Just to be clear: There are several launch systems capable of sending "things" into space, just not people. Things like Mars rovers and probes to other planets and comets don't use man-rated launchers.

Why would that be a good idea? Just private good m'kay?

Not even a hardline anti-government libertarian should want to just give tax money to a private corporation.

This is a common mental mistake of Slashdotters. Of course there is a scale of various levels of knowledge. Perhaps even more importantly, a person can be an expert in some subjects and an idiot in others.

We know how to land in vacuum with little gravity. Mars has too strong gravity to use rockets all the way. Both parachutes and breaking rockets are still useful for landing on Mars, but it is very different from both Earth and the Moon.

Do you know anything about tree rings? Why was this modded up?

If said work of "skeptics" was crap, then criticizing a journal for publishing crap is completely reasonable.

Wasn't this some stacks of punch cards that was thrown out in the mid-80s sometime?

How is that going to help you when they refuse to let you in at the border check?

I forgot the assumption that all crap articles are deleted.

1,000 articles total
800 are crap
200 are good

All 800 crap articles are deleted.
100 of the good ones are also deleted.
800/900 = 89% of deletions are correct, so deleters think they are doing a good job, while half of good new articles are deleted.

I forgot the assumption that all crap articles are deleted.

1,000 articles total
800 are crap
200 are good

All 800 crap articles are deleted.
100 of the good ones are also deleted.
800/900 = 89% of deletions are correct so deleters think they are doing a good job, while half of good new articles are deleted.

Of course a lot of crap is coming in. It always has. The problem is that many start to assume anything added by a newbie is crap until proven otherwise.

As a thought example, let's say 80% of new articles are crap. Then let's say 90% is deletions are accurate. 90% is pretty good, but that still means about 44% of good new articles are deleted.

Except Wikipedia is far from finished. Sure, the subjects the subjects the average Wikipedia writer (or Slashdotter) is likely to look up are well covered. Some subject areas were pretty much covered already in 2004. There is an article on pretty much every American town, film, band, athlete etc, but as soon as you go outside North America, Europe, Japan and Australia it gets a lot more sparse.

There is also a huge number of historical people with no articles. Whole academic subjects such as philosophy are barely covered and not very well written. Events before 2001 that aren't frequently referenced today is not nearly as well covered as recent events.

How much tricks does that require? Will it break stuff when finally upgrading to a new version of Ubuntu?