This one always bothered me. For something to be 'official' there must be someone who officiates; ie. an official. So, when someone says "It's official: Apple is better than Linux!" I always wonder "from what office did the official in charge of determining what OS is the best dispatch this notice?
Widespread destruction of satellites would be politically speaking the equivalent of widespread use of nuclear weapons.... essentially setting your nation up to be taken out by the rest of the world immediately as a direct threat to the continuation of the species. It isn't so much that it could be done, but that it would be an incredibly stupid idea if it ever was done.
Tests are tests, and in that case China was merely thumping its chest saying it was one of the big boys that needed to be treated as a peer by the other nations. The loss of access to space and the loss of many spacecraft would all but halt almost every major economy in the world right now. Access to space and the exploitation of space is indeed that valuable.
I wasn't commenting on the official RFC paper defining HTTP, I was referring to the basic protocol which was used by HTTP. It wasn't anything new and in fact adopted many standard practices being used by a great many other file transfer protocols and software. This is one of the reasons why FTP servers could be directly accessed by most web browsers, because the transfer protocols were almost identical.
What has gone on is that HTTP has diverged from this base design and certainly has adapted and developed over the years to become something substantially different. My point is that it wasn't a revolutionary design but rather an evolutionary design with one small tweak after another over the years to add one new feature, then another and another until you have what we now know as HTTP. As such, this isn't really patentable either other than the concept of a hyperlinked GUI.... which also wasn't anything particularly new.
If you really want to get into the nitty gritty of very early hyperlink applications, I'd give PLATO more kudos along that front than even Hypercard, although I will agree that Hypercard was one of the early "mainstream" applications and made the hyperlink integral to the application.
There were also some early uses of hyperlinked applications done by the Xerox PARC team that were legitimate.... and done in the late 1970's/early 1980's. Of course the story of how Steve Jobs basically "stole" the concept of the GUI from the PARC team is well known in computer history.
IBM also played with the idea, but it was well after the concept was well established and implemented by others, nor did the IBM software really get any sort of traction in the marketplace. I think I had actually heard about "hyperlink" by IBM, but I have never used. Hypercard was installed on nearly every Macintosh computer by Apple, and could be found on almost every college campus as well as many high school campuses and in many homes. There is no way IBM ever had that kind of market penetration for "hyperlink" or whatever it was called.
100 kilowatts is roughly the power needed to run a small neighborhood and is something on the order of a municipal power system. They can and are usually operated by professional engineers and not your average "Joe sixpack" and already make up a surprisingly large amount of the existing power grid at least in terms of numbers if not actual power generated.
Yes, sometimes you do have incompetent folks running stuff like this and sometimes there is a lack of qualified people who can act as operators, but licensing of operators is already current law for stuff like this. My problem is with the huge mega plants that can and do cause multiple problems when they go... like Chernobyl. A much smaller plant operated by a neighbor whose first name is familiar to you is much less likely to blow up and kill your family.
I will give credit to Al Gore for helping to sponsor legislation that did help fund the early internet backbone. That at least deserves some sort of recognition. It was also his effort that put an e-mail server into the White House when he was elected Vice-President and even came up with the presidential e-mail address of president@whitehouse.gov. I don't know if it was him personally or one of his staffers, but he also was responsible for the "whitehouse.gov" domain to be registered. I think that counts for something, and in 1990 the internet was still very much a new thing that was just beginning to be used by politicians. Al Gore's predecessor, Dan Quayle, certainly didn't have an e-mail address until much later.
Much of this official adoption by the White House also legitimized the internet in a great many ways.... and it should be noted that Al Gore was also instrumental in getting the first web server started in the White House as one of the first federal web servers. That comparatively speaking these are much less grand than saying he was "the father of the internet", I do think some kudos are certainly earned on his part.
Then gopher would have been developed into something similar.
There were so many other potential software packages that were doing essentially the same thing that the web was doing that I'd have to agree with this statement. It should be noted that SGML was already being used when Tim Berners-Lee introduced the sub-set that is known as HTML. It was already an interenational standard, as was HTTP, which was mostly a re-worked variant of FTP and other similar file transfer protocols.
For myself, I would rather see a couple thousand 100 kilowatt generators/reactors than 10-20 large multi-gigawatt reactors. The problem with the mega reactors is that while they are generally safe, when you have major problems those problems are fatal and cause problems for multiple countries and millions of people. A much smaller reactor can be built to a standard design which will build up economies of scale in terms of its production, as well as help to build an operational history in terms of knowing what kinds of problems can happen based upon what has happened at other facilities. You don't get that kind of benefit from a monolithic central power plant which is essentially a unique installation and design.
I would also rather try to help clean up the mess from an accident caused by a 100 kilowatt power plant than a 50 gigawatt power plant, regardless of the fuel source. It also has the side benefit that you can have hundreds or thousands of "owner/operators" where no single person has a monopoly on the power being generated. That last point is why such approach is rarely taken, as electrical power is often converted into political power as well.
