This sounds familiar. I've backed off from editing for similar reasons; the established cliques don't like outsiders. Its like an online version of The League of Gentlemen
The virtues of logical arguments and fresh perspectives are not recognised by the Wikipedia community. Everyone has an opinion, they group together with people of similar opinions, and they slug it out in online tribal warfare.
In my experience, the Wikipedia community has been deteriorating for some time now. I suspect the percentage of people inactive was lower than 98.3% a year or two ago, but people have been driven away.
Most pages of any significance have a group of people that have appointed themselves overseers, and resist new additions on general principle. Often, they have a collective ideology slant and have chased off everyone who disagrees in any significant way. In this state, the odd person coming along and trying to modify the article against the views of the established mass is shouted down, accused of going against consensus, and chased off. If you took all editors of an article over all time, there would be a completely different consensus than the momentary ones that occur when a single dissenter arrives.
Adding monetary incentives would make this worse. It would make the local tribes more militant and more powerful, finally ending the principle of a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
Wikipedia was an interesting and important social experiment, but I think it is past its peak and is due to decline. I personally believe that history will be more interested in the talk pages and edit logs than the content itself.
Soyuz 5 survived a re-entry ass-backwards, and several have since. Capsules have been shown to be safer on re-entry, which isn't really surprising considering they are aerodynamically much simpler.
mises.org? Are you shitting me? Fringe lunatic economics don't impress me one bit. If you want a respected commentator on the situation try Robert Peston
Oh, and don't throw around the Latin like it makes you look smart. I learned that shit at school and it doesn't impress me at all.
I am perfectly rational, I also feel people who are stupid need to have this pointed out sometimes. The two aren't mutually exclusive. I do not suffer fools gladly.
When NASA started they were working with transistors and no clue if what they were doing was possible. SpaceX gets to draw on all the decades of work done by bad old government and they still fuck it up the first few times.
You've got a nice little thought-stopper there. By claiming that causative events are radically separated in time from their consequences, you can pin the global crisis on 'teh gubment' just as easily as you could pin global warming on a lack of pirates. You do not understand logic or reason, you ignorant little cretin. You also seem to fail to understand that every respected economic expert on the planet disagrees with your amateur assessment. Idiot.
"If at first you don't succeed because you were dumb, then second and third you still don't succeed because you are still being dumb, you probably shouldn't be handed big NASA contracts"
It will always be cheaper to find alternative materials here on Earth than it will be to bring them from space (at least with any technology we can expect to see in our lifetime). The ONLY way for mankind to start moving out into the solar system is to abandon the idea that everything must make a monetary profit.
I knew clicking on these thread it would be full of libertarians mentally wanking themselves off.
This really shows the power of capitalism in this time of government failing. Yes, although the Congress and administration would like you to believe that the current "crisis" is a result of greed, the bottom line is that the money had to come from someplace, and it came from them. Anyway, by looking at Scaled Composites and SpaceX and seeing what they can do when freed from the binders of government "fairness" (corruption, really, since nothing is truely fair) has simply been fascinating. Space flight is finally coming of age.
The "power" of capitalism is what caused the current financial crisis, not teh evil government. Banking institutions collapsed after regulations were removed, not whilst they were in place. To go from that to claiming that a 50-years-behind corporate spaceflight program (that is hardly capitalist anyway as it is driven largely by Musk's cash and optimism, not genuine returns) shows a lack of grasp of reality.
Oh, and never forget that his only real customer is the government. Its practically socialism!
Look at this project in comparison to "Orion". A small team vs. thousands. A few designers vs. hundreds of engineers using bulky project management. It goes to show that you really only need project management to do something the first time (IE, not knowing where the major failing points will be). After that, you need something lightweight and agile so that you aren't throwing away the experience of your people by second guessing them until they are unable to make quick decisions.
Retard. Their "small team" and "quick decisions" are what caused them to blow up the first 3 rockets they launch with hilariously simple mistakes. Your beloved capitalist market tends to interpret redundancy and quality control as waste and bureaucracy, when in fact they are necessary for space flight.
Will the NASA craft be somehow safer as a result of this rigor? I doubt it. Because the project is so tedious it's probably likely some things were just given up on. SpaceX will get it through testing, trial and error, and will find out more in two throw-away tests than NASA will in 10 years of rigorous development. And because they are only supporting one application, a proprietary one, they don't have to be "fair", and spend 10x as much to ensure compatibility with vendor specifications.
Thanks, but I'd rather take facts over the uninformed ranting of a teenage Ayn Rand fanboy. The facts are, SpaceX have a 75% failure rate and NASA have been putting people into space for decades with relatively few mistakes.
Now I'm not saying the government should get out of the space business, but I do think they need to lean it out and put more on the contractors, and open it up to more competition. The fact that this is finally possible is in large part due to the decrease in cost of computers. From project management software to CAD to anything else, it's now possible to wield the same level of computational and data harnessing power on your desktop that was previously limited to only government-sized resources. The gap is closing because there's really not a lot they can do that we can't (with computers). In fact, the increase in the size of government recently seems to be it trying to preserve itself by creating more jobs. "Let's move those computers to something the private industry will never be trusted to do", they think, "such as listening to all the telephone and internet traffic or studying weapons."
