Elementary economics, law of supply and demand. Advertising raises demand for the advertised goods, that's what it's designed to do. Increased demand results in increased prices (and increased profits). All consumers pay those increased prices, not just Wikipedia's readers. So by selling ad space on Wikipedia, Wikipedia would in essence be financed through a general tax on all consumers of the advertised goods. I prefer the status quo: Wikipedia should be financed only by those who like the site enough to donate.
but it seems very unlikely that the current course of action is going to sustain Wikimedia for the duration.
Well it seems not unlikely to me, given that it has worked wonderfully for the last six years, donations keep increasing and traffic is leveling off. Obviously the Wikimedia chairperson has to say things that bring in donations, but based on their own numbers, they need only $75,000 per month to pay salaries, hosting and bandwidth, so they are good to go until at least April 2008, even if donations completely dry up.
Advertising is immoral because it raises demand and therefore raises everybody's prices, even for those people who don't benefit from Wikipedia. I prefer that only people who like Wikipedia pay for it.
If I want to read about George W. Bush, abortion, Christianity, the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, etc., etc., I'm not going to trust Wikipedia because the article will be slanted one way now and the other way an hour from now.
When reading Wikipedia articles on controversial topics, you also have to look at the article's history and the article's Talk page. If you do that, you are likely to get a much richer picture of the debate and the positions and rhethoric of the involved parties than you could ever get from more traditional sources, such as Encyclopaedia Britannica or The New York Times. Articles on controversial topics, if read together with their history and their Talk pages, are the big strength of Wikipedia.
Given a choice between "Wikipedia + relevant ads" vs. "No Wikipedia", I would personally choose the former.
Yes, given a choice between "one kick in the nuts" and "two kicks in the nuts", I would personally choose the former, reluctantly. But why do I have to choose? Where is the evidence that these are the only two choices?
According to the financial audit, in Summer 2006 they had $500,000 cash on hand and incoming donations of $30,000 per month. In January 2007 the last fundraiser finished with $1,000,000. In their own projection, they say they need $75,000 per month to keep the site running and to pay salaries. Assuming that that same cost was incurred already throughout the latter half of 2006, and that every month in 2006 they received $30,000 in donations but now after the fundraiser additional donations have completely dried up, Wikimedia has now enough cash on hand to operate through April 2009. Of course this assumes that they don't start hiring new people left and right (which unfortunately is in their plans).
If you want to decrease the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, you should reduce consumption on all levels. As a nice side effect, reducing consumption lowers the prices for everybody (and corporate profits), by the simple law of supply and demand.
I've seen articles on there that authoritatively claim "the first one was built at..." with no dates and no citation. It may even be true, but there's no way to check. I just throw {{fact}} on those.
I think citing sources is vastly overrated. So what if I can find a source that states the first one was built in 1768? Will you ever find out that the vast majority of scholars actually agree that the first one was built in 1762? No, because the cited reference won't tell you that. Only a thorough and comprehensive study of the literature in the field will tell you that. Here's my take on references in Wikipedia.
That's crap. The customers didn't lose anything. The bank lost money; it was tricked into paying out funds without having been authorized to do so by the funds' owners. The bank neglected the first rule of the banking business: "Know your customer". It did not properly check the identity of the people it was interacting with, and therefore has to eat the full loss.
want each and every one of these complaining Wikipedians to get together and make a no-strings-attached donation equivalent in size to that of the one made by Virgin Unite
The "donation" by Virgin was not "no-strings-attached". They bought a prominent good-will inducing placement of their name and logo on a top-12 website for 24 hours, and they paid $200K for it. Something like that is called a purchase, not a donation.
Wiki is consuming resources whether it being disk space or electricity to run. How are those bills being paid? Please think about the reality of the situation.
The reality of the situation is that it is laughably cheap to run Wikipedia, and that the Foundation gets much more money than it needs through donations. Read the financial report linked at the top of every Wikipedia page. Even before they started the current drive, they had $500,000 cash in the bank, and they took in about $30,000 in donations every month, just by sitting there. Compare it to their expenses and you will see that they are doing just fine, thank you. That's the reality of the situation.
Certainly monks and other such selfless people have contributed alot to science
Selfless people like that have contributed a lot to Wikipedia. You don't want to scare them away.
The real world includes things like money, advertising and probably many other things you may consider to be corrupting or evil but it is often because of and not in spite of these facets of society that progress and learning advance.
