It is a crying shame that you roll over whenever somebody tries to stop you from trying to correct articles like that in the first place.
Some people have better things to do with their lives...
There certainly are a bunch of cyber bullies on Wikipedia, and there is an attempt to be a check on their actions, but it does take some effort and standing up to those bullies in the first place.
There is no practical attempt. Administrator intervention applies only to blatant vandalism, and it's trivial to hide vandalism as a more complex content dispute.
Resolving content disputes involves MONTHS of practically full-time, day-in, day-out effort, going through the request for moderation process. And at the end of all of that? You get ONE REVISION accepted. Any changes, any idiot that comes along after, you get to go do the whole thing again, and again, and again. It's an utterly impractical system that I wouldn't wish on anyone.
The situation is the same today as it ever was... The only practical way to fix an article on Wikipedia is to gang-up on it. Get 5 people together, who are going revert changes other idiots make. Of course, the problem is that the idiots can band together as well. Leaving Wikipedia as it always was: He who yells loudest, wins.
Quite a number of animals travel several km of terrain per day. Horses, deer, various kinds of cattle, wolves, deer, bears, elephants, giraffe, wildebeest, zebras, and others.
Humans are able to travel much further, for extended periods (relative to body size and weight) than any other land mammals I'm aware of. Most of the animals you listed, while all able to travel a couple km in a day, do not do so (day after day) for an extended periods, as do humans.
Enough time has passed for their form to have developed bipedalism if that was actually more efficient.
Appeals to authority ("evolution" in this case) are simple logical fallacies.
The FACT that upright, 'heel first' bipedalism as found in humans is the most efficient form of terrain locomotion found in the animal kingdom has been studied and duly confirmed by numerous scientists. There is no question or debate here. Given those facts, clearly something is inaccurate in your (above) statement.
"Our 'heel first' gait makes us incredibly efficient walkers"
"Relative to other mammals, humans are economical walkers but not economical runners. Given the great distances hunter-gatherers travel, it is not surprising that humans retained a foot posture, inherited from our more arboreal great ape ancestors, that facilitates economical walking."
Bookstore owners have to pay sales tax. Amazon doesn't have to. End result: said store owner goes bankrupt because Amazon has a competitive advantage because of tax differences.
Sales tax on most books is certainly less than it costs to ship the book cross-country. End result: Entrenched players still turn a profit, but have to cut prices and profit margins to compete with Amazon.
Yes, because most animals don't need to travel several km over terrain each day. If they did, they'd be bipeds. Still the most efficient form we know of...
The GIMP's ridiculous name has cost it some valuable media exposure. How can the GIMP expect to be taken seriously by professionals when they don't even feel comfortable using the name?
This is BS.
You don't actually mind the name, just THE ACRONYM. Any reason you're FORCED to use the most common abbreviated name instead of forming one of your own, or worse, USING THE FULL NAME?
Don't want to say "gimp"? Fine. So call it IMP, GNU-IMP, Image MP, etc. If the name bothered anyone all that much, they'd just use CinePaint instead.
TFA is just run-of-the-mill pro-Intel propaganda. "We employ lots of people!" "People who say start-ups are better than entrenched players are dead wrong because I say so!" etc.
The only point he makes is that newer companies have fewer (domestic) employees. Never-mind that automation has been the rule since the start of the industrial revolution. Before China opened wide, it was those "dammed robots" taking our jobs... Think of how many more jobs there would be if bulldozers were outlawed, and roads had to be leveled by hand!
This all ignores the fact that wages for those fewer people nearer the top are rising drastically, and as the labor pool opens, more jobs are created in other industries, which might have been uneconomical before such automation was possible. Instead of having full employment, with everyone working themselves to death farming day-in, day-out, we now have some level of unemployed people, but the rest are making far more than they would have under the old system. And incidentally, the unemployed benefit greatly from the same system as well, not just because when they are working, they earn a lot more, but also because prices of necessities are so low, you can feed yourself on less than 50 cents a day, modest enough that collecting cans would get you through. And never mind government unemployment pay/welfare which will afford you a vastly higher standard of living higher than a farmer in China.