If you actually approached some kind of understanding of the subject and weren't just trotting out capitalist dogma like a mindless drone, you might know that a lot of the early problems NASA had were due to competition between contractors and insufficient (government, gasp!) management of them. Sorry if the facts interrupt your little
I'm not sure it matters so much where the money has to be spent - you can't expect 75% cost reductions in an area of design and manufacture that has been pretty much untouched since the last time it was attempted, 40 years ago.
There has been work done on space habitation aboard the ISS, but that is one of the easiest parts - there has been no work done since Apollo on manned planetary landers or very heavy lift rockets such as Saturn V.
Spare me the neoliberal party line. Its clear your philosophy is bankrupt by opening any newspaper these days.
The profit motive isn't any good for driving large space exploration, for the same reason it isn't any good for managing credit risks; prices can only reflect what has happened before and have zero value in forecasting future risks.
How does space exploration have "no obvious returns"? The return is the ability to travel into space. Just because something is not profitable doesn't mean it isn't worthwhile.
This is why corporate space exploration will never be any good.
NASA is being set up to fail, because of the prevailing pro-corporate attitude in the US. The idea is that private entities are efficient, responsible, and capable of long-term planning and technological development. So nobody wants to be accused of being 'socialist' by giving more money to a government agency.
The original Apollo program cost $135 billion in modern(ish) money over about 10 years:
So the US government is expecting a great deal more, for a lot less money, when there has been no real development in interplanetary manned travel since Apollo.
Funny, my router says different, as do online speed tests. ADSL distribution isn't great in this country, but there are large urban areas where speeds of 16meg+ are viable.
Its a flat tax against everyone in the UK i.e. a poll tax. Last time someone tried to openly introduce a poll tax there was rioting, so the only reason it stands for the license fee is because Brits are quite fond of the BBC.
The problem is mainly that the BBC is (rightly) moving beyond TV and radio and producing a lot of online media. This is being paid for by a tax on TVs which is a fairly bizzare state of affairs.
Non-commercial media is a good idea, but the model for raising the funds has to be fair and sensible.
This could be the end of the free Internet in the UK (something the government has been pushing for a while now). You would buy packages of sites (IP addresses) you can access rather than a genuine Internet connection.
The license fee is a model the BBC see as unsustainable - so they are seeking other means of funding.
This is not the way. Personally I would just slice it off income tax and thus it wouldn't disproportionately burden the poor. As it stands its practically a poll tax.
British passports are EU passports. You are an EU citizen, but a British subject. Considering our de jure head of state is unelected and our de facto head of state is normally elected by a single consituency, its silly to consider us citizens.
If as I suspect he is thinking of a whitelist scheme, almost certainly any ip address with a whiff of anything outside the narrow definition of acceptable material would not be permitted. Seeing as any website that matters to the government (i.e. is a giant corporate wallet-emptying machine) wouldn't be affected by this they won't spend extra money to clear servers containing material of variable age suitability.
Slashdot Mirror
This sounds familiar. I've backed off from editing for similar reasons; the established cliques don't like outsiders. Its like an online version of The League of Gentlemen
The virtues of logical arguments and fresh perspectives are not recognised by the Wikipedia community. Everyone has an opinion, they group together with people of similar opinions, and they slug it out in online tribal warfare.
But it may be too late anyway.
In my experience, the Wikipedia community has been deteriorating for some time now. I suspect the percentage of people inactive was lower than 98.3% a year or two ago, but people have been driven away.
Most pages of any significance have a group of people that have appointed themselves overseers, and resist new additions on general principle. Often, they have a collective ideology slant and have chased off everyone who disagrees in any significant way. In this state, the odd person coming along and trying to modify the article against the views of the established mass is shouted down, accused of going against consensus, and chased off. If you took all editors of an article over all time, there would be a completely different consensus than the momentary ones that occur when a single dissenter arrives.
Adding monetary incentives would make this worse. It would make the local tribes more militant and more powerful, finally ending the principle of a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
Wikipedia was an interesting and important social experiment, but I think it is past its peak and is due to decline. I personally believe that history will be more interested in the talk pages and edit logs than the content itself.
Soyuz 5 survived a re-entry ass-backwards, and several have since. Capsules have been shown to be safer on re-entry, which isn't really surprising considering they are aerodynamically much simpler.
mises.org? Are you shitting me? Fringe lunatic economics don't impress me one bit. If you want a respected commentator on the situation try Robert Peston
Oh, and don't throw around the Latin like it makes you look smart. I learned that shit at school and it doesn't impress me at all.
I am perfectly rational, I also feel people who are stupid need to have this pointed out sometimes. The two aren't mutually exclusive. I do not suffer fools gladly.
When NASA started they were working with transistors and no clue if what they were doing was possible. SpaceX gets to draw on all the decades of work done by bad old government and they still fuck it up the first few times.
Bullshit. All the mistakes they made were schoolboy stuff that would've been spotted with proper quality control.
