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Hi there.

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intelligent non-human life is most likely everywhere around us, but beyond the perceptual capacities of the vast majority of humans. Goldfish don't see you walking by their bowl, they just see a flash of light...

For example, to us they are just Lady Gaga and Michael Jackson.

Motorways aren't E roads, they are M roads. Scotland and Ireland don't have any E numbered roads.

Ireland and Scotland have E-numbered roads, but in Scotland there aren't road signs with the numbers on (the UK doesn't sign E roads).

See http://commons.wikimedia.org/w... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I... for more information.

I hope not, but it's starting to feel like it. According to the WMF statements , they have (Approx) $60 Million in assets, and spent $45 Million a year, of that, $20 Million went into salaries, $5 Million into awards and grand, $2 Million on conferences and travel and $12 Million on "Other Operating Expenses".

They spend $2.5 Million on hosting and the content is created by the community for free.

Each year they're making more money then the last and what have we seen from it? There seems to be a lot of people not doing a lot of work over there.

I think you may find that some or all of the Wiki Loves Monuments tools were written by people outside the Wikimedia Foundation. Have a look at this page and its edit history. (WMF staffers typically have a "(WMF)" at the end of their user name.) Similarly this page. Many of the most useful software components remain volunteer-contributed.

Kolbe, you are killing me! LOL... so the API software wizardry that is cited above as a great reason to donate more money to the gaping maw of the WMF, was actually written by volunteers who are completely apart from the developer boondoggle at the WMF?

Someone just got pwnd.

I think you may find that some or all of the Wiki Loves Monuments tools were written by people outside the Wikimedia Foundation. Have a look at this page and its edit history. (WMF staffers typically have a "(WMF)" at the end of their user name.) Similarly this page. Many of the most useful software components remain volunteer-contributed.

Kolbe, you are killing me! LOL... so the API software wizardry that is cited above as a great reason to donate more money to the gaping maw of the WMF, was actually written by volunteers who are completely apart from the developer boondoggle at the WMF?

Someone just got pwnd.

I think you may find that some or all of the Wiki Loves Monuments tools were written by people outside the Wikimedia Foundation. Have a look at this page and its edit history. (WMF staffers typically have a "(WMF)" at the end of their user name.) Similarly this page. Many of the most useful software components remain volunteer-contributed.

I think you may find that some or all of the Wiki Loves Monuments tools were written by people outside the Wikimedia Foundation. Have a look at this page and its edit history. (WMF staffers typically have a "(WMF)" at the end of their user name.) Similarly this page. Many of the most useful software components remain volunteer-contributed.

Over here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/...

Wikiwand is one of those engineering shops they are scared of, because WikiWand have been doing better work than their own programmers, and are presenting Wikipedia content in a prettier format. And if people migrate to Wikiwand, then as you rightly say, people don't see their fundraising banners.

Their new VP of Engineering, Damon Sicore (ex-Mozilla), spelt that fear out. According to Sicore, the WMF will have to “scale to a size that enables us to compete with the engineering shops that are trying to kill us. That means we need to double down on recruiting top talent, and steal the engineers from the sources they use because well they are REALLY GOOD. ... I want everyone to keep this in mind: If we don’t move faster and better than google, apple, and microsoft (and their ilk and kin), they will consume us and we will go away. It’s that simple.”

Note well that what he's talking about going away there is the Wikimedia Foundation, not Wikipedia. The Wikipedia volunteers work for nothing; they are not reliant on donation money. And Wikipedia itself is also free, meaning it can be hosted by WikiWand, Google or anyone else who thinks they can present the content better than WMF. And if they managed to improve the content at the same time ... As I see it, this is what this expansion is about, not about keeping Wikipedia online and ad-free. And that's not what they're telling the public.

Comodo IceDragon [...] Comodo Secure Chromium and Dragon

One feature of Comodo Dragon creates a perverse incentive not to encrypt personal web sites. When Comodo Dragon sees a domain-validated TLS certificate, it displays this interstitial designed to scare users away from using any HTTPS site not operated by "a legitimate business". This makes users feel safer using clear HTTP than using HTTPS on a site operated by an individual, which runs against the effort of HTTPS Everywhere to bring the benefits of encryption even to personal sites. Does Comodo IceDragon do the same?

