Usually I don't feed ACs, but here I am astonished and ask for clarifications At my university, at least for staff, Matlab is 'free' in the same way that Microsoft Office is free - namely, we have a site license/7,500 licensed MATLAB seats all paid for by the university centrally. It might cost the university a lot of money, but it costs me and my budget zero dollars. Likewise, not using it will save me zero dollars.
Also, you can buy the student version for $89 - though without tool boxes, and the license might expire if you leave university, it's far from a Microsoft campus license price (unless those are cheaper than I would predict).
I wonder where does the CMU team's student's stipend come? research grants? university? or they truly do all their work AFTER they fulfilled their obligatory research. In the DARPA Grand Challenge, several of the teams (including CMU if I remember correctly) ran the project as an undergraduate class(20MB PDF warning) (i.e. for credit). Thus they could field twoteams without needing to pay any stipends.
Obviously there are costs for buying kit, and travel expenses, but section 3.2.2 of the rules only specifies 90% of funding from non-governmental sources - so there's no limit on raising sponsorship from private companies.
Not having seen the rules - I don't know how vague they are - but the mission statement is pretty clear. The specific issue in the article the comes to mind was the disallowing of the scavenged fuel tanks. Draft guidelines here.
I must say, they include some weird requirements:
4.3.5 says the X Prize Foundation gets to give you a video, an e-mail, and a text message you must broadcast from the moon, and they get to specify the soundtrack for your video broadcast. 4.3.3.3 says you must take three substantially different self portraits of your rover, clearly showing the Google Lunar X Prize logo. 4.3.4.9 wants the same again at the end of the drive. 5.3.3 "The Embedded Communications Specialist or other TEAM member or members shall publish a minimum of one blog per week to an XPF-designated website or XPF-designated Blogger account. TEAMs shall also provide online streaming videos, posted to an XPF-designated website or XPF-designated YouTube account with a minimum monthly cumulative duration of 15 minutes. TEAMs shall publish a minimum of 8 discrete, substantively different videos per month, 4 of which shall have a minimum length of 30 seconds." 5.3.4.1 "TEAMs shall send representatives to appear as spokespeople, judges, or attendees for Google Lunar X PRIZE-related public education and outreach events at the request of XPF." 5.5 "Logo Placements TEAMS shall display certain Google Lunar X PRIZE logos as specified by XPF. [...] XPF reserves the right to put logos on all CRAFTs, as well as launch facilities, launch vehicles, secondary vehicles, and other relevant equipment. [...] XPF reserves 50% of available logo space on the CRAFT and all relevant vehicles. 5.11.4 "The TEAM shall make the provision of all data related to the Mooncast and fulfillment of the Google Lunar X PRIZE Mission Requirements exclusive to XPF and XPF-identified Partners." 6.3 "Competition Media Rights are the rights held by and or conveyed to XPF [...] This package shall also include an irrevocable, perpetual, world-wide, royalty-free, exclusive, sublicensable right and license to XPF for all video and imagery, regardless of its inclusion in the Google Lunar X PRIZE Mission Requirements, taken from the launch site, mission control center(s), or spacecraft(s) by XPF, its Partners, or the TEAM "
With requirements like that you can see why someone might think "Hey, this competition suddenly seems less about science/engineering and more about publicity/advertising"
stepping up and taking away someone's personal property is nothing but thuggery. Perhaps, but bear in mind they can retrieve their PDA when they leave, and one can avoid the issue altogether by leaving your PDA at home, turning it off, or just plain not using it.
The fact is, private amusement parks can have rules, and can ask you to leave if you refuse to follow them. This is just an example of that.
If you're so very important that you can't turn your blackberry off for a day, you have the option of not visiting Alton Towers. If you really are that important, maybe you should turn your PDA off anyway, so your employers can be prepared for if you ever die or move jobs.
