That sounds like a good plan to me. Converting the country to a totalitarian state sounds like a nice idea.
1. The US will apologize to the world for our "interference" in their affairs, past &present. You know, Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, Noriega, Milosovich and the rest of those 'good ole boys.' We will never "interfere" again.
That's what victims have been asking for. That should help a lot...
2. We will withdraw our troops from all over the world, starting with Germany, South Korea and the Philippines. They don't want us there. We would station troops at our borders. No more sneaking through holes in the fence.
Yep... not many people (except the elites) in those countries want foreign troops...
3. All illegal aliens have 90 days to get their affairs together and leave. We'll give them a free trip home. After 90
days the remainder will be gathered up and deported immediately, regardless of who or where they are. France would welcome them.
Kind of cruel but it's your country... totalitarians are known to do that sort of thing...
4. All future visitors will be thoroughly checked and limited to 90 days unless given a special permit. No one from a
terrorist nation would be allowed in. If you don't like it there, change it yourself and don't hide here. Asylum would never be available to anyone. We don't need any more cab drivers or 7-11 cashiers.
Sounds cool... who needs tourism anyway? I'm not too sure if capitalists are going to take it kindly to getting rid of low wage workers but that's your problem...
5. No "students" over age 21. The older ones are the bombers. If they don't attend classes, they get an "F" and it's
back home baby.
Sure... while you are at it, why even have foreign students at all? Doesn't your fascist ideology call for getting rid of all foreigners since they are a threat to the nation?
6. The US will make a strong effort to become self-sufficient energy wise. This will include developing non-polluting
sources of energy but will require a temporary drilling of oil in the Alaskan wilderness. The friggin' caribou will have to cope for a while.
You need to check with your leaders (those that are smarter than you) because you have no idea what you are talking about! Do you think USA is in the Middle East because they NEED the oil for their own use? Of course not! Less than 15% of oil comes from the Middle East. USA is there because of PROFITS. It is hard to turn down free money (which is what oil wells are). Aliens could teleport the Middle East to another galaxy and USA will be least impacted of all. USA hardly NEEDs the oil from the Middle East. Of course, getting the oil companies to give up their profits is tougher. I imagine this will your toughest issue. Implementing fascism is easy but getting the capitalists to stay away from money is not.
7. Offer Saudi Arabia and other oil producing countries $10 a barrel for their oil. If they don't like it, we go some
place else. They can go somewhere else to sell their production. (About a week of the wells filling up the storage sites would be enough.)
Continuing with the previous point, you have no idea what you are talking about. Oil consumption is expected to INCREASE over the decades--not decrease. Most of the oil from the middle east does NOT go to USA--it goes to Japan and Europe! The Middle Eastern countries will be selling oil at the same rate for the most part (except now they won't get the 15% sales from USA).
8. If there is a famine or other natural catastrophe in the world, we will not "interfere." They can pray to Allah or
whomever, for seeds, rain, cement or whatever they need. Besides most of what we give them is stolen or given to the army. The people who need it most get very little, if anything.
That's cool... It was Ayn Rand, likely your hero, who said that altruism is bad and greed is good. You can
Employers say that people will be paid more but watch everyone end up being paid LESS for not having the license, while those that get the qualification will get the same salaries as now.
How much do you want to bet that salaries will remain the same while employers only hire those that are licensed? Those that are not licensed will probably get paid less (becoming an underclass). There is nothing better to a capitalist than shifting risks to the worker (software developers are now liable) while not wanting to pay for it themselves.
I haven't been ripping anything but I see your point. I guess multiple CPUs would help in that case... as far as games are concerned, most games cannot use multiple CPUs. There are some exceptions (I think Quake always supported multiple CPUs; probably other FPS games too, but things like RPG, RTS, action RPG, TBS don't really use multiple CPUs).
If games started using multiple CPUs I can them becoming popular... but until then, I don't see it working (except if you are ripping something as you mentioned)...
Yes there are exceptions. The celeron 366 is probably the BEST EVER for overclocking (someone correct me if I'm wrong--I'm not an overclocker:) ). But in general your accesories cost more.
Even with your celeron setup, you probably had to upgrade to higher speed memory and the video card too. 100Mhz memory was common and your setup is great. But if you were trying to overclock a 100MHz frontside bus to something higher (this is what people were doing with the Pentium III (my PC is a pentium III) ), you had to make sure that your memory is rated (133Mhz memory was common so no problem there), and your video card would be ok (this is not ok for all cards), as well as other components on the board (like PCI devices and stuff).
