Subsidized. You know, like the BBC. Quality content, paid for by your tax dollars. Ah, wait... This is the United States and we ere hates dem dar communist bullshiat.
"Senator Jones: As a citizen whose taxes are support Wikipedia, I insist that my edits to the article on pumpkin growing be allowed to stand. A Mexican should not have the right to censor my ideas on pumpkin growing! As you're on the finance committee, please ask Wikipedia to respect my words and not allow any more Mexicans to remove them. Thank you."
I think a good compromise plan would be to establish a projected required operating budget (maybe $10M / year, growing at 10% per year until reaching $100M / year), and put up the display ads, rake in the cash far faster than they need it [...]
Stop there. Why raise it faster than necessary? Surely Wikipedia could display ads on only a percentage of page views, tweaking the number as needed to maintain a neutral revenue.
I've browsed a number of talk pages and any disputes over policy come down to a single person's complaint and a bunch of WP regulars pounding on him/her for being wrong.
Exactly. I put up what I thought was the good fight, but it came down to me versus a regular, so I lost by default. My interest in repeating the process is nil, especially since I'm powerless to have any real say in the end result.
Yet without them everyone and their dog would have an article.
And that would be bad why? It wouldn't. So Wikipedia would have to rank search results based on something like PageRank (if they don't already), and maybe bias the output of Special:Random similarly.
Storage certainly isn't a problem. This page you're reading right now? The whole thing, HTML and all, comes out to 121KB at this particular moment in time. If it were pasted en bloc as a Wikipedia article, a single terabyte drive could store 9 million uncompressed copies of it. For perspective, there are currently about 2.2 million English Wikipedia pages.
So maybe a page about my dog isn't noteworthy, but would it actually harm anything? No. So why not err on the side of caution and retain articles that at least a few authors are willing to maintain?
Would the text advert drive away contributors who are basically what Wikipedia is selling?
I'm not sure I understand this thinking. Why should I, as a potential contributor, turn away from Wikipedia because it carried advertising? Now I certainly have no interest in working for free so someone else can profit, but if the money went to a non-profit that did good things with it (such as keeping Wikipedia online), I don't see the conflict.
The writer couldn't be farther from truth. 98.3% of users are inactive because rest of the 1.7% users have formed a self-serving "community", and most people who are contributing in their spare time don't have the energy and will to fight their way inside this community.
I turned my back on Wikipedia after a page I worked to clean up was deleted for not being "noteworthy". It wasn't high art, but I personally found it more interesting than the individual pages for each Pokemon. To each his own, I guess, but the 15-year-old powertripper who deleted the page I help to craft also deleted any desire for me to support Wikipedia. I'll still fix the occasional typo or grammar problem, but I don't waste my time with the bigger stuff or even bother logging in to do it.
I wonder if some viewers are more aware of the flicker than others.
That could be, or maybe it was just a particularly janky string of lights. I'm not particularly sensitive to flicker in most cases (although I still run CRT monitors at 85Hz) but this was just blatantly obvious.
Mixing light colors gives me headaches, literally.
The world outside your carefully-modulated basement must be hellish for you, then.
I'm only halfway joking. I can think of many mixed-light settings - perhaps more than of evenly-lit ones - and am pretty skeptical of your ailment. That would make you almost unable to function in any common environment.
Until they make a CFL that matches a normal incandescent I'm not switching.
Until they make a normal incandescent that matches a CFL, I'd never consider switching back.
We bought one of those "sun lamps" you used to see advertised, and I hated its weirdly artificial white light. One day after my wife had already left for work, I glanced toward our bedroom and saw the light from it still spilling out into the hallway. When I went in to turn it off, I realized I was seeing real sunlight coming in through the window. All jokes about geeks and the sun aside, I realized that the "weird" color is almost identical to real sunlight; it just seems out of place coming from a lamp at night.
Having made that connection, I just can't stand incandescent light anymore. Even nice bulbs are hideously yellowish. "Warm?" No. Try ugly. Florescent bulbs only look odd because you're not used to them, but there's no going back once adjust.
You are either buying CFLs from a completely incompetent manufacturer, or simply have a bizarre situation where reality is bending around you.
