They were probably thinking it would be awesome to deploy a swarm of small fighter planes by dropping them from a bomber. In which they were absolutely right, it hardly gets any more awesome than that. Unfortunately, it also doesn't get much more impractical than that, which was apparently casually brushed aside to satisfy the rule of cool. Unfortunately, reason set in before it was taken in production.

Free in that statement is about free as in freedom, not free as in beer

Last I checked .NET isn't a language.

I didn't know that the fire mentioned above was controversial, it didn't seem so from the original post. If it was, it was phrased rather misleading imo. But this experiment sounds fun too. Pick a clearly slanted article, and I'll make the anonymous edit.

"show me every page in wikitext mode" is a setting that virtually nobody would want though. I know I wouldn't want that. If that seriously would be your preference, you might be the only one. Always on visual editor (that doesn't suck and loads fast). Now that would be awsome.

So, let's put the hypothesis to the test. Which article was it? Then we can try it out, and see what happens.

You would see an unholy mess of wikitext rather than a parsed article. It's slowly getting there though. There is a visual editor - though it's far from good yet, and couldn't handle the server load of being always on. For now, you're still stuck pressing edit.

Wow, really? It is incredibly bad for a discussion page to be locked. Could you give a couple of examples? Heck, even one example would be great. If this is realy true, it should be fixed immediately.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Pending_AfC_submissions

And if they don't, they're not a real admin, right?

Sometimes that does happen too fast - but most what is fast-deleted is in fact junk. What were the articles about? Can you remember the titles, or failing that, your Wikipedia user name? I can restore them for you if you want (and they aren't junk, obviously)

wikipedia indicates that there were 5.9 million viewers in the U.S. alone, vs 2.93 million for the season opening episode. I think one can easily call this a massive success. The piracy issues seems minor in comparison.

I'm not much of a tv watcher myself, but the show I do tend to watch, Dr. Who, is free to air where I live. Without commercials too. I don't think I've ever watched it on live tv, I always pirate it purely for convenience. As long as the most convenient thing is pirating, I will continue doing so. For music on the other hand, the most convenient thing is generally spotify, so I pay the reasonable price for a subscription. The things not on spotify I pirate. Afaik Netflix is not yet available here in the Netherlands (it wasn't the last time I checked, about a year back), but if it were and there was a subscription that fit my consumer pattern, I wouldn't mind paying something for it either. Digital on demand media is getting there. Its just a matter of time. The traditional media will either adapt to the demands of a new generation of consumers, or die out and be replaced by those who do understand how to deliver what I want.

Yes. But that's not really to the point. The point is, that equations break the flow of prose, and don't work well in explaining things, other than in a purely mathematical context. If you are not speaking about mathematics (and nobody other than mathematicians really do, and the OP is rather math related, but is not about the math of the uncertainty principle but its applications) it's best to keep equations out of it. This is obviously a rule of thumb and there are bound to be exceptions where using an equation is actually beneficial to the global understanding of the issue, but these cases are rare, and far in between. For the OP for example, I agree that not using equations was probably the right choice, though I would have made different editorial choices in the prose, and possibly using one equation (to wit, \sigma_{x}\sigma_{p} \geq \frac{\hbar}{2} ) could maybe have been defensible, but still a choice I would have disagreed with.

I would argue that very few to no popular articles need the exact formula for black body specific intensity. But if they do, the formulaic form is clearly superior. It's likelier that the article would focus on a specific aspect off blackbody radiation. To wit, I would expect the majority to talk about the ultraviolet catastrophe, and I wouldn't explain it in terms of equations at all, neither in symbolic nor in written out form.