I can provide a horse that you can put fuel into that doesn't have any direct intrinsic cost, and as a side benefit they are self-replicating Von Neumann machines. None the less, pollution from horses was one of the first complaints that raised the specter of environmental quality in the first place. Just imagine what New York City was like when 100,000 horses went into Manhattan every day. Automobiles were a huge improvement in air quality alone.
There is a "Moore's Law" sort of thing happening with battery technology, but it isn't an 18 month-3 year cycle. It is more like battery capacity doubles every 10-15 years or so. It is still remarkable, but not nearly as steep as Moore's law has been for consumer electronics.
Keep in mind that some of the very first automobiles of any kind (like back when Henry Ford was still on the assembly line) were electric vehicles. The basic technology for electric vehicles is nearly a century old. There have been some improvements coming and I do think practical and affordable electric automobiles are much closer to reality than personal hovercraft, but it has been a long, long time coming. On the other hand, battery technology now commands the big bucks in terms of R&D research funding as even a modest improvement in terms of storage capacity can have a huge payoff at the moment.
Seriously though, anything orbital inherently has an absolutely whopping suborbital capability.
Not quite. Sure, you can buy a Delta IV for a half billion dollars to perform a sub-orbital mission.... but why spend so much money?
The point of hiring these particular companies is that they can send experiments above the Kármán line at a price that is reasonable and affordable. If you have an experiment that depends upon a microgravity environment in order to work, at the moment there are very limited options available to test the design. There are drop towers (literally, where you get a box and drop it to the ground for a couple of seconds), parabolic flights on jets, and sounding rockets. All of these approaches are currently being used for testing prior to an orbital launch of a spacecraft, but sub-orbital spacecraft like is being offered in this contract adds an additional option and the ability to test something for a longer period of time in a microgravity environment prior to sending it into orbit.
Something else also being offered here is the ability to have these experiments operated by either researchers or professional astronauts during the flight itself... something that currently is unavailable without these new "space tourism" flights being available. If you are going to spend a billion dollars on some experiment which is going to Mars or Saturn, spending $200k for a sub-orbital flight is comparatively a trivial cost and something that can easily be justified. You can also get a funding grant for a research proposal on that size of a budget fairly easily, where it is much harder to justify spending several million dollars for something similar that makes it into orbit.
This isn't to say that the big boosters will be ignored, as they certainly are going to be used, but what was announced here on the original post was the ability to get things to happen with these smaller vehicles that are much cheaper to operate. The $10 million is basically a pot of money which is going to be available for researchers to explicitly develop projects that will work in the sub-orbital domain and provide a funding pool which can be used to help pay for such projects. If you have a university physics laboratory and want to fund a $300k microgravity experiment proposal, this announcement can help pay for the trip which will put the experiment into space. There are things to be learned in this environment that we simply don't know yet, in spite of the thousands of launches which have happened already.
An extra side benefit of all of this is that many of these sub-orbital vehicles like Spaceship Two are also going to have regularly scheduled trips into space, where it may be possible to conduct an experiment with a very small window of opportunity. The larger rockets usually have to be scheduled years in advance where the actual launch could be delayed by several months or more depending on issues that come up during the launch preparation process. These sub-orbital vehicles can launch stuff where the window of opportunity to make a measurement is only a few minutes long or only known a day in advance. The big rockets really can't be used in that same capacity.
I assume that the e-mail address is one you got through other means, as normally the e-mail addresses are not public information, at least from the Wikipedia page. Wikipedia-l is another story, which is where I presume you got the information.
Yes, some users have some very crazy "usernames".... which is something you should expect with an on-line community. Before you get critical of this particular arbitrator's name, have you seen what he has done on Wikipedia and why he was elected by his peers for the arbitrator position? Do you have a specific beef against him or are you simply complaining because you felt he ruled in some manner contrary to how you wanted him to rule on a particular issue you sent before the ArbCom? He has a few arrows in his back because he has waded into a few arguments, but who on Wikipedia who has actually done something hasn't?
I really don't see the problem here unless you give something more substantial.
It would be good for the rest of the world to remember what happened in Germany when Germany had a massive debt they felt they couldn't repay. And you thought the current military misadventures were bad?
I'm not really saying anything specific or advocating any sort of political philosophy with this sentiment, I'm just saying that if you stick to the historical precedent, it doesn't look pretty no matter what choices might be made here and this is going to have a global impact no matter what is done.
Again, note who made the change, and also note that he did not achieve consensus on this edit, but simply made a policy change. If that isn't wheel warring, I don't know what else I can call it. This edit was reverted by the community too! Mind you, check out this particular user's list of contributions on the site. Not exactly a major player in the community either. And no, he didn't "own" the servers as the WMF had long since taken control of those pieces of hardware.