Yes, the business world is in turmoil right now, but it's only a matter of a few years before the bubble in China has to burst. Then everything should (eventually) settle down, and result in higher standard of living for all.
/.ers who were crying for Ethernet instead of HDMI back when HDTVs were first coming out, were doing so for reasons of data sharing with PCs, cable range, price, and available peripherals (eg, switches).
If you're using some proprietary protocols, so you don't get the same range, and you can't use standard network switches to route and boost the signals, why bother? Why not use 9P9C jacks (like cheap UPSes)? All of 10 cents more expensive for a larger jack/connector, and then you wouldn't confuse the two and burn-out your equipment.
it's a mental model; a recognition that others are like you; a mapping of their emotions to your reaction to those emotions; an ability to recognise or even assess another's situation and apply that mapping. This all requires some intelligence, although perhaps not as much as we'd like to believe.
The simplest of creatures can communicate. Once you have basic communications down, it's not a big step for animals to communicate emotional distress (not just physical danger)... After all, it doesn't really matter (to you) whether rotten food or the loss of a mate causes you to feel bad. The only thing that's different in more intelligent animals is how subtle the clues may be, such as reading small facial expressions, rather than just, eg., a dog/cat vocalizing. Still, just because the clues are less explicit, doesn't mean that information isn't being communicated.
If you have communications, and know to respond to danger signals, it's also pretty straight forward to develop some response to emotional distress as well. After all, it's pretty much a one-size fits-all situation... It hardly matter what the cause of the distress is, there's generally one response to help with all of them. Again I'll use the example of dogs/cats grooming one-another.
[...] and enjoy the same take-home pay after taxes. What is unfair or discriminatory about that?
I'm single. My taxes are MUCH higher than someone who is married, with multiple dependents. I also rent instead of owning a home, which means I don't get those tax breaks either.
Now, I don't think there should be a tax on being gay, but why wouldn't Google pay ME more to cover my additional tax burden? Why only for sexual preference?
Yeah, a government issued ID card sounds exactly like a Social Security Card
Actually not. TFA says you can't buy property without providing your government ID number. No such requirement for a SS#.
A Social Security Number is only needed for income taxes, which of course makes getting a job problematic, but still possible. And the trade-off is a reasonable one... We certainly don't want people hiding their income and not paying taxes.
The mere existence of illegal immigrants in the US should prove that you can get along without one.
I've been wondering for twenty years at least: how big a telescope do we need to build, in space, or on the dark side of the moon, or even on earth, to see cities on an earthlike planet somewhere out there?
That pre-supposes there are cities on other planets out there... That's pure wishful thinking as much as anything else. Even if there are forms of life, who says it's intelligent, and who says we'd recognize it if we were looking right at it from a distance?
I expect that it would lead to public outrage in any case: "Why are we wasting money building this giant telescope and not using it here on more immediate problems, like public welfare?!"
The answer is, it's beyond our technology right now. If nothing else, interstellar gas clouds and the like will obscure far too much to get that kind of resolution. Advanced technology may improve this in the distant future, but for now, you're out of luck.
And why are we not building one instead of wasting all the money on welfare, manned space exploration of a our mostly dead solar system, and more missiles so we can blow this place earth up even more times than we already can (I think we destroy the earth up to 6 times now?)
None of the above is a "waste" of money. Each has some benefits, all of which much more immediate than any possible benefit of an ultra-massive telescope.
The main problem with our space program is that for 100 years we've been stuck with the rocket equation and 2% at best payloads. Ion engines give a little more hope for an interstellar probe someday...
Ion engines are an improvement, but the problem with space travel isn't a few watts of propulsion in space... It's lifting the whole thing out of the atmosphere. If that was free, you'd see aircraft-carrier-sized spacecraft flying all over the solar system by now.
There are several possible ways to improve this equation, a Cramjet holds out the most immediate possibility of drastically reducing cost and necessary overhead and infrastructure. In the longer-term, the space elevator holds the promise of making orbit absolutely dirt cheap.
