If you have a 25 percent probability that your edit will be reverted, why bother?
Well, that means a 75% probability that your edit will not be reverted.
This seems plausible, and in fact expected, for an encyclopedia. To start with, people will be adding articles, and will be adding new material to articles that already exist. As it approaches maturity, there will be fewer new articles to add, and the edits will be disagreeing with things that somebody else wrote.
Further, after the article has been fine-tuned with many edits, there's not going to be much new value to add... but the trolls and graffiti are still going to continue at a roughly constant rate, so the ratio of graffiti-edits to content-edits will go up. So it's not unsurprising that the revert percentage will go up.
I'm not sure that there's anything in the original article that's not obvious.
Yeah, because GPS coordinates are really relevant to crash data...
Sure. This is a mobile unit, so if there is a locus of crashes at a particular location, that might indicate that the problem is with the link to the local access point. It's perfectly reasonable that this is data that they'd want for debugging. (And they'd also like to get the same information from systems that don't crash, so they can say "well, other Palms have accessed from that spot with no problem, so it's not the local node).
Just because they want (or think that perhaps sometime in the future they might want) this information, though, doesn't mean that they should get it without permission. This is personal information; they shouldn't be collecting it without asking.
Users have shown that they will not pay for online content unless there is an actual value-add. News sites provide nothing that can't be eventually seen on TV or read elsewhere.
To the contrary, newspapers provide a lot-- they provide in depth reporting. And that's not free-- if it's to exist, it has to be paid for somehow.
Unfortunately, now that news is global, there is a vast oversupply of news reporting; thousands of newspapers to chose from. The news sources are simply driving each other out of business.
Not to mention the moon has plenty of Helium 3, which would make it worthwhile to set up as a mining colony.
Helium three has no known use, with the exception of the trivial amount used in low-temperature science.
While, in principle, the fusion reaction D+3He --> 4He+p would be a nice reaction, in practice the ignition barrier to this reaction is twice as high as the ignition barrier to the D+T --> 4He+n reaction... a reaction that we can't achieve breakeven for. There's little use in going to the moon to get the fuel for a reaction that we don't know how to do.
It's been mentioned here in the past, but what would combine the awe and excitement of a 'stunt', along with the progress of science, would be to establish a manned space station/city. It can be fairly near the Earth at first...
I can see an argument of humans vs space probes, but the idea of putting the humans in orbit to release the space probes seems to be the worst of both worlds.
If we are going to send humans out there, they should be landing on something, otherwise send probes.
It turns out that the last 200 kilometers, getting from orbit to the surface and back, is vastly, completely, incredibly the hardest part. It is much, much simpler to get humans into orbit than to land them on the surface of Mars. Among other things, to land on the surface, you need design, build, test, quality, and fly two additional vehicles, a lander vehicle and a launch vehicle, both of which are flying in regimes that are hard to engineer for. Not to mention a long-duration habitat for the Mars surface, and spacesuits that will survive for hundreds of EVAs on the Mars surface-- not easy.
Orbiting Mars is vastly simpler than landing on it.
People have been talking about and "calculating" these chances for decades at least, and the answers have consistently been bouncing back and forth between "thousands" and "one" civilization.
Not quite true... back in the 1950s, the answers had ranged between billions and one.
Every single article on the subject has the same bottom line: we don't know.
That's true, but the numbers at the beginning of the Drake equation are getting a lot better understood. (and will be much much better understood once the Kepler mission starts giving results of the statistics of Earth-sized planets in the galaxy).
So our bottom line of "we don't know" is now supported by a lot more data.
maybe they will discover that moving boats do it too?! Or birds do the same with the air?!
Boats don't mix water very much vertically, at least not much below the surface layers, anyway. It's the vertical mixing, of both salinity and temperature, that makes a difference in thermohaline flow.
My guess, and I suppose I could be wrong here, is that the contribution of birds to atmospheric mixing is below the noise level. The atmosphere is strongly heated from the bottom, which results in thermal instability ("thermals"). The oceans, on the other hand, are primarily heated from the top (except around thermal vents).
The author of that article actually mentioned that we have been able to make green lasers, but that they are not efficient enough to be used.
Actually, the author of that summary mentioned that we have been able to make green diode lasers, but they are not efficient enough to be used for applications that need high efficiency. (they're used all the time for applications that don't need high efficiency-- laser pointers, for example-- take a look at google).
The author of the summary failed to point out that green lasers using technologies other than semiconductor diode lasers have been avalable for decades.
Copper vapor lasers are quite efficient, actually, although argon ion lasers efficiencies are indeed pretty low. Doubled YAG lasers are very commonly used for green-- a diode-pumped doubled YAG can get a wallplug efficiency of around 20%, IIRC.
Looking at this accidental photograph, the trail does look quite bright and shows other trails running parallel to the main one. Where I live, this happens when you get an aircraft running across the field of view.