I'm just saying that in hindsight action were taken which drove substantial numbers of people from at least this sister project, and I can point out similar kinds of anti-new user policies which drove people from Wikipedia under the presumption that the new users would continue to come and that instead we had to hold back the tide to keep them from overrunning the place. Now they simply stopped coming altogether. It was also during this particular episode that if you look back at inflection points in terms of the growth of new users, that the number of new users coming into the projects pretty much stopped growing. Wikipedia was trying to become "more professional" so it lost the initial spark of energy which kept it growing.
I could point to a real wheel war I got into with none other than Brion Vibber, but that goes beyond the scope of what I'm talking about here. I did get kind of sick of the whole thing and there were other situations I got involved with too involving other "admins" that kept reverting stuff I was involved with by imposing page blocks on content I wanted the community to edit, reverting blocks, blocking users that I unblocked, and other really horrible practices. It opens old wounds for me, so I try not to go searching for it, but the stuff is there to look at and in the project archives.
Why do you think most millionaires don't spend all day doing nothing. Sure, they may have more leisure time than the average person, but most of them find a multitude of other things to do.
Almost every financially wealthy person (unless they inherited the money or won the lottery) I have ever met usually is insanely driven and works incredibly long hours... usually to the exclusion of other social pursuits. They may show up to campaign fundraisers or a social cocktail party, but most of the time they are usually "working" even at those events... building contacts, negotiating deals, or doing something that will in the long run earn money for them and their companies.
This isn't to say that somebody working 5 jobs and working 100+ hours per week is going to be wealthy, but those who are wealthy certainly don't sit around doing nothing.
For myself, being unemployed was perhaps the worst experience I have had precisely because I was spinning my wheels doing nothing. At least doing something like writing on Wikipedia gave me something to do when I was looking for a job, but it isn't the same thing. Most people who participate on Wikipedia do it on a part-time volunteer basis.... and when I see somebody over doing the "admin" work on Wikipedia or elsewhere I usually advise them to scale it back and not let it wrap up their lives.
There is a group of people, including admins, on Wikipedia that insist upon the idea that fewer articles are better. It goes on the mistaken notion that somehow if there are fewer articles, those people coming by to edit Wikipedia will work on those fewer articles to make them better instead of "wasting" their time on frivolous junk like articles on Jar-Jar Binks or other Star Wars characters.
Much of the reason these other "wikis" exist is in part because they have been explicitly driven out of Wikipedia by these "deletionists" who insist that the fancruft articles are bad for a "true encyclopedia".
The problem I've had with editing is that when you do get to a dispute over an edit there is no group of normal people to arbitrate.
That isn't quite true. There is an Arbitration Committee that is heavily vetted before anybody gets onto that body and is technically elected by the Wikipedia user community which is supposed to deal with that issue. That sometimes new contributors are unaware of the Arbitrators may be true, and there are usually other ways to deal with editorial disputes that must be tried first before an arbitrator gets involved.
Most wikis usually have a public discussion forum where you can also raise the issue if you think something is happening that you believe to be unfair or unreasonable, including editing disputes. Sometimes the folks on that forum can be jerks and tell you to buzz off with such petty concerns, but there are usually a few reasonable people who lurk on those forums which will help you out as well. If such help is offered, take it.
For myself, I think the paid employees tend to screw things up totally, the worst of them being Jimmy Wales himself. That the arbitration board should be monitored in their arguments may be true, but I have rarely if ever seen a serious problem that wasn't really resolved to the best needs of the community through the Arbitration Committee. They have and do "bitch slap" admins that overstep their authority and have the power to "de-admin" somebody who is abusing their authority. The "ArbCom" work for the most part, so much so that the Wikimedia Board of Trustees simply refuses to get involved in overturning their decisions. For non-English Wikipedias, it does become a larger problem as such an ArbCom does not exist for those other language projects. Various proposals have been formed to make an appellate "meta ArbCom" to handle those rare cases where the ArbCom doesn't seem to work out.
Professional staff is the last thing that Wikipedia really needs, and I think there are too many working for Wikimedia as it is.
Another huge problem is that admins rarely get punished for breaking the rules, certainly compared to "ordinary editors" and especially brand-new editors.
I've called some admins on the carpet for that kind of foolish behavior.... usually getting them to back down because I showed myself as somebody with a clue. Still, it takes some wikilawyering to put these kind of admins in their place when they start to forget policies like "All editors are equal" and other similar policies.
The problem here are those who feel that Wikipedia being snowed under by "cruft" articles like a synopsis of each episode of Star Trek or separate articles for each monster in World of Warcraft sort of miss the point of those kind of articles: Those articles help provide the "training" and experience for new users to expand into something more serious like John Robert or Quantum mechanics.