I mean really we are just NOW adding video support to HTML? Really?
What makes you think, even now, we need the video tag? <embed src=...> has worked perfectly for decades. WMV was an even more dominant web video platform before Flash gained traction, and it was simple enough to allow plenty of 3rd party players.
The only reason it's become a big issue is that companies that stream video on the web now enjoy the idea that they can micro-manage video playback on your computer. If they cared about their users at all, they would have an <embed src=...> fallback if the Flash player was not found. Instead, their ill-conceived predicate is that, if they can't give you the pop-up text balloons, and all the other annoyances on top of the video window (not just below it, or something else sane like that) they've decided you're better off being unable to see the video at all...
If anything, we should be breaking companies of this controlling mentality.
HTML5 **should** be an established standard by now. Instead, a committee seems to be doing everything in its power to hold it back...
HTML5 video was held back by those who do not want to standardize on H.264/AAC, Mozilla in particular. The idea that Theora would become the standard for web video is laughable. Now that Google has thrown VP8/VPx/WebM into the ring, long after the fact, things may get moving again.
My understanding is that no backwards compatible BIOS design would recognize disks above 2 TB in size. If you don't use the MBR disk format, you can exceed 2 TB, but MBR is the only format a BIOS can recognize and work with.
The BIOS doesn't need to "work with" a hard drive, unless you're running a legacy OS (DOS, Windows 95, etc) on it. Any GPT-enabled version of GRUB / LILO / etc. will allow a BIOS-based system to boot-up a Linux (or FreeBSD, or...) kernel on drives of any size. The BIOS only needs to recognize the first few sectors, so it can read the instructions on the header of the disk.
Windows, OTOH, will not work, as Microsoft refuses to handle the boot-strapping process without firmware support, and so demands the use EFI for GPT partitions.
It won't work as a boot disk with *any* BIOS.
This is just pedantry. It's perfectly understandable people will call EFI their "BIOS", even though it is technically a different type of firmware.
At this point we need faster more secure storage, not bigger.
Faster would be nice, but RAID helps tremendously there...
But I certainly wouldn't trade large amounts capacity for speed, and neither would the rest of the world, which is why we don't all use SSDs.
Between a couple of my PCs and a HD DVR, I can certainly fill-up a 3TB drive in a relatively short time-frame. I know this, because I have to keep cleaning-up my 1.5TB drive I use for backup copies.
I will say that some more effort should go into lowering the price floor. Far too often people that don't need much space will buy a 1TB drive because it's only $15 more than a similar 100GB drive. So lower-cost drives for budget computers would be desirable, and low-end Flash isn't cheap enough in reasonable capacities, either.
Their cars run on DC motors (or at least get power from a DC source). Yet the company is named after a man who is acknowledged as the father of the alternating current (at least in the US).
Tesla had many accomplishments. While AC is an important one, so is radio communications, and the like. Some of his accomplishments are in the DC realm, at least due to having worked for Edison early in his career.
As far as freeing it up.... if it's for commercial use, instead of for networking peer to peer, what good is it for any of us?
I don't know about you, but I LIKE having unlimited cell phone + data service for under $50/month. I certainly wouldn't depend on the availability of wifi hotspots for my phone service (at least without a fallback to cell towers).
I also like that the government is getting money for the spectrum and using them to provide services to all of us, rather than raising income taxes.
??? A 500mHz band has the same data capacity regardless of whether it starts at 0Hz or 60gHz.
At ~2.5Ghz you hit the resonant frequency of water mollecules, and any signals you send through the lower atmosphere are guaranteed to be attenuated in a rather short distance. At 60GHz, you actually hit the resonant frequency of OXYGEN, which means the signal is going nowhere fast.
Why don't you participate in fixing those articles then, rather than preaching to 3 or 4 of us here? You talk about Wikis as if they were some kind of Stalinist information outlets.
