Indeed.
Print encyclopedias had to be picky about editing, because even edited down they were still 100lbs and took up feet of shelf space.
A digital encyclopedia has no such constraints. It can be a repository for everything, at no cost.
The "not notable" constraint is totally artificial and serves only as an outlet for the petty-minded to exert some small degree of power.
DG
Says the "Anonymous Coward".
Oh, the irony.
DG
Where Wikipedia fails HARD though is the article deletion process.
There are people out there who get a weird thrill from deleting articles.
An article that has been in place for *10 years* can be snuffed out just because a motivated moderator decides it isn't "notable" and sets up a "speedy delete".
Notice 6 months after the fact, try and put it back, and the whole friggin' WORLD descends on you.
Wikipedia is ruled by a group of petty, self-nominated bureaucrats. And the system - as horribly broken as it is - cannot be reformed, because there are too many vested interests who want to see it STAY broken.
Let me guess, you're a Wikipedia moderator, right?
It continually amazes me how, in a world where storage is effectively free, where there is literally no cost to hosting articles, that there exist people who seek to suppress knowledge because it doesn't meet their arbitrary standard of "notable".
Give a man the power to say "no", and he says "no" - a lot.
DG
Every car gets 0 miles to the gallon unnecessarily stopped at a light.
I'm wondering, instead of using red/green switches at intersections, maybe we can have the cars drive through diffraction plates set up around the intersection. Then the wavefunction of you and car can spread out into the intersection via diffraction and arrive randomly into one of several quantum states (outbound lanes) which head toward your destination. If we made cars and their drivers out of bosons instead of fermions, it might work. Only one fermion can occupy any given quantum state. So with fermionic cars, there's always a small probability of quantum entanglement within the intersection between you and some other guy trying to make a left.
When I lived in Toronto, about a year ago, I had to look hard to find anyone using an Apple or Android phone.
It was all BlackBerry - on the subway, in Starbucks, on the street - BB ruled the roost.
And the BB10 phones are *amazing*. The UI is bar none the best designed for a phone I've ever encountered.
Yup.
And as I already had the Windows version, it was free.
Works flawlessly on an HD7870 Ubuntu / Catalyst box. Squee!
The only problem with that 2009 article is that Dragon Heavy still hasn't been built, tested or flown and is behind schedule. SpaceX had planned to launch it last year, then this year, and now their launch manifest shows 2015 but is expected to slip further. They had reported cross-flow problems with the two outer boosters in 2013, but have not said much about it since.
Nobody's stopping you from unplugging your computer, or are they? But this isn't about "we" can do. It's about other people doing things you don't like them to do, such as leaving their computers running performing work you deem unworthy.
Uh huh. Me and 97% of climate scientists.
Why is this so hard for everyone to understand? Why is the idea of wanting to unplug our computers before bedtime so alien to everybody? Running a computer all day to mine a Bitcoin yields nothing to the world except a big finite number and some CO2.
Money is needed as a way for people to handle the flow of resources, not just for handling more money. Dollars can also be handled electronically. They do not consume natural resources when printed except for the piece of paper. A dollar doesn't derive its value from a scarcity of paper.
Mining Bitcoins is environmentally destructive. As time goes on and the keys get exponentially sparser, the system nominally sustains expansion of its monetary base by surfing on Moore's Law forever- which is a failure point since electrical power is becoming the rate limiting factor to Bitcoin production. Bitcoins are a currency that requires cotinuous destruction of real resources just to sustain its monetary base.
These comparisons to running a bank branches are weird. It's not as simple as the "total energy consumed per dollar/Bitcoin transaction". We need bank branches because the public actually has dollars to put in them. Bitcoins are mined by suckers within the scheme, immediately enter the financial stratosphere, and are rarely seen by the public afterwards, simply because they're volatile and not safe long-term investments. Skyscrapers wouldn't disappear or go dark if people used Bitcoins instead of dollars. Bank branches will not close; the public need for them will still exist.
The inherent energy inefficiencies in transferring and handling ordinary money within bank branches is generally considered a nuisance, not a founding principle behind the currency's supposed value. People want dollars because they can be traded, not because finding them consumed someone a lot of work. The energy inefficiencies involved with handling money itself are generally considered to be a nuisance, something to avoid. but now we're sowing a new currency based on the kilowatt-hours that must be wasted by minting it. A Bitcoin economy makes resource scarcity worse to deal with, and it's a bad currency with no usefulness to the vast majority of us.
It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.