Wholesale deletion of the cruft articles drives entire communities away from Wikipedia, which in turn fractures the community and makes Wikipedia less due to the separation of those communities. A similar thing happened on Wikibooks, where most of the game walk through books were deleted on a wholesale basis, along with the "Jokebook" that worked as a proving ground for many new contributors. I still claim that "cleanup" of Wikibooks killed the project and similar things also happened on Wikipedia and the other sister projects.
I think the breaking point came when new sister projects essentially stopped being developed. I spoke up as bluntly as I could put it when the New Project Policy page on the Wikimedia Meta project was declared an obsolete historical page. Mind you, that page has not been made historical because a new policy was developed to replace it, but rather because no new Wikimedia projects are being developed.
Essentially, the Wikimedia Foundation killed the leavening yeast that helped to cause the projects to grow along with the people who had the creative energies to make things happen. When you do that, the project dies. Those people move onto other things when that happens, and indeed they have. You now have Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and many other "social network" sites that didn't exist when Wikipedia was starting out. The fact that those in charge really don't care that the spark of energy which built Wikipedia in the first place is gone and that they killed that spark speaks volumes about why Wikipedia is losing contributors and participants.
Jimbo didn't help by essentially killing Wikibooks and Wikiversity either, but that is another completely different story even though it is a variation on the theme here. You don't drive away those who have the creative spark, particularly from volunteer organizations. You can and must treat volunteers differently.
I stopped doing it after all my changes kept being reverted for various stupid reasons. If they don't want people contributing, maybe they should keep some of the content that is actually submitted.
I think this goes back to the ethos of those who are working on Wikipedia and how they view contributions.
BTW, this is an excellent comment and IMHO shows precisely why Wikipedia is losing contributors. If you could care less about new contributors and how they are being treated, those new contributors will care less about you as well. Far too much on Wikipedia is now automated or being run by a bunch of folks who really don't want to be friendly to somebody not familiar with Wikipedia policies. They may feel overwhelmed with trolls or facing other problems, and sometimes you eventually think that everybody is a troll which is a new contributor.
The spirit of cooperation and willingness to accept new ideas certainly is lost on Wikipedia now. I remember when contributors who had a good idea and wanted to do even very radical overhauls of the site were encouraged to do so. Even things such as changing out the entire engine running the site were at least encouraged to happen as an experimental project to see if you could make a better one. Such radical moves are not simply given "let's see what you might come up with that could be better" but they aren't even considered any more or even be allowed to be raised.
As much as I would like to believe this, admins and and do "throw their weight around" and sometimes revert edits that otherwise would not normally be acceptable out of "ordinary editors". I got in one particularly nasty edit war with another admin that ended up going into the wheel warring category, and I simply backed off and essentially quit even participating in the project as a result.
Oh wait, somebody wants to know why participation has dropped again?
As a former administrator who used (and still uses) his real name on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, I don't think it is necessarily a terrible idea. I was harassed to a limited extent and there was some concern about trolls causing problems for my family, but on the whole it wasn't nearly as bad as you claim here. Most trolls are lazy, which is why admin tools work at all in the first place.
The worst cases are those folks who know project policies and can wikilawyer their way into doing whatever they want to do with impunity. Many of those are admins already and thus make it even harder to stop them.
In general, I have seen police officers on the whole seem to be getting more professional in their behavior and generally respecting the rights of the citizens for whom they serve. One of the problems that police officers face is that they deal with the scum of society on a daily basis, and sometimes tend to forget that ordinary people living ordinary lives generally are not a part of that scum. If nearly everybody you deal with has been breaking laws, you start to think that everybody is a criminal.
Still, training and education standards for police officers has been gradually improving, where now for many departments it takes a college degree together with "advanced training" specific to law enforcement of some kind in order to get hired onto a typical police department. This isn't true everywhere, but for most of the departments I've seen in my area this is most certainly the case. You will certainly never get promoted to sergeant or detective if you lack that degree. Somebody who has put that kind of commitment into a career is not going to throw it away being a bully or doing something really stupid. Also, my hope is that raising the standards like this is also going to act as a screen to weed out the "bad cops" who abuse the rights of others.
I've had to deal with abuse police officers, so I'm not saying they are perfect or that they are always right. About 80% of the time, however, simply contacting the supervisor for the officer is enough to pull the officer into line and stop the abuse and remind the officer that they must also follow the law as it applies to their duties and scope of authority. I would dare say that unfortunately most abuse by officers still doesn't get reported as most citizens simply take it as a way of life thinking they can't fight city hall.
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This one always bothered me. For something to be 'official' there must be someone who officiates; ie. an official. So, when someone says "It's official: Apple is better than Linux!" I always wonder "from what office did the official in charge of determining what OS is the best dispatch this notice?
Perhaps the "official" was Al Gore?