I made substantial improvements, which were reverted out-of-hand by a couple users who had severe ownership issues. With no other editors around, it became a simple edit-war. (Where were you?) Requested for admin intervention went nowhere (phrases like "Remember, it takes two people for an edit war"). Having gone through the mediation process before, I was and remain completely unwilling to subject myself to that again, and don't have the MONTHS of man-hours to waste even if I wanted to waste my life.
Wikipedia has SEVERE problems. Blaming those who are pointing out the problem, and incidentally have put much effort into trying to help, just serves to excuse it, and allow it to continue unabated, and even get worse.
I've put a LOT of very, very good work into Wikipedia, most all of which degrades daily as those who know just enough to be dangerous all make changes to the same. I have yet to see any improvements from others, except for simple copy-editing (spelling-fixed, missing words, etc.).
Wikipedia is a lost cause, unless policies are COMPLETELY changed. Citizendium has it right. Read their policies / FAQ for a good laundry-list of problems with WP, and the right solutions to each of them that CZ has adopted.
Of course, you're right. It's far more important to make sure that the 1% of users on non-standard hardware have the opportunity to see the video
You'll find the majority of computers in the world are not x86 compatible. Remember ARM? You know, that thing in your cell phone, DVD player, toaster, etc.?
And even with x86, Adobe simply doesn't provide a plugin for many OSes.
And on platforms where it does, there are innumerable legitimate reasons for people to refuse to install it.
than that the rest of the world gets to see it.
It's perfectly clear what your problem is. Your only concern is what YOU get out of it, and are perfectly happy to be short-sighted about it all.
CO2 is not a pollutant. It is in fact essential for the Earth's life cycle.
Sulfur is essential for some life on earth as well, but that doesn't mean it's not a pollutant when you spray large quantities of it into the atmosphere (hooray for acid rain!).
Methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.
Yes, but it's much, much shorter lived, and so has much less impact.
Any methane infrastructure will necessarily have emissions.
The link you cite is about automobiles. Yes, if you have many millions of poorly maintained vehicles driving around, and average people fueling up every day, you can expect lots of leaks. When you're talking about a single pipeline to a power plant, you shouldn't expect much leakage at all. There's a lot of experts, and money working on preventing any such leaks before they happen. That's the main benefit of centralization after all.
Owing to the intermittent nature of wind, the need for 100% backup of generating capacity, and the ability to provide at most 20% of total electricity, wind is a way to in effect get an extra increment in efficiency in a natural-gas based electric power generation economy.
Wow! More BS packed into a single sentence than I've ever seen...
Wind is only intermittent on a small scale. On larger scales, it's plenty reliable, and more than 20% of capacity could well be supplied by it.
Wind won't replace all other power sources, sure, but that doesn't mean natural gas will be the base load provider, either.
With enough installed wind capacity, base-load and peaking could be provided by hydro, both utilizing current dams, and using pumped-hydro supplied from wind power at times when supply exceeds demand.
Base load could also be provided by nuclear, or even solar, as liquid-sodium solar-thermal power plants are being testing out, which would allow for substantial electricity production over-night, and for a couple days into a solar lull (which very, very rarely happens in the deserts, anyhow).
Using a cleaner burning fuel like natural gas would allow for generating facilities that capitalize on both the MHD effect
Except cleaner burning fuel is not needed. MHD generators can be used in coal power plants as well, and have been used in several trials.
By adding an MHD system to a conventional plant, energy efficiency can be increased by 50% over a conventional facility
Except you'd be hard-pressed to find a "conventional plant" these days, as they've by and large all gone to dual-generation methods cheaper than MHD generators, that still allow them to get that same 60% efficiency.
Slashdot Mirror
Some people have better things to do with their lives...
There is no practical attempt. Administrator intervention applies only to blatant vandalism, and it's trivial to hide vandalism as a more complex content dispute.
Resolving content disputes involves MONTHS of practically full-time, day-in, day-out effort, going through the request for moderation process. And at the end of all of that? You get ONE REVISION accepted. Any changes, any idiot that comes along after, you get to go do the whole thing again, and again, and again. It's an utterly impractical system that I wouldn't wish on anyone.