Since the article says that many others, including some security cameras, saw the same bolide, the "airplane" interpretation is ruled out even without paying attention to the fact that the meteor did not have red and green navigation lights on its wingtips.
Just pointing out, the actual wording was in the form of question, not a "statement".
"Jonathan Lamy, chief spokesperson for the RIAA[,] declared DRM dead, when he was asked about the RIAA's view on DRM for an upcoming SCMagazine article. "DRM is dead, isn't it?" Lamy said."
One really wonders why it is "news" when a RIAA spokesman asks an off-the-cuff question. It's really being blown out of proportion to call it a "statement from the RIAA."
The figure is $1 - $1.56 billion in the next 10 years.
That's a revenue stream of 100 million to 150 million per year. That's a very disappointing number, probably an order of magnitude to low to make a profitable business out of lunar transportation. Even if a company could manage to tap the revenue stream with a single flight per year, it's hard to believe that this would cover more than the fixed costs and overhead.
Sure. And, for that matter, why not pedal an ergometer to run the radio in your car? I mean, maybe the radio does sit one meter away from an engine producing tens of kilowatts, but you're in the car anyway, so why not add your 170 watts and run the radio on it? Heck, you could run the radio, MP3 player, GPS-- the works.
Nice test, but of course a Hohmann trajectory to Mars takes nine months-- 275 days, not 105.
They exited the spacecraft when they were only halfway there!
My proposed solution is to make it a rule that all software developers should be required to serve at least one day a week on the help desk.
As far as I can tell, developers-- at least the Microsoft developers, anyway-- really, honestly don't know why ordinary users find their products frustrating and hard to use; while the help-desk people do know what the problems are, but are considered to be so low on the totem pole that nobody would ever think of asking their opinions.
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Very likely true. I believe them.
Nevertheless, their policy essentially boils down to, "all your base are belong to us."
If you have a 25 percent probability that your edit will be reverted, why bother?
Well, that means a 75% probability that your edit will not be reverted.
This seems plausible, and in fact expected, for an encyclopedia. To start with, people will be adding articles, and will be adding new material to articles that already exist. As it approaches maturity, there will be fewer new articles to add, and the edits will be disagreeing with things that somebody else wrote.
Further, after the article has been fine-tuned with many edits, there's not going to be much new value to add... but the trolls and graffiti are still going to continue at a roughly constant rate, so the ratio of graffiti-edits to content-edits will go up. So it's not unsurprising that the revert percentage will go up.
I'm not sure that there's anything in the original article that's not obvious.
Yeah, because GPS coordinates are really relevant to crash data...
Sure. This is a mobile unit, so if there is a locus of crashes at a particular location, that might indicate that the problem is with the link to the local access point. It's perfectly reasonable that this is data that they'd want for debugging. (And they'd also like to get the same information from systems that don't crash, so they can say "well, other Palms have accessed from that spot with no problem, so it's not the local node).
Just because they want (or think that perhaps sometime in the future they might want) this information, though, doesn't mean that they should get it without permission. This is personal information; they shouldn't be collecting it without asking.
Users have shown that they will not pay for online content unless there is an actual value-add. News sites provide nothing that can't be eventually seen on TV or read elsewhere.
To the contrary, newspapers provide a lot-- they provide in depth reporting. And that's not free-- if it's to exist, it has to be paid for somehow.
Unfortunately, now that news is global, there is a vast oversupply of news reporting; thousands of newspapers to chose from. The news sources are simply driving each other out of business.
Um, hello? They were selling nice (and very effective) RFID blocking wallets and passport holders there for $20.
The cost is $0.02 for the aluminum foil, and $19.98 in overhead?
Not to mention the moon has plenty of Helium 3, which would make it worthwhile to set up as a mining colony.
Helium three has no known use, with the exception of the trivial amount used in low-temperature science.
While, in principle, the fusion reaction D+3He --> 4He+p would be a nice reaction, in practice the ignition barrier to this reaction is twice as high as the ignition barrier to the D+T --> 4He+n reaction... a reaction that we can't achieve breakeven for. There's little use in going to the moon to get the fuel for a reaction that we don't know how to do.
Who cares if it is hard? It is that difficulty that should be making us want to do it!
Indeed. But we should do it in achievable footsteps.
Not one quick flags and footprints mission. Step by step, building capability all the way.
It's been mentioned here in the past, but what would combine the awe and excitement of a 'stunt', along with the progress of science, would be to establish a manned space station/city. It can be fairly near the Earth at first...
you're in luck! We got one. In orbit now. You can see it yourself
(That was, of course, Wehrner von Braun's view, too)
I can see an argument of humans vs space probes, but the idea of putting the humans in orbit to release the space probes seems to be the worst of both worlds.
If we are going to send humans out there, they should be landing on something, otherwise send probes.