You're absolutely right. Hipsters are killing open source projects left and right with their fucking awful UI changes.

Just look at what happened to gedit. It's a text editor that comes with GNOME.

Gedit used to look like this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Gedit2261.png

It had a clean, usable, consistent UI. The major functionality was easily available, and the UI was extremely intuitive and efficient to use.

The hipsters can't stand for usable software, of course. It needed to be "improved"!

This is what gedit looks like more recently: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Gedit_3.11.92.png

I'm not joking. That's really what it looks like. Using it is even worse than it looks.

Gedit's UI today is fucking awful.

It's like they've taken the worst aspects of tablet UI design, and forced it into a text editor that's probably never used anywhere but on desktops and laptops.

The traditional menus and toolbars are gone, replaced with incomprehensibly bad icons and a shitty Chrome-style hamburger menu that's an unusable jumble of unrelated functionality.

It's absolutely fucking moronic what they've done to gedit. They've managed to completely destroy the UI of a text editor, for crying out loud!

Why the fuck would I want to contribute anything but a total and complete reversion back to the old UI? Getting rid of this shit-for-brains UI is the best possible bugfix that gedit could undergo right now. But will it be accepted? Of course not! The hipsters can't possibly be wrong about the UI.

You're absolutely right. Hipsters are killing open source projects left and right with their fucking awful UI changes.

Just look at what happened to gedit. It's a text editor that comes with GNOME.

Gedit used to look like this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Gedit2261.png

It had a clean, usable, consistent UI. The major functionality was easily available, and the UI was extremely intuitive and efficient to use.

The hipsters can't stand for usable software, of course. It needed to be "improved"!

This is what gedit looks like more recently: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Gedit_3.11.92.png

I'm not joking. That's really what it looks like. Using it is even worse than it looks.

Gedit's UI today is fucking awful.

It's like they've taken the worst aspects of tablet UI design, and forced it into a text editor that's probably never used anywhere but on desktops and laptops.

The traditional menus and toolbars are gone, replaced with incomprehensibly bad icons and a shitty Chrome-style hamburger menu that's an unusable jumble of unrelated functionality.

It's absolutely fucking moronic what they've done to gedit. They've managed to completely destroy the UI of a text editor, for crying out loud!

Why the fuck would I want to contribute anything but a total and complete reversion back to the old UI? Getting rid of this shit-for-brains UI is the best possible bugfix that gedit could undergo right now. But will it be accepted? Of course not! The hipsters can't possibly be wrong about the UI.

Thanks, but I'd be surprise if that happened.

1. You may have noticed that the "story" submitter is Jaromil, so I suspect (extrapolating from experience) he's accompanied by his sock puppet army (do they imitate the NSA with forum flooding and FUD techniques, or does the NSA imitate them?)
2. I've always suspected that the NSA is actively involved in ceasing this opportunity to divide Debian, if not celebrating the number of senior Debian developers who have left due to the number of personal attacks and threats they've recieved from the "anti-systemd" "campaign"

Jaromil does some excellent graphic work - but his musical ability is more autistic than artistic, allowing for a broad spectrum of tastes... and his "software accomplishments" is less than truthful (his hasciicam program lacks truthful attributions to it's true basis, and his Dyneobolic distro is just one of very many "respins". Not a patch on Knoppix - which is the work of one person , or a shadow of Mint and other Debian derivatives. There have been many Debian fork attempts...

Some vaguely related trivia regarding your pseudonym. Unix was a joke name chosen by the developers of Multix - the operating system that was intended to "do everything", when their funding was cut. Eunuchs/Unix was the result. Linux was the name given to Linux Torvalds to create a non-Unix compatible kernel.

apt-get install sysvinit-core

Just call it -traditional-init

What is this thing about creating supposedly funny or original names for technical things (a branch is not a brand). Just makes things hard to remember.