Wikipedia certainly shows that there are extremely important exceptions to this statement (for which you fail to provide any evidence), and maybe Wikipedia's most important contribution is precisely to disprove this little rule of yours.
Wikipedia is free, in every sense of the word. You don't have to pay in order to view it. You are free to reuse or change it. You don't have to rent out your eyeballs to use it. You don't have to have your brain polluted by ads in order to view it. You don't even have to install an ad-blocker to view it. It always has been free, and it will stay that way. A project that exists because of the goodwill of the community has no choice but to operate by the highest moral standards.
If you prefer your Wikipedia with ads, there are plenty of mirror sites out there for you. They all smell cheesy.
If you think there is an open source or free content project out there worthy of funding, be my guest and donate. Don't make me pay by putting up ads on Wikipedia.
Ethiopia wants to trademark its coffee names. The guy in the video says right at the beginning that signing a licensing agreement recognizing the trademarks "is against the law". There is in fact no law on the books in the U.S. that makes signing such an agreement illegal. You can sign whatever you want.
Furthermore, the guy conveniently omits that "Starbucks intervened in the USPTO decision by prompting the National Coffee Association of USA, Inc. (NCA), of which it is a leading member, to oppose the approval of the trademarks." (see here) Why would Starbucks actively oppose the Ethiopian trademark application if they really wanted to help Ethiopian farmers?
All the talk about "we want the farmers to succeed, we built schools, we pay over commodity prices", while making up 90% of the video, is bullshit and completely besides the point. They don't care about that charity crap, they want hard and cold trademark agreements.
Apparently the copyright owner disagrees, or else they would have sued already. If Google believes it's fair use and no court has decided otherwise, they have absolutely no legal or moral obligation to take down the material.
Well, if the term isn't even well-defined, then of course we can't agree on anything. I'm talking about the Many Worlds theory in the sense of Everett, also described by David Deutsch. Essentially, the theory takes Schrödinger's equation serious, describing all properties of all things in the universe by a single wave function, and asks how this wave function will evolve. Some objects are tiny, like electrons, others are huge like electron-detectors or conscious observers. And then you notice that in this wave evolution, as tiny things interact with big things designed to "detect" them, the wave function after the interaction can be thought off as several almost independent wave functions; these almost independent ones you call parallel worlds. So the theory doesn't require parallel worlds: it simply defines what they are and proves that they exist.
Now if you follow the part of the wave function describing a particular observer, again you will notice that it splits into several after the observation; then you can point to each of the subsequent observers and say: look, this one subjectively experienced a wave collapse to event A, this other one experienced a wave collapse to event B etc. What remains to be explained? Do you, as an observer, want an explanation why you personally experienced a collapse to event A? That, to me, is as if a twin asks "why was I the one born first?" Well, one had to be born first; your brother wonders why he was born second.
there are still concious observers in the Many Worlds interpretation
Sure, but the theory doesn't require them, it just allows for them.
But there is still a collapse - just for the individual experiencing it.
True, the subjective collapse that every observer experiences is explained by Many Worlds. So "collapse", rather than the biggest mystery of QM, is simply a phenomenon predicted by the theory.
the Transactional Interpretation
I'm not familiar with that one, I'll check it out, thanks.
In practice, the many-worlds interpretation solves little.
In practice everything is perfectly all right; all you need is to compute probabilities of experimental outcomes, and we can do that just fine. In the theory we have a problem, because the standard interpretations of quantum mechanics use terms such as "measurement" and "collapse" which they refuse to define, and then they refuse to explain why a collapse would occur, and you get people speculating about a requirement for conscious observers and other nonsense.
The point of physics should be to explain a particular history that is experienced.
Well, it depends what kind of explanation you want. Of course no approach to quantum mechanics can tell you why you experienced history A rather than history B; all it can tell you is what the probabilities of the two histories are. The many world-worlds interpretation gives a (to me) convincing account as to how these probabilities arise from Schrödinger's equation alone.
who or what determines which branch i take when the universe splits?
You split with it. One copy of you takes one branch, the other copy takes the other branch. One copy now asks itself "why did I take branch 1?" whereas the other copy asks itself "why did I take branch 2?"
You might be inclined to say "Well, all right, but I clearly took this branch rather than the other, what's the reason?" Realize that your copy in the other branch says exactly the same thing. Both copies feel the same continuity, neither is privileged.
