You do realize that entire tale about railroad gauges being the same width as Roman roads is apocryphal and contradicted by the evidence, right? Around the world there have been more than 90 different narrow gauges deployed and more than 40 broad gauges. Many of them enjoyed widespread usage for decades. Hell, so-called "standard gauge" is only used by 55% of the railroads in the world today. Even the original horse drawn railways in England in the late 1700s had widely varying gauges, from under 4 feet up to 5 feet, despite involving literal horses.
The coward's observations about the stickiness of protocols are perfectly valid though.
Let me give you a few examples: And - both sections in the sentence/section must apply for it to be considered in-force. Or - either section can apply, but not both at the same time. And/Or - both sections may apply at the same time.
Of all the examples of legalese, you picked the ones explicitly understood by a website full of software developers and engineers? That's the least confusing part of EULAs.
A much better example is the Latin phrase per se. People on Slashdot don't even spell it right, let alone know what it means legally. Translated from the Latin literally, it means "by itself", but in legal terms its meaning is closer to "inherently", which in practical terms translates to not having to prove something. Publishing writing falsely accusing someone of being a convicted felon is libel per se, which means there's no argument that defends it and the victim does not have to prove specific injury in order to be awarded damages.
That's a much more useful example. Three little words, two of them Latin (and one with a Latin root), and the explanation requires a long compound sentence full of words with more than two syllables. An explanation a lawyer doesn't need, because they know what the phrase means already.
The shutdown happened when the GOP controlled House, Senate, and the Oval office. It's the first single party shutdown in the history of the United States.
Even better, after the new congresscritters were seated January 3, 2019 and the House was officially under Democratic control, the new house voted to approve the Republican sponsored appropriations bill from the Republican controlled Senate, so it was still a single party shutdown.
As someone who works on boats at sea, the prospect of having personal broadband at work is a dream come true. However, considering that they're steel boats (so the decks will reflect the signal), what is needed is a way to use a single antenna on the top of the vessel to connect with multiple customers inside the vessel. Employers aren't going to want to pay for very much data for employees, and as an employee, I'd rather pay for my own, so as not to be restricted by what my employer might allocate.
The high end subscription from Starlink is supposed to be 1 gigabit per second service. Sharing that on a boat won't be any problem at all. You could share that to every passenger on a monster cruise ship and still have everyone be fairly content.
In fact, it might be a good idea for any Starlink earth station to look like a hotspot from the consumer side.
This seems likely to happen. The antennas require line of sight to the sky and the signal can not go through walls or ceilings. They're using a very high frequency signal that does not penetrate structures. Since the antenna will likely be roof mounted, it would make sense to include integrated WiFi to reduce the required number of cables (power only, in that case). That's one option. Another, and possibly more likely option because of operating environment concerns, is a coax cable to the antenna on a roof going to a box somewhere in the structure you want to service. That box accepts power and provides ethernet ports and probably wifi just as most ISP boxes do today. It'll be a router. That keeps the electronics that really prefer operating at room temperature from having to be more expensive to tolerate cooking in roof summer heat.
Won't. Twitter knows. Twitter is carefully ignoring them for a precisely calibrated length of time designed to hide just how few actual unique humans use Twitter.
"Research based solely on publicly available information about accounts and tweets on Twitter often cannot paint an accurate or complete picture of the steps we take to enforce our developer policies," a spokesperson wrote.
Also, they're getting paid. Publicly available information does not include how much they're getting paid for allowing those accounts. So the spokesperson spoke the technical truth. The best kind of truth.
For long runs, it's better to knife-trench the dirt beside the road, and bore under roads, sidewalks, and driveways — more expensive, mind you, but it avoids problems like this.
And in typical Google arrogance, they couldn't be arsed to hire someone like you who could have told them that up front.
It's not like any of this is new.
Google Fiber is a genius idea. The country needs a second or third wireline provider, nationwide. But it's not software, so Google is culturally incapable of seeing it through.
Whether they actually believe any of that shit is something I'm very kind and don't press them on, but they're heavily into the 'must do' / 'must not do' shite purely on archaic superstitious grounds.
They believe, correctly, that "when in Rome, rub blue mud into your bellybutton," as Robert Heinlein put it. They are signaling community status in what they believe to be an advantageous community just as hard as they can. It's probably working for them too.