(*and ducks for cover*)
Widespread destruction of satellites would be politically speaking the equivalent of widespread use of nuclear weapons.... essentially setting your nation up to be taken out by the rest of the world immediately as a direct threat to the continuation of the species. It isn't so much that it could be done, but that it would be an incredibly stupid idea if it ever was done.
Tests are tests, and in that case China was merely thumping its chest saying it was one of the big boys that needed to be treated as a peer by the other nations. The loss of access to space and the loss of many spacecraft would all but halt almost every major economy in the world right now. Access to space and the exploitation of space is indeed that valuable.
I wasn't commenting on the official RFC paper defining HTTP, I was referring to the basic protocol which was used by HTTP. It wasn't anything new and in fact adopted many standard practices being used by a great many other file transfer protocols and software. This is one of the reasons why FTP servers could be directly accessed by most web browsers, because the transfer protocols were almost identical.
What has gone on is that HTTP has diverged from this base design and certainly has adapted and developed over the years to become something substantially different. My point is that it wasn't a revolutionary design but rather an evolutionary design with one small tweak after another over the years to add one new feature, then another and another until you have what we now know as HTTP. As such, this isn't really patentable either other than the concept of a hyperlinked GUI.... which also wasn't anything particularly new.
If you really want to get into the nitty gritty of very early hyperlink applications, I'd give PLATO more kudos along that front than even Hypercard, although I will agree that Hypercard was one of the early "mainstream" applications and made the hyperlink integral to the application.
There were also some early uses of hyperlinked applications done by the Xerox PARC team that were legitimate.... and done in the late 1970's/early 1980's. Of course the story of how Steve Jobs basically "stole" the concept of the GUI from the PARC team is well known in computer history.
IBM also played with the idea, but it was well after the concept was well established and implemented by others, nor did the IBM software really get any sort of traction in the marketplace. I think I had actually heard about "hyperlink" by IBM, but I have never used. Hypercard was installed on nearly every Macintosh computer by Apple, and could be found on almost every college campus as well as many high school campuses and in many homes. There is no way IBM ever had that kind of market penetration for "hyperlink" or whatever it was called.
100 kilowatts is roughly the power needed to run a small neighborhood and is something on the order of a municipal power system. They can and are usually operated by professional engineers and not your average "Joe sixpack" and already make up a surprisingly large amount of the existing power grid at least in terms of numbers if not actual power generated.
Yes, sometimes you do have incompetent folks running stuff like this and sometimes there is a lack of qualified people who can act as operators, but licensing of operators is already current law for stuff like this. My problem is with the huge mega plants that can and do cause multiple problems when they go... like Chernobyl. A much smaller plant operated by a neighbor whose first name is familiar to you is much less likely to blow up and kill your family.
I will give credit to Al Gore for helping to sponsor legislation that did help fund the early internet backbone. That at least deserves some sort of recognition. It was also his effort that put an e-mail server into the White House when he was elected Vice-President and even came up with the presidential e-mail address of president@whitehouse.gov. I don't know if it was him personally or one of his staffers, but he also was responsible for the "whitehouse.gov" domain to be registered. I think that counts for something, and in 1990 the internet was still very much a new thing that was just beginning to be used by politicians. Al Gore's predecessor, Dan Quayle, certainly didn't have an e-mail address until much later.
Much of this official adoption by the White House also legitimized the internet in a great many ways.... and it should be noted that Al Gore was also instrumental in getting the first web server started in the White House as one of the first federal web servers. That comparatively speaking these are much less grand than saying he was "the father of the internet", I do think some kudos are certainly earned on his part.
Yes, but not on the Internet .
Define internet please.
HyperCard was done on AppleTalk..... close enough that I don't think you can make a legal, mathematical, or rational distinction between the two.
Then gopher would have been developed into something similar.
There were so many other potential software packages that were doing essentially the same thing that the web was doing that I'd have to agree with this statement. It should be noted that SGML was already being used when Tim Berners-Lee introduced the sub-set that is known as HTML. It was already an interenational standard, as was HTTP, which was mostly a re-worked variant of FTP and other similar file transfer protocols.
For myself, I would rather see a couple thousand 100 kilowatt generators/reactors than 10-20 large multi-gigawatt reactors. The problem with the mega reactors is that while they are generally safe, when you have major problems those problems are fatal and cause problems for multiple countries and millions of people. A much smaller reactor can be built to a standard design which will build up economies of scale in terms of its production, as well as help to build an operational history in terms of knowing what kinds of problems can happen based upon what has happened at other facilities. You don't get that kind of benefit from a monolithic central power plant which is essentially a unique installation and design.
I would also rather try to help clean up the mess from an accident caused by a 100 kilowatt power plant than a 50 gigawatt power plant, regardless of the fuel source. It also has the side benefit that you can have hundreds or thousands of "owner/operators" where no single person has a monopoly on the power being generated. That last point is why such approach is rarely taken, as electrical power is often converted into political power as well.