And look at:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

Are you really telling me than not one of the countless existing forks of debian wants to stay with traditional init and you could help there? would that not increase the chances of continued support. Or is this just about being the boss of something?

I think it's you that need some teaching. https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

                  United Russia (238)
                  Communist Party of the Russian Federation (92)
                  A Just Russia (64)
                  Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (56)

See, not even the Communist Party is in control, Putin is far from a communist. I found this typing russian parliament in wikipedia. As your teacher in International Affairs I have to use quite advanced tools just so you know. Class time is over you can go back eating cheetos and watch some handegg on tv oblivious to the fact you live in a country that only allows 2 parties which are basically the same to exist.

One of the biggest reasons why it matters is that the ratio of population per representative is getting worse. By now there should be at least 5 times more representatives then there are. Every election your vote gets less of a representative, and fewer representatives have to fight for your vote per capita.

Apparently the collision has become more serious than when I was at school, and now it's not going to pass through, but whack together, merging the super-massive black holes into a doubly super-massive black hole.

So get your popcorn ready, it's going to be a show.

You keep asking others to look at data, except that data confirm that you're completely wrong. Firstly about the stock market, now even about the unemployment rate, which obviously started skyrocketing at the end of 1929, and not after the Smoot-Hawley tariff:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

Sorry, the economic religion you believe in is just delirious.

I think all the solar activity graphs look like that, they are based on the same satellite data. For example:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/Solar-cycle-data.png

How can increased solar activity be causing global warming if solar activity is not increasing? Isn't it more likely that the huge increase in CO2, a strongly-warming gas, is the cause?

No Westminster system is party based for elections you vote for individuals. Though some of those systems have a hybrid system for the Senate / House of review.

Looking at - https://commons.wikimedia.org/... I would guess first past the post (US style) is probably the most represented, followed by a hybrid then party based.

"Do a lot of damage" is a funny way to phrase "Completely destroy"

Nuclear explosions are big. Really damn big. Have you looked at footage of underground nuclear tests?

This was a tiny little 1.2 kiloton bomb under 60 feet of packed soil. Silos aren't packed soil, and though the details are classified, I believe most bombs on ICBMs are somewhere in the megatonish range.

As pointed out elsewhere, silos are heavily-reinforced concrete. You'd have a gun barrel effect directing the blast straight up.

Further, the typical warhead on an American Peacemaker ICBM is a 300kt W87. Granted, there may be up to ten of them, but unless they exploded simultaneously, the detonation would destroy the other nine.

"Do a lot of damage" is a funny way to phrase "Completely destroy"

Nuclear explosions are big. Really damn big. Have you looked at footage of underground nuclear tests?

This was a tiny little 1.2 kiloton bomb under 60 feet of packed soil. Silos aren't packed soil, and though the details are classified, I believe most bombs on ICBMs are somewhere in the megatonish range.

Link to image for those unaware: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

And did you ever notice that the cockpits still have yolks for the pilots?

Well, who doesn't like eating a nice fried egg while they're flying? Perhaps you meant "yokes". If you did:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/w...

Notice the complete absence of yokes. They do get some nice keyboards, though.

The whole global warming scare made it abundantly obvious that the current state of science (plus politics) is incapable of intelligently managing the climate, or perhaps even managing it at all, much less intelligently.

But, hey, look what Harvard Economists have done with engineering the economy! Can't we have some ivory tower academics "fixing" the planet too?

But seriously, an upper-bound projected sea level rise of 4 inches is completely unprecedented, so we should seek to thwart the productive capacity of humanity, and whatever happens, don't put one tenth of that money into ensuring clean water for every human on Earth, eliminating malaria, or building fusion reactors. Where the regulatory victory in that?!

I think the Atari Lynx is my favourite.

I played it in stores a few times and it was massive, good looking, back-lit color screen!

The games may have been bad what do I know and it was big but .. It's such a cute device.

Such beauty:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...
Not this one:
http://www.studio42.info/Lynx/...
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...
The Sega game gear I never felt the attraction for:
http://www.studio42.info/GameG...