However they have now asked for direct read-only access to our Oracle database, [...] my heart sinks at the thought of amateurs pawing through my database. Unfortunately, 'because you are stupid' is not considered a valid business reason to reject their request. So can any Slashdotters assist me in building my case to restrict access? Not to state the obvious, but perhaps your justification for refusing access could be based on your reasons for refusing access?
If the only reason to refuse them access is that you "don't like the idea", you should come up with a proper reason you feel that way, and if you can't, you should change your opinion - or risk gaining a reputation as an arrogant, arbitrary obstructionist.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated [...] Maybe someone can explain why the act of entering the country nullifies my constitutional rights. The Hamilton Tariff Act of 1789 was the second act signed into law by the United States government (the first was an act to regulate the time and manner of administering certain oaths). It's called the Hamilton Tariff Act after Alexander Hamilton, the first United States Secretary of the Treasury and one of the Founding Fathers.
The power of the government to inspect goods being imported from abroad is almost as old as the United States itself. One assumes the founding fathers, when codifying this power in law, did not consider it an "unreasonable" search.
I always thought that ad skipping was a major benefit of DVRs. Do you skip all the ads? If you assume most people who pay for DVRs want to skip ads, one would expect DVR buyers to skip ads.
Their teenage children may not feel as strongly about adverts because children of DVR buyers, unlike DVR buyers themselves, have not self-selected for wanting to skip ads.
IMHO the extent of differences they are talking about (The brand mark on the RJ-45 connector, the font of the barcode sticker, and suchlike) could easily be explained by a completely normal mid-production change in suppliers. I would say it is far from clear that the two boards are not from the same manufacturing line. Indeed, it would be hard to make two such identical boards without the original CAD data.
The US doesn't do it because of proliferation concerns (which makes no sense to me, but whatever).
The reasons may include:
1. The US would rather (for example) Iran not have breeder reactors and the resulting weapon material*. The US gets criticised for having a hypocritical attitude in this area ("we can have bombs but they can't") and might prefer to avoid saying "we can have breeder reactors but they can't".
2. The government kind of sucks at keeping track of things - be it 1000 laptops or $9 billion in Iraq funds. If you don't want weapons grade material to "go missing" or be "unaccounted for" it might be best to just not have any in the first place.
*I guess nuclear war between Israel and Iran would be undesirable. Of course, Iran's belligerence seems to be getting exaggerated in the current american political climate.
(Incidentally: 'progressive' tax policies that increase the marginal tax rate based on income pretty much guarantee that the wealthy will always be mostly conservative, since they'll end up paying more for basically the same services.)
Of course, people with larger incomes will pay more tax for the same services even with a flat percentage income tax.
You could have a poll tax (Constant $ amount from everyone), but they tend to be unpopular with the poor, who tend to outnumber the rich.
The OP doesbn't need a grid tie invertor. That's for selling excess power back to the power company. [...] I can't for the life of my see how "small scale" and "grid tie" relate at all.
Well, with a small-scale grid-tied system he wouldn't need any batteries - or any battery paraphernalia (chargers, DC-DC converters, multiple inverters).
It would also alleviate the need to do any rewiring - just plug the inverter into any convenient socket and watch your electricity meter run backwards. No need to run low voltage DC cabling from the roof down to the living room.
What's more, he would enjoy the high reliability of the mains electricity system, even if his generation facilities proved unreliable - if his solar panels broke, things would keep running without intervention, until he was able to perform a repair.
That being said, what can we do to ensure this doesn't happen again?
We could disincentivise future crimes of this type by classifying them as treason; employing "non-torture enhanced interrogation techniques" such as waterboarding in investigating said crimes; and establishing a compulsory minimum sentence of death.
The problem with the president's crimes is he can block investigations under national security rules and pardon people in the unlikely event their crimes are proven. In other words, there is no non-trivial disincentive to committing crimes when ordered to by the president.
We need to correct this situation by creating substantial, unavoidable penalties which will dissuade rational people from committing these crimes. Of course, criminals who cooperate with the investigation by testifying against their superiors would receive reduced penalties so there would be an incentive to secretly gather CYA proof when committing these crimes.
