenger airliners on the Earth can and do maneuver in those atmospheric conditions, although you would be correct that it would be much more difficult and require much, much longer "runways" to accomplish the task. A Helium baloon, however, certainly could do some manuvering (or even use Hydrogen since it would be harder to burn on Mars).

For an excellent comparison of the size different between Mars and the Earth, I love this picture. Unfortunately, it doesn't show comparisons to other airless objects like the Moon.

All I'm pointing out here is that there are terrestrial analogs that you can use to show how flight on Mars wouldn't necessarily have to involve a power decent engine like you need on the Moon.

And I'm split. Should I run around worrying that it might go off, or should I get the popcorn ready for one helluva show?

I wouldn't worry; you should expect to be within the area of total destruction, and dead instantly — much better than trying to survive the subsequent ice age. The caldera covers a large hunk of Wyoming.

aristocrats hedonistically consuming grapes on a chaise lounge ... Like this?!?

I'm going to go out on a limb and say 'unicode' (probably UTF-8). It'd be ridiculous in this day and age to support every single character set in the old way. ASCII is a subset of both Latin-1 and UTF-8, and Latin-1 is *almost* (but not quite) a subset of UTF-8. How is one supposed to type 'a minimalist latin charset' in a keyboard that doesn't have them, are you proposing changing the keyboards of all those who don't use latin-based charsets? Learn a language or two, try to find out more about the world, and *then* give your opinion, at least then it'll have a basis in fact.

...that the French had an aversion to things normal people like! Apparently they like stuff besides snails, frog's legs, and French military defeats!

Must I conclude from you half baked wrong arguments you are still pissed about being wrong about Irak?

In the name of France, and all the french people, I say "We're sorry."

Sorry for being right. Sorry for your not-so-funny comment. Sorry your life seem to be so miserable you need to hide it behind ill conceived contempt for the french.

And believe us, if is there something the french are immune to, it is contempt... You see, arrogance is so much in our DNA and culture you'll need talent to even attract anything from us but smiling frowns of pity for the average disdainful comment. (I'm not speaking of your above abysmal comment, of course. Please, check your facts and have some brain examination for a possible Hydrocephalus affliction)

You see, it's like a game, for us. The Brittish know that we like to argument for the sake of argument... And the other's utter humiliation. Not so dissimilar from Tauromachy. We, the french, take some fact, and go against the official trend saying something we know is true. (Note the we know is true part. It's important). And somehow, there is always some braindead macho man coming up with his "My own is longer than your's" challenge to defy us on our own grounds. And then, of course, the braindead monkey ridiculizes himself. Of course, even after admitting some semantic miscalculation, the victim can't still accept being in the bad end of an international joke, apparently everyone knowing it even before the beginning of the invasion.

And then, after all the efforts we put together, using our intelligence services, working night and day, trying not to spill the joke and contain our laughter, sending our most talented orators, having half the world agreeing with our viewpoint when you painfully put together your supporters, the only biting, acid, venomous answer you have is "Hey, I was told they eat frogs, Muah ah ah!" ???

WTF???

-- Yours truly, France, (very, very, very disappointed)

If global warming is due to increased CO2 production from man, then would it not also be true that a smaller population base would have a smaller impact?

That would suggest that our current rate of mortality (in adults and children), being vastly reduced by modern medical practices, are sideline contributors to the problem at large.

Imagine, what would world population numbers be like without man's own interference? 1 maybe 2 billion people? How much pollution is created to sustain the infrastructures for supporting 4-5 billion additional people?

Modern medicines impact can easily be seen when viewing graphs of world population numbers. Take away 4 billion people, their fossil fuel consumptions, the deforestation and watershed damage incurred to support them, and we could be talking about a whole different ballgame altogether.

Now am I saying that I don't like modern medicine? Heck no. But that doesn't remove it from being partially responsible.

Graph of global population estimates : http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c4/Extr apolated_world_population_history.png

Invention of Penicillin : 1928, widespread use 1943. Compare that to the graph.... interesting?

Yea, who would pay $400 dollars for a device that essentially performs the exact same function as a $50 portable CD player?

That's a terrible idea...