I can provide a horse that you can put fuel into that doesn't have any direct intrinsic cost, and as a side benefit they are self-replicating Von Neumann machines. None the less, pollution from horses was one of the first complaints that raised the specter of environmental quality in the first place. Just imagine what New York City was like when 100,000 horses went into Manhattan every day. Automobiles were a huge improvement in air quality alone.
There is a "Moore's Law" sort of thing happening with battery technology, but it isn't an 18 month-3 year cycle. It is more like battery capacity doubles every 10-15 years or so. It is still remarkable, but not nearly as steep as Moore's law has been for consumer electronics.
Keep in mind that some of the very first automobiles of any kind (like back when Henry Ford was still on the assembly line) were electric vehicles. The basic technology for electric vehicles is nearly a century old. There have been some improvements coming and I do think practical and affordable electric automobiles are much closer to reality than personal hovercraft, but it has been a long, long time coming. On the other hand, battery technology now commands the big bucks in terms of R&D research funding as even a modest improvement in terms of storage capacity can have a huge payoff at the moment.
Seriously though, anything orbital inherently has an absolutely whopping suborbital capability.
Not quite. Sure, you can buy a Delta IV for a half billion dollars to perform a sub-orbital mission.... but why spend so much money?
The point of hiring these particular companies is that they can send experiments above the Kármán line at a price that is reasonable and affordable. If you have an experiment that depends upon a microgravity environment in order to work, at the moment there are very limited options available to test the design. There are drop towers (literally, where you get a box and drop it to the ground for a couple of seconds), parabolic flights on jets, and sounding rockets. All of these approaches are currently being used for testing prior to an orbital launch of a spacecraft, but sub-orbital spacecraft like is being offered in this contract adds an additional option and the ability to test something for a longer period of time in a microgravity environment prior to sending it into orbit.
Something else also being offered here is the ability to have these experiments operated by either researchers or professional astronauts during the flight itself... something that currently is unavailable without these new "space tourism" flights being available. If you are going to spend a billion dollars on some experiment which is going to Mars or Saturn, spending $200k for a sub-orbital flight is comparatively a trivial cost and something that can easily be justified. You can also get a funding grant for a research proposal on that size of a budget fairly easily, where it is much harder to justify spending several million dollars for something similar that makes it into orbit.
This isn't to say that the big boosters will be ignored, as they certainly are going to be used, but what was announced here on the original post was the ability to get things to happen with these smaller vehicles that are much cheaper to operate. The $10 million is basically a pot of money which is going to be available for researchers to explicitly develop projects that will work in the sub-orbital domain and provide a funding pool which can be used to help pay for such projects. If you have a university physics laboratory and want to fund a $300k microgravity experiment proposal, this announcement can help pay for the trip which will put the experiment into space. There are things to be learned in this environment that we simply don't know yet, in spite of the thousands of launches which have happened already.
An extra side benefit of all of this is that many of these sub-orbital vehicles like Spaceship Two are also going to have regularly scheduled trips into space, where it may be possible to conduct an experiment with a very small window of opportunity. The larger rockets usually have to be scheduled years in advance where the actual launch could be delayed by several months or more depending on issues that come up during the launch preparation process. These sub-orbital vehicles can launch stuff where the window of opportunity to make a measurement is only a few minutes long or only known a day in advance. The big rockets really can't be used in that same capacity.
I assume that the e-mail address is one you got through other means, as normally the e-mail addresses are not public information, at least from the Wikipedia page. Wikipedia-l is another story, which is where I presume you got the information.
Yes, some users have some very crazy "usernames".... which is something you should expect with an on-line community. Before you get critical of this particular arbitrator's name, have you seen what he has done on Wikipedia and why he was elected by his peers for the arbitrator position? Do you have a specific beef against him or are you simply complaining because you felt he ruled in some manner contrary to how you wanted him to rule on a particular issue you sent before the ArbCom? He has a few arrows in his back because he has waded into a few arguments, but who on Wikipedia who has actually done something hasn't?
I really don't see the problem here unless you give something more substantial.
It would be good for the rest of the world to remember what happened in Germany when Germany had a massive debt they felt they couldn't repay. And you thought the current military misadventures were bad?
I'm not really saying anything specific or advocating any sort of political philosophy with this sentiment, I'm just saying that if you stick to the historical precedent, it doesn't look pretty no matter what choices might be made here and this is going to have a global impact no matter what is done.
For an interesting discussion that eventually led to my leaving Wikibooks as a regular contributor, I'd point out this following discussion:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Reading_room/Archives/2006/May#Gaming_manual_as_a_textbook
Mind you, the wheel warring here was absolutely atrocious.... and note who started the whole thing.