These products don't usually have more than a 3-4 year life-cycle anyway, and this way instead of being stuck with a single version, you get something which improves over time. With one-off payments, Microsoft has a financial incentive to release a new version of Office every few years, and for it to have enough new features that people will upgrade. Doing so is the only way they can maintain their revenue stream.
With a subscription-based model, you'll get the Internet Explorer 6 of software: Years without a meaningful update because there is no financial incentive to spend money improving the software.
Five years down the road, when everyone has an Office subscription instead of a license, Ballmer will be sitting in his office with two proposals on his desk: Proposal 1 is to hire several experts in statistical computing, and overhaul the statistics routines in Office to produce consistent and correct results in areas where they currently don't. Cost: $300,000 for experts, programmers, testers, documentation. Benefit: Subscriptions stay the same, so nothing except improving customer satisfaction. Proposal 2 is to add a wizard to Powerpoint so you can set all the animated transitions in your presentation to the same style without having to modify them all manually. Cost: $30,000 for a programmer for 6 months. Benefit: No financial benefit (as with proposal 1) and a small increase in customer satisfaction.
Which proposal would you fund, if you were a for-profit business? Which do you think Steve Ballmer would fund?
in 2006 residential use was 1,351,520,036 megawatt hours; commercal use was 1,299,743,695 megawatt hours; industrial use was 1,011,297,566 megawatt hours; transportation use was 7,357,543 megawatt hours; and 'direct use' was 146,926,612 megawatt hours.
In other words, of a total 3.82 billion megawatt hours, 1.35 billion megawatt hours were used residentially. That's 35.3%.
In other words, approximately 5.6% of north American energy use is for residential lighting.
I don't know how much power is used for commercial and industrial lighting, but if I'm at work 8 hours a day and at home with the lights on for 6 hours a day, and I have the same amount of artificial lighting in both places (true for me, maybe not in general) you'd expect combined residential, commercial and industrial to roughly double residential, for a total of 11%
Wrong; that's not $10 worth of injected-molded plastic, that's thousands of dollars worth at least. It was always my understanding that the great promise of self-replicating machines was that they could be manufactured in huge volumes inexpensively, by having them build each other. Exponential growth and all that. At least, I think that's why the reprap web page quotes people saying "[RepRap] has been called the invention that will bring down global capitalism, start a second industrial revolution and save the environment..."
You lose this key benefit (inexpensive high volume manufacturing) if self-replication is not cost-competitive at a large scale.
To put it another way, if you want a million of these machines, you could make a self-replicating machine... or you could get the parts injection moulded with the same raw material, for a tooling cost of $1 per machine, with technology we have right now.
Of course, the users would have a harder job modifying the design in that situation.
Reading comprehension FTW! That quote once more:
with respect to Your Content that you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Services, you grant Adobe a worldwide, royalty-free yadda yadda yadda Seems to me you can parse this as Your Content that you (submit or make available) for inclusion on publicly accessible areas; or as Your Content that you (submit) or (make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas) and arrive at two different conclusions about its meaning.
Of course, it's most likely Adobe intend the former meaning. Still, ambiguously worded legal agreements FTL.
I wonder how Dell and Apple and everyone else can provide 64 gig SSD options for their notebooks for less than 1000 dollars. None of the brands had any info on the specs of the drives easily locatable, and I am worried these are the low end SSDs that are much much slower Well, one option is economies of scale - Apple could get 1,000 SSDs at $1,000 (total $1,000,000) but it's unlikely 'Rocketdisk' has that much spare cash to spend. Rocketdisk might keep 5 in stock at $2,000 (total $10,000). Also, if SSD supplies are limited Apple and Dell and IBM might be buying up the entire supply - big contracts tend to get preferential treatment compared to small contracts, for obvious reasons.
Fortunately, you don't have to worry about not knowing the performance of these SSDs because there are reviews aplenty comparing the macbook with and without the SSD. Here is one such review. Here's the summary: a bunch of benchmark bars showing the macbook air SSD outperform the macbook air sans-SSD; but being outperformed by the macbook and macbook pro without SSDs.
