Precisely this.

At one time, ages ago, getting admin privileges was easy. Make some good edits, prove you could contribute well, and you were basically in.

Then came editcountitis, where people with less than X thousand edits (I think it's at what, 50,000 now?) were cast aside. Editcountitis created the current "revert monkey" culture and the fast-action tools so that people can automatically revert anything that happens without even reading the edit. Push button, issue revert. Most of these monkeys sit around slapping "revert" all day without reading; some of them actually just use a script to automatically click "revert" on their tool of choice in order to pad their edit counts.

Then came, also, the cliques. Self-protecting groups formed, and the worst is the admins because once you are an admin, you are expected to ALWAYS back up the actions of another admin. You can't badmouth other admins - that's not the way the game is played - but you can be as ugly and mean-spirited to any normal user you want, and when they respond in kind you can either issue a block yourself or ask a supposedly "uninvolved" admin to be your proxy in return for Favors To Be Named Later. Because after all, "civility" only applies to those who don't have the Special Buttons.

The way the game is played, if you are trying to influence an article on Wikipedia, is simple. You revert-monkey someone right to the point of 3RR. You never discuss anything on a talk page and if you've hit 3RR, you find someone to collude with to start reverting in tag-team, then you accuse the other side of either "breaking 3RR" or "not discussing." If you want to and have the backing of a friendly admin, you get them blocked and then issue gloating messages or just template the hell out of them to further infuriate them and bait them into responding "incivilly" to your harassment, at which point your friend the admin gets to escalate the blocks over and over again. Eventually, you'll run the new person off and you get to [[WP:OWN]] your article again, so long as you can keep new editors from ever sticking around long enough for them to actually work and discuss and change the consensus.

The goal of wikipedia's admins is to drive off new editors, and anyone who tells you differently is likely a wikipedia admin.

Always the way.

I'll just recomment this from yesterday:

So many burnt-up, cynical admins who think that they can just do what they want and abuse people - because they pretty much can. Look at the way Toddst1 treats people as a great example of how crappy Wikipedia culture really is.

Every time I see a story about Wikipedia, I remember this from years ago. And I chuckle, because that corrupt place hasn't changed one bit since. They have a new crop of Essjays now, and the Durova List behavior is alive and well too.

The reason they are losing participation is because those at the top - the Toddst1's of Wikipedia who run things - DO NOT WANT there to be participation. They want to keep anyone new away, so that their existing friends who "WP:OWN" (look it up) various articles can maintain control. The more new people come, the more likely it is that consensus will actually overturn bad edits and POV editing perpetrated by organized POV editing groups who maintain a list of "interested editors" to aim at an article where someone differs on their POV edits, poised to attack and overwhelm with multiple admins ready to instantly issue blocks as needed.

Cloud services take all of your IT problems, and give them to someone else, period. A cloud is not inherently going to fix your problems, or make them worse, but just delegate them to someone who may or may not give a crap.

FTFY.

I don't trust Cloud services with anything, for good reasons:
- Lack of deletion confirmability.
- Lack of security (seriously, Dropbox will accept "1111" as a valid password)
- Lack of confidentiality - law enforcement says "we want to look at user32X's files", Dropbox/Google/etc will cheerfully hand them over without so much as a notification to you. Your account is hacked or your password guessed, poof your files are in the wild. One person misrepresents themselves and the file gets shared out, or some bit is flipped making your files "visible", you get no notification and your files are in the fucking wild.

Yes, that was how Essjay worked too. The lying little piece of shit was like every other Wikipedia admin, they're all lying pieces of shit.

Try living there a while and see how close some of these people are to stereotypes firsthand. You're the one who hasn't ever been near Texas.

"Kicks its butt"

As in:
- Commands a much larger share of the market.
- Carries a greater variety of product.
- Is ubiquitously installed in almost every home in a way Blu-Ray is most definitely not.

As for your claims of technical superiority, I say that Blu-Ray is technically superior. Being able to push 7.1, high-quality sound and 1080p video is quite something.

-HOWEVER-

When you're talking about that "superiority" to people who sit 8 feet away from a 20-30 inch screen, possibly even a CRT, and their sound system is the same stereo speakers that have always been built into the set, Blu-ray's technical superiority means precisely two things: JACK and SQUAT. And it's because the rest of the system, even if they were to hook up a Blu-Ray player, DOES NOT CARE. It cannot play back 7.1 sound. It cannot play back any more meaningful visible content than the 480p or possibly 720p that is native to its resolution (maybe even 480i in the case of a CRT). Even if it is a 30" 1080p screen, sitting at 6-8 feet from it you quite literally cannot see the difference because your eyes are not that good.

Blu-Ray is niche for the upper end for that reason. It is GREAT, if you have a 5.1 or 7.1 sound system and a TV screen of 55+ inches. Below that, you encounter diminishing returns quite quickly.

No kidding. So many burnt-up, cynical admins who think that they can just do what they want and abuse people - because they pretty much can. Look at the way Toddst1 treats people as a great example of how crappy Wikipedia culture really is.

Every time I see a story about Wikipedia, I remember this from years ago. And I chuckle, because that corrupt place hasn't changed one bit since. They have a new crop of Essjays now, and the Durova List behavior is alive and well too.

First of all most of what you posted is an opinion not actually fact..

Fact: the Founders wanted to not have a standing military (or the expense of one) and most of them argued for the "citizen militias" as a replacement.
Fact: Washington and the other actual military members of the Convention, knowing how fucking useless the militias had been, argued strongly against this.
Fact: The "in defense of the State" option was pulled just as I said.

The rest of your bullshit is just bullshit, most notably your pointing to the Virginia Declaration. The proposed verbiage for the amendment was, in order:

The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person.