In any case, that's a great setup you had. Only deficiency would be the 2 CPUs which aren't generally used by home users (games don't support multiple CPUs:( ).
What does this mean: Before we got down to our actual record attempt, we checked the loading capacity of the materials and individual components. To do this, we placed the entire test construction in a polystyrene shell and installed it. ( source)
I don't get the part about testing the loading capacity. What is that? And how do you test it by placing in in polystyrene?
I think heat generated is non-linear with processor speed. So, overclocking a faster processor should be harder than a slower one. I'm not really sure though... I may be overlooking something...
What you are saying is not possible without switching to some new technology. The higher the clock speed, the more the heat. You just cannot get around that. The gates are switching faster and generate more heat.
So to answer your question, you can never reduce heat without lowering the frequency. Maybe that's what you want. But if you reduce the heat, all that will do is to cut costs (lower cooling costs, lower energy costs, etc). Your performance won't improve.
So, unless the heat loss costs are very high (not the case for consumer PCs), no one is going to try lowering the heat dissipation UNLESS that results in performance increase (this is possible as this experiment shows i.e. generating less heat means that you can increase the clock frequency).
For a home user, what do they run that really requires multitasking? What applications need to be multitasked (with multiple CPUs)? I don't see too many. I mean, most home users do not even max out their single CPUs (except when playing games). Surfing the web, word processing, reading e-mail, playing games (not the high-end ones), playing MP3s, etc don't really need multiple CPUs.
I've been using a home user a lot lately (since I'm unemployed) and I don't think multiple CPUs will really help me. In any case, I would think that home user applications are memory-limited.
The only situation where I would look into multi-CPUs for home is when you are running some sort of server related task in the background (say you want to run a personal ftp server or something). Even then, I'm still not sure how benefitial multi-CPUs would be. The way I see it, single CPUs will dominate the home market for a long time.
I was interested in multi-CPU systems when I was young (mostly because I couldn't afford it and thought they were great). But these days, I just don't see them being used in the home market. Most home user activities are memory-limited or video-card-limited.
Based on the other messages here, it seems that the chemicals from some other contaminant was the cause of it...or it could be tobacco too but seems unlikely given other people's responses.
To test your hypothesis, perhaps someone can buy a bunch of cigarettes (unless you can get tobacco leaves) and burn them and stick your hand into the smoke (not the fire) and see if it does anything (or preferably mash them into some liquid and then soak in on your hand). If someone has warts and wants a traditional alternative this might be it.... DISCLAIMER: I am not responsible for any damage to yourself. Only recommended for adults.
Overclocking was ALWAYS a sport. Generally, the overclocking add-ons (like fans, water cooling systems, etc) are more expensive than a higher level CPU.
I don't think anyone really overclocked to improve performance. In any case, the performance improvement from overclocking is negligible for home users.
Wow, you used a word I didn't know: occidental:) Had to look it up...
...knowledge is not out of reach anyways...
I disagree. Most knowledge costs a ton of money. I actually live in an occidental country (Canada) and when I was growing up, there was only one place to look for free or cheap knowledge. I'm working class so paying for books all the time is kind of too expensive. Perhaps for the middle class and upper class, it isn't a big deal. The only place to find knowledge was libraries. With the assault on public socialist institutions by the capitalists (capitalism calls for privatization of everything, including libraries), it wouldn't suprise me if public libraries are privatized within my lifetime. When that happens, the only place to get free knowledge is the internet.
Websites like wikipedia.org are the last refuge of knowledge-seekers that are "poor". With that scenario, I think sites like wikipedia.org have enormous potential to transform society. Do not assume the impact of wikipedia.org (which is apparently expanding to include dictionaries and stuff) is minimal. I always point people towards it when people need some quick overview.
Moreover, Wikipedia is not the only one of a kind. Why saving this one and not the others?
Wikipedia.org is the BEST and most through one I have found so far. If you know of other FREE encyclopedias let me know. I know there are some commerical ones but they might dissapear any minute. I mean, I have no idea how sites like dictionary.com and encyclopedia.com make money, and it wouldn't surprise me if they close down soon. It is imperative that knowledge remains free (although that is a losing battle in a capitalist society).