The Good:
* No more entire machine slowdowns! (well, most of the time...)
* Speedy boot, disk read, and build times
The Bad:
* The moderate gains in everyday use aren't worth $1,300 And now you know!
Granted, he probably shouldn't have deleted everything and changed the password, so it's likely he may face charges because of this. That's our legal system, folks. I have it on good authority that he was developing a proprietary gmail-interfacing application, and accessing the account, deleting its contents and changing its password happened because of some debug code which was unintentionally left in. It was an honest mistake which could have happened to anyone.
existing designs are jammed just as tightly as they can possibly be. You can't put more functionality into an existing die size. [...] I was reading about the Maxim DS3600 the other day -- on-chip encryption and tamper-sensing, including detecting temperature changes and reacting by blanking all the on-board memory and stored encryption keys in nanoseconds, far faster than dumping liquid helium onto the chip would be able to freeze the memory for decoding. It's true that it would require extra space or rearrangement to add, say, a keylogger to a USB keyboard.
But it would require only a handful of malformed vias among millions to make your 'military grade' memory-wiping electronics get stuck at 'do not wipe' and your built-in test hardware get stuck at 'no problem'.
Why do the deletionists care if there are trivial articles on there? If they consider an article trivial, isn't it fairly easy to just not read it and not contribute to it?
The most reasonable justification I've heard is "the criteria for notability is verifiability". That is, wikipedia doesn't need unverifiable articles because thanks to vandalism, there's a good chance they aren't true.
Therefore, the only articles wikipedia wants are those that can be verified. They also prefer verification come from someone credible - such as a newspaper, magazine, academic journal, etc - rather than something like a blog post which could easily be fabricated by vandals.
If I start a Wikipedia page about myself saying "Mike1024 is a well known athlete, porn star and rock band guitarist" it should probably be deleted because, though all those things may individually be true, I have no evidence they are true.
'Web 3.0 is taking what we've built in Web 2.0--the wisdom of the crowds--and putting an editorial layer on it of truly talented, compensated people to make the product more trusted and refined.'" What I want to know is: Where are they going to get the money to compensate these experts?
The university I work at expenses academics' time at £50 ($100) per hour to include expenses. Wikipedia is very large, which is one of its key virtues. Hiring people just to read and yes/no each article at $100 an hour would be extremely expensive, to say nothing of actually validating facts. You'd need a lot of Google AdWords clicks.
I would wager part of Wikipedia's success is due to it's charitable design. I think if someone works for $100 an hour, it would be easier to get them to work pro bono on your project, than to get them to work for $30 per hour on your project, because with money comes obligation and inconvenience.
Of course, Britannica can attract experts because you can put 'edited Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on Aphids' on your resume - but you can only do that with projects with established name recognition, which a new website would not have. How many people outside of Slashdot have heard of Citizendium?
From the article
You can't be a leaker and a liar at the same time. In fact, it's really unclear what Baer claims is legit (but stolen) and what it claims is false or forged. It would be possible to have both stolen true information and fabricated false information in the same document - or to have a mix of authentic documents and forged documents. Hence "stolen and forged bank records" could be true.
Also, it makes sense for a company not to comment on the authenticity of leaked documents - and the bank could argue that wikileaks should remove the documents if they are fake (assuming wikileaks purports to be a factual site); and should remove them if they are illegal; and therefore should remove the documents without the bank specifying if they are authentic or not.
That said, hosting fictional information probably isn't a crime (unless you could work slander or libel into it); and hosting private/secret documents against the rights holders' wishes is kind of wikileaks' raison d'etre.
However, someone persuaded the students that Blackboard was a wonderful thing. So much so, that their organizations petitioned the administration to make Blackboard mandatory for all classes. I don't know if the student leaders were bribed, but it would not surprise me -- it is sad to say how easily some people can be bought for the price of a couple of pizzas. In subjects like physics, engineering and CS it goes without saying that lecture slides, lab handouts, assignments, deadlines and timetables will all be on the lecturer's website in sensible formats (i.e. PDF, any maybe.ps).