The ones who do it most aggressively have convinced themselves they actually do believe the practices are necessary. Belief often works that way, for those capable of it. Not being capable of belief myself, I don't really understand those who do, but I know they can do that to themselves.
I understood it fine. And I understood the errors in it, unlike you. There are loads of people in the top five percentile of the entire population who are utter morons at statistics. You are failing at statistics by failing to distinguish dependent and independent variables. You believe the variables are independent. They are not. That's the flaw in your analysis.
Less serious but still very damaging items on the "diverse effects" list are usually around 1/10.000 to 1/100.000. Former would mean around 40.000 people in US. That's no longer an insignificant number.
Final factor in the risk assessment formula is the risk of actually suffering the nastier effects of those illnesses. In case of measles for example, death is about 1/10.000 with proper medical care. Contrast with diverse effects and you'll see where this argument is going.
What you left out of that analysis is that as more and more morons make that flawed risk assessment, the odds of death being 1/10000 changes dramatically for the worse. The odds are 1/10000 with historically high vaccination rates. Change the rate for the worse and you'll discover many more deaths, which changes that foolish odds of death evaluation.
If everyone stopped vaccinating for the worst childhood diseases, literally millions of children would die. Population density is so high that all of the worst diseases would spread like wildfire through an unvaccinated population. It would be a disaster of biblical proportions.
Here's a question: as the earth's magnetic field is based significantly on the location of the magnetic pole, the strength of any electromagnetic field varies significantly depending on the incidence angle of incoming particles (ie to exclude solar wind) has anyone studied what impact this shift would have on earth's climate?
Yes.
Danish astrophysicist Henrik Svensmark and Danish geophysicists Mads Knudsen and Peter Riisager say those shifts in the magnetic field that allow more charged particles to enter the atmosphere affect cloud formation in the upper atmosphere. They say the current alignment has been reducing cloud formation and precipitation at lower latitudes for the last hundred years, increasing temperatures.
One thing I don't get about China's plan, it seems worrying but also kind of easily gamed - like you could go around in a hood or those face matching block patterns on normally, but just sometimes go out plain-faced doing good deeds to raise your score.
The face blocking pattern stuff could well get you arrested, but China is not arresting everyone with a hood pulled up are they? That seems unrealistic.
What's interesting is Chinese people are way ahead of the government in this instance. All of southeast Asia and China too has already normalized wearing a face mask in public, to "prevent the spread of disease" and "filter out pollution". I suspect it does little or nothing to change the rate of spread of most diseases, or filter pollution, but it does wonders for concealing a huge chunk of your face.
A small piece of the impetus behind China's newfound zeal for reducing air pollution might be to eliminate that excuse for hiding the face.
Society as a whole has been breaking down as well, and when dictators and those who aspire to be dictators(such as Donald Trump) become the norm, rather than the exception, deaths will increase until society pulls together again to remove these people from power.
There's nothing like a good war to cause an explosion in the human birth rate. We've already demonstrated that, more than once.
Dictators don't have much affect on birth rates in and of themselves. North Korea's birth rate has been below the replacement rate for a decade, while the birth rate in every African dictatorship is above replacement rate. Dictators that cause a lot of war and strife cause birth rates to go up. Dictators that enforce stability don't cause birth rates to go down, but don't cause any increase either. When the infant mortality rate goes down and the average education achievement of women goes up birth rates go down. Nothing else really matters.
My concern is not quite geometric population growth in the face of sustainable abilities to service that growth. We fail that that, and fail consistently, as the greed model thwarts any appreciation for what happens to the next generation. We kick it forward. We answer the call of our biology and have lots of children, eschew birth control and even abortion in the name of population sustainability, which creates constant profit growths for the greed model.
Except we don't. That's the whole point. The facts on the ground say the UN is full of shit (to no one's surprise) and you're wrong too (even less surprising).
The US's birth rate fell below the replacement rate in 1973, returned to above replacement in 1989, then dropped below again in 2011.
South Korea's birth rate fell below the replacement rate in 1984 and has never risen above it since.
Japan's birth rate fell below the replacement rate in 1975 and has never risen above it since.