The only other encyclopedia that comes anywhere close to wikipedia.org is Internet-Encyclopedia, which is very similar to wikipedia.org since it uses the same software and is similar*. There aren't that many encylopedias on the web. Having said that, I still recommend Microsoft Encarta to everyone. That is the best and wikipedia.org comes nowhere near that. For less than $100, you can get an amazing encyclopedia with multimedia content (wiki sucks when it comes to its lack of pictures, sound files, etc). But when it comes to free encyclopedias, wikipedia.org is the only one that matters. Commercial encyclopedias also won't let you quote stuff so if you are not a member you can't link to them from a message post (for example)
(* Side note: It is interesting how internet-encyclopedia.org varies from wikipedia.org. The difference between the two is (apparently) internet-encyclopedia.org articles are written by those SYMPATHETIC to the topic, while wikipedia.org isn't like that. Which is the better approach? )
The point is not that they are of equal caliber; the point is that they are similar organizations: entities that do not make money.
As far as whether wikipedia is as important as the Red Cross, the potential is there. Wikipedia.org has the potential to spread knowledge like nothing before it. It's all a subjective view. I mean, certain segments of the population do not support the Red Cross right now either.
The problem facing Wikipedia.org is not unexpected. As a site becomes popular, it becomes very expensive to run. Asking for $20k is not much. I expect that they will need more donations in the future. I'm surprised they need money for hardware. I would think bandwidth might cost even more. Since wikipedia has enormous potential (it is already the #1 free encyclopedia even though not many have heard of it), its costs will mount. For reference, a political site like antiwar.com raises $100k per quarter (antiwar.com is in the top 10 of all news sites). I imagine Wikipedia.org needs at least that much. It wouldn't suprise me if they need around $200k per quarter if the site becomes really popular (when everyone starts using it).
I think Wikipedia.org should open up their books to avoid criticism. It seems some people think the money is going to be scammed. I suggest that wikipedia.org start posting their financial statements. Since it is a non-profit organization (I think), it should have been doing that already.
What you are saying is true. Wiki will need more money in the future.
Anyway, the VAST MAJORITY of non-profit organizations ask money directly. There are only a FEW that rely on foundations created by wealthy people. The wealthy foundations may seem like to be popular since they make the news (eg. Melinda Gates Foundation) but they account for VERY LITTLE of the money raised by non-profits.
I do expect Wikipedia.org to keep asking for donations continuously from now on (sine they are the #1 encyclopedia site now--meaning tons of users=higher costs)... If you don't want to pay for it, fine. But this isn't a flaw with any "model". That's how all non-profit organizations operate.
A free institution comes from socialism and religion. Obviously you have no understanding of it. When someone says an institution (like a library, or school) is free, they mean that EVERYONE has access to it. Anyone can walk into a public library and sign out a book (just have to show ID). Strictly speaking, a library isn't free. People's taxes are used to pay for it. But that's not what we mean by free. When someone says free, it means it is subsidized. You don't have to pay anything if you don't want to.
Wikipedia.org is the foremost FREE encyclopedia on the web. You haven't heard of it (probably) but it is a very valuable resource. If you don't want to support it, that's ok. But don't go around bashing it without understanding it.
Most of your "solutions" are totally irrelevant here. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. So offering pay services isn't going to work (I mean, what will you offer other than knowledge?) Besides, if you privatize it (that's what you are talking about), it likely will lose since it is nowhere near as good as MS Encarta. They are different things.
Obviously you have never heard of a non-profit organization before. Obviously you have no idea how the Red Cross operates. Obviously you haven't seen any non-profit try to raise money. Obviously you live in a profit-only world... Obviously you are not a human:(
First of all, it's YOU who needs to pick up a few books. UBL's $300million estimate is way off. He is worth around $30million (not $300m as CIA likes to claim). As far as him going to Afghanistan after the war, what's your point?
BTW, if you are going to attack me on such an important issue, why don't you post with your real name like I do? Scared of agents?
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Re:Let the conspiracy theories begin...
on
Make More Mistakes
·
· Score: 1
You are not going to like this... but I sent an e-mail to Celestron (don't know if it went to the right person). Let's see what they say...
The way I look at it, the mission failed. The orbiter is ok so maybe it is more accurate to say 50% of hte mission failed.
