Snowflame

This is because Larry Sanger is crazy. There are legitimate criticisms of Wikipedia to be made, but citing them to Sanger makes them weaker not stronger.

I mean... according to him, that company's business HAS suffered. Granted, he blames it on a conspiracy out to "cancel" him with advertisers rather than technical problems, but still.

Per other comments in the thread, Ms. De Santis might be imaginary and just a way to puff Ms. Rossi up. At the least, her portrait was a stock photograph on the staff page of RECEPTIO.

There are some science-y reasons in support of (2), though. Granted, we are biased by being familiar with human life, of course. Consider this: phosphorus is a fairly rare element out there. It's comparatively common on Earth vs. other parts of the galaxy, and "more common" is still somewhat rare on Earth. Yet, Earth life has gone out of its way to use phosphorus for some fairly key parts of itself (DNA!) despite its rarity. Maybe it's path dependence / weird luck, but maybe phosphorus really is that much better than other elements for such purposes. If phosphorus really is both very rare galactically AND key for the development of advanced life, that really does argue in favor of (2), that Earth just hit the cosmic jackpot for sustainability of life. (High phosphorus scarcity would also make interstellar colonization by humans a non-starter... we'd be stuck using robots to explore at best.)

Are you trolling? No it isn't?

If nothing else, the time issue is a huge one. Cheaters have very consistent seconds-per-move while actual masters make obvious moves instantly and pause on tougher moves.

Xoogler here. Back at Google, there was an explicit policy that "heroic" efforts result in at most a bump of one level on the internal assessment scale - there was an idea that you should be doing productive work without having to overwork yourself, and too much "willing to work constantly" from reports was a danger sign for the manager's performance review. (Granted, this also could be super stressful for borderline employees, who are essentially told that even if they work hard, we'll still fire you.)

The original Reddit post somewhat overstated the nature of "several people expressed concern." Nobody told him outright that despite what he might think, he did not really know Scots. That one screenshot'd, anonymized conversation was the one time something like that happened in seven years - but that could very easily be read as a criticism of those specific translations, not of his work as a whole. It seems as if the Reddit OP was the first person to notice the editor's systemic incompetence and failure to understand the degree of his lack of fluency. So... no, I don't think he ever made this "second and bigger mistake", aside from general massive naivety. After being told explicitly now, he's certainly ashamed and horrified at wasting so much time on his own personal dialect of Scots.

Xoogler here. You are very, very wrong if you think there is no dissent within Google. There's plenty.

That said, this is a company that has massively succeeded with other bets that were "absolutely predictable they would never work." So just because something looks questionable doesn't mean it gets shot down.

(Now, IMO, Glass was a mistake - but for entirely different reasons than you describe. An elite fashion product cuts against Google's reputation as something for everybody, even IF it had succeeded.)

You do realize that it was the US court system that put the library-of-the-world version of Google Books on ice, correct? Larry & Sergey wanted a hippy "share all the books to everyone" view of this. The court said no, do what the book publishers say.

The headline is a tad hyperbolic. Notably, there was one area where Lawrence proooobably was, uh, stretching the truth (for good reason): he insisted that the Arabs had sneaked some ninja division into taking Damascus "first." This account isn't shared by anyone else and would imply these Arabs took the city, then retreated, then came back later or something.

Why would Lawrence fudge here? Well, this will seem very quaint to modern eyes, but apparently there was a bias toward "whoever did the work gets the spoils" back then. If the British army took Damascus then it was theirs to distribute as they saw fit, if it was a combined British/Arab force then it'd be a little different. This is ludicrous since there's a unified commander-in-chief who is British who can pick whichever army they like to have the honor of entering the city first. Anyway, Lawrence was exaggerating the date where the Arab troops arrived to try and get them some of the glory & responsibility afterward, since he was considerably more pro-Arab independence than some of the other Brits.

It's a silly issue since the Turks had basically lost regardless and who cares which army enters first, of course.