The problem that I have is that many of us don't WANT to be a pirates, but the studios heavy-handedness and greed make it almost impossible NOT to.
Horsecrap. Your desire to own something you cannot legally buy drives you to piracy - but rather than owning up to the that fact, you blame the studios.
Since Falcon 9 + Dragon (booster + capsule, which is what you actually meant, as otherwise there are no seats) is some years from being operational (which is why NASA is buying seats on Soyuz in the first place) - you haven't 'saved' anything. Nor do two Falcon/Dragon flights replace the 6 (at a minimum) to 12 (at a maximum)* Soyuz flights, as the flights are intended to rotate small numbers of crew at a time over a period of two years.
* The number of flights depends on how many seats (1 or 2) the US occupies on a given flight.
The problem [is] that Wikipedia doesn't want the crap in the first place.
There is no "Wikipedia wants", it's not a person---that's the whole problem, people disagree about the direction wikipedia should go in.
Yes, there is a "'Wikipedia wants", because there are basic standards for quality (which is the topic of discussion here).
The balance of your reply is just more of the same - hogwash that indicates you not only fail to understand the issue but also how your non-solution doesn't even begin to address it.
Thus while hundreds (thousands? we're a small place) of mortgages theoretically issued by the credit union have gone under - none of them appear on the credit union's books. They've already taken their profit and run.
Yes, but thanks to this the members of the credit union (end-users, ie: anyone who puts their life savings in an account there) are in a much safer position than people who put "money in the bank". Your credit union knew exactly how to handle itself to protect its members.
I don't think the people who the credit union conned into buying bad mortgages so they could make a little profit (all of whom were members as well) feel particularly protected. They didn't need a bailout, but that doesn't make them any less slimy.
Even in the US, where the failure of a large mega plant puts too much strain on the system.
Ok, which pretty much has nothing to do with your original post, or my reply.
Missouri has a single plant (wanting to add more reactors on the same site). If that plant fails, St. Louis and Southern Illinois is without power
Which failure doesn't produce a national level problem, *exactly* as I stated.
Sure, power can be shifted from other areas of the country, but that usually only works for the short term (remember the rolling blackouts in California a few years back).
When you understand the blackouts had nothing to do with generating capacity and everything to do with the regulatory environment - get back to me.
If this quake and tsunami hit the west coast of the US, then California, Washington, etc. would be experiencing the same problems that Japan is.
But the rest of the US would not be, completely unlike Japan.
Or in short, you not only don't comprehend the issues or my reply - you don't even comprehend your own posting. You're just a parrot repeating "smaller plants! smaller plants!".
Yes, MediaWiki+MySQL has limits, but nothing compared to a physical book.
Just because it doesn't face the same limitations as a physical book does, doesn't mean that there are no limitations.
In the case of a wiki, the critical limitation is the number of capable editors available to ensure the articles are well written, well sourced, and well maintained. Wikipedia is approaching this critical threshold - not only are the tags indicating problems with articles multiplying (that is, increasing numbers of articles are so tagged), the average age of the tags are steadily increasing as well.
But why delete things just because they aren't notable? As you said, it isn't as though we are going to run out of bits.
But they are running out of editor hours to maintain the articles. Storage and bandwidth aren't the only limits.
Also it isn't as though it clutters things up, since you access information via search and thus skip over shit you don't care about.
The problem here is twofold - just because you don't care about it doesn't mean that somebody else doesn't - and Wikipedia's goal is to provide quality information to everyone.
Well if you are going to allow trivial shit like that, then I'd say all bets are off. Let pretty much anything that is true and sourced on there. Fuck notability.
Which is exactly the problem that kicked off this thread - the article in question at the time it was deleted was unsourced. If the article wasn't important enough to somebody to ensure that it was properly written and sourced - odds are that it isn't important enough to anybody to even be in the encyclopedia in the first place.
I see the same shit on forums. Someone will start a new thread on a topic related to an existing thread and someone else will say "I don't see why this needs a new thread." My reply is "You know we don't pay by the thread, right?"
True, but the greater the number of threads - the harder it is to have high quality discussions and harder it is to find the information you're looking for. (At the end of that curve lies/b/.)
The real fallout that Japan needs to worry about is that they have permanently lost a substantial part of their capacity to generate electricity and won't be able to replace it anytime soon. The US and other countries with these high power nuclear plants should learn a lesson. It is better to build several smaller plants instead of a few megaplants.