The situation is the same today as it ever was... The only practical way to fix an article on Wikipedia is to gang-up on it. Get 5 people together, who are going revert changes other idiots make. Of course, the problem is that the idiots can band together as well. Leaving Wikipedia as it always was: He who yells loudest, wins.
Humans are able to travel much further, for extended periods (relative to body size and weight) than any other land mammals I'm aware of. Most of the animals you listed, while all able to travel a couple km in a day, do not do so (day after day) for an extended periods, as do humans.
Appeals to authority ("evolution" in this case) are simple logical fallacies.
The FACT that upright, 'heel first' bipedalism as found in humans is the most efficient form of terrain locomotion found in the animal kingdom has been studied and duly confirmed by numerous scientists. There is no question or debate here. Given those facts, clearly something is inaccurate in your (above) statement.
"Our 'heel first' gait makes us incredibly efficient walkers"
"Relative to other mammals, humans are economical walkers but not economical runners. Given the great distances hunter-gatherers travel, it is not surprising that humans retained a foot posture, inherited from our more arboreal great ape ancestors, that facilitates economical walking."
http://www.cinepaint.org/
No GIMP in the URL, no GIMP in the splash screen, etc.
Sales tax on most books is certainly less than it costs to ship the book cross-country. End result: Entrenched players still turn a profit, but have to cut prices and profit margins to compete with Amazon.
Yes, because most animals don't need to travel several km over terrain each day. If they did, they'd be bipeds. Still the most efficient form we know of...
This is BS.
You don't actually mind the name, just THE ACRONYM. Any reason you're FORCED to use the most common abbreviated name instead of forming one of your own, or worse, USING THE FULL NAME?
Don't want to say "gimp"? Fine. So call it IMP, GNU-IMP, Image MP, etc. If the name bothered anyone all that much, they'd just use CinePaint instead.
TFA is just run-of-the-mill pro-Intel propaganda. "We employ lots of people!" "People who say start-ups are better than entrenched players are dead wrong because I say so!" etc.
The only point he makes is that newer companies have fewer (domestic) employees. Never-mind that automation has been the rule since the start of the industrial revolution. Before China opened wide, it was those "dammed robots" taking our jobs... Think of how many more jobs there would be if bulldozers were outlawed, and roads had to be leveled by hand!
This all ignores the fact that wages for those fewer people nearer the top are rising drastically, and as the labor pool opens, more jobs are created in other industries, which might have been uneconomical before such automation was possible. Instead of having full employment, with everyone working themselves to death farming day-in, day-out, we now have some level of unemployed people, but the rest are making far more than they would have under the old system. And incidentally, the unemployed benefit greatly from the same system as well, not just because when they are working, they earn a lot more, but also because prices of necessities are so low, you can feed yourself on less than 50 cents a day, modest enough that collecting cans would get you through. And never mind government unemployment pay/welfare which will afford you a vastly higher standard of living higher than a farmer in China.
Yes, the business world is in turmoil right now, but it's only a matter of a few years before the bubble in China has to burst. Then everything should (eventually) settle down, and result in higher standard of living for all.
/.ers who were crying for Ethernet instead of HDMI back when HDTVs were first coming out, were doing so for reasons of data sharing with PCs, cable range, price, and available peripherals (eg, switches).
If you're using some proprietary protocols, so you don't get the same range, and you can't use standard network switches to route and boost the signals, why bother? Why not use 9P9C jacks (like cheap UPSes)? All of 10 cents more expensive for a larger jack/connector, and then you wouldn't confuse the two and burn-out your equipment.
The simplest of creatures can communicate. Once you have basic communications down, it's not a big step for animals to communicate emotional distress (not just physical danger)... After all, it doesn't really matter (to you) whether rotten food or the loss of a mate causes you to feel bad. The only thing that's different in more intelligent animals is how subtle the clues may be, such as reading small facial expressions, rather than just, eg., a dog/cat vocalizing. Still, just because the clues are less explicit, doesn't mean that information isn't being communicated.