Oh, wait....http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/t humb/5/57/Ipod_sales.svg/402px-Ipod_sales.svg.png/

...meet response from the past...
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df /Body_painting.JPG

Database download is all available, http://download.wikimedia.org/ Image dumps are already out there, we're going to streamline images dump delivery some day. Its a terabyte of media... Now, regarding the implosion, I can put my absolute trust in people who have access. Oh the other hand, participating in Wikipedia's "Terminal Pissing Contest" (love it), would ruin the life for anyone ;-) The bigger disaster would be having some of tech guys leave the project, than some drop of some data ;)

Here is what Jimbo wrote:
---------

In response to the EssJay scandal, I want to bring back an old proposal
of mine from 2 years ago for greater accountability around credentials:

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2 005-May/022085.html

At the time, this seemed like a plausibly decent idea to me, and the
reaction at the time was mostly positive, with some reasonable caveats
and improvements:

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2 005-May/thread.html
to read the entire thread of "An idea".

Nowadays, I bring back the proposal for further consideration in light
of the EssJay scandal. I think it imperative that we make some positive
moves here... we have a real opportunity here to move the quality of
Wikipedia forward by doing something that many have vaguely thought to
be a reasonably good idea if worked out carefully.

For anyone who is reading but not online, I will sum it up. I made a
proposal that we have a system whereby people who are willing to verify
their real name and credentials are allowed a special notification.
"Verified Credentials". This could be a rather open ended system, and
optional.

The point is to make sure that people are being honest with us and with
the general public. If you don't care to tell us that you are a PhD (or
that you are not), then that's fine: your editing stands or falls on its
own merit. But if you do care to represent yourself as something, you
have to be able to prove it.

This policy will be coupled with a policy of gentle (or firm)
discouragement for people to make claims like those that EssJay made,
unless they are willing to back them up.

How to confirm? What counts as confirmation? What sorts of things need
confirmation? These are very interesting questions, as there are many
types of situations. But one thing that we have always been very very
good at is taking the time to develop a nuanced policy.

Just to take a simple example: how to verify a professor? This strikes
me as being quite simple in most cases. The professor gives a link to
his or her faculty page at the college or university, including the
email there, and someone emails that address to say "are you really
EssJay?" If the answer is yes, then that's a reasonable confirmation.

We can imagine some wild ways that someone might crack that process
(stealing a professor's email account, etc.) but I think we need not
design around the worst case scenario, but rather design around the
reasonable case of a reasonable person who is happy to confirm
credentials to us.

(This is a lower level of confirmation than we might expect an employer
to take, of course.)

For someone like me, well, I have an M.A. in finance. I could fax a
copy of the degree to the office. Again, someone could fake their
credentials, but I don't think we need to design against some mad worst
case scenario but just to have a basic level of confirmation.

--Jimbo

_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list

Here is what Jimbo wrote:
---------

In response to the EssJay scandal, I want to bring back an old proposal
of mine from 2 years ago for greater accountability around credentials:

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2 005-May/022085.html

At the time, this seemed like a plausibly decent idea to me, and the
reaction at the time was mostly positive, with some reasonable caveats
and improvements:

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2 005-May/thread.html
to read the entire thread of "An idea".

Nowadays, I bring back the proposal for further consideration in light
of the EssJay scandal. I think it imperative that we make some positive
moves here... we have a real opportunity here to move the quality of
Wikipedia forward by doing something that many have vaguely thought to
be a reasonably good idea if worked out carefully.

For anyone who is reading but not online, I will sum it up. I made a
proposal that we have a system whereby people who are willing to verify
their real name and credentials are allowed a special notification.
"Verified Credentials". This could be a rather open ended system, and
optional.

The point is to make sure that people are being honest with us and with
the general public. If you don't care to tell us that you are a PhD (or
that you are not), then that's fine: your editing stands or falls on its
own merit. But if you do care to represent yourself as something, you
have to be able to prove it.

This policy will be coupled with a policy of gentle (or firm)
discouragement for people to make claims like those that EssJay made,
unless they are willing to back them up.

How to confirm? What counts as confirmation? What sorts of things need
confirmation? These are very interesting questions, as there are many
types of situations. But one thing that we have always been very very
good at is taking the time to develop a nuanced policy.

Just to take a simple example: how to verify a professor? This strikes
me as being quite simple in most cases. The professor gives a link to
his or her faculty page at the college or university, including the
email there, and someone emails that address to say "are you really
EssJay?" If the answer is yes, then that's a reasonable confirmation.

We can imagine some wild ways that someone might crack that process
(stealing a professor's email account, etc.) but I think we need not
design around the worst case scenario, but rather design around the
reasonable case of a reasonable person who is happy to confirm
credentials to us.

(This is a lower level of confirmation than we might expect an employer
to take, of course.)

For someone like me, well, I have an M.A. in finance. I could fax a
copy of the degree to the office. Again, someone could fake their
credentials, but I don't think we need to design against some mad worst
case scenario but just to have a basic level of confirmation.