That's not a function of them having built megaplants - that's a function of them being a small country where a small number of plants in a compact geographic area represent a large fraction of their electrical generation capacity. They have such a small number of geographically concentrated plants because, unlike the US, they don't have the area to widely distribute the plants.
To take out an equivalent percentage of the US's generating capacity and create an equivalent national problem would require a disaster on nearly a continental scale.
yep have to admit when all the mortgage things happened, the credit unions remained unscathed. My wife and I asked our credit union about that and they said they don't report to a board but only report to their members so they are not under alot of pressure to make giant risky investments; they are only their for their members.
If your local credit union is anything like mine - they were unscathed during the mortgage crisis because they didn't actually hold any mortgages in the first place. They'd either sold them to one of the big companies as soon as the ink was dry, or they'd never held the paper in the first place, acting merely as an affiliate/franchisee for one of the big companies. My local credit union even takes this 'arms length' approach a step further - their 'mortgage arm' is actually a quasi-independent (but wholly owned by the credit union) organization to whom the credit union has licensed their name.
Thus while hundreds (thousands? we're a small place) of mortgages theoretically issued by the credit union have gone under - none of them appear on the credit union's books. They've already taken their profit and run.
Switch to a local credit union. That is, by far, your best alternative.
That's what your local credit union would like you to believe...
But my local credit union doesn't hold mortgage paper - it sold my mortgage to Countrywide before I'd even signed the papers. (In fact, the earliest paperwork I filled out already had Countrywide preprinted on it.) The same is true for the credit card I have from my local credit union, the credit union doesn't back the card, it's just an affiliate/franchisee of Visa.
BOA will then make some "campaign" contributions to the Senators and after a few weeks, the public will have forgotten it all because the powers that be will come up with some distraction issue.
The powers that be won't expend an iota of effort to come up with a distraction - they know damn well that the public's attention span is nearly non-existent. Look at all the coverage in the last few days here on Slashdot about internet connectivity in Libya and the rest of the 'Jasmine revolution'.
Oh, wait - there hasn't been any, yet the revolution grinds on while the magpie has moved on to hourly updates on Japan. By the end of the week, or early next, another shiny will come along and Japan will drop off the radar too.
editors time is not [cheap] [...] Given the number of pages that I regularly see that have tags months and years old indicating that they need sources, formatting, etc... I'd say Wikipedia is in the midst of an unrecognized crisis in this regard.
Your argument assumes that editor time can be freely shifted from one article to another. If I'm very interested in anime and manga (and nothing else), I'm not going to start editing articles about voting theory or cladistics and the tree of life, or whatever---I don't have the interest, and/or I don't have the knowledge.
True, and a factor I hadn't considered - and one that makes the situation even worse than I'd outlined.
That way, flexible volunteer labor can be directed to where that's useful, and the seldom-viewed stuff can coexist and be crap, and no one will care because no one reads it anyways, and in that way everyone gets to have their cake and eat it too.
A true geek solution - implement a bug tracker to track the bugs in a system intended to track bugs, but which misses the problem and the point of the first system entirely.
The problem isn't that original tracking system isn't working (which it isn't) but that Wikipedia doesn't want the crap in the first place. Even if nobody reads it, it's linked to from other articles (and if it isn't, then there are other problems with the article) - and if the foundation is unsound, then the roof cannot be. Even if nobody reads it, experience shows that it will be edited, experience also shows that lacking editorial oversight many of the edits (howsoever well meaning) will tend to reduce the quality of the article or induce other problems. Which loops right back to the original problem, lack of volunteer hours to maintain the article at the intended level of quality.
If Wikipedia and its current admins had been around in 1890, they'd have deleted the entry for Vincent Van Gogh.
And in 1890 - they'd have been right to do so. In 1890 Vincent Van Gogh was pretty much a minor figure, well known - but in a small circle. At the time of his death, he was one of dozens and dozens of such figures which might someday become interesting and influential.
His fame and influence didn't really begin to grow until almost twenty years after his death. The dozens and dozens of others - didn't. Such fame and influence is not a given, and is only obvious in hindsight.