Germany's birth rate fell below the replacement rate in 1971 and has never risen above it since.
I could go on for another 100 countries. Most never return to above replacement once they drop below it. The US is very unusual in returning even for a while, but first generation immigrants tend to have more children than natives and the US still allows more immigration (both legal and illegal) than practically any country in the world.
Everywhere that infant mortality drops below about 24 per thousand live births, the birth rate drops below the replacement rate. There is some variance depending on whether or not women are allowed/provided better than elementary education and depending on the local religion, but even in places with (nominally) very strong religious objections to birth control, if women are educated and infant mortality is low enough, the birth rate drops below replacement. Why this should be has not been definitively explained, but it is happening, across the entire world, and the correlations with education and reasonably capable medical practices are statistically significant.
Same here, and I'll add that the main difference with US comics is that the latter are mostly about super heroes, while the former are mostly about anything else (fantasy, SF, drama, humor, family, thrillers, etc)...
Look at Marvel's and DC's back catalogs. You'll be surprised to discover superheros were the minority in the 40s and 50s. Even into the 60s, they were publishing more westerns, war (mostly WWII)(both combat and spy), romance, and traditional non-super adventures than they were superhero books. Batman may be 80 years old but Batman was only one book among many for half of its existence. They didn't even name his book after him. It was 'Detective Comics' for many many years. Superheros were selected by the public, not the publishers.
There's an argument to be made that the rise of superheros to prominence in comics corresponded with the decline in society revolving around the Christian church. For most of a thousand years, the Christian church was the source of stories about miracles and larger than life characters. I'm old enough to remember Sunday school that was willing, even eager, to dwell on the Old Testament. It's full of prophets and miracles and drama. As society relegated the Christian mythos more and more to history, superhero comics grew in popularity. They were filling a gap. Humans love gods and monsters in stories, and that's what superhero comics are. Ultimately they rummaged through history and resurrected all the old demigods, from Hercules to the Norse pantheon, adopting the characters wholesale into their own mythos (minus all the kinky animal sex). And why wouldn't they? They're a perfect fit, and serve the same purpose. And they've successfully displaced the Christian prophets.
More power to them, I say. Superhero comics manage to always be just ridiculous enough that no one takes them too seriously. That's a big step up. When people take their god myths seriously, people get burned at the stake. If superheros successfully inoculate the species against that habit, they're a huge win.
Because if this style of extorsion becomes a "thing", the thiefs will eventually go after the big youtube guns, you know, the ones that bring millions of revenue to youtube. So it's in youtube's interest to nip this thing in the bud.
Youtube doesnt care, at all, which monetized video is being watched. They get their revenue either way. The lack of some videos, no matter how popular, will not reduce the number of viewer hours, and will only alter which videos were viewed but not the number of ads served.
More to the point, the Youtube big guns (and those are Sony and NBC Universal, NOT PewDiePie and his ilk) are already protected by code, which will straight up ignore claims against monetized videos of privileged accounts. Youtube carefully prevents deep pockets with the right law firm on retainer from being offended. Everybody else can go fuck themselves. You've hired a lawyer you say? Youtube still doesn't care because it wasn't the right lawyer. "But I can't afford the right lawyer," you say. Yes, now you're getting it.
The current nightmare scenario: there is a gene hack that makes photosynthesis more efficient. (BTW, a current photosynthesis wastes almost as many photons as it uses, and there is now work going on to "fix" this problem. It's happening now.) Land plants with improved yields go into mass use. Meanwhile, previously unknown virus activity moves the new energy pathways into algae and there is a world wide tropical water algae bloom. So much oxygen is consumed that a crash of all tropical ocean life occurs. Within a few years atmospheric oxygen levels drop and everything else starts to die.
The vast majority of algal blooms are not limited by energy availability. They're limited by the presence of dissolved nutrients, such as phosphates. No phosphates, no bloom. It doesn't matter how efficient the photosynthesis is. An algae can not reproduce itself if it doesn't have enough material to work with. An out of control genetic enhancement spreading through the population might increase the speed at which a bloom occurs, but it won't change its size.