Or he's compulsive about turning off lights when he walks out of a room for two seconds. CFLs don't like to be switched many times, so they're great in a living room where you tend to turn them one once at the beginning of the evening but maybe not so much in a frequently-used bathroom.
Thanks for that. I didn't have the energy to run the numbers on the ridiculous transportation claim but I'm glad someone did. What's that about the Hindenburg and hydrogen burning, though? I'd heard different theories about how it started but didn't realize any of them were bordering on conspiracy.
I picked up a string at the local home store and took them to the test electrical socket to make sure they were OK ("fool me once..."). They lit up but had a terrible flicker, like they were being fed a lower-frequency AC. A worker was walking by and stopped to ask if I needed help:
Me: I want to try these LED lights, but they flicker really badly.
Worker: (looking at them closely) No, they're not flickering.
Me: Umm, sure they are.
Worker: No, they all do that. I could see why you'd say they're flickering, but that's just what all do.
Me: But they are flickering, like they're blinking really fast!
Worker: Well, they all look like they're flickering like that, but they're not.
Me: (setting them down and backing away slowly)
And that's why my tree is wrapped in 25,000 imported Italian twinkle lights and not geek-friendly LEDs.
BTW, I hope that didn't come across as snippy. When the kernel panicked, I was looking all around for a serial cable. Not finding one and not wanting to waste downtime looking harder, I just snapped a picture with my cellphone so I'd have the information later. So I meant what I said earlier, but didn't intend to sound like a smartass.:-)
First of all, if you want to raise money have toll roads.
Fine, as long as you're either not collecting them on interstate highways or not accepting federal highway funds. Nothing makes me despise a state quite as quickly as having to pay tolls on a highway I already paid for.
If something like this were implemented, trucking companies who happen to be based in Oregon would suddenly find themselves elsewhere, with their trucks registered as being owned in other states.
Why? Their taxes would be far lower. A friend's dad drives a truck and he told me he can get 5 MPG on level ground with a light load. At $0.012 per mile, he'd be coming out ahead as long as gas taxes are more than $0.06 a gallon, of which I am absolutely certain is true.
I would imagine they work pretty much the same way bans, embargoes, and tariffs work for all goods: exports and imports are declared by the sender and inspected at the border.
We (the US) have inspectors at every entry point into Iran? Remember, it's us trying to keep them from importing, not them trying to keep themselves from doing it.
Let's for a moment gloss over whether those restrictions are good ideas. Are they even possible? I mean, we're talking about computing hardware here, the kind of stuff you can buy anywhere in the world without identification. It's not like a ban on nuclear materials where there's a limited supply and you can watch the sources pretty closely. So if HP quits selling to Iran, what's to stop them from buying from Turkey or England or India or Japan or China, and how could we ever pretend to know or that we could prevent it?
Why just use the fancy new technology called an odometer?
I'm a hypothetical Oregon resident with a big farm. I put 5,000 miles on a truck driving around on the farm, hauling hay, etc. Never once have I been on public property, but ever mile has been inside the state borders. How much do I pay?
The amount of damage done to a road by a passing vehicle is a geometric? exponential? function of the weight of the vehicle. For instance, say a road will fail if a 100,000 pound vehicle drives over it. In that case, a 120,000 pound truck would do much more damage than two 60,000 trucks. At the low end, you reach a point where no damage is done at all. It's not possible to ruin a modern highway with bicycles, for example.
So you're justified in taxing vehicles proportionally to their weight, since more weight means more damage, which means more expensive repairs. Conveniently enough, gas mileage is a useful proxy for vehicle weight: the heavier they are, the more gas tax they pay per mile.
I have no love for Priuses, but it's insane to tax them the same as someone in a semi truck. There are two possible explanations that don't involve Gov. Kulongoski being a stark moron:
This is a concession to the trucking industry or people who have to pay them, such as lumber companies who want to reduce transportation costs, or
Slashdot Mirror
Subsidized. You know, like the BBC. Quality content, paid for by your tax dollars. Ah, wait... This is the United States and we ere hates dem dar communist bullshiat.