However, in other areas (like art history, literature, political philosophy etc) lecturers may be less technically adept, and may have chosen not to maintain personal websites.
Perhaps the requests from students were mostly from students in those areas, who just wanted the same information available to their more technically inclined peers via lecturers' websites.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, you can buy the student version for $89 - though without tool boxes, and the license might expire if you leave university, it's far from a Microsoft campus license price (unless those are cheaper than I would predict).
Just my $0.02
Obviously there are costs for buying kit, and travel expenses, but section 3.2.2 of the rules only specifies 90% of funding from non-governmental sources - so there's no limit on raising sponsorship from private companies.
I must say, they include some weird requirements:
4.3.5 says the X Prize Foundation gets to give you a video, an e-mail, and a text message you must broadcast from the moon, and they get to specify the soundtrack for your video broadcast.
4.3.3.3 says you must take three substantially different self portraits of your rover, clearly showing the Google Lunar X Prize logo.
4.3.4.9 wants the same again at the end of the drive.
5.3.3 "The Embedded Communications Specialist or other TEAM member or members shall publish a minimum of one blog per week to an XPF-designated website or XPF-designated Blogger account. TEAMs shall also provide online streaming videos, posted to an XPF-designated website or XPF-designated YouTube account with a minimum monthly cumulative duration of 15 minutes. TEAMs shall publish a minimum of 8 discrete, substantively different videos per month, 4 of which shall have a minimum length of 30 seconds."
5.3.4.1 "TEAMs shall send representatives to appear as spokespeople, judges, or attendees for Google Lunar X PRIZE-related public education and outreach events at the request of XPF."
5.5 "Logo Placements TEAMS shall display certain Google Lunar X PRIZE logos as specified by XPF. [...] XPF reserves the right to put logos on all CRAFTs, as well as launch facilities, launch vehicles, secondary vehicles, and other relevant equipment. [...] XPF reserves 50% of available logo space on the CRAFT and all relevant vehicles.
5.11.4 "The TEAM shall make the provision of all data related to the Mooncast and fulfillment of the Google Lunar X PRIZE Mission Requirements exclusive to XPF and XPF-identified Partners."
6.3 "Competition Media Rights are the rights held by and or conveyed to XPF [...] This package shall also include an irrevocable, perpetual, world-wide, royalty-free, exclusive, sublicensable right and license to XPF for all video and imagery, regardless of its inclusion in the Google Lunar X PRIZE Mission Requirements, taken from the launch site, mission control center(s), or spacecraft(s) by XPF, its Partners, or the TEAM "
With requirements like that you can see why someone might think "Hey, this competition suddenly seems less about science/engineering and more about publicity/advertising"
The fact is, private amusement parks can have rules, and can ask you to leave if you refuse to follow them. This is just an example of that.
If you're so very important that you can't turn your blackberry off for a day, you have the option of not visiting Alton Towers. If you really are that important, maybe you should turn your PDA off anyway, so your employers can be prepared for if you ever die or move jobs.
If the only reason to refuse them access is that you "don't like the idea", you should come up with a proper reason you feel that way, and if you can't, you should change your opinion - or risk gaining a reputation as an arrogant, arbitrary obstructionist.
The act sets certain import duties; establishes that before ships are permitted to unload they must provide a manifest listing all goods carried; and permits inspectors to board vessels "to examine whether the goods imported are conformable to the entries thereof".
The power of the government to inspect goods being imported from abroad is almost as old as the United States itself. One assumes the founding fathers, when codifying this power in law, did not consider it an "unreasonable" search.
Their teenage children may not feel as strongly about adverts because children of DVR buyers, unlike DVR buyers themselves, have not self-selected for wanting to skip ads.
Jusy my $0.02.
16,000 libraries of congress? That *is* a lot of data.