True, some physicists evoke conscious observers (though no free-will observers) to resolve the measurement problem, and they get all the press because of their new age angle. Of course, if you want to make that precise you have to come up with a mathematical definition of conciousness so that it fits into the rest of the Hilbert space theory, and I haven't seen much progress on that front. Is a child concious? How about a toddler, a baby? A dog, a bacterium, an atom?
The measurement problem is beautifully resolved by the many-worlds interpretation: all you have is a humongous wave function that describes everything and evolves under Schrödinger's equation. "Measurements" have no special status. A measurement is an interaction which tends to "clump together" the wave function in a bunch of different areas; these areas we call "different worlds"; they all exist in parallel. Every large thing exists either in one clump or in another or in both, but never spread out in between like electrons often do. So slightly different copies of you exist in various different clumps, inaccessible to you because of the valleys between the clumps. Most cosmologists prefer this interpretation, because obviously if you want to apply quantum mechanics to the whole universe, you don't have room for an outside observer performing measurements.
And quickly back to the topic at hand: free will. You are a probabilistic information processor, just like a chess computer. During the time the computer ponders its decision, it is "free". You are free in exactly the same sense. And probabilistic information processors can be held responsible for their actions; the fact that they will be held responsible is just one more piece of information for them to consider.
I would be extremely surprised if we ever made contact with some alien intelligence and they did not know about and heavily use complex numbers. They are the best and most natural numbers, fundamental to math, physics and engineering.
You cannot eliminate complex numbers by using pairs of real numbers with certain rules of addition and multiplication, because complex numbers are pairs or real numbers with certain rules of addition and multiplication. Whether you write (a,b) or a+ib doesn't matter, you are talking about the same complex number, just using different notation.
Suppose someone doesn't like rational numbers, claiming that they are not needed and everything can be done with integers alone. Whenever they find a need to talk about ratios, they simply introduce a pair of integers, with the suitable rules of arithmetic so that the pairs behave just like fractions. Can that person claim to have eliminated the need for rational numbers? No; they are using rational numbers, just in a different notation.
Re:Johnny Come Lately Books
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Rails Recipes
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Guess who pays for that? The rest of us, with increased prices for the products we buy.
That's incorrect. The book seller/publisher/author pay for it, with decreased profits. You apparently think the bookseller goes like "Oh, these leeches who return books eat into my profits, so I'll have to increase my book prices to make up for it." But if a book seller could increase profits simply by increasing prices, they would do so anyway, they wouldn't need the leeches as an excuse. By increasing their prices they will decrease their profits. The price the public at large is willing to pay for a given book does not depend on the presence or absence of book leeches.
I mean, what's the imaginary component of a matter wave, anyhow?
A matter wave, or any other wave considered in quantum mechanics, is intrinsically a complex wave, assigning a complex number to every point in space (or, more generally, to every possible outcome of an experiment). The Schrödinger equation tells you how these waves evolves over time. The wave encodes everything there is to know about the object. Two such complex waves can interfere, and then the complex numbers gets added using the rules of complex arithmetic. Neither the real nor the imaginary part of a matter wave alone have any physical meaning, but the complex wave does. If you are interested in probabilities of certain events, of course you need real numbers. These come about by taking the square of the absolute value of the complex numbers. But you need to retain the whole complex wave and can't simply represent the object by its probability wave alone, because then interference wouldn't work correctly.
Wish Feynman was still around to explain stuff like this.
Check out theses videos of Feynman explaining quantum electrodynamics with complex numbers. Note that this is for laymen and he doesn't use the term "complex number"; he uses little arrows and explains how they turn and can be added and how their length is measured (absolute value), i.e. he develops complex arithmetic on the fly.
Slashdot Mirror
Elementary economics, law of supply and demand. Advertising raises demand for the advertised goods, that's what it's designed to do. Increased demand results in increased prices (and increased profits). All consumers pay those increased prices, not just Wikipedia's readers. So by selling ad space on Wikipedia, Wikipedia would in essence be financed through a general tax on all consumers of the advertised goods. I prefer the status quo: Wikipedia should be financed only by those who like the site enough to donate.
Advertising is immoral because it raises demand and therefore raises everybody's prices, even for those people who don't benefit from Wikipedia. I prefer that only people who like Wikipedia pay for it.
