I can't speak for the others you've listed, but these Capitol Hill edits almost exclusively affect articles on sitting members and those on politically contentious topics. If it really is by "junior IT staff," then it's more likely that they're doing it under orders from their higher-ups rather than wasting office hours on topics they're personally interested in.

On the other hand, TFA seems to indicate that this SEO fiasco was less about trying to improve the utility's reputation than about improving the executive's personal reputation.

$18k of company money to try to justify a personal $60k/a raise really doesn't sound good.

If you've fallen in love with the Walt Disney World experience, you now have the option to live in a town designed by Disney itself: Celebration, Florida. Resembling "Main Street, USA" and the "EPCOT World Showcase" writ large, Celebration helps blur the distinction between between Disney and real life, effectively letting you live in a theme park.

Know who doesn't live in Celebration, Florida and its mean income over $75k/yr? The people who work in Celebration, Florida.

It's not hard to find new developments across the US where you see new apartments and condominiums built alongside or even on top of faux city shops (complete with acres of parking) to give the residents the "gentrified neighborhood" experience. But you can bet that the folks who actually work in Whole Foods or PF Chang's don't actually live there. And the folks that work there can't afford to shop there.

Prices in cities are targeted at those high-earning college graduates. There may be greater need for bartenders, waitstaff, etc, but those low-wage workers can't afford to actually live in the city themselves, which necessitates long commutes, which eats up even more of their meager pay, which ensures that the lower class stays lower class.

Martians notwithstanding, nobody had any idea what the far side of the moon looked like before 1959. Sure, 55 years may be "a very long time" for some people, but we're not exactly talking about something that puzzled Hipparchus here.

I think you've misread the post. In "What she did was wrong", I read "wrong" as "unethical", "unscientific", or at the very best "incompetent". Your criticism assumes it meant "something which eventually turned out not to be how reality works".

Immune system genes are often under balancing selection - i.e. the rarest alleles are favoured (until, due to this favouring, they cease to be rarest, then other alleles are favoured.) An infusion of new different alleles from Neandertals could be favoured simply because they are different, not because they are evolved to European conditions.

Testing between these hypotheses seems difficult. The 'balancing selection' hypothesis predicts that the genes will readily spread back into Africa, whereas the 'evolved for European conditions' predicts they will not. The problem is that you need some neutral mutations that arose in Europe at the same time as a 'control' for comparison purposes. I'm not sure how to identify such mutations, but I expect it could be done.

There is another obvious point in history where such a gene transfer could have occurred. European conditions favour light skin, and Neandertals had been hanging out there for some tens of thousands of years before modern humans turned up and so had evolved light skin. These newcomers, having recent ancestry in Africa, were probably dark skinned. Interbreeding could easily have introduced the beneficial-to-European-conditions light skin mutations into the modern population.

My memory of the literature (which I have followed just a little bit, not closely) is that this did not happen - genetic analysis shows that modern Europeans and Neandertals acquired light skin through different mutations. However, Wikipedia says this is still under debate.

I explicitly did so.

This is a silly objection. That isn't how payback times are used.

Payback time is a quick indication of return on investment. You then compare that return on investment with the other options available to you, such as leaving the money in the bank.

If you included interest rates in payback time, you'd need to be constantly adjusting it as rates changed, and it would differ for different entities depending on their access to finance. Instead you keep it simple, and each entity has its own idea (based on circumstances and current interest rates) of what the effective payback time is of leaving the money in the bank (or not borrowing it, or investing it in other opportunities.) (For example, a start-up is likely to require a very short payback time - they're strapped for cash and are trying to get their Big New Idea to market where they hope it will make a fortune. Up-front money is then very expensive compared to down-the-road money. For them, it may make sense to lease a supercomputer even if buying it would have a two year payback time.)

What is missing from this analysis is depreciation of assets. After 6.4 years, money in the bank will have depreciated much less than the solar cells. Payback time is a rough guide - it tells you whether it is worth your while doing a more detailed analysis including finance cost, depreciation, tax implications etc.

Why would I? Much like the entire concurring majority, I'm a guy.

Pregnancy: it takes two to happen, but it's always the woman's fault.

They aren't. They're using an established term "energy payback". The authors wrote an analysis which will be useful to many people but used the word "payback" in a way which does not match your preconceived notion of how it should be used. For this, you label them "charlatans".

So all the people interested in energy payback times should not be able to publish or read about it because you've claimed ownership of the word "payback" and won't license them to use it? They should use a less clear term to express their meaning because otherwise some random idiot who reads technical papers might make the leap "payback = money", despite the term "energy payback" being self explanatory?

Had you argued that because this is "energy payback" rather than financial payback, it isn't worthy of being reported on Slashdot, I could respect your argument. Instead you label people charlatans because what they discuss is not what you're interested it.

Oh good, I'll just print up a bunch of fliers saying you torture kittens and set fire to orphanages and post them around your home town. Because nobody has heard of you and I'm not a publicly listed company, it will be 'opinion' rather than 'libel'.

I have no idea whether this guy's claims are justified, but neither do you. My liking Wikipedia does not therefore mean that the facts or the law are on the side of Wikipedia.

When El Nino leads to a new record high temperature by a large margin (for argument's sake, in 2015), the denialists will quietly adopt this as their new standard for 'normal' and in 2025 they'll be saying "warming is a hoax because temperatures haven't risen on average since 2015."

http://xkcd.com/1321/