--Jimbo

_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list

Maybe some old-fashioned would like to buy computers looks like
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9d /Commodore64.jpg or http://www.softwolves.pp.se/cbm/minaburkar/pics/cb m64-exterior.jpg
But I really not expect too much for such a company.

I'd take this study's fearmongering with a grain of salt. It probably came from one of those deletionist Think-Tanks.

- RG>

Yes, in a word. IMNAL and I don't know Australian law, but the art of parody manages to thrive there as well as in the US. This isn't even really a question as much as a statement.

I can't find an online references, but I have a DVD that contains an interview with the lead singer of Snog (a consumerist anti-corporation band) about how they were taken to court and had to pull one of their albums from the shelves in Australia because McDonald's sued them over the way their album cover resembled the fast food companies restaurant and had McDonald's products in the image.

Ironically, the same album cover was in stores and remained so in the the USA where McDonald's is based. I suppose the parody laws in Australia are kind of rather weak.

I wish I could find more info online about this, but like I said it was in the "extras" of the DVD on who they were discussing their new album.

I like his comment about The Architect from The Matrix Reloaded as a candidate for playing him in a movie. The analogy is neat and there really is a more than passing resemblance!

Vint

It's nice to see an eminent man with a proper sense of humour.

Essjay has stated his resignation from the project, and removal of his permissions have been coordinated and removed on the meta wiki: http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Reques ts_for_permissions&oldid=538959#Essjay

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/71/Crud e_NGPL_IEAtotal_1960-2004.png

Pretty much what I said

Argoff, see my post just above in your defense. Seriously guys, we all have our opinions and facts here, as do many scientists. Why such hostility towards eachother on this topic? Can't we all just agree to disagree, and learn from it? Let's stop with the mutual self destruction here. Let CO2, the sun, or even the almighty Xenu destroy us instead.

Out of Essjay's 20,000 edits there were about a dozen where he effectively said "I'm a professor with a PHD, STFU users and do what I say!".

It's not shocking that Jimbo did not know about these edits considering how few there were out of so many. Many people on wikipedia have known that Essjay's prior identity was fake for the last two months (since it's been public since he started at wikia), but it's only since this hit the press that people have found the really disgraceful edits.

This is what changed Jimbo's position. No one sane at wikipedia has a problem with the made up identity, we have a problem with using a made up identity to influence discussion, even though people should be smart enough to know better.

You can see a few of these bad edits here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Doc_glasgow/di ffs

This can only go two ways: Either we wind up with death matches, or robots with psychological problems.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df /Body_painting.JPG

Pick the Knuth: both have a round face, thin hair and no teeth!

image 1

image 2

plainly stated genocide -check I Agree Native American genocide

intolerant idealism -check I agree Creationism, Christian Fundamentalism

racist -check Do I need to even say anything. America invented modern racism

sworn enemy of neighbor(s) -check Invaded Canada ,Panama, Granada and Mexico in the past Sworn enemy of Cuba Sure I agree

willing to sacrifice entire nation for megalomaniac goals -check Iraq and cold war anyone?

So sure dont ignore Hitler but dont elect him too but gosh you rednecks went ahead and elected him twice. Will you please go out into the woods and shoot yourself now or are you just as shameless as the Chritian right?

Will you fucking stop being obsessed with the Shrub, who's gonna be kicked out of the Whitehouse in a year anyway, and focus on some other, no less deserving figures?

plainly stated genocide -check I Agree Native American genocide

intolerant idealism -check I agree Creationism, Christian Fundamentalism

racist -check Do I need to even say anything. America invented modern racism

sworn enemy of neighbor(s) -check Invaded Canada ,Panama, Granada and Mexico in the past Sworn enemy of Cuba Sure I agree

willing to sacrifice entire nation for megalomaniac goals -check Iraq and cold war anyone?

So sure dont ignore Hitler but dont elect him too but gosh you rednecks went ahead and elected him twice. Will you please go out into the woods and shoot yourself now or are you just as shameless as the Chritian right?

Will you fucking stop being obsessed with the Shrub, who's gonna be kicked out of the Whitehouse in a year anyway, and focus on some other, no less deserving figures?

Um, I think they meant this:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/d/d 0/Death_Star.jpg/180px-Death_Star.jpg

can you explain Mr Hajj's missile launch the same way? It actually a single flare that has been cloned and then called a missile. how was that dust removal?

Nice apologist post.

Give it a rest, the facts arent on your side. He was employed by them and they were presenting his fake photos are the real thing. There are a far more than one photo that he was manipulating. Take a look at this "missile launch". that used to be a single defensive flare. need i show more? just do a damn google search i cant post hundreds of photos here.