I think the Atari Lynx is my favourite.

I played it in stores a few times and it was massive, good looking, back-lit color screen!

The games may have been bad what do I know and it was big but .. It's such a cute device.

Such beauty:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...
Not this one:
http://www.studio42.info/Lynx/...
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...
The Sega game gear I never felt the attraction for:
http://www.studio42.info/GameG...

For many reasons, modern air to air missiles do not produce much of a smoke trail.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

That is what an AIM-9 Sidewinder looks like leaving the wingtip rail of a F-16 Falcon. Note the almost complete lack of a smoke trail.

Here is another, leaving an A-10 launch rail.

http://chivethebrigade.files.w...

> No it doesn't. The booster is very smoky but the upper stage is pretty clean firing. Here's what a missile actually looks like: > https://commons.wikimedia.org/... The SA-2 isn't a BUK

They overtook the French, with their TGV.

No, they didn't.
There is less space per passenger in a TGV than in an ICE, but the TGV is faster ( http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi... ) and safer ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E... ).
There are many connections (e.g. Stuttgart München) where ICEs average about 100km/h.

I was manager at Boeing on a Gun-Launch propellant delivery system study, and using them for space launch is quite feasible. They have been used in hypersonic research for decades, like this one at Arnold Engineering Development Center: https://upload.wikimedia.org/w... You just need to make one somewhat larger, and install it on a mountain with the right slope.

Gas guns are preferred over electromagnetic ones for low launch rates. The power supply for a space launch gun would be immense, because the power draw is very high for a short time. High pressure gas can be stored in a tank, and released all at once. Electromagnetic would be more efficient in the long run, but you need to overcome the high initial cost.

For humans and spacecraft equipment (as opposed to bulk items like fuel and structural parts), you are limited to about 6 g's (60 m/s^2). There are a few locations on Earth where you can install a 20 km pipe, which lets you reach about Mach 5. The gas pressure for that level of acceleration is surprisingly low, about what is put in vehicle tires.

They overtook the French, with their TGV.

Not quite http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi... The TGV network still has more fast (300+ km/h) tracks

That's quite a beard for a woman

FYI, Leslie Lamport is a man.

Here, Here, Here, Here.

And here.

LMAO wow, the point went completely over your head. If you think this: "The Earth is only 400 thousand years old?" is equivalent to suggesting what you say...wow, just wow...Particularly after this, "That's what I thought, but the link [you give] only shows a 400,000 year window."

No the point is, excusing the boshe ice core citation and the bell curve comment (wth does that have to do with anything), we are colder than it has been historically.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
http://commons.wikimedia.org/w...
http://commons.wikimedia.org/w...

You can make your graph look like anything you want it to by selecting your window.

LMAO wow, the point went completely over your head. If you think this: "The Earth is only 400 thousand years old?" is equivalent to suggesting what you say...wow, just wow...Particularly after this, "That's what I thought, but the link [you give] only shows a 400,000 year window."

No the point is, excusing the boshe ice core citation and the bell curve comment (wth does that have to do with anything), we are colder than it has been historically.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
http://commons.wikimedia.org/w...
http://commons.wikimedia.org/w...

You can make your graph look like anything you want it to by selecting your window.

We use the ELK stack for our log management. It's primary engine is the NoSQL Elasticsearch It works great, it's fast and is extremely flexible. WikiMedia Recently moved to Elasticsearch as its primary search engine. It's definitely worth a look.

amazing graphics

Are you... are you serious? You're joking, right?

Here's "amazing graphics for the 2600", or this, or this. Even good old Pitfall looks like a masterpiece compared to it. ET looks especially awful considering it came out so late in the 2600's life.

Are you just making crap up just to have something positive to say about the game?

Here, have a citation from the very source: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki...

(3) Too many people don't realize the vast number of predictions made by current theories that have been tested by measurement

The most obviously broken parts of physics, like the inflationary miracle after the Big Bang, are based on what measurements, exactly? The CMB? The same CMB that BICEP 2 based its nonsense on?