The loss of dissolved oxygen happens after the bloom dies and begins to decay in the water, not as part of the growth process. It's temporary, as wave action will restore the dissolved oxygen. During the bloom, depending on the species that's growing, it may emit large amounts of excess oxygen into the atmosphere, since oxygen is a waste product of algal metabolisms for many species. This will result in a temporary, localized spike in oxygen levels in the air, not a drop in atmospheric oxygen levels.
The end result is faster blooms, but no change in the rate at which dissolved oxygen is lost from the water, and no permanent changes to any part of the system. Algal blooms happen constantly, year in and year out, all over the globe. Most went unnoticed before satellite observation. None of them threaten life on Earth. Genetically modified algae won't change that.
The power grid itself could very well be damaged with widespread outages. Equipment necessary to replace damaged components could take years to come online.
Even this is unlikely. Widespread outages, yes. Damage, no. Practically every substation in the grid includes circuit breakers. Big grid-scale circuit breakers that have to be reset with a wrench, not some flippy finger thingie. When surges come down the line, the breakers trip. Yes, some of them won't trip fast enough, or maybe at all because they're defective. A few transformers will blow up because of it. But the entire US grid has to deal with lightning storms as a matter of course, so surges are familiar and designed for occurrences. And no, the surge caused by a large solar flare isn't any worse than the surge caused by direct lightning strikes.
I have no idea how impactful his bigger edits are, and TFA and other articles written recently have shown pages he did considerable work on, but I would assume the vast majority (99%+ possibly) are very minor edits.
It's Wikipedia. I assume 99%+ of his edits are reverts of other peoples' corrections.
Slashdot Mirror
...booby traps in your own treasure room.
Ah, I see you too are a Dungeon Keeper player.
You sound awesome enough for an interview.
Do you want to be on a stellar engineering team?
You do realize that entire tale about railroad gauges being the same width as Roman roads is apocryphal and contradicted by the evidence, right? Around the world there have been more than 90 different narrow gauges deployed and more than 40 broad gauges. Many of them enjoyed widespread usage for decades. Hell, so-called "standard gauge" is only used by 55% of the railroads in the world today. Even the original horse drawn railways in England in the late 1700s had widely varying gauges, from under 4 feet up to 5 feet, despite involving literal horses.
The coward's observations about the stickiness of protocols are perfectly valid though.
Let me give you a few examples:
And - both sections in the sentence/section must apply for it to be considered in-force.
Or - either section can apply, but not both at the same time.
And/Or - both sections may apply at the same time.
Of all the examples of legalese, you picked the ones explicitly understood by a website full of software developers and engineers? That's the least confusing part of EULAs.
A much better example is the Latin phrase per se. People on Slashdot don't even spell it right, let alone know what it means legally. Translated from the Latin literally, it means "by itself", but in legal terms its meaning is closer to "inherently", which in practical terms translates to not having to prove something. Publishing writing falsely accusing someone of being a convicted felon is libel per se, which means there's no argument that defends it and the victim does not have to prove specific injury in order to be awarded damages.
That's a much more useful example. Three little words, two of them Latin (and one with a Latin root), and the explanation requires a long compound sentence full of words with more than two syllables. An explanation a lawyer doesn't need, because they know what the phrase means already.
Is there a biomass index?
There's one for the US. Presumably other governments have something similar.
The shutdown happened when the GOP controlled House, Senate, and the Oval office. It's the first single party shutdown in the history of the United States.
Even better, after the new congresscritters were seated January 3, 2019 and the House was officially under Democratic control, the new house voted to approve the Republican sponsored appropriations bill from the Republican controlled Senate, so it was still a single party shutdown.
Mitch McConnell has very peculiar motivations.
As someone who works on boats at sea, the prospect of having personal broadband at work is a dream come true. However, considering that they're steel boats (so the decks will reflect the signal), what is needed is a way to use a single antenna on the top of the vessel to connect with multiple customers inside the vessel. Employers aren't going to want to pay for very much data for employees, and as an employee, I'd rather pay for my own, so as not to be restricted by what my employer might allocate.
The high end subscription from Starlink is supposed to be 1 gigabit per second service. Sharing that on a boat won't be any problem at all. You could share that to every passenger on a monster cruise ship and still have everyone be fairly content.
In fact, it might be a good idea for any Starlink earth station to look like a hotspot from the consumer side.