"Senator Jones: As a citizen whose taxes are support Wikipedia, I insist that my edits to the article on pumpkin growing be allowed to stand. A Mexican should not have the right to censor my ideas on pumpkin growing! As you're on the finance committee, please ask Wikipedia to respect my words and not allow any more Mexicans to remove them. Thank you."
Do you really want to go down that road?
I think a good compromise plan would be to establish a projected required operating budget (maybe $10M / year, growing at 10% per year until reaching $100M / year), and put up the display ads, rake in the cash far faster than they need it [...]
Stop there. Why raise it faster than necessary? Surely Wikipedia could display ads on only a percentage of page views, tweaking the number as needed to maintain a neutral revenue.
I've browsed a number of talk pages and any disputes over policy come down to a single person's complaint and a bunch of WP regulars pounding on him/her for being wrong.
Exactly. I put up what I thought was the good fight, but it came down to me versus a regular, so I lost by default. My interest in repeating the process is nil, especially since I'm powerless to have any real say in the end result.
Yet without them everyone and their dog would have an article.
And that would be bad why? It wouldn't. So Wikipedia would have to rank search results based on something like PageRank (if they don't already), and maybe bias the output of Special:Random similarly.
Storage certainly isn't a problem. This page you're reading right now? The whole thing, HTML and all, comes out to 121KB at this particular moment in time. If it were pasted en bloc as a Wikipedia article, a single terabyte drive could store 9 million uncompressed copies of it. For perspective, there are currently about 2.2 million English Wikipedia pages.
So maybe a page about my dog isn't noteworthy, but would it actually harm anything? No. So why not err on the side of caution and retain articles that at least a few authors are willing to maintain?
My 8gig Zune works just fine.
I wouldn't go that far.
I feel sorry for MSFT.
Really? You have a broken player and they have your money, but you feel bad for them?
Zune: The Brown Ring Of Death.
Would the text advert drive away contributors who are basically what Wikipedia is selling?
I'm not sure I understand this thinking. Why should I, as a potential contributor, turn away from Wikipedia because it carried advertising? Now I certainly have no interest in working for free so someone else can profit, but if the money went to a non-profit that did good things with it (such as keeping Wikipedia online), I don't see the conflict.
The writer couldn't be farther from truth. 98.3% of users are inactive because rest of the 1.7% users have formed a self-serving "community", and most people who are contributing in their spare time don't have the energy and will to fight their way inside this community.
I turned my back on Wikipedia after a page I worked to clean up was deleted for not being "noteworthy". It wasn't high art, but I personally found it more interesting than the individual pages for each Pokemon. To each his own, I guess, but the 15-year-old powertripper who deleted the page I help to craft also deleted any desire for me to support Wikipedia. I'll still fix the occasional typo or grammar problem, but I don't waste my time with the bigger stuff or even bother logging in to do it.
I can see a simple/cheap circuit that uses a single diode to simply chop off the negative voltage portion, resulting in lights that flicker at 60hz.
I'm pretty sure I saw a series of about 100 diodes doing exactly that.
I wonder if some viewers are more aware of the flicker than others.
That could be, or maybe it was just a particularly janky string of lights. I'm not particularly sensitive to flicker in most cases (although I still run CRT monitors at 85Hz) but this was just blatantly obvious.
Mixing light colors gives me headaches, literally.
The world outside your carefully-modulated basement must be hellish for you, then.
I'm only halfway joking. I can think of many mixed-light settings - perhaps more than of evenly-lit ones - and am pretty skeptical of your ailment. That would make you almost unable to function in any common environment.
Until they make a CFL that matches a normal incandescent I'm not switching.
Until they make a normal incandescent that matches a CFL, I'd never consider switching back.
We bought one of those "sun lamps" you used to see advertised, and I hated its weirdly artificial white light. One day after my wife had already left for work, I glanced toward our bedroom and saw the light from it still spilling out into the hallway. When I went in to turn it off, I realized I was seeing real sunlight coming in through the window. All jokes about geeks and the sun aside, I realized that the "weird" color is almost identical to real sunlight; it just seems out of place coming from a lamp at night.
Having made that connection, I just can't stand incandescent light anymore. Even nice bulbs are hideously yellowish. "Warm?" No. Try ugly. Florescent bulbs only look odd because you're not used to them, but there's no going back once adjust.