If the NASA ones (that are soon to arrive) fail too, then that proves one thing. We have finally discovered life on Mars!!! Yes, there is life on Mars. The Martians are alive and shooting down our probes... That, in my opinion, proves the existence of life without any doubt.;)
hmm...that's a technicality:) Yes, the mission is "successful" in that they have an orbiter. BUT the lander seems to have failed. Even if I followed your reasoning, I would say the mission is 50% successful (half of it failed).
I think you are wrong. I'm not a capitalist but GROWTH is EXTREMELY important to capitalism. Just ask any capitalist. Or listen to what any economist says (90% of all economists are capitalists). They all point out that growth of any sort is crucial. It applies to not only corporations, but to countries, economies, families, population, wealth, etc.
To see why you can't survive without growth under capitalism, consider the following scenario. Let's say you have two companies. One attempts to grow and hence is getting bigger, increasing its profits, etc. Let's say the other one doens't grow. Who do you think will win? The one that is growing has a higher probability of getting bigger and crushing its competition (size DOES give a huge advantage).
That's not all of it. In fact you can ignore that if you want. Instead, look at it from an INVESTOR's point of view. Which company do you think is more attractive to investors? If both of these were listed on the stock market, which one is going to get investment money? The one that is growing. If anything, the ones that don't grow will get practically no investment. Its stock price will plummet. It will have a harder time raising funds via bonds or loans (or would have to pay more in interest relative to the higher growth company). And so forth. If YOU were the investor, YOU would invest in the higher growth one. I am pretty sure that would be the case. Just look at the stock market and you'll see that's how it works. People want the growth ones because those are the ones that are INCREASING their profits. It is so bad that CEOs who don't come up with some growth plan (regardless of how bogus), their company (and eventually them) will get hammered...
Slashdot Mirror
That sounds like a good plan to me. Converting the country to a totalitarian state sounds like a nice idea.
1. The US will apologize to the world for our "interference" in their affairs, past &present. You know, Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, Noriega, Milosovich and the rest of those 'good ole boys.' We will never "interfere" again.
That's what victims have been asking for. That should help a lot...
2. We will withdraw our troops from all over the world, starting with Germany, South Korea and the Philippines. They don't want us there. We would station troops at our borders. No more sneaking through holes in the fence.
Yep... not many people (except the elites) in those countries want foreign troops...
3. All illegal aliens have 90 days to get their affairs together and leave. We'll give them a free trip home. After 90 days the remainder will be gathered up and deported immediately, regardless of who or where they are. France would welcome them.
Kind of cruel but it's your country... totalitarians are known to do that sort of thing...
4. All future visitors will be thoroughly checked and limited to 90 days unless given a special permit. No one from a terrorist nation would be allowed in. If you don't like it there, change it yourself and don't hide here. Asylum would never be available to anyone. We don't need any more cab drivers or 7-11 cashiers.
Sounds cool... who needs tourism anyway? I'm not too sure if capitalists are going to take it kindly to getting rid of low wage workers but that's your problem...
5. No "students" over age 21. The older ones are the bombers. If they don't attend classes, they get an "F" and it's back home baby.
Sure... while you are at it, why even have foreign students at all? Doesn't your fascist ideology call for getting rid of all foreigners since they are a threat to the nation?
6. The US will make a strong effort to become self-sufficient energy wise. This will include developing non-polluting sources of energy but will require a temporary drilling of oil in the Alaskan wilderness. The friggin' caribou will have to cope for a while.
You need to check with your leaders (those that are smarter than you) because you have no idea what you are talking about! Do you think USA is in the Middle East because they NEED the oil for their own use? Of course not! Less than 15% of oil comes from the Middle East. USA is there because of PROFITS. It is hard to turn down free money (which is what oil wells are). Aliens could teleport the Middle East to another galaxy and USA will be least impacted of all. USA hardly NEEDs the oil from the Middle East. Of course, getting the oil companies to give up their profits is tougher. I imagine this will your toughest issue. Implementing fascism is easy but getting the capitalists to stay away from money is not.
7. Offer Saudi Arabia and other oil producing countries $10 a barrel for their oil. If they don't like it, we go some place else. They can go somewhere else to sell their production. (About a week of the wells filling up the storage sites would be enough.)
Continuing with the previous point, you have no idea what you are talking about. Oil consumption is expected to INCREASE over the decades--not decrease. Most of the oil from the middle east does NOT go to USA--it goes to Japan and Europe! The Middle Eastern countries will be selling oil at the same rate for the most part (except now they won't get the 15% sales from USA).
