Any for-profit entity hotlinking Commons is unfair. Heck, they have the right to redistribute freely the image as they see fit, instead of consuming resources that are a common good.
But this goes beyond that - it's some blind check of internet connectivity for the app, and doesn't get shown to the user. We're pretty sure of that, given that with the amount of noise that task generated, if there was an app featuring that image at least one of the ~ 90M daily "views" would've been someone reading these posts.
The hard upper limit on a neutron star mass, the Rhoades-Ruffini limit, is at 3.2 solar masses.
This discovery is significant, because we never found a collapsed object in the 2-3 solar masses range, but it definitely doesn't need new physics to be explained.
When you people will be able to scale git to accept the number of revisions Wikipedia has, and add several new ones per second with millisecond latencies, please let me know.
Also, only a programmer could think git is a friendlier interface than a wiki.
There are things that are wrong in the wiki comunity, none of which would be solved by using github instead.
Not to point out that the forking model would lead to fragmentation and GitHub is actually a privately owned for-profit platform, of course.
Physics gave up being "deterministic" (in the sense you used the term in) about 120 years ago.
And mathematics is just a convenient tool with which we describe reality, no one would seriously think today that our math is deeply inscribed in the essence of reality as Galileo thought.
Apart from this, and the fact that the paper shows a very weak statistical significance, I agree fully with your last statement.
What a whole bunch of inaccuracies. I have no time to waste rebutting all the multiple falsehoods in this post, but I want people living in other countries know that it is filled with inaccuracies and plain falsehoods.
Techops at WMF here: the TL;DR is "no", but I can get into details.
MediaWiki accounts for the lion's share of the servers we run (between MW itself and the databases and the object storage for files/images, I think around 60%), but it's not really that inefficient, also because we aggressively cache content on our own CDN.
Given the amount of traffic we handle, I don't think any sgnificant change could reduce the hosting burden much - and it's already a very small footprint at 2M/year. To give you some context, we have currently less than 2000 physical nodes across all of our datacenters; it's pretty hard to reduce that number further while guaranteeing stability and performance of the sites.
I'm not saying we couldn't improve things - there is always room for it - but I doubt we could do something that reduces our hardware footprint by a significant amount. As a benchmark, moving from PHP 5.x to HHVM gave us more capacity and over two years we reduced by 15% the number of MediaWiki application servers, but that does not result in a huge change in the hosting bill.
If McDonald's provided cheap food by ignoring the labor laws, would that be fair? Or any safety regulation on how food is preserved, etc. I could go on, but I think you get my point.
I share your sentiment towards our taxi drivers, but I'd rather ask our laws to change to be fairer than to advocate Uber's right to just break the law.
The solution to that is to allow more licences, and maybe to use those new licences to compensate current drivers for the loss of value of the licence they bought.
Allowing a corporation to just ignore existing regulations while everyone else is respecting them is a completely different story.
Let me add: I have very little sympathy for the taxi drivers guild and their practices, but I don't think that's a good reason to allow Uber to operate outside of the law.
Basically no one is ever willing to wait for anyone else, as OP's reasoning shows pretty adamantly.
Of course they're grossly incorrect.