IMHO the extent of differences they are talking about (The brand mark on the RJ-45 connector, the font of the barcode sticker, and suchlike) could easily be explained by a completely normal mid-production change in suppliers. I would say it is far from clear that the two boards are not from the same manufacturing line. Indeed, it would be hard to make two such identical boards without the original CAD data.
Just my $0.02
The US doesn't do it because of proliferation concerns (which makes no sense to me, but whatever).
The reasons may include:
1. The US would rather (for example) Iran not have breeder reactors and the resulting weapon material*. The US gets criticised for having a hypocritical attitude in this area ("we can have bombs but they can't") and might prefer to avoid saying "we can have breeder reactors but they can't".
2. The government kind of sucks at keeping track of things - be it 1000 laptops or $9 billion in Iraq funds. If you don't want weapons grade material to "go missing" or be "unaccounted for" it might be best to just not have any in the first place.
*I guess nuclear war between Israel and Iran would be undesirable. Of course, Iran's belligerence seems to be getting exaggerated in the current american political climate.
(Incidentally: 'progressive' tax policies that increase the marginal tax rate based on income pretty much guarantee that the wealthy will always be mostly conservative, since they'll end up paying more for basically the same services.)
Of course, people with larger incomes will pay more tax for the same services even with a flat percentage income tax.
You could have a poll tax (Constant $ amount from everyone), but they tend to be unpopular with the poor, who tend to outnumber the rich.
The OP doesbn't need a grid tie invertor. That's for selling excess power back to the power company. [...] I can't for the life of my see how "small scale" and "grid tie" relate at all.
Well, with a small-scale grid-tied system he wouldn't need any batteries - or any battery paraphernalia (chargers, DC-DC converters, multiple inverters).
It would also alleviate the need to do any rewiring - just plug the inverter into any convenient socket and watch your electricity meter run backwards. No need to run low voltage DC cabling from the roof down to the living room.
What's more, he would enjoy the high reliability of the mains electricity system, even if his generation facilities proved unreliable - if his solar panels broke, things would keep running without intervention, until he was able to perform a repair.
That being said, what can we do to ensure this doesn't happen again?
We could disincentivise future crimes of this type by classifying them as treason; employing "non-torture enhanced interrogation techniques" such as waterboarding in investigating said crimes; and establishing a compulsory minimum sentence of death.
The problem with the president's crimes is he can block investigations under national security rules and pardon people in the unlikely event their crimes are proven. In other words, there is no non-trivial disincentive to committing crimes when ordered to by the president.
We need to correct this situation by creating substantial, unavoidable penalties which will dissuade rational people from committing these crimes. Of course, criminals who cooperate with the investigation by testifying against their superiors would receive reduced penalties so there would be an incentive to secretly gather CYA proof when committing these crimes.
With a subscription-based model, you'll get the Internet Explorer 6 of software: Years without a meaningful update because there is no financial incentive to spend money improving the software.
Five years down the road, when everyone has an Office subscription instead of a license, Ballmer will be sitting in his office with two proposals on his desk: Proposal 1 is to hire several experts in statistical computing, and overhaul the statistics routines in Office to produce consistent and correct results in areas where they currently don't. Cost: $300,000 for experts, programmers, testers, documentation. Benefit: Subscriptions stay the same, so nothing except improving customer satisfaction. Proposal 2 is to add a wizard to Powerpoint so you can set all the animated transitions in your presentation to the same style without having to modify them all manually. Cost: $30,000 for a programmer for 6 months. Benefit: No financial benefit (as with proposal 1) and a small increase in customer satisfaction.
Which proposal would you fund, if you were a for-profit business? Which do you think Steve Ballmer would fund?
in 2006 residential use was 1,351,520,036 megawatt hours; commercal use was 1,299,743,695 megawatt hours; industrial use was 1,011,297,566 megawatt hours; transportation use was 7,357,543 megawatt hours; and 'direct use' was 146,926,612 megawatt hours.