8. If there is a famine or other natural catastrophe in the world, we will not "interfere." They can pray to Allah or whomever, for seeds, rain, cement or whatever they need. Besides most of what we give them is stolen or given to the army. The people who need it most get very little, if anything.
That's cool... It was Ayn Rand, likely your hero, who said that altruism is bad and greed is good. You can
Employers say that people will be paid more but watch everyone end up being paid LESS for not having the license, while those that get the qualification will get the same salaries as now.
How much do you want to bet that salaries will remain the same while employers only hire those that are licensed? Those that are not licensed will probably get paid less (becoming an underclass). There is nothing better to a capitalist than shifting risks to the worker (software developers are now liable) while not wanting to pay for it themselves.
Sivaram Velauthapillai
If you find it entertaining, you must have no heart...
:(
That's not funny
Sivaram Velauthapillai
I haven't been ripping anything but I see your point. I guess multiple CPUs would help in that case... as far as games are concerned, most games cannot use multiple CPUs. There are some exceptions (I think Quake always supported multiple CPUs; probably other FPS games too, but things like RPG, RTS, action RPG, TBS don't really use multiple CPUs).
If games started using multiple CPUs I can them becoming popular... but until then, I don't see it working (except if you are ripping something as you mentioned)...
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Yes there are exceptions. The celeron 366 is probably the BEST EVER for overclocking (someone correct me if I'm wrong--I'm not an overclocker :) ). But in general your accesories cost more.
:( ).
Even with your celeron setup, you probably had to upgrade to higher speed memory and the video card too. 100Mhz memory was common and your setup is great. But if you were trying to overclock a 100MHz frontside bus to something higher (this is what people were doing with the Pentium III (my PC is a pentium III) ), you had to make sure that your memory is rated (133Mhz memory was common so no problem there), and your video card would be ok (this is not ok for all cards), as well as other components on the board (like PCI devices and stuff).
In any case, that's a great setup you had. Only deficiency would be the 2 CPUs which aren't generally used by home users (games don't support multiple CPUs
Sivaram Velauthapillai
I think they had gloves and glasses... but no overcoats or aprons. Imagine if some nitrogen accidentally falls on your pants or something...
Sivaram Velauthapillai
What does this mean:
Before we got down to our actual record attempt, we checked the loading capacity of the materials and individual components. To do this, we placed the entire test construction in a polystyrene shell and installed it. ( source)
I don't get the part about testing the loading capacity. What is that? And how do you test it by placing in in polystyrene?
Thanks!
Sivaram Velauthapillai
I think heat generated is non-linear with processor speed. So, overclocking a faster processor should be harder than a slower one. I'm not really sure though... I may be overlooking something...
Sivaram Velauthapillai
What you are saying is not possible without switching to some new technology. The higher the clock speed, the more the heat. You just cannot get around that. The gates are switching faster and generate more heat.
So to answer your question, you can never reduce heat without lowering the frequency. Maybe that's what you want. But if you reduce the heat, all that will do is to cut costs (lower cooling costs, lower energy costs, etc). Your performance won't improve.
So, unless the heat loss costs are very high (not the case for consumer PCs), no one is going to try lowering the heat dissipation UNLESS that results in performance increase (this is possible as this experiment shows i.e. generating less heat means that you can increase the clock frequency).
Sivaram Velauthapillai
For a home user, what do they run that really requires multitasking? What applications need to be multitasked (with multiple CPUs)? I don't see too many. I mean, most home users do not even max out their single CPUs (except when playing games). Surfing the web, word processing, reading e-mail, playing games (not the high-end ones), playing MP3s, etc don't really need multiple CPUs.
I've been using a home user a lot lately (since I'm unemployed) and I don't think multiple CPUs will really help me. In any case, I would think that home user applications are memory-limited.
The only situation where I would look into multi-CPUs for home is when you are running some sort of server related task in the background (say you want to run a personal ftp server or something). Even then, I'm still not sure how benefitial multi-CPUs would be. The way I see it, single CPUs will dominate the home market for a long time.
I was interested in multi-CPU systems when I was young (mostly because I couldn't afford it and thought they were great). But these days, I just don't see them being used in the home market. Most home user activities are memory-limited or video-card-limited.