Wikipedia has the potential to become what traditional encyclopedias can only aspire to be -- but they've decided instead to imitate as if it were a virtue what encyclopedias do out of unfortunate necessity. They've basically decided to self-limit themselves to make sure they don't transcend the limitations of their paper relatives, and for some reason consider themselves better off for making sure they are no better.
While Wikipedia does not suffer from the traditional limitations of dead tree encyclopedias - that doesn't mean they don't suffer limitations of their own. While storage space and bandwidth are cheap - editors time is not. Pages of little value tend to drift into muck as they rarely get reviewed and maintained. (Making the exceedingly generous assumption they weren't inaccurate and poorly written muck in the first place.) Given the number of pages that I regularly see that have tags months and years old indicating that they need sources, formatting, etc... I'd say Wikipedia is in the midst of an unrecognized crisis in this regard.
The catch, of course, is to keep from drowning the information in noise
Which is exactly why the original Old Man Murray article was proposed for deletion - it was noise (that is, unsourced and poorly written), not information.
They should be working on how to organize information to make sure whatever the current generation finds most notable is most easy to find, not on limiting information to what history tells us will inevitably be a large number of very poor decisions on what's actually worth recording.
Which means that what the 'current generation' doesn't find interesting soon descends into being worthless unmaintained noise. Wikipedia isn't interested in being a repository of poorly written and unmaintained noise.
Essentially what is being described in the article is good coaching. A good coach doesn't necessarily have the skills or abilities of a star athlete, but he knows how to manage his players to get the best performance out of them. The best manager I ever worked for summed it up in one glorious line: "You're the expert, that's why I hired you."
Oddly enough, and apropos of the discussion above about leadership/management in the military upthread... That's pretty much exactly what the best CO I ever worked for told me: "I don't know what exactly you do down there, I don't need to - your and your chief are the experts".
In your first message you were not discussing sunrise or sunset times, you were discussing length of the day ("we go to work in the dark and come home in the dark"). The length of day is determined by your position north or south because of the Earth's axial tilt.
It might be pointless to you, but that's you. I live not so far from you (near Seattle), and when the sun starts setting at 1900 next week (rather than 1800 as it has this past week) and that extra hour of daylight is going to be very useful.
My name is BMO and I live in Rhode Island. We here in the Northeast US are far enough east that during the winter, we go to work in the dark and we come home in the dark.
How far east or west you live is irrelevant to the length of your day - it's your position north or south that determines the length of your day.
It wasn't a snark - it was a statement of fact. You're falsely claiming to be an authority about something you aren't an authority on at all.
The comment about not being a nuclear physicist relates to not being certain about nuclear power generation in a disorganized pile of uranium in the bottom of a reactor vessel.
Yet, that didn't stop you from specifically stating that there would be very little heat being generated in such a pile in your first posting.
I have not, however, ran sophisticated computer simulations to these ends, nor am I qualified to perform a back of the envelope calculations to the same effect.
Yet that doesn't stop you from making positive statements as to what will and won't happen.
I am, however, intimately familiar with the normal and emergency operating parameters of a certain pressurized water reactor, and many of the physical principles are similar to that of the boiling water reactor in question. As such, I can compare the likely conditions in this reactor with the normal and emergency operating conditions in the reactor that I am familiar with, and make reasonably credible predictions
Since the normal and emergency parameters of PWR's and BWR's are roughly completely unlike the conditions inside a compact mass - no, you cannot make predictions of any credibility based on those parameters. (Hint: read up on Corium - particularly the section on reactor vessel breaching - which you (again, falsely) claim can't happen at all.)
But hey, there's no PHD in nuclear physics after my name. How could I possibly know anything relevant?
You've twice stated you *aren't* in fact knowledgeable about the particular situations under discussion - so by your own admission, you don't know anything relevant.
Not to mention that the Straits of Jan de Fuca are miles wide - absolutely no barrier to a tsunami. There's no magical barrier to the tsunami's energy in the Admiralty Inlet either.
I have checked a map - and it shows that the Puget Sound is connected to the Pacific Ocean. So while no, this one wasn't big enough by the time it got here, a similar quake off of BC or Alaska or our own coast could easily generate one that would.
Sitting here in a house near Seattle, near the water... Part of the NOAA site says there is no alert, part of the website says there *is* an alert - but the page with details is down. Waiting and watching...
Slashdot Mirror
Horsecrap. Your desire to own something you cannot legally buy drives you to piracy - but rather than owning up to the that fact, you blame the studios.