And Black Hole information retention is based on...?

And our completely broken notion of how stars should be orbiting the Black Hole at the center of our galaxy is a confirmation of our theory? Surely you gest.

Wikipedia's list of Unsolved Problems in Physics has, by my count, 148 questions (and another 74 things that need to be discussed). Wiki's corresponding U.P. in Chemistry looks to have 25 or 30.

There are at least a few modern physicists trying to deal with the horrendous state of physics today -- Lee Smolin, Frank Close, Peter Woit, and Amit Goswani come immediately to mind. Others like Anton Z Capri (& Feynman & Einstein) at least kept their sense of humor throughout their career.

Far too many are followers, and the system encourages this, big time. Lee Smolin talked about this, and how he tried to go against his gut at first, before ultimately coming out with Loop Quantum Gravity.

So is it all a bed of roses to you, "Roger"? Or have you a better theory? Or are you just interested in nitpicking?

"Apple - gay to the core"

Sure, there are some niche scientific uses for suborbital flights. But that is still isn't the same as managing orbital flight. The ASM-135 was also suborbital, you'll note.

Niche? Many satellites are in low earth orbit. The International Space Station is at 211 miles. Hubble is at 370 miles. Earth imaging at 373 to 497 miles. Again the F-15 launched ASM-135 hit a satellite at 345 miles in the 80s.

An interesting graphic:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

Take a look at a timezone map, like this one: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/World_Time_Zones_Map.png

Notice anything about it? like how France and Spain are in the wrong timezone?

How many British people are actually involved with day-to-day trade with European companies, that would necessitate a CET working day? Surely that number of people is vanishingly small. Many more people work night shifts and early shifts.

And yet, despite that, you want all of us to be on CET? Why?

This isn't really about timezones at all, is it? It's all about your hateful bigotry against the people you call "little Englanders", and your mindless intolerance for any English thing that differs from the rest of Europe.

Really, man, get a grip! Your Anglophobia is really weird. Get a hold of yourself before you find yourself checking for UKIPpers under your bed.

This doesn't exactly look like a low-power device, seeing as I can have a 1kw RF PA in a shoebox. Plus while some twenty-odd satellites give you global coverage, you'd need many times more LORAN stations to give you the same.

The final sentence of the summary is misleading.

Many of the poorest and most rural states in the country tend to favor Republican politicians.

The link is to a 2011 article, which states the following:

Most of the 10 poorest states in the country are Republican. Mississippi is the poorest... followed by Arkansas, Tennessee, West Virginia, Louisiana, Montana, South Carolina, Kentucky, Alabama and North Carolina.

The economics of a state is more impacted by what party holds the governorship and statehouse, not by what party they voted for for president. Looking at the governorship of each of those states
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...
you see that the parties of the governors of the states listed are, respectively, Republican, Democratic, Republican, Democratic, Republican, Democratic, Republican, Democratic, Republican, Republican.

Sure they do! Just thousands of them that you just can't see without some optical help.

Probably you only wrote for the lulz, but I'm somewhat baffled. Obviously less hairy in Africa, due to climate

Not due to climate. Inuit aren't as hairier than Europeans, and Indians and Australian aboriginals can be very hairy.

But in parts of Africa, they have no arm hair at all. Not even the vestigial stuff. I think we'd gone further from the common ancestor with chimps/bonobos before we mixed back with Neanderthals.

African lips are further from chimps than Europeans too.

But more upright posture? I see caucasians with a more upright posture than Africans.

Do you? I definitely see the Sudanese around here always straight as a die, no hint of a slouch.

It is the forehead that's baffling: caucasians generally have a tall, upright forehead, while africans often have a gentler elevation angle from the eyebrows up... Which is a neanderthal feature.

I have a flat forehead, it's smoothly curved from my eyes to my hairline, but the furthest part forward of it is my brow ridges. But those tall hairless Africans have a forehead that bulges out in the centre.

This map begs to differ, even at only 10 percent efficiency.