Also, look at this edit:
http://en.wikibooks.org/w/index.php?title=Wikibooks%3AWhat_is_Wikibooks&action=historysubmit&diff=281147&oldid=265973
Again, note who made the change, and also note that he did not achieve consensus on this edit, but simply made a policy change. If that isn't wheel warring, I don't know what else I can call it. This edit was reverted by the community too! Mind you, check out this particular user's list of contributions on the site. Not exactly a major player in the community either. And no, he didn't "own" the servers as the WMF had long since taken control of those pieces of hardware.
I'm just saying that in hindsight action were taken which drove substantial numbers of people from at least this sister project, and I can point out similar kinds of anti-new user policies which drove people from Wikipedia under the presumption that the new users would continue to come and that instead we had to hold back the tide to keep them from overrunning the place. Now they simply stopped coming altogether. It was also during this particular episode that if you look back at inflection points in terms of the growth of new users, that the number of new users coming into the projects pretty much stopped growing. Wikipedia was trying to become "more professional" so it lost the initial spark of energy which kept it growing.
I could point to a real wheel war I got into with none other than Brion Vibber, but that goes beyond the scope of what I'm talking about here. I did get kind of sick of the whole thing and there were other situations I got involved with too involving other "admins" that kept reverting stuff I was involved with by imposing page blocks on content I wanted the community to edit, reverting blocks, blocking users that I unblocked, and other really horrible practices. It opens old wounds for me, so I try not to go searching for it, but the stuff is there to look at and in the project archives.
Why do you think most millionaires don't spend all day doing nothing. Sure, they may have more leisure time than the average person, but most of them find a multitude of other things to do.
Almost every financially wealthy person (unless they inherited the money or won the lottery) I have ever met usually is insanely driven and works incredibly long hours... usually to the exclusion of other social pursuits. They may show up to campaign fundraisers or a social cocktail party, but most of the time they are usually "working" even at those events... building contacts, negotiating deals, or doing something that will in the long run earn money for them and their companies.
This isn't to say that somebody working 5 jobs and working 100+ hours per week is going to be wealthy, but those who are wealthy certainly don't sit around doing nothing.
For myself, being unemployed was perhaps the worst experience I have had precisely because I was spinning my wheels doing nothing. At least doing something like writing on Wikipedia gave me something to do when I was looking for a job, but it isn't the same thing. Most people who participate on Wikipedia do it on a part-time volunteer basis.... and when I see somebody over doing the "admin" work on Wikipedia or elsewhere I usually advise them to scale it back and not let it wrap up their lives.
There is a group of people, including admins, on Wikipedia that insist upon the idea that fewer articles are better. It goes on the mistaken notion that somehow if there are fewer articles, those people coming by to edit Wikipedia will work on those fewer articles to make them better instead of "wasting" their time on frivolous junk like articles on Jar-Jar Binks or other Star Wars characters.
Much of the reason these other "wikis" exist is in part because they have been explicitly driven out of Wikipedia by these "deletionists" who insist that the fancruft articles are bad for a "true encyclopedia".
The problem I've had with editing is that when you do get to a dispute over an edit there is no group of normal people to arbitrate.
That isn't quite true. There is an Arbitration Committee that is heavily vetted before anybody gets onto that body and is technically elected by the Wikipedia user community which is supposed to deal with that issue. That sometimes new contributors are unaware of the Arbitrators may be true, and there are usually other ways to deal with editorial disputes that must be tried first before an arbitrator gets involved.
Most wikis usually have a public discussion forum where you can also raise the issue if you think something is happening that you believe to be unfair or unreasonable, including editing disputes. Sometimes the folks on that forum can be jerks and tell you to buzz off with such petty concerns, but there are usually a few reasonable people who lurk on those forums which will help you out as well. If such help is offered, take it.
For myself, I think the paid employees tend to screw things up totally, the worst of them being Jimmy Wales himself. That the arbitration board should be monitored in their arguments may be true, but I have rarely if ever seen a serious problem that wasn't really resolved to the best needs of the community through the Arbitration Committee. They have and do "bitch slap" admins that overstep their authority and have the power to "de-admin" somebody who is abusing their authority. The "ArbCom" work for the most part, so much so that the Wikimedia Board of Trustees simply refuses to get involved in overturning their decisions. For non-English Wikipedias, it does become a larger problem as such an ArbCom does not exist for those other language projects. Various proposals have been formed to make an appellate "meta ArbCom" to handle those rare cases where the ArbCom doesn't seem to work out.
Professional staff is the last thing that Wikipedia really needs, and I think there are too many working for Wikimedia as it is.
Another huge problem is that admins rarely get punished for breaking the rules, certainly compared to "ordinary editors" and especially brand-new editors.
I've called some admins on the carpet for that kind of foolish behavior.... usually getting them to back down because I showed myself as somebody with a clue. Still, it takes some wikilawyering to put these kind of admins in their place when they start to forget policies like "All editors are equal" and other similar policies.