Since Falcon 9 + Dragon (booster + capsule, which is what you actually meant, as otherwise there are no seats) is some years from being operational (which is why NASA is buying seats on Soyuz in the first place) - you haven't 'saved' anything. Nor do two Falcon/Dragon flights replace the 6 (at a minimum) to 12 (at a maximum)* Soyuz flights, as the flights are intended to rotate small numbers of crew at a time over a period of two years.
* The number of flights depends on how many seats (1 or 2) the US occupies on a given flight.
Yes, there is a "'Wikipedia wants", because there are basic standards for quality (which is the topic of discussion here).
The balance of your reply is just more of the same - hogwash that indicates you not only fail to understand the issue but also how your non-solution doesn't even begin to address it.
I don't think the people who the credit union conned into buying bad mortgages so they could make a little profit (all of whom were members as well) feel particularly protected. They didn't need a bailout, but that doesn't make them any less slimy.
Ok, which pretty much has nothing to do with your original post, or my reply.
Which failure doesn't produce a national level problem, *exactly* as I stated.
When you understand the blackouts had nothing to do with generating capacity and everything to do with the regulatory environment - get back to me.
But the rest of the US would not be, completely unlike Japan.
Or in short, you not only don't comprehend the issues or my reply - you don't even comprehend your own posting. You're just a parrot repeating "smaller plants! smaller plants!".
Just because it doesn't face the same limitations as a physical book does, doesn't mean that there are no limitations.
In the case of a wiki, the critical limitation is the number of capable editors available to ensure the articles are well written, well sourced, and well maintained. Wikipedia is approaching this critical threshold - not only are the tags indicating problems with articles multiplying (that is, increasing numbers of articles are so tagged), the average age of the tags are steadily increasing as well.
But they are running out of editor hours to maintain the articles. Storage and bandwidth aren't the only limits.
The problem here is twofold - just because you don't care about it doesn't mean that somebody else doesn't - and Wikipedia's goal is to provide quality information to everyone.
Which is exactly the problem that kicked off this thread - the article in question at the time it was deleted was unsourced. If the article wasn't important enough to somebody to ensure that it was properly written and sourced - odds are that it isn't important enough to anybody to even be in the encyclopedia in the first place.
True, but the greater the number of threads - the harder it is to have high quality discussions and harder it is to find the information you're looking for. (At the end of that curve lies /b/.)
That's not a function of them having built megaplants - that's a function of them being a small country where a small number of plants in a compact geographic area represent a large fraction of their electrical generation capacity. They have such a small number of geographically concentrated plants because, unlike the US, they don't have the area to widely distribute the plants.
To take out an equivalent percentage of the US's generating capacity and create an equivalent national problem would require a disaster on nearly a continental scale.
And you know this how? Particularly since there practically *isn't* such a thing as time when there aren't other developing major stories.
If your local credit union is anything like mine - they were unscathed during the mortgage crisis because they didn't actually hold any mortgages in the first place. They'd either sold them to one of the big companies as soon as the ink was dry, or they'd never held the paper in the first place, acting merely as an affiliate/franchisee for one of the big companies. My local credit union even takes this 'arms length' approach a step further - their 'mortgage arm' is actually a quasi-independent (but wholly owned by the credit union) organization to whom the credit union has licensed their name.
Thus while hundreds (thousands? we're a small place) of mortgages theoretically issued by the credit union have gone under - none of them appear on the credit union's books. They've already taken their profit and run.
That's what your local credit union would like you to believe...
But my local credit union doesn't hold mortgage paper - it sold my mortgage to Countrywide before I'd even signed the papers. (In fact, the earliest paperwork I filled out already had Countrywide preprinted on it.) The same is true for the credit card I have from my local credit union, the credit union doesn't back the card, it's just an affiliate/franchisee of Visa.
The powers that be won't expend an iota of effort to come up with a distraction - they know damn well that the public's attention span is nearly non-existent. Look at all the coverage in the last few days here on Slashdot about internet connectivity in Libya and the rest of the 'Jasmine revolution'.
Oh, wait - there hasn't been any, yet the revolution grinds on while the magpie has moved on to hourly updates on Japan. By the end of the week, or early next, another shiny will come along and Japan will drop off the radar too.
True, and a factor I hadn't considered - and one that makes the situation even worse than I'd outlined.