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Yuck.. did you have to add the sidenote? :)
Based on the other messages here, it seems that the chemicals from some other contaminant was the cause of it...or it could be tobacco too but seems unlikely given other people's responses.
To test your hypothesis, perhaps someone can buy a bunch of cigarettes (unless you can get tobacco leaves) and burn them and stick your hand into the smoke (not the fire) and see if it does anything (or preferably mash them into some liquid and then soak in on your hand). If someone has warts and wants a traditional alternative this might be it.... DISCLAIMER: I am not responsible for any damage to yourself. Only recommended for adults.
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Overclocking was ALWAYS a sport. Generally, the overclocking add-ons (like fans, water cooling systems, etc) are more expensive than a higher level CPU.
I don't think anyone really overclocked to improve performance. In any case, the performance improvement from overclocking is negligible for home users.
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Why do people soup up their Honda Civic with mods instead of buying a better car?
;)
Why do people buy Acura with leather seats and high-end mods instead of buying a better BMW for the same price?
Why do people install super cool alarm systems in their cars when you can buy cheaper insurance to cover the same thing?
If you don't know the answer, you never will
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Wow, you used a word I didn't know: occidental :) Had to look it up...
...knowledge is not out of reach anyways...
I disagree. Most knowledge costs a ton of money. I actually live in an occidental country (Canada) and when I was growing up, there was only one place to look for free or cheap knowledge. I'm working class so paying for books all the time is kind of too expensive. Perhaps for the middle class and upper class, it isn't a big deal. The only place to find knowledge was libraries. With the assault on public socialist institutions by the capitalists (capitalism calls for privatization of everything, including libraries), it wouldn't suprise me if public libraries are privatized within my lifetime. When that happens, the only place to get free knowledge is the internet.
Websites like wikipedia.org are the last refuge of knowledge-seekers that are "poor". With that scenario, I think sites like wikipedia.org have enormous potential to transform society. Do not assume the impact of wikipedia.org (which is apparently expanding to include dictionaries and stuff) is minimal. I always point people towards it when people need some quick overview.
Moreover, Wikipedia is not the only one of a kind. Why saving this one and not the others?
Wikipedia.org is the BEST and most through one I have found so far. If you know of other FREE encyclopedias let me know. I know there are some commerical ones but they might dissapear any minute. I mean, I have no idea how sites like dictionary.com and encyclopedia.com make money, and it wouldn't surprise me if they close down soon. It is imperative that knowledge remains free (although that is a losing battle in a capitalist society).
The only other encyclopedia that comes anywhere close to wikipedia.org is Internet-Encyclopedia, which is very similar to wikipedia.org since it uses the same software and is similar*. There aren't that many encylopedias on the web. Having said that, I still recommend Microsoft Encarta to everyone. That is the best and wikipedia.org comes nowhere near that. For less than $100, you can get an amazing encyclopedia with multimedia content (wiki sucks when it comes to its lack of pictures, sound files, etc). But when it comes to free encyclopedias, wikipedia.org is the only one that matters. Commercial encyclopedias also won't let you quote stuff so if you are not a member you can't link to them from a message post (for example)
(* Side note: It is interesting how internet-encyclopedia.org varies from wikipedia.org. The difference between the two is (apparently) internet-encyclopedia.org articles are written by those SYMPATHETIC to the topic, while wikipedia.org isn't like that. Which is the better approach? )
Sivaram Velauthapillai
The point is not that they are of equal caliber; the point is that they are similar organizations: entities that do not make money.
As far as whether wikipedia is as important as the Red Cross, the potential is there. Wikipedia.org has the potential to spread knowledge like nothing before it. It's all a subjective view. I mean, certain segments of the population do not support the Red Cross right now either.
Sivaram Velauthapillai
The problem facing Wikipedia.org is not unexpected. As a site becomes popular, it becomes very expensive to run. Asking for $20k is not much. I expect that they will need more donations in the future. I'm surprised they need money for hardware. I would think bandwidth might cost even more. Since wikipedia has enormous potential (it is already the #1 free encyclopedia even though not many have heard of it), its costs will mount. For reference, a political site like antiwar.com raises $100k per quarter (antiwar.com is in the top 10 of all news sites). I imagine Wikipedia.org needs at least that much. It wouldn't suprise me if they need around $200k per quarter if the site becomes really popular (when everyone starts using it).