A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, being the best security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; but no person religiously scrupulous shall be compelled to bear arms.

A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, being the best security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; but no one religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person.

A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, being the best security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed, but no one religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person.

A well regulated militia, being the best security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms for the common defence, shall not be infringed.

A well regulated militia, being the best security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms in defence of the State, shall not be infringed.

A well regulated militia being the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

And just like that, a million wack-jobs began to think that the 2nd amendment allowed them limitless right to go out and be fucking irresponsible with guns, not to register (though all states at the time REQUIRED them to register for the Militia and register their service weapons and to purchase certain bore sizes to be compatible with the local and federal ammunition stores), and eventually led to a bunch of retarded teaparty wack-jobs and insane nutcases like the "Montana Freemen" and other "Militias" thinking they had the right to stage armed revolt or even kill elected officials on a whim.

You make it sound like you've never met the twits from Texas, who really can't keep their fingers off the damn triggers.

The original wording of the amendment was:
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms in defence of the Stat, shall not be infringed."

That bit was pulled not because they wanted open crazy, but because of several representatives who brought up the fact that several States had laws on the books requiring citizens to carry for other purposes, like laws requiring able-bodied men to shoot 20-24 head of "pest birds" before planting season to stop them from eating planted seeds or devouring huntable wildlife.

Meanwhile, the Framers also tried to do WITHOUT a standing army. Their theory - dumbasses as most of them really were - was that they could "call up the militia" whenever there was need for a war, thus avoiding the cost of actually training troops. This despite the fact that Washington, who'd been their general, strongly advised against it due to (a) the fact that the weekend wackjobs were unreliable, (b) the fact that the weekend wackjobs tended to come untrained, (c) the fact that the weekend wackjobs tended to bring weaponry incompatible with the provided munitions, and (d) the fact that the weekend wackjobs tended to grab their re-issued rifles and promptly desert from the army, going back home or reenlisting with a different militia to scam extra signing bonuses.

The end result of this was that by 1814 when the British showed back up, the weekend wackjobs showed their true colors, busy off masturbating in the woods while the British were burning the city of Washington DC, including that place we know as the "White House", so named because to repair the damage they covered basically the entire fucking thing in white paint to hide the smoke and burn marks.

And after that we never did without a standing militia again, and pretty much the entire reason for the 2nd amendment - the idea that we would have a "well regulated" (e.g. trained and capable) army full of state volunteers, called up when needed and equipped with "regulation" arms and ammunition compatible with what the army had in stock for use in war, was rendered fucking null and void.

The 2nd amendment is a remnant of a really BAD idea by some fucking stupid "founders" and we've just never gotten round to repealing it, despite its being like an inflamed appendix causing nothing but trouble for our society ever since.

And now, folks, it's time for "Who do you trust!" Hubba, hubba, hubba! Money, money, money! Who do you trust? Me? I'm giving away free money. And where is the Batman? HE'S AT HOME WASHING HIS TIGHTS!

So do you trust the Joker, or the Batman?

Thunderbolt is almost exclusively a 2012 Apple thing. Even people who HAVE Thunderbolt ports wind up wishing they had an extra USB port instead.

Apple will be happy to sell you an adapter to make a usable USB3.0 port out of your useless fucking Thunderbolt port for just $59.99... ;)

Well that's often how standards work.

Consider how VHS beat Beta (aside from the "having Porn" aspect). Consider how many of Sony's other proprietary formats failed to take off because a cheaper, "technically inferior" alternative exists. DAT, MiniDisc, "Sony Dynamic Digital Sound", ATRAC, HiFD... the world is uncompromising.

Consider how Iomega beat the pants off of SyQuest (Zip drives vs EZ135), despite being slower, lower capacity, and prone to the media itself dying in a way that would actually destroy the drive (click of death). How did they do this? By getting Gateway and Dell to pack in Zip drives on a ton of computers for about 5 years and then selling the media everywhere.

And then Iomega tried for the Jaz drives, and competed with Castlewood's Orb drives, and both of them got smacked around by people going "hey you idiots, we can burn DVDs now."

Consider how Blu-Ray has settled into the niche, high-end "I have a 800-inch TV and 13-point surround sound" video/audiophile nerd zone, while DVD still kicks its butt by being available to anyone who can scrape together $20 for a player, $20 for a tv of any sort (even an old CRT still works w/ it), and $5-10 a month for a Netflix subscription or some cheap movies from the local grocery store or walmart's bargain bin.

Consider how the Atari 5200 couldn't manage to get buyers and was whomped by the Atari 2600. How the NES, woefully inferior to the Sega Genesis, nevertheless completely beat it in sales for two whole years before Nintendo finally got around to releasing the SNES (Genesis released 1989, SNES released 1991). How the supposedly "technically superior" PSP line have been a constant source of jokes and derision while Nintendo laughs their ass to the bank re-releasing old games on Gameboy/DS/3DS hardware that is, in terms of technical limitations, less powerful than an old Playstation and makes the games look more than a decade old.

Look how hard Apple tried to push Firewire only to have nobody else want it. Look how hard they're now trying to push Thunderbolt, which they can only sell to people who by an Apple laptop or desktop machine. Thunderbolt is headed the way of Firewire, fast.

It does you no good to be "technically superior" if you can't get your product into people's hands. History is littered with "technically superior" crap that nobody adopted.

Oh, and this myth of rampart anti-US sentiments in Germany isn't really true, either.

Though the US seems to be working very hard to make sure that anti-US sentiment round the globe in general remains high. :(

Clearly, the geek and nerd community feels it is the latter role that they should be full filling

Clearly, the law as written disallowing obvious patents agrees with us. Legal code: 35 U.S.C. 103 (A)