You are either buying CFLs from a completely incompetent manufacturer, or simply have a bizarre situation where reality is bending around you.
Or he's compulsive about turning off lights when he walks out of a room for two seconds. CFLs don't like to be switched many times, so they're great in a living room where you tend to turn them one once at the beginning of the evening but maybe not so much in a frequently-used bathroom.
Thanks for that. I didn't have the energy to run the numbers on the ridiculous transportation claim but I'm glad someone did. What's that about the Hindenburg and hydrogen burning, though? I'd heard different theories about how it started but didn't realize any of them were bordering on conspiracy.
Did you notice all the LED xmas lights this year?
I picked up a string at the local home store and took them to the test electrical socket to make sure they were OK ("fool me once..."). They lit up but had a terrible flicker, like they were being fed a lower-frequency AC. A worker was walking by and stopped to ask if I needed help:
Me: I want to try these LED lights, but they flicker really badly.
Worker: (looking at them closely) No, they're not flickering.
Me: Umm, sure they are.
Worker: No, they all do that. I could see why you'd say they're flickering, but that's just what all do.
Me: But they are flickering, like they're blinking really fast!
Worker: Well, they all look like they're flickering like that, but they're not.
Me: (setting them down and backing away slowly)
And that's why my tree is wrapped in 25,000 imported Italian twinkle lights and not geek-friendly LEDs.
BTW, I hope that didn't come across as snippy. When the kernel panicked, I was looking all around for a serial cable. Not finding one and not wanting to waste downtime looking harder, I just snapped a picture with my cellphone so I'd have the information later. So I meant what I said earlier, but didn't intend to sound like a smartass. :-)
You think I haven't?
First of all, if you want to raise money have toll roads.
Fine, as long as you're either not collecting them on interstate highways or not accepting federal highway funds. Nothing makes me despise a state quite as quickly as having to pay tolls on a highway I already paid for.
If something like this were implemented, trucking companies who happen to be based in Oregon would suddenly find themselves elsewhere, with their trucks registered as being owned in other states.
Why? Their taxes would be far lower. A friend's dad drives a truck and he told me he can get 5 MPG on level ground with a light load. At $0.012 per mile, he'd be coming out ahead as long as gas taxes are more than $0.06 a gallon, of which I am absolutely certain is true.
I would imagine they work pretty much the same way bans, embargoes, and tariffs work for all goods: exports and imports are declared by the sender and inspected at the border.
We (the US) have inspectors at every entry point into Iran? Remember, it's us trying to keep them from importing, not them trying to keep themselves from doing it.
Let's for a moment gloss over whether those restrictions are good ideas. Are they even possible? I mean, we're talking about computing hardware here, the kind of stuff you can buy anywhere in the world without identification. It's not like a ban on nuclear materials where there's a limited supply and you can watch the sources pretty closely. So if HP quits selling to Iran, what's to stop them from buying from Turkey or England or India or Japan or China, and how could we ever pretend to know or that we could prevent it?
Can you not dump the output to a serial console or even UDP?
If I had a serial console laying around, I certainly wouldn't have been taking pictures of the screen.
Why just use the fancy new technology called an odometer?
I'm a hypothetical Oregon resident with a big farm. I put 5,000 miles on a truck driving around on the farm, hauling hay, etc. Never once have I been on public property, but ever mile has been inside the state borders. How much do I pay?
The amount of damage done to a road by a passing vehicle is a geometric? exponential? function of the weight of the vehicle. For instance, say a road will fail if a 100,000 pound vehicle drives over it. In that case, a 120,000 pound truck would do much more damage than two 60,000 trucks. At the low end, you reach a point where no damage is done at all. It's not possible to ruin a modern highway with bicycles, for example.
So you're justified in taxing vehicles proportionally to their weight, since more weight means more damage, which means more expensive repairs. Conveniently enough, gas mileage is a useful proxy for vehicle weight: the heavier they are, the more gas tax they pay per mile.
I have no love for Priuses, but it's insane to tax them the same as someone in a semi truck. There are two possible explanations that don't involve Gov. Kulongoski being a stark moron:
Any Oregonians have insight on the matter?