This seems likely to happen. The antennas require line of sight to the sky and the signal can not go through walls or ceilings. They're using a very high frequency signal that does not penetrate structures. Since the antenna will likely be roof mounted, it would make sense to include integrated WiFi to reduce the required number of cables (power only, in that case). That's one option. Another, and possibly more likely option because of operating environment concerns, is a coax cable to the antenna on a roof going to a box somewhere in the structure you want to service. That box accepts power and provides ethernet ports and probably wifi just as most ISP boxes do today. It'll be a router. That keeps the electronics that really prefer operating at room temperature from having to be more expensive to tolerate cooking in roof summer heat.
Too bad most people eat animals raised on corn.
No they don't.
Beef cattle are grass fed for two thirds of their life, and only grain fed for the last third. The USDA tracks these things.
Won't. Twitter knows. Twitter is carefully ignoring them for a precisely calibrated length of time designed to hide just how few actual unique humans use Twitter.
"Research based solely on publicly available information about accounts and tweets on Twitter often cannot paint an accurate or complete picture of the steps we take to enforce our developer policies," a spokesperson wrote.
Also, they're getting paid. Publicly available information does not include how much they're getting paid for allowing those accounts. So the spokesperson spoke the technical truth. The best kind of truth.
For long runs, it's better to knife-trench the dirt beside the road, and bore under roads, sidewalks, and driveways — more expensive, mind you, but it avoids problems like this.
And in typical Google arrogance, they couldn't be arsed to hire someone like you who could have told them that up front.
It's not like any of this is new.
Google Fiber is a genius idea. The country needs a second or third wireline provider, nationwide. But it's not software, so Google is culturally incapable of seeing it through.
There was wild speculation by some hypocritical lunatic about what might happen if everybody was a freewheeling sociopath.
It was called Atlas Shrugged.
FTFY
When have we ever taken and twisted a technology to its moist perverse extreme?
I see what you did there.
Whether they actually believe any of that shit is something I'm very kind and don't press them on, but they're heavily into the 'must do' / 'must not do' shite purely on archaic superstitious grounds.
They believe, correctly, that "when in Rome, rub blue mud into your bellybutton," as Robert Heinlein put it. They are signaling community status in what they believe to be an advantageous community just as hard as they can. It's probably working for them too.
The ones who do it most aggressively have convinced themselves they actually do believe the practices are necessary. Belief often works that way, for those capable of it. Not being capable of belief myself, I don't really understand those who do, but I know they can do that to themselves.
I understood it fine. And I understood the errors in it, unlike you. There are loads of people in the top five percentile of the entire population who are utter morons at statistics. You are failing at statistics by failing to distinguish dependent and independent variables. You believe the variables are independent. They are not. That's the flaw in your analysis.
Fool.
Less serious but still very damaging items on the "diverse effects" list are usually around 1/10.000 to 1/100.000. Former would mean around 40.000 people in US. That's no longer an insignificant number.
Final factor in the risk assessment formula is the risk of actually suffering the nastier effects of those illnesses. In case of measles for example, death is about 1/10.000 with proper medical care. Contrast with diverse effects and you'll see where this argument is going.
What you left out of that analysis is that as more and more morons make that flawed risk assessment, the odds of death being 1/10000 changes dramatically for the worse. The odds are 1/10000 with historically high vaccination rates. Change the rate for the worse and you'll discover many more deaths, which changes that foolish odds of death evaluation.
If everyone stopped vaccinating for the worst childhood diseases, literally millions of children would die. Population density is so high that all of the worst diseases would spread like wildfire through an unvaccinated population. It would be a disaster of biblical proportions.
Here's a question: as the earth's magnetic field is based significantly on the location of the magnetic pole, the strength of any electromagnetic field varies significantly depending on the incidence angle of incoming particles (ie to exclude solar wind) has anyone studied what impact this shift would have on earth's climate?
Yes.
Danish astrophysicist Henrik Svensmark and Danish geophysicists Mads Knudsen and Peter Riisager say those shifts in the magnetic field that allow more charged particles to enter the atmosphere affect cloud formation in the upper atmosphere. They say the current alignment has been reducing cloud formation and precipitation at lower latitudes for the last hundred years, increasing temperatures.