You've got a nice little thought-stopper there. By claiming that causative events are radically separated in time from their consequences, you can pin the global crisis on 'teh gubment' just as easily as you could pin global warming on a lack of pirates. You do not understand logic or reason, you ignorant little cretin. You also seem to fail to understand that every respected economic expert on the planet disagrees with your amateur assessment. Idiot.
"If at first you don't succeed because you were dumb, then second and third you still don't succeed because you are still being dumb, you probably shouldn't be handed big NASA contracts"
Capitalism retard misses the point once more. If what you claim is true, what is happening now would've happened a long time ago. You fail.
It will always be cheaper to find alternative materials here on Earth than it will be to bring them from space (at least with any technology we can expect to see in our lifetime). The ONLY way for mankind to start moving out into the solar system is to abandon the idea that everything must make a monetary profit.
75% failure is not extreme reliability
I knew clicking on these thread it would be full of libertarians mentally wanking themselves off.
The "power" of capitalism is what caused the current financial crisis, not teh evil government. Banking institutions collapsed after regulations were removed, not whilst they were in place. To go from that to claiming that a 50-years-behind corporate spaceflight program (that is hardly capitalist anyway as it is driven largely by Musk's cash and optimism, not genuine returns) shows a lack of grasp of reality.
Oh, and never forget that his only real customer is the government. Its practically socialism!
Retard. Their "small team" and "quick decisions" are what caused them to blow up the first 3 rockets they launch with hilariously simple mistakes. Your beloved capitalist market tends to interpret redundancy and quality control as waste and bureaucracy, when in fact they are necessary for space flight.
Thanks, but I'd rather take facts over the uninformed ranting of a teenage Ayn Rand fanboy. The facts are, SpaceX have a 75% failure rate and NASA have been putting people into space for decades with relatively few mistakes.
If you actually approached some kind of understanding of the subject and weren't just trotting out capitalist dogma like a mindless drone, you might know that a lot of the early problems NASA had were due to competition between contractors and insufficient (government, gasp!) management of them. Sorry if the facts interrupt your little
I'm not sure it matters so much where the money has to be spent - you can't expect 75% cost reductions in an area of design and manufacture that has been pretty much untouched since the last time it was attempted, 40 years ago.
There has been work done on space habitation aboard the ISS, but that is one of the easiest parts - there has been no work done since Apollo on manned planetary landers or very heavy lift rockets such as Saturn V.
Spare me the neoliberal party line. Its clear your philosophy is bankrupt by opening any newspaper these days.
The profit motive isn't any good for driving large space exploration, for the same reason it isn't any good for managing credit risks; prices can only reflect what has happened before and have zero value in forecasting future risks.
How does space exploration have "no obvious returns"? The return is the ability to travel into space. Just because something is not profitable doesn't mean it isn't worthwhile.
This is why corporate space exploration will never be any good.
NASA is being set up to fail, because of the prevailing pro-corporate attitude in the US. The idea is that private entities are efficient, responsible, and capable of long-term planning and technological development. So nobody wants to be accused of being 'socialist' by giving more money to a government agency.
The original Apollo program cost $135 billion in modern(ish) money over about 10 years:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program#Program_costs_and_cancellation
Whereas Constellation is being given $3 billion a year for about 20 years, or about $60 billion in current money.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/expectmore/detail/10004394.2006.html
So the US government is expecting a great deal more, for a lot less money, when there has been no real development in interplanetary manned travel since Apollo.
Funny, my router says different, as do online speed tests. ADSL distribution isn't great in this country, but there are large urban areas where speeds of 16meg+ are viable.
Its a flat tax against everyone in the UK i.e. a poll tax. Last time someone tried to openly introduce a poll tax there was rioting, so the only reason it stands for the license fee is because Brits are quite fond of the BBC.
The problem is mainly that the BBC is (rightly) moving beyond TV and radio and producing a lot of online media. This is being paid for by a tax on TVs which is a fairly bizzare state of affairs.
Non-commercial media is a good idea, but the model for raising the funds has to be fair and sensible.
This could be the end of the free Internet in the UK (something the government has been pushing for a while now). You would buy packages of sites (IP addresses) you can access rather than a genuine Internet connection.
The license fee is a model the BBC see as unsustainable - so they are seeking other means of funding.
This is not the way. Personally I would just slice it off income tax and thus it wouldn't disproportionately burden the poor. As it stands its practically a poll tax.
British passports are EU passports. You are an EU citizen, but a British subject. Considering our de jure head of state is unelected and our de facto head of state is normally elected by a single consituency, its silly to consider us citizens.
Criticising capitalism won't get any protest from me, but if you are proposing an alternative make sure it isn't one that is clearly worse.
I see some potentially promising techniques being developed in Athens at the moment.
If as I suspect he is thinking of a whitelist scheme, almost certainly any ip address with a whiff of anything outside the narrow definition of acceptable material would not be permitted. Seeing as any website that matters to the government (i.e. is a giant corporate wallet-emptying machine) wouldn't be affected by this they won't spend extra money to clear servers containing material of variable age suitability.