If you have communications, and know to respond to danger signals, it's also pretty straight forward to develop some response to emotional distress as well. After all, it's pretty much a one-size fits-all situation... It hardly matter what the cause of the distress is, there's generally one response to help with all of them. Again I'll use the example of dogs/cats grooming one-another.
I'm single. My taxes are MUCH higher than someone who is married, with multiple dependents. I also rent instead of owning a home, which means I don't get those tax breaks either.
Now, I don't think there should be a tax on being gay, but why wouldn't Google pay ME more to cover my additional tax burden? Why only for sexual preference?
Actually not. TFA says you can't buy property without providing your government ID number. No such requirement for a SS#.
A Social Security Number is only needed for income taxes, which of course makes getting a job problematic, but still possible. And the trade-off is a reasonable one... We certainly don't want people hiding their income and not paying taxes.
The mere existence of illegal immigrants in the US should prove that you can get along without one.
That pre-supposes there are cities on other planets out there... That's pure wishful thinking as much as anything else. Even if there are forms of life, who says it's intelligent, and who says we'd recognize it if we were looking right at it from a distance?
I expect that it would lead to public outrage in any case: "Why are we wasting money building this giant telescope and not using it here on more immediate problems, like public welfare?!"
The answer is, it's beyond our technology right now. If nothing else, interstellar gas clouds and the like will obscure far too much to get that kind of resolution. Advanced technology may improve this in the distant future, but for now, you're out of luck.
None of the above is a "waste" of money. Each has some benefits, all of which much more immediate than any possible benefit of an ultra-massive telescope.
Ion engines are an improvement, but the problem with space travel isn't a few watts of propulsion in space... It's lifting the whole thing out of the atmosphere. If that was free, you'd see aircraft-carrier-sized spacecraft flying all over the solar system by now.
There are several possible ways to improve this equation, a Cramjet holds out the most immediate possibility of drastically reducing cost and necessary overhead and infrastructure. In the longer-term, the space elevator holds the promise of making orbit absolutely dirt cheap.
What makes you think, even now, we need the video tag? <embed src=...> has worked perfectly for decades. WMV was an even more dominant web video platform before Flash gained traction, and it was simple enough to allow plenty of 3rd party players.
The only reason it's become a big issue is that companies that stream video on the web now enjoy the idea that they can micro-manage video playback on your computer. If they cared about their users at all, they would have an <embed src=...> fallback if the Flash player was not found. Instead, their ill-conceived predicate is that, if they can't give you the pop-up text balloons, and all the other annoyances on top of the video window (not just below it, or something else sane like that) they've decided you're better off being unable to see the video at all...
If anything, we should be breaking companies of this controlling mentality.
HTML5 video was held back by those who do not want to standardize on H.264/AAC, Mozilla in particular. The idea that Theora would become the standard for web video is laughable. Now that Google has thrown VP8/VPx/WebM into the ring, long after the fact, things may get moving again.
The BIOS doesn't need to "work with" a hard drive, unless you're running a legacy OS (DOS, Windows 95, etc) on it. Any GPT-enabled version of GRUB / LILO / etc. will allow a BIOS-based system to boot-up a Linux (or FreeBSD, or ...) kernel on drives of any size. The BIOS only needs to recognize the first few sectors, so it can read the instructions on the header of the disk.
Windows, OTOH, will not work, as Microsoft refuses to handle the boot-strapping process without firmware support, and so demands the use EFI for GPT partitions.
This is just pedantry. It's perfectly understandable people will call EFI their "BIOS", even though it is technically a different type of firmware.
Faster would be nice, but RAID helps tremendously there...
But I certainly wouldn't trade large amounts capacity for speed, and neither would the rest of the world, which is why we don't all use SSDs.
Between a couple of my PCs and a HD DVR, I can certainly fill-up a 3TB drive in a relatively short time-frame. I know this, because I have to keep cleaning-up my 1.5TB drive I use for backup copies.