According to the financial audit, in Summer 2006 they had $500,000 cash on hand and incoming donations of $30,000 per month. In January 2007 the last fundraiser finished with $1,000,000. In their own projection, they say they need $75,000 per month to keep the site running and to pay salaries. Assuming that that same cost was incurred already throughout the latter half of 2006, and that every month in 2006 they received $30,000 in donations but now after the fundraiser additional donations have completely dried up, Wikimedia has now enough cash on hand to operate through April 2009. Of course this assumes that they don't start hiring new people left and right (which unfortunately is in their plans).
If you want to decrease the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, you should reduce consumption on all levels. As a nice side effect, reducing consumption lowers the prices for everybody (and corporate profits), by the simple law of supply and demand.
The "donation" by Virgin was not "no-strings-attached". They bought a prominent good-will inducing placement of their name and logo on a top-12 website for 24 hours, and they paid $200K for it. Something like that is called a purchase, not a donation.
The reality of the situation is that it is laughably cheap to run Wikipedia, and that the Foundation gets much more money than it needs through donations. Read the financial report linked at the top of every Wikipedia page. Even before they started the current drive, they had $500,000 cash in the bank, and they took in about $30,000 in donations every month, just by sitting there. Compare it to their expenses and you will see that they are doing just fine, thank you. That's the reality of the situation.
If you prefer your Wikipedia with ads, there are plenty of mirror sites out there for you. They all smell cheesy.
If you think there is an open source or free content project out there worthy of funding, be my guest and donate. Don't make me pay by putting up ads on Wikipedia.
Furthermore, the guy conveniently omits that "Starbucks intervened in the USPTO decision by prompting the National Coffee Association of USA, Inc. (NCA), of which it is a leading member, to oppose the approval of the trademarks." (see here) Why would Starbucks actively oppose the Ethiopian trademark application if they really wanted to help Ethiopian farmers?
All the talk about "we want the farmers to succeed, we built schools, we pay over commodity prices", while making up 90% of the video, is bullshit and completely besides the point. They don't care about that charity crap, they want hard and cold trademark agreements.
Now if you follow the part of the wave function describing a particular observer, again you will notice that it splits into several after the observation; then you can point to each of the subsequent observers and say: look, this one subjectively experienced a wave collapse to event A, this other one experienced a wave collapse to event B etc. What remains to be explained? Do you, as an observer, want an explanation why you personally experienced a collapse to event A? That, to me, is as if a twin asks "why was I the one born first?" Well, one had to be born first; your brother wonders why he was born second.
You might be inclined to say "Well, all right, but I clearly took this branch rather than the other, what's the reason?" Realize that your copy in the other branch says exactly the same thing. Both copies feel the same continuity, neither is privileged.
True, some physicists evoke conscious observers (though no free-will observers) to resolve the measurement problem, and they get all the press because of their new age angle. Of course, if you want to make that precise you have to come up with a mathematical definition of conciousness so that it fits into the rest of the Hilbert space theory, and I haven't seen much progress on that front. Is a child concious? How about a toddler, a baby? A dog, a bacterium, an atom?
The measurement problem is beautifully resolved by the many-worlds interpretation: all you have is a humongous wave function that describes everything and evolves under Schrödinger's equation. "Measurements" have no special status. A measurement is an interaction which tends to "clump together" the wave function in a bunch of different areas; these areas we call "different worlds"; they all exist in parallel. Every large thing exists either in one clump or in another or in both, but never spread out in between like electrons often do. So slightly different copies of you exist in various different clumps, inaccessible to you because of the valleys between the clumps. Most cosmologists prefer this interpretation, because obviously if you want to apply quantum mechanics to the whole universe, you don't have room for an outside observer performing measurements.
And quickly back to the topic at hand: free will. You are a probabilistic information processor, just like a chess computer. During the time the computer ponders its decision, it is "free". You are free in exactly the same sense. And probabilistic information processors can be held responsible for their actions; the fact that they will be held responsible is just one more piece of information for them to consider.
I would be extremely surprised if we ever made contact with some alien intelligence and they did not know about and heavily use complex numbers. They are the best and most natural numbers, fundamental to math, physics and engineering.
Suppose someone doesn't like rational numbers, claiming that they are not needed and everything can be done with integers alone. Whenever they find a need to talk about ratios, they simply introduce a pair of integers, with the suitable rules of arithmetic so that the pairs behave just like fractions. Can that person claim to have eliminated the need for rational numbers? No; they are using rational numbers, just in a different notation.
Heisenberg's matrices contain complex numbers.