Pic

Since the bandwith costs for the uploader don't scale with number of users, you can easily stream video with the same quality as the average DVD rip.

The owner sounds like a real toad.

Not sure about storage. The database dumps are here: http://download.wikimedia.org/ - those are bzipped or 7zipped.

I have nothing against wikis. Stop making generalized statments. I DO have something against the way wikipedia is run, it's content is (mostly) fine as far as I care. It's the first place I go when I want to know something, but I quit as an editor there long ago.

For examples, I am a bit short seeing as I left months ago, but after a few google searches I was able to find some complaints/acknowledgments.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2005 -July/025921.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Friday/Admin_abu se

Lest we forget how one admin deleted all user templates because of a hissy fit or how it's very common for an admin to delete a page/speedy it out of process because he doesn't like it. I am sure there is a lot more because I have a high tolerance for getting pissed off at places, but the whole experience is kind of blanked out seeing as it was a while ago. I can't imagine it got much better.

Can someone explain to me when the Wikimedia Foundation suddenly became poverty-stricken? The latest financial statement from the Wikimedia Foundation indicates that in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2006, they received $1,508,039 and spent $791,907 (leaving them with net assets of $1,004,216); according to the Wikimedia fundraising website they received a further $1,096,299 in the second half of 2006 and have received $275,427 so far in 2007. In order for the Wikimedia Foundation to be in trouble, they must have gone from spending $791,907 last fiscal year to spending over $2,000,000 in the first 8 months of this fiscal year.

Personally, I'm not going to make any donations or support advertising on Wikipedia until someone explains where all the money is going.

Can someone explain to me when the Wikimedia Foundation suddenly became poverty-stricken? The latest financial statement from the Wikimedia Foundation indicates that in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2006, they received $1,508,039 and spent $791,907 (leaving them with net assets of $1,004,216); according to the Wikimedia fundraising website they received a further $1,096,299 in the second half of 2006 and have received $275,427 so far in 2007. In order for the Wikimedia Foundation to be in trouble, they must have gone from spending $791,907 last fiscal year to spending over $2,000,000 in the first 8 months of this fiscal year.

Personally, I'm not going to make any donations or support advertising on Wikipedia until someone explains where all the money is going.

Perhaps you were thinking of the NES version? Or the C64 version?

Not great, but still better than the screenshot you found.

It would be exactly as useful and 0% as annoying if they kept the key but printed something else on it, like a star, or a light bulb or something.

I'm not really a Sun fanboy at all, but I think diamond on the Win key and the text "Compose" on the menu key might be a good idea. I mean, Mac users have meta keys, why can't PC users get them too? =)

but it seems very unlikely that the current course of action is going to sustain Wikimedia for the duration.

Advertising is immoral because it raises demand and therefore raises everybody's prices, even for those people who don't benefit from Wikipedia. I prefer that only people who like Wikipedia pay for it.

It's really not enough to run the site considering the growth. First consider the financials to have a look at the expenses. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/2 /28/Wikimedia_2006_fs.pdf
Then look at the traffic growth path:
http://hemlock.knams.wikimedia.org/~leon/stats/tra fstats/trafficstats-yearly.png
Putting those together it will cost many times last years expenses just to keep the site running, much less reach the real goal of getting information to people in their language. Many of those people have no internet access.

Finally, while I contribute a lot, the quality of most articles is most definitely not fairly high. From random sampling, the large majority of articles are very poor quality. If all you want is a reasonable intro to a topic a decent percentage are ok for that. Anything more, and its a very small percentage of articles that are high quality. So yes, it's working to produce and improve material, but not fast enough to reach the goal of a high quality reference work. Hence the point of the essay, change is needed.

It's really not enough to run the site considering the growth. First consider the financials to have a look at the expenses. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/2 /28/Wikimedia_2006_fs.pdf
Then look at the traffic growth path:
http://hemlock.knams.wikimedia.org/~leon/stats/tra fstats/trafficstats-yearly.png
Putting those together it will cost many times last years expenses just to keep the site running, much less reach the real goal of getting information to people in their language. Many of those people have no internet access.

Finally, while I contribute a lot, the quality of most articles is most definitely not fairly high. From random sampling, the large majority of articles are very poor quality. If all you want is a reasonable intro to a topic a decent percentage are ok for that. Anything more, and its a very small percentage of articles that are high quality. So yes, it's working to produce and improve material, but not fast enough to reach the goal of a high quality reference work. Hence the point of the essay, change is needed.