Cap'n Refsmmat

Atheist: Here's the message off of archive.org: As for the wiki, I think the advantages would be that we could make it more detailed. If we're aiming for a scientific audience, we could go for more advanced material (being sure that the basics are covered for the layman as well) and try to cover more details.

This is a rather radical suggestion, but anyways... At the moment, I really think that the main page of SFN is rather dull. A newcomer would see a list of threads and not get much of an idea of what the forums are about. The "news" posts are few and far between (though they used to be used far more, I think) and so it's really a rather boring front page. I think we can do better. A more custom front page including the following would probably make it nicer and more attractive to newcomers: A nice welcome message, like the one from Fafalone that was there loongg ago. More news articles. Not sure how you could get more activity in the news forums, but that's necessary. RSS feeds from places like BBC News/Science, NewScientist.com, nature.com, and other sciency websites. A nicer, more attractive template than the one currently used portal. Less crowded would be nice too, as in getting rid a lot of the little information boxes on the left and right and making the navigation menu cleaner.. A link to our (hopefully) future project, WiSci or OpenScience or whatever it's going to be called, and a nice teaser about it to attract people to it. This would be a rather nice way to get people to take a look at SFN, as first impressions really matter. Secondly, I think we need more content. Forum threads aren't that interesting for someone new browsing around, and people won't come here just to read threads. Getting guests to visit regularly, even if they don't want to register, is another nice thing. My suggestion to achieve this would be both the science news pages, and a science wiki. We have many intelligent members here, and it would not be hard to get a solid wiki up and running. It could also be used to post commonly-discussed topics and their arguments, rebuttals, and so forth. It would also attract people who are interested in science, but don't have the time to or don't want to join a forum. Now, you're probably going to say that this would require large amounts of work and time and money and all that fun stuff. I won't try to argue with you. But the advantages of it are many, and we have a vast memberbase that can help get it where we want it. As for money, that's what my paid subscriptions idea is for--a way to get more money for the server, without big ugly ads on every page. What does everybody think? Should we go for it?

I'm thinking that this would be a way to improve SFN. You could still be a regular user if you didn't pay, its just that blike can't pay for it all by himself without any financial support. And I've just had a really nice idea for another thing we can do to make SFN better and bigger, so more money for hosting would be a good thing.

IRC. There are some stickies in the announcements forum about it.

I've thought up of a way Blike could take advantage of vB's paid subscription system. By enabling the system, he could eliminate the Google ads (given enough revenue from subscriptions) or upgrade to more expensive hosting, software, whatever he wants. A few ideas on what the paid subscribers would get: 1. Ability to lock own threads. 2. Ability to "soft delete" own posts--make them only visible to moderators, so that we can get them back if they abuse it (I think this is a vB feature) 3. Greater PM limit. 4. Images in signatures. 5. A nifty little rank image or title or something. 6. Larger avatars (?) 7. No ads. 8. Whatever else I think of. Of course, you could remove these priveleges if they're abused, etc. Do you think this would be a good way to help support SFN while eliminating advertisements?

It's gone gold now. Are there plans to upgrade immediately or are we just going to wait until it goes through a few updates to iron things out? Frankly I don't know what front-end changes there are, so I'm indifferent.

We have 206,000, and the post numbers are at 211,000, so I thought 5-6,000 would be accurate. Going by the stats on the front page, at least.

I think the very first clause in your post is wrong (and therefore the basis of your post is), because it is commonly accepted that the universe is functionally infinite. That is, you can never get to the end of the universe, so it might as well be infinite. That's my understanding, at least.

I'm just wondering why 3/4 of the posts in this thread are by moderators. Anyways, It's rather selfish to say "let's keep all of our jobs in America" or whatever. Capitalism, people. If you don't like it, find a way to do better than the alternative workers and make more money. That's why it's a free market economy. If we were to put regulations on outsourcing and all that fun stuff, everybody would complain because now they have to pay more for their products. Capitalism.

It wouldn't be able to "jump around" indefinitely, you know. It would waste a lot of its energy creating light and heat.

Mambo is decent, although I don't think it would do what you want it to do (community contribution). There are piles of CMSs out there, I'm sure there's even a list of them on Wikipedia.

I would suggest reading The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene. You may get lost after the first few chapters, but keep trying and you'll learn a lot. It covers a lot of physics and even quantum physics, which you may find confusing. It is confusing, but you can understand it if you try hard enough. The key to understanding this book is to keep re-reading and read carefully. That's what I had to do.

The "new substance" happens to be energy. That has already been explained and verified.

Theories typically have some sort of evidence to back them up. http://scienceforums.net/forums/showthread.php?t=11529

The problem is, you're assuming that there's such a thing as hyperspace, and that there is a tangible border between it and our current "normal space."

The problem is that lightning is of extraordinary voltage, and that it's static electicity. Static electricity is nearly impossible to store and use. I'd also like to see your device survive a few strikes. They're several times hotter than the surface of the sun, you know.

I think he said that because all of the pictures can be attributed to the camera, dust on the lense, floating particles, and bad exposures. He's just making a joke. There are many strange things that occur in my neighbor's house at night, but I don't take pictures of it and call it ghosts. (just kidding)

I wouldn't assume it's "not permitted." Most teachers would like it if you go above and beyond what they teach.

That was disproven on Mythbusters, I believe. Anyways, I agree with the long exposure idea. Any camera would use a long exposure when it was as dark as it is in that picture, so it's quite understandable.

My congratulations and thanks to Blike, who made this all possible with some money and a lot of time. I'd also like to thank the moderators, because a quick estimate reveals that they have deleted more than 5,000 posts in the lifetime of this forum. While some people may say 200,000 isn't much, at least we know very little of it is spam.

Report it to Symantec. I believe they'll let you do that. That'll teach you to use IE...

Put them into quarantine on your virus program. Then look at symantec.com and go to the virus database and do a search.

Just like weapon development and WWII: we only do it when we really really need it.

Out of curiosity, I'd like to ask if Blike is still interested or if he forgot about it. I think a wiki would be great for SFN. We could refer people to the wiki articles for commonly asked questions (and maintain a list of creationist arguments and rebuttals) and so on. Also it would be fun. As for YT's question, I think that would be simple, although that would require a seperate listing of words and articles. There might be arguments over what's a word and what deserves an article. It would be easier to just do articles. I've finished 1.0 of scWiki, in case you'd like to use that. Since I have enough time on my hands, if you'd like a feature, I can probably add it. (Nothing too extravagant though!)

The only method that you could get the drivers from with my mouse was the internet, so if you got it from a disreputable site it is quite possible.