Knudsen, Mads F. and Peter Riisager. "Is there a link between Earth’s magnetic field and low-latitude precipitation?" Geology (2009) 37 (1) pp 71-74.
They didn't have the nerve to title the paper with a declarative, but their abstract says yes, there's a significant statistical correlation.
All that said, Ajit Pai is an idjit, and we all hate him.
He is not an idiot. If he were an idiot, he'd be ineffectual. He's perfectly intelligent, and thoroughly malevolent to public interest.
You are a bloody idiot upvoted by slashdot imbecile moderators.. There is no choice in statistics.
Statistics are the aggregate count of the outcomes of choices.
One thing I don't get about China's plan, it seems worrying but also kind of easily gamed - like you could go around in a hood or those face matching block patterns on normally, but just sometimes go out plain-faced doing good deeds to raise your score.
The face blocking pattern stuff could well get you arrested, but China is not arresting everyone with a hood pulled up are they? That seems unrealistic.
What's interesting is Chinese people are way ahead of the government in this instance. All of southeast Asia and China too has already normalized wearing a face mask in public, to "prevent the spread of disease" and "filter out pollution". I suspect it does little or nothing to change the rate of spread of most diseases, or filter pollution, but it does wonders for concealing a huge chunk of your face.
A small piece of the impetus behind China's newfound zeal for reducing air pollution might be to eliminate that excuse for hiding the face.
Society as a whole has been breaking down as well, and when dictators and those who aspire to be dictators(such as Donald Trump) become the norm, rather than the exception, deaths will increase until society pulls together again to remove these people from power.
There's nothing like a good war to cause an explosion in the human birth rate. We've already demonstrated that, more than once.
Dictators don't have much affect on birth rates in and of themselves. North Korea's birth rate has been below the replacement rate for a decade, while the birth rate in every African dictatorship is above replacement rate. Dictators that cause a lot of war and strife cause birth rates to go up. Dictators that enforce stability don't cause birth rates to go down, but don't cause any increase either. When the infant mortality rate goes down and the average education achievement of women goes up birth rates go down. Nothing else really matters.
My concern is not quite geometric population growth in the face of sustainable abilities to service that growth. We fail that that, and fail consistently, as the greed model thwarts any appreciation for what happens to the next generation. We kick it forward. We answer the call of our biology and have lots of children, eschew birth control and even abortion in the name of population sustainability, which creates constant profit growths for the greed model.
Except we don't. That's the whole point. The facts on the ground say the UN is full of shit (to no one's surprise) and you're wrong too (even less surprising).
The US's birth rate fell below the replacement rate in 1973, returned to above replacement in 1989, then dropped below again in 2011.
South Korea's birth rate fell below the replacement rate in 1984 and has never risen above it since.
Japan's birth rate fell below the replacement rate in 1975 and has never risen above it since.
Germany's birth rate fell below the replacement rate in 1971 and has never risen above it since.
I could go on for another 100 countries. Most never return to above replacement once they drop below it. The US is very unusual in returning even for a while, but first generation immigrants tend to have more children than natives and the US still allows more immigration (both legal and illegal) than practically any country in the world.
Everywhere that infant mortality drops below about 24 per thousand live births, the birth rate drops below the replacement rate. There is some variance depending on whether or not women are allowed/provided better than elementary education and depending on the local religion, but even in places with (nominally) very strong religious objections to birth control, if women are educated and infant mortality is low enough, the birth rate drops below replacement. Why this should be has not been definitively explained, but it is happening, across the entire world, and the correlations with education and reasonably capable medical practices are statistically significant.
Same here, and I'll add that the main difference with US comics is that the latter are mostly about super heroes, while the former are mostly about anything else (fantasy, SF, drama, humor, family, thrillers, etc)...
Look at Marvel's and DC's back catalogs. You'll be surprised to discover superheros were the minority in the 40s and 50s. Even into the 60s, they were publishing more westerns, war (mostly WWII)(both combat and spy), romance, and traditional non-super adventures than they were superhero books. Batman may be 80 years old but Batman was only one book among many for half of its existence. They didn't even name his book after him. It was 'Detective Comics' for many many years. Superheros were selected by the public, not the publishers.