A true geek solution - implement a bug tracker to track the bugs in a system intended to track bugs, but which misses the problem and the point of the first system entirely.
The problem isn't that original tracking system isn't working (which it isn't) but that Wikipedia doesn't want the crap in the first place. Even if nobody reads it, it's linked to from other articles (and if it isn't, then there are other problems with the article) - and if the foundation is unsound, then the roof cannot be. Even if nobody reads it, experience shows that it will be edited, experience also shows that lacking editorial oversight many of the edits (howsoever well meaning) will tend to reduce the quality of the article or induce other problems. Which loops right back to the original problem, lack of volunteer hours to maintain the article at the intended level of quality.
And in 1890 - they'd have been right to do so. In 1890 Vincent Van Gogh was pretty much a minor figure, well known - but in a small circle. At the time of his death, he was one of dozens and dozens of such figures which might someday become interesting and influential.
His fame and influence didn't really begin to grow until almost twenty years after his death. The dozens and dozens of others - didn't. Such fame and influence is not a given, and is only obvious in hindsight.
While Wikipedia does not suffer from the traditional limitations of dead tree encyclopedias - that doesn't mean they don't suffer limitations of their own. While storage space and bandwidth are cheap - editors time is not. Pages of little value tend to drift into muck as they rarely get reviewed and maintained. (Making the exceedingly generous assumption they weren't inaccurate and poorly written muck in the first place.) Given the number of pages that I regularly see that have tags months and years old indicating that they need sources, formatting, etc... I'd say Wikipedia is in the midst of an unrecognized crisis in this regard.
Which is exactly why the original Old Man Murray article was proposed for deletion - it was noise (that is, unsourced and poorly written), not information.
Which means that what the 'current generation' doesn't find interesting soon descends into being worthless unmaintained noise. Wikipedia isn't interested in being a repository of poorly written and unmaintained noise.
Oddly enough, and apropos of the discussion above about leadership/management in the military upthread... That's pretty much exactly what the best CO I ever worked for told me: "I don't know what exactly you do down there, I don't need to - your and your chief are the experts".
In your first message you were not discussing sunrise or sunset times, you were discussing length of the day ("we go to work in the dark and come home in the dark"). The length of day is determined by your position north or south because of the Earth's axial tilt.
It might be pointless to you, but that's you. I live not so far from you (near Seattle), and when the sun starts setting at 1900 next week (rather than 1800 as it has this past week) and that extra hour of daylight is going to be very useful.
How far east or west you live is irrelevant to the length of your day - it's your position north or south that determines the length of your day.
It wasn't a snark - it was a statement of fact. You're falsely claiming to be an authority about something you aren't an authority on at all.
Yet, that didn't stop you from specifically stating that there would be very little heat being generated in such a pile in your first posting.
Yet that doesn't stop you from making positive statements as to what will and won't happen.
Since the normal and emergency parameters of PWR's and BWR's are roughly completely unlike the conditions inside a compact mass - no, you cannot make predictions of any credibility based on those parameters. (Hint: read up on Corium - particularly the section on reactor vessel breaching - which you (again, falsely) claim can't happen at all.)
You've twice stated you *aren't* in fact knowledgeable about the particular situations under discussion - so by your own admission, you don't know anything relevant.
Oh? Why don't you watch this video - taken *inside* San Francisco Bay: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdMDCLwblkY
Not to mention that the Straits of Jan de Fuca are miles wide - absolutely no barrier to a tsunami. There's no magical barrier to the tsunami's energy in the Admiralty Inlet either.
Which doesn't seem to have stopped, or even slowed you down from making any number of pronouncements relating to nuclear physics.
I have checked a map - and it shows that the Puget Sound is connected to the Pacific Ocean. So while no, this one wasn't big enough by the time it got here, a similar quake off of BC or Alaska or our own coast could easily generate one that would.
You can see live data from the Tsunami warning bouys here.
Sitting here in a house near Seattle, near the water... Part of the NOAA site says there is no alert, part of the website says there *is* an alert - but the page with details is down. Waiting and watching...
Well, no, he didn't address your point because nothing you said implied or required negative mass.
Bullshit. Your hypothesis was that the distribution was Gaussian - I showed that it cannot possibly be so.
There is no further point to this conversation, because you're a clueless addlepated jackass.