In other words, of a total 3.82 billion megawatt hours, 1.35 billion megawatt hours were used residentially. That's 35.3%.
Furthermore, according to the EIA's "Residential Electricity Prices: A Consumer's Guide" (Figure 5) lighting makes up 15.8% of residential usage.
In other words, approximately 5.6% of north American energy use is for residential lighting.
I don't know how much power is used for commercial and industrial lighting, but if I'm at work 8 hours a day and at home with the lights on for 6 hours a day, and I have the same amount of artificial lighting in both places (true for me, maybe not in general) you'd expect combined residential, commercial and industrial to roughly double residential, for a total of 11%
Michael
You lose this key benefit (inexpensive high volume manufacturing) if self-replication is not cost-competitive at a large scale.
To put it another way, if you want a million of these machines, you could make a self-replicating machine... or you could get the parts injection moulded with the same raw material, for a tooling cost of $1 per machine, with technology we have right now.
Of course, the users would have a harder job modifying the design in that situation.
Just my $0.02.
Of course, it's most likely Adobe intend the former meaning. Still, ambiguously worded legal agreements FTL.
Fortunately, you don't have to worry about not knowing the performance of these SSDs because there are reviews aplenty comparing the macbook with and without the SSD. Here is one such review. Here's the summary: a bunch of benchmark bars showing the macbook air SSD outperform the macbook air sans-SSD; but being outperformed by the macbook and macbook pro without SSDs. The Good:
* No more entire machine slowdowns! (well, most of the time...)
* Speedy boot, disk read, and build times
The Bad:
* The moderate gains in everyday use aren't worth $1,300 And now you know!
But it would require only a handful of malformed vias among millions to make your 'military grade' memory-wiping electronics get stuck at 'do not wipe' and your built-in test hardware get stuck at 'no problem'.
Just my $0.02
Why do the deletionists care if there are trivial articles on there? If they consider an article trivial, isn't it fairly easy to just not read it and not contribute to it?
The most reasonable justification I've heard is "the criteria for notability is verifiability". That is, wikipedia doesn't need unverifiable articles because thanks to vandalism, there's a good chance they aren't true.
Therefore, the only articles wikipedia wants are those that can be verified. They also prefer verification come from someone credible - such as a newspaper, magazine, academic journal, etc - rather than something like a blog post which could easily be fabricated by vandals.
If I start a Wikipedia page about myself saying "Mike1024 is a well known athlete, porn star and rock band guitarist" it should probably be deleted because, though all those things may individually be true, I have no evidence they are true.
The university I work at expenses academics' time at £50 ($100) per hour to include expenses. Wikipedia is very large, which is one of its key virtues. Hiring people just to read and yes/no each article at $100 an hour would be extremely expensive, to say nothing of actually validating facts. You'd need a lot of Google AdWords clicks.
I would wager part of Wikipedia's success is due to it's charitable design. I think if someone works for $100 an hour, it would be easier to get them to work pro bono on your project, than to get them to work for $30 per hour on your project, because with money comes obligation and inconvenience.
Of course, Britannica can attract experts because you can put 'edited Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on Aphids' on your resume - but you can only do that with projects with established name recognition, which a new website would not have. How many people outside of Slashdot have heard of Citizendium?
Just my $0.02.
Also, it makes sense for a company not to comment on the authenticity of leaked documents - and the bank could argue that wikileaks should remove the documents if they are fake (assuming wikileaks purports to be a factual site); and should remove them if they are illegal; and therefore should remove the documents without the bank specifying if they are authentic or not.
That said, hosting fictional information probably isn't a crime (unless you could work slander or libel into it); and hosting private/secret documents against the rights holders' wishes is kind of wikileaks' raison d'etre.
Just my $0.02
However, in other areas (like art history, literature, political philosophy etc) lecturers may be less technically adept, and may have chosen not to maintain personal websites.
Perhaps the requests from students were mostly from students in those areas, who just wanted the same information available to their more technically inclined peers via lecturers' websites.
Just my $0.02