"Plenty of humans would rather be a slave then to starve."

All dogs would rather be a slave than to starve, not just plenty of.

I wouldn't go with wolves as my counter example. I'd go with cats.

Science has solved most of them by proving they are all based on limited perspective. You are destroying and maiming other creatures with every action you take in every moment of your life. So you can kill yourself or make the conscious decision to keep doing it. It's a little silly to pause and hesitate when doing so would actually benefit you.

I can think of little that would HINDER scientific progress so much.

Is a zoo really much different than permanent involuntary institutionalization?

I think most people would prefer the death penalty to prison bitch.

*tips hat*

That sir was one of the most clever racism trolls I've ever seen.

Human Life > Animal Life

The only basis needed is self interest. We are in fact humans, being fair to non-humans waits in line after being fair to humans.

The interesting thing is that the MOST justifiable things human with animals are things that animal rights activists have success fighting. Such as experimentation for science and medicine. These things are temporary efforts that produce results that benefits animals and humans alike forever after.

The abuses that they don't generally fight at all or even advocate (such as the keeping of pets, aka captivity) and especially spaying and neutering are the things we could end with little or no negative impact on the interests of our own species.

Why should he? We don't live in the rest of the world. That would be their problem.

It doesn't just need to coincide with our timeframe but also with our timescale. Neurons are actually fairly simple energy patterns all told. If you have lots of them you have intelligence. Something that has a similar pattern that fires on thousand year scales wouldn't be able to perceive us and wouldn't move fast enough to seem intelligent to us.

"A good comparison of Wikipedia, since they are producing an educational product, is to compare them with modern universities, which are all "non-profit" as well. Look at many of the salaries at most colleges and universities, and you'll see many people making in excess of $100,000 per year, and athletic coaches that are paid in excess of $1,000,000 per year. Being classified as "non-profit" clearly does not mean that you have to pay your employees poorly.

And, of course, most universities also solicit funds and donations with the same agressiveness as Wikipedia as well. Got to keep that football and basketball program rolling, after all."

So because modern universities are poorly run and inefficient Wikipedia should be as well? Modern universities exist in their current form because they are largely government funded. The government gives credence to their degrees and therefore conducts the research it funds via the resources that universities produce. As a consequence most very expensive and cutting edge research is performed there and most of the knowledge related to it housed there. Even with the how available, that funding buys tools you just don't have elsewhere. Technology and open information is slowly eroding at that but it isn't there yet.

Modern universities, especially in the US, are a poor resource for education. They are slow to change and adapt. Throughout the vast vast majority of tech employers care far more about what you know, your proven track record, and your ability to learn than they do about degrees. Most employers, especially those with hiring managers who are promoted from engineering positions, would take someone with 10 years of related experience (especially who was still young) over someone with a masters. He'll eventually find one that will pay the same or only slightly less than they would a peer with the experience and the degree on top of it. Pretty much all would take someone doing a similar job at another enterprise of similar size for even two years. So tech is a long way toward already being there.

For science see the problem I mentioned above. For engineering... this is such a broad category, old school engineering fields often have entrenched degree mentality while newer and more flexible engineering areas have less of one. Maths? I'm not really sure this is properly considered a category so much as the common language between the previous areas. If we taught maths as the creative, easy, and flexible thing it is people working in STE would be not just using but developing maths on a daily basis.

Is that Wikipedia is not and does not need to be a stunning marvel of technology. The brilliance is in the concept, not the implementation.

The most talented people in the organization are likely the backend guys who have to make the scaling, redundancy, and infrastructure work on what should be a shoestring budget. Anything on that scale requires extremely gifted and creative people, especially if you can't just throw money at it. Although given a couple years I could certainly do it for an annual upkeep cost of less than two million.

Granted, if it were my brainchild and succeeded to Wikipedia's degree I'd probably give myself a permanent position and an overgenerous salary along with half a dozen other key people who made it happen. That seems fair to me. If our capitalist society thought it was fair for Bill Gates to be the richest man in the world for a few clever business tactics that resulted in windows being widespread the Wikipedia creators should at least have a comfortable life without having to worry about accounting for productivity. And so long at it weren't at the expense of Wikipedia itself I would be okay with a portion of my donation going to the ones who made it possible for this thing that is so valuable I'd volunteer to pay to keep it to exist at all. But even if you give 6 guys $250k/yr that is only $1.5m.

Thinking of the global scale of Wikipedia, the type of data it houses, the kind of bandwidth likely required, etc. I'd think $5m would be a very solid operating budget.
 

That isn't the norm across the country for IT workers. Are you the self taught and never broke in type or the got burned in some economic shift and fell out of the stream type?

It's not just influence. Nobody wants to see them. I think I speak for the entire internet when I say that we are sick of more and more intrusive advertising.

I expect them to hire devs outside silicon valley?

There is qualified talent all over the country and all over the world. You don't need to look in silicon valley to find someone qualified to work on a wiki. And aside from some of the infrastructure guys (the flavor the DC will usually supply if asked) nobody needs to be in California. For that matter there are plenty of well wired DC's that aren't in California.