I will say that some more effort should go into lowering the price floor. Far too often people that don't need much space will buy a 1TB drive because it's only $15 more than a similar 100GB drive. So lower-cost drives for budget computers would be desirable, and low-end Flash isn't cheap enough in reasonable capacities, either.
Tesla had many accomplishments. While AC is an important one, so is radio communications, and the like. Some of his accomplishments are in the DC realm, at least due to having worked for Edison early in his career.
I don't know about you, but I LIKE having unlimited cell phone + data service for under $50/month. I certainly wouldn't depend on the availability of wifi hotspots for my phone service (at least without a fallback to cell towers).
I also like that the government is getting money for the spectrum and using them to provide services to all of us, rather than raising income taxes.
At ~2.5Ghz you hit the resonant frequency of water mollecules, and any signals you send through the lower atmosphere are guaranteed to be attenuated in a rather short distance. At 60GHz, you actually hit the resonant frequency of OXYGEN, which means the signal is going nowhere fast.
I made substantial improvements, which were reverted out-of-hand by a couple users who had severe ownership issues. With no other editors around, it became a simple edit-war. (Where were you?) Requested for admin intervention went nowhere (phrases like "Remember, it takes two people for an edit war"). Having gone through the mediation process before, I was and remain completely unwilling to subject myself to that again, and don't have the MONTHS of man-hours to waste even if I wanted to waste my life.
Wikipedia has SEVERE problems. Blaming those who are pointing out the problem, and incidentally have put much effort into trying to help, just serves to excuse it, and allow it to continue unabated, and even get worse.
I've put a LOT of very, very good work into Wikipedia, most all of which degrades daily as those who know just enough to be dangerous all make changes to the same. I have yet to see any improvements from others, except for simple copy-editing (spelling-fixed, missing words, etc.).
Wikipedia is a lost cause, unless policies are COMPLETELY changed. Citizendium has it right. Read their policies / FAQ for a good laundry-list of problems with WP, and the right solutions to each of them that CZ has adopted.
Region-locking can be worked around by technical methods, like using a proxy (of some sort). Proprietary locking cannot.
You'll find the majority of computers in the world are not x86 compatible. Remember ARM? You know, that thing in your cell phone, DVD player, toaster, etc.?
And even with x86, Adobe simply doesn't provide a plugin for many OSes.
And on platforms where it does, there are innumerable legitimate reasons for people to refuse to install it.
It's perfectly clear what your problem is. Your only concern is what YOU get out of it, and are perfectly happy to be short-sighted about it all.
Sulfur is essential for some life on earth as well, but that doesn't mean it's not a pollutant when you spray large quantities of it into the atmosphere (hooray for acid rain!).
Yes, but it's much, much shorter lived, and so has much less impact.
The link you cite is about automobiles. Yes, if you have many millions of poorly maintained vehicles driving around, and average people fueling up every day, you can expect lots of leaks. When you're talking about a single pipeline to a power plant, you shouldn't expect much leakage at all. There's a lot of experts, and money working on preventing any such leaks before they happen. That's the main benefit of centralization after all.
Wow! More BS packed into a single sentence than I've ever seen...
Wind is only intermittent on a small scale. On larger scales, it's plenty reliable, and more than 20% of capacity could well be supplied by it.
Wind won't replace all other power sources, sure, but that doesn't mean natural gas will be the base load provider, either.
With enough installed wind capacity, base-load and peaking could be provided by hydro, both utilizing current dams, and using pumped-hydro supplied from wind power at times when supply exceeds demand.
Base load could also be provided by nuclear, or even solar, as liquid-sodium solar-thermal power plants are being testing out, which would allow for substantial electricity production over-night, and for a couple days into a solar lull (which very, very rarely happens in the deserts, anyhow).
Except cleaner burning fuel is not needed. MHD generators can be used in coal power plants as well, and have been used in several trials.
Except you'd be hard-pressed to find a "conventional plant" these days, as they've by and large all gone to dual-generation methods cheaper than MHD generators, that still allow them to get that same 60% efficiency.