There's an argument to be made that the rise of superheros to prominence in comics corresponded with the decline in society revolving around the Christian church. For most of a thousand years, the Christian church was the source of stories about miracles and larger than life characters. I'm old enough to remember Sunday school that was willing, even eager, to dwell on the Old Testament. It's full of prophets and miracles and drama. As society relegated the Christian mythos more and more to history, superhero comics grew in popularity. They were filling a gap. Humans love gods and monsters in stories, and that's what superhero comics are. Ultimately they rummaged through history and resurrected all the old demigods, from Hercules to the Norse pantheon, adopting the characters wholesale into their own mythos (minus all the kinky animal sex). And why wouldn't they? They're a perfect fit, and serve the same purpose. And they've successfully displaced the Christian prophets.
More power to them, I say. Superhero comics manage to always be just ridiculous enough that no one takes them too seriously. That's a big step up. When people take their god myths seriously, people get burned at the stake. If superheros successfully inoculate the species against that habit, they're a huge win.
Because if this style of extorsion becomes a "thing", the thiefs will eventually go after the big youtube guns, you know, the ones that bring millions of revenue to youtube. So it's in youtube's interest to nip this thing in the bud.
Youtube doesnt care, at all, which monetized video is being watched. They get their revenue either way. The lack of some videos, no matter how popular, will not reduce the number of viewer hours, and will only alter which videos were viewed but not the number of ads served.
More to the point, the Youtube big guns (and those are Sony and NBC Universal, NOT PewDiePie and his ilk) are already protected by code, which will straight up ignore claims against monetized videos of privileged accounts. Youtube carefully prevents deep pockets with the right law firm on retainer from being offended. Everybody else can go fuck themselves. You've hired a lawyer you say? Youtube still doesn't care because it wasn't the right lawyer. "But I can't afford the right lawyer," you say. Yes, now you're getting it.
The current nightmare scenario: there is a gene hack that makes photosynthesis more efficient. (BTW, a current photosynthesis wastes almost as many photons as it uses, and there is now work going on to "fix" this problem. It's happening now.) Land plants with improved yields go into mass use. Meanwhile, previously unknown virus activity moves the new energy pathways into algae and there is a world wide tropical water algae bloom. So much oxygen is consumed that a crash of all tropical ocean life occurs. Within a few years atmospheric oxygen levels drop and everything else starts to die.
The vast majority of algal blooms are not limited by energy availability. They're limited by the presence of dissolved nutrients, such as phosphates. No phosphates, no bloom. It doesn't matter how efficient the photosynthesis is. An algae can not reproduce itself if it doesn't have enough material to work with. An out of control genetic enhancement spreading through the population might increase the speed at which a bloom occurs, but it won't change its size.
The loss of dissolved oxygen happens after the bloom dies and begins to decay in the water, not as part of the growth process. It's temporary, as wave action will restore the dissolved oxygen. During the bloom, depending on the species that's growing, it may emit large amounts of excess oxygen into the atmosphere, since oxygen is a waste product of algal metabolisms for many species. This will result in a temporary, localized spike in oxygen levels in the air, not a drop in atmospheric oxygen levels.
The end result is faster blooms, but no change in the rate at which dissolved oxygen is lost from the water, and no permanent changes to any part of the system. Algal blooms happen constantly, year in and year out, all over the globe. Most went unnoticed before satellite observation. None of them threaten life on Earth. Genetically modified algae won't change that.
The power grid itself could very well be damaged with widespread outages. Equipment necessary to replace damaged components could take years to come online.
Even this is unlikely. Widespread outages, yes. Damage, no. Practically every substation in the grid includes circuit breakers. Big grid-scale circuit breakers that have to be reset with a wrench, not some flippy finger thingie. When surges come down the line, the breakers trip. Yes, some of them won't trip fast enough, or maybe at all because they're defective. A few transformers will blow up because of it. But the entire US grid has to deal with lightning storms as a matter of course, so surges are familiar and designed for occurrences. And no, the surge caused by a large solar flare isn't any worse than the surge caused by direct lightning strikes.
I have no idea how impactful his bigger edits are, and TFA and other articles written recently have shown pages he did considerable work on, but I would assume the vast majority (99%+ possibly) are very minor edits.
It's Wikipedia. I assume 99%+ of his edits are reverts of other peoples' corrections.