I think Wikipedia.org should open up their books to avoid criticism. It seems some people think the money is going to be scammed. I suggest that wikipedia.org start posting their financial statements. Since it is a non-profit organization (I think), it should have been doing that already.
Sivaram Velauthapillai
What you are saying is true. Wiki will need more money in the future.
Anyway, the VAST MAJORITY of non-profit organizations ask money directly. There are only a FEW that rely on foundations created by wealthy people. The wealthy foundations may seem like to be popular since they make the news (eg. Melinda Gates Foundation) but they account for VERY LITTLE of the money raised by non-profits.
I do expect Wikipedia.org to keep asking for donations continuously from now on (sine they are the #1 encyclopedia site now--meaning tons of users=higher costs)... If you don't want to pay for it, fine. But this isn't a flaw with any "model". That's how all non-profit organizations operate.
Sivaram Velauthapillai
A free institution comes from socialism and religion. Obviously you have no understanding of it. When someone says an institution (like a library, or school) is free, they mean that EVERYONE has access to it. Anyone can walk into a public library and sign out a book (just have to show ID). Strictly speaking, a library isn't free. People's taxes are used to pay for it. But that's not what we mean by free. When someone says free, it means it is subsidized. You don't have to pay anything if you don't want to.
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Wikipedia.org is the foremost FREE encyclopedia on the web. You haven't heard of it (probably) but it is a very valuable resource. If you don't want to support it, that's ok. But don't go around bashing it without understanding it.
Most of your "solutions" are totally irrelevant here. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. So offering pay services isn't going to work (I mean, what will you offer other than knowledge?) Besides, if you privatize it (that's what you are talking about), it likely will lose since it is nowhere near as good as MS Encarta. They are different things.
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Obviously you have never heard of a non-profit organization before. Obviously you have no idea how the Red Cross operates. Obviously you haven't seen any non-profit try to raise money. Obviously you live in a profit-only world... Obviously you are not a human :(
Sivaram Velauthapillai
First of all, it's YOU who needs to pick up a few books. UBL's $300million estimate is way off. He is worth around $30million (not $300m as CIA likes to claim). As far as him going to Afghanistan after the war, what's your point?
BTW, if you are going to attack me on such an important issue, why don't you post with your real name like I do? Scared of agents?
Sivaram Velauthapillai
You are not going to like this... but I sent an e-mail to Celestron (don't know if it went to the right person). Let's see what they say...
Sivaram Velauthapillai
You are an optimist :)
;)
Search & rescue? By whom?
The way I look at it, the mission failed. The orbiter is ok so maybe it is more accurate to say 50% of hte mission failed.
If the NASA ones (that are soon to arrive) fail too, then that proves one thing. We have finally discovered life on Mars!!! Yes, there is life on Mars. The Martians are alive and shooting down our probes... That, in my opinion, proves the existence of life without any doubt.
Sivaram Velauthapillai
hmm...that's a technicality :) Yes, the mission is "successful" in that they have an orbiter. BUT the lander seems to have failed. Even if I followed your reasoning, I would say the mission is 50% successful (half of it failed).
Sivaram Velauthapillai
I think you are wrong. I'm not a capitalist but GROWTH is EXTREMELY important to capitalism. Just ask any capitalist. Or listen to what any economist says (90% of all economists are capitalists). They all point out that growth of any sort is crucial. It applies to not only corporations, but to countries, economies, families, population, wealth, etc.
To see why you can't survive without growth under capitalism, consider the following scenario. Let's say you have two companies. One attempts to grow and hence is getting bigger, increasing its profits, etc. Let's say the other one doens't grow. Who do you think will win? The one that is growing has a higher probability of getting bigger and crushing its competition (size DOES give a huge advantage).
That's not all of it. In fact you can ignore that if you want. Instead, look at it from an INVESTOR's point of view. Which company do you think is more attractive to investors? If both of these were listed on the stock market, which one is going to get investment money? The one that is growing. If anything, the ones that don't grow will get practically no investment. Its stock price will plummet. It will have a harder time raising funds via bonds or loans (or would have to pay more in interest relative to the higher growth company). And so forth. If YOU were the investor, YOU would invest in the higher growth one. I am pretty sure that would be the case. Just look at the stock market and you'll see that's how it works. People want the growth ones because those are the ones that are INCREASING their profits. It is so bad that CEOs who don't come up with some growth plan (regardless of how bogus), their company (and eventually them) will get hammered...
Sivaram Velauthapillai