The problem here are those who feel that Wikipedia being snowed under by "cruft" articles like a synopsis of each episode of Star Trek or separate articles for each monster in World of Warcraft sort of miss the point of those kind of articles: Those articles help provide the "training" and experience for new users to expand into something more serious like John Robert or Quantum mechanics.
Wholesale deletion of the cruft articles drives entire communities away from Wikipedia, which in turn fractures the community and makes Wikipedia less due to the separation of those communities. A similar thing happened on Wikibooks, where most of the game walk through books were deleted on a wholesale basis, along with the "Jokebook" that worked as a proving ground for many new contributors. I still claim that "cleanup" of Wikibooks killed the project and similar things also happened on Wikipedia and the other sister projects.
I think the breaking point came when new sister projects essentially stopped being developed. I spoke up as bluntly as I could put it when the New Project Policy page on the Wikimedia Meta project was declared an obsolete historical page. Mind you, that page has not been made historical because a new policy was developed to replace it, but rather because no new Wikimedia projects are being developed.
Essentially, the Wikimedia Foundation killed the leavening yeast that helped to cause the projects to grow along with the people who had the creative energies to make things happen. When you do that, the project dies. Those people move onto other things when that happens, and indeed they have. You now have Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and many other "social network" sites that didn't exist when Wikipedia was starting out. The fact that those in charge really don't care that the spark of energy which built Wikipedia in the first place is gone and that they killed that spark speaks volumes about why Wikipedia is losing contributors and participants.
Jimbo didn't help by essentially killing Wikibooks and Wikiversity either, but that is another completely different story even though it is a variation on the theme here. You don't drive away those who have the creative spark, particularly from volunteer organizations. You can and must treat volunteers differently.
I stopped doing it after all my changes kept being reverted for various stupid reasons. If they don't want people contributing, maybe they should keep some of the content that is actually submitted.
I think this goes back to the ethos of those who are working on Wikipedia and how they view contributions.
BTW, this is an excellent comment and IMHO shows precisely why Wikipedia is losing contributors. If you could care less about new contributors and how they are being treated, those new contributors will care less about you as well. Far too much on Wikipedia is now automated or being run by a bunch of folks who really don't want to be friendly to somebody not familiar with Wikipedia policies. They may feel overwhelmed with trolls or facing other problems, and sometimes you eventually think that everybody is a troll which is a new contributor.
The spirit of cooperation and willingness to accept new ideas certainly is lost on Wikipedia now. I remember when contributors who had a good idea and wanted to do even very radical overhauls of the site were encouraged to do so. Even things such as changing out the entire engine running the site were at least encouraged to happen as an experimental project to see if you could make a better one. Such radical moves are not simply given "let's see what you might come up with that could be better" but they aren't even considered any more or even be allowed to be raised.
As much as I would like to believe this, admins and and do "throw their weight around" and sometimes revert edits that otherwise would not normally be acceptable out of "ordinary editors". I got in one particularly nasty edit war with another admin that ended up going into the wheel warring category, and I simply backed off and essentially quit even participating in the project as a result.
Oh wait, somebody wants to know why participation has dropped again?
As a former administrator who used (and still uses) his real name on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, I don't think it is necessarily a terrible idea. I was harassed to a limited extent and there was some concern about trolls causing problems for my family, but on the whole it wasn't nearly as bad as you claim here. Most trolls are lazy, which is why admin tools work at all in the first place.
The worst cases are those folks who know project policies and can wikilawyer their way into doing whatever they want to do with impunity. Many of those are admins already and thus make it even harder to stop them.
In general, I have seen police officers on the whole seem to be getting more professional in their behavior and generally respecting the rights of the citizens for whom they serve. One of the problems that police officers face is that they deal with the scum of society on a daily basis, and sometimes tend to forget that ordinary people living ordinary lives generally are not a part of that scum. If nearly everybody you deal with has been breaking laws, you start to think that everybody is a criminal.
Still, training and education standards for police officers has been gradually improving, where now for many departments it takes a college degree together with "advanced training" specific to law enforcement of some kind in order to get hired onto a typical police department. This isn't true everywhere, but for most of the departments I've seen in my area this is most certainly the case. You will certainly never get promoted to sergeant or detective if you lack that degree. Somebody who has put that kind of commitment into a career is not going to throw it away being a bully or doing something really stupid. Also, my hope is that raising the standards like this is also going to act as a screen to weed out the "bad cops" who abuse the rights of others.
I've had to deal with abuse police officers, so I'm not saying they are perfect or that they are always right. About 80% of the time, however, simply contacting the supervisor for the officer is enough to pull the officer into line and stop the abuse and remind the officer that they must also follow the law as it applies to their duties and scope of authority. I would dare say that unfortunately most abuse by officers still doesn't get reported as most citizens simply take it as a way of life thinking they can't fight city hall.