It turns out that the last 200 kilometers, getting from orbit to the surface and back, is vastly, completely, incredibly the hardest part. It is much, much simpler to get humans into orbit than to land them on the surface of Mars. Among other things, to land on the surface, you need design, build, test, quality, and fly two additional vehicles, a lander vehicle and a launch vehicle, both of which are flying in regimes that are hard to engineer for. Not to mention a long-duration habitat for the Mars surface, and spacesuits that will survive for hundreds of EVAs on the Mars surface-- not easy.
Orbiting Mars is vastly simpler than landing on it.
Of course, I've talked and written on that subject many times before-- Teleoperation from Mars Orbit: A proposal for human exploration, Footsteps to Mars, etc.
(I agree, however, that L-1 is silly-- nothing there to explore.)
People have been talking about and "calculating" these chances for decades at least, and the answers have consistently been bouncing back and forth between "thousands" and "one" civilization.
Not quite true... back in the 1950s, the answers had ranged between billions and one.
Every single article on the subject has the same bottom line: we don't know.
That's true, but the numbers at the beginning of the Drake equation are getting a lot better understood. (and will be much much better understood once the Kepler mission starts giving results of the statistics of Earth-sized planets in the galaxy).
So our bottom line of "we don't know" is now supported by a lot more data.
Later incorporated into his novel Diaspora
maybe they will discover that moving boats do it too?! Or birds do the same with the air?!
Boats don't mix water very much vertically, at least not much below the surface layers, anyway. It's the vertical mixing, of both salinity and temperature, that makes a difference in thermohaline flow.
My guess, and I suppose I could be wrong here, is that the contribution of birds to atmospheric mixing is below the noise level. The atmosphere is strongly heated from the bottom, which results in thermal instability ("thermals"). The oceans, on the other hand, are primarily heated from the top (except around thermal vents).
Having been stung by a jellyfish the image of one in a blender did bring a smile to my face. They might make a nice sushi smoothie.
Or use them to make a stinger to remember.
In the science field, there's a saying "anecdotes are not data."
Let's see some real statistics.
The author of that article actually mentioned that we have been able to make green lasers, but that they are not efficient enough to be used.
Actually, the author of that summary mentioned that we have been able to make green diode lasers, but they are not efficient enough to be used for applications that need high efficiency. (they're used all the time for applications that don't need high efficiency-- laser pointers, for example-- take a look at google).
The author of the summary failed to point out that green lasers using technologies other than semiconductor diode lasers have been avalable for decades.
Copper vapor lasers are quite efficient, actually, although argon ion lasers efficiencies are indeed pretty low. Doubled YAG lasers are very commonly used for green-- a diode-pumped doubled YAG can get a wallplug efficiency of around 20%, IIRC.
Looking at this accidental photograph, the trail does look quite bright and shows other trails running parallel to the main one. Where I live, this happens when you get an aircraft running across the field of view.
Since the article says that many others, including some security cameras, saw the same bolide, the "airplane" interpretation is ruled out even without paying attention to the fact that the meteor did not have red and green navigation lights on its wingtips.
"Jonathan Lamy, chief spokesperson for the RIAA[,] declared DRM dead, when he was asked about the RIAA's view on DRM for an upcoming SCMagazine article. "DRM is dead, isn't it?" Lamy said."
One really wonders why it is "news" when a RIAA spokesman asks an off-the-cuff question. It's really being blown out of proportion to call it a "statement from the RIAA."
That's a revenue stream of 100 million to 150 million per year. That's a very disappointing number, probably an order of magnitude to low to make a profitable business out of lunar transportation. Even if a company could manage to tap the revenue stream with a single flight per year, it's hard to believe that this would cover more than the fixed costs and overhead.
We need another revenue stream--
Sure. And, for that matter, why not pedal an ergometer to run the radio in your car? I mean, maybe the radio does sit one meter away from an engine producing tens of kilowatts, but you're in the car anyway, so why not add your 170 watts and run the radio on it? Heck, you could run the radio, MP3 player, GPS-- the works.
Why not get some power back from it, rather than just dissipating it as heat?
Because humans are good for about a quarter of a horsepower. Maybe 175 watts, peak. Not really worth the effort of converting to power.
Note, by the way, that some of the crews of Mir spent six months on Mir, which is smaller than a Mars craft is likely to be.
Yeah, but those were Russians.
Not all of them-- Shannon Lucid spent six months on Mir.
Nice test, but of course a Hohmann trajectory to Mars takes nine months-- 275 days, not 105. They exited the spacecraft when they were only halfway there!
Excellent! Go, Space-X!
My proposed solution is to make it a rule that all software developers should be required to serve at least one day a week on the help desk.
As far as I can tell, developers-- at least the Microsoft developers, anyway-- really, honestly don't know why ordinary users find their products frustrating and hard to use; while the help-desk people do know what the problems are, but are considered to be so low on the totem pole that nobody would ever think of asking their opinions.