With the exception of the "will go to any length", stuff that I've snipped out here, I'm pretty much one of them.

And the reason is simple. Image and web filtering outside of Wikipedia has always turned out to be a coatrack not just for "not showing sexual acts" but for the insertion of political, sexist, racist, or heterosexist bias. Moreover, not every parent shares the same definition of what it's inappropriate to see, you and I might not call "holding hands" porn, but the laws of North Carolina essentially treat it as sexual incitement, and the people behind those laws are going to want that called "adult content." Obviously the Wikipedia community will average a bit more liberal than that, but (a) there's no objective place to draw a line for an adult content image filter, and (b) those discussions are still going to eat a lot of cycles, and will inevitably erode WP:NPOV, Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy.

And, .. where's the real problem? I've spent quite a bit of time on Wikipedia, and sure there's stuff there I don't want to look at. But surprisingly little, and the vast majority of what is actually problematic doesn't stick around inappropriately in articles. Yet Wikipedia still gets a fair bit of whining where you might think there'd be none--the number of folks deeply offended that one of the pictures at kissing involves two men, or did a few years ago, is telling enough. The last thing the encyclopedia needs is an excuse for more of that bullshit.

So, what's really behind this effort?

Hard to say with Sanger, and he does have fair "concerns", but he's got a history with Wikipedia that raises questions about the motivation for this article. For the board, I'd guess there's a desire to some extent for political (or even legal) cover, a natural inclination, I've worked on a non-profit board. It happens.

But many of those of us who actually want to build an encyclopedia with a neutral point of view are against it.

I'm surprised that anyone thinks this is a surprise.

Commons is the main image host for the English Wikipedia, there are a few cases where images are hosted on ENWIKI itself, but if possible things end up at Commons so they can be reused.

So the links are fair.

Not really.

In short, you have (1) a woman who didn't play by the book and is an asshat, (2) a company that overreacted, and (3) a guy who did play by the book and who clearly had a legitimate beef.

You seem to be directing your outrage at #3.

Way to set priorities, dude. I'm outta here, have a nice day.

I'm no lawyer, but I would assume the woman actually has a case against Go Daddy (not the photographer), for taking down the non-infringing sites. Especially if she really did suffer financial damages.

I'd be willing to bet (without looking) that GoDaddy's ToS have this covered.

Filing a DMCA request doesn't require a lawyer. Try again.

Tineye's image similarity is a lot smarter than Google's. Sadly their database is much tinier.

Ahh, we're in complete agreement. Carry on then. ;)

True. But...

What makes you think C4 would cost any more to get onto a plane?

By itself it is (here) a small concentration of power, roughly speaking offset in Apple's plan by the deconcentration of power that happens when they issue new shares of stock for stock option grants and so on. No big deal.

Another way of thinking about it is that there's a lot of money sitting around that isn't actually doing much for it's share owners. It's making maybe a couple percent in government bonds. By returning some of the "wealth of the company" to owners, it allows those owners to decide how they want that additional money invested. If Apple could make a new product that cost $50B to make and returned a good profit on that, it'd be much better for investors if they didn't issue a buyback. But it doesn't do anyone much good for a cash pile that big to just sit around in low-yielding bonds, unless it can eventually be put to work.

It's not particularly nasty. The fact that they're doing both share buybacks and dividends is a little imperfect, but falls well short of evil.

In one sense, the two are similar. Some of the "value of the company" is returned to its owners. In the case of a dividend, it's obviously pretty even-handed, in the case of a buyback, it tends to be too, those whole sell into the buyback get paid off, those who don't effectively end up with their shares being worth proportionally more.

However, you generally want to do one, or the other, not both. Roughly speaking, if the stock is undervalued, you want to do a buyback, if the stock is overvalued, you want to issue a dividend. There's maybe a little adjustment you should do for this because of tax policy. Being unclear about which is better for investors is commonplace and, to be fair, often a compromise that reflects the fact that "overvalued" and "undervalued" are often debatable. So it's not "evil" or even "oh my god stupid", just a little bit meh, IMHO.

Published in Science, their paper gives the best-yet estimate of the true number of words in English—a million, far more than any dictionary has recorded (the 2002 Webster's Third New International Dictionary has 348,000) with more than half of the language considered 'dark matter' that has evaded standard dictionaries (PDF).

Umm, no. The phrase "true number of words in English" is sufficiently ill-defined to make the question meaningless. There are two ways people think about whether something is a "true word" in English, but more or less, you need to either rely on an authoritative reference to make that determination (which is not what's happening here), or you note it's existence by some level of usage in practice, and set a somewhat arbitrary bar for how often the word has been used (which is what's happening here.)

As per Zipf's law, etc, tweak that "bar" a little bit, and you'll get quite different results.

If I remember correctly, mode 3 is particularly, mmm, challenging.

http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/1979

Correction: 190.25 (a). Sorry about that.

Yes, cable car operators are really in California law (and spelled out as such), but this is also true of bus and other public transit operators too.

http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=pen&group=00001-01000&file=187-199

See at: 192.25 (a)

I stick by my belief, though. The idea that we actually consider motive is very much part of the homicide laws of nearly every state in the US. Usually motive is at the heart of the difference between first and second degree murder. Hate crime laws really aren't, in my opinion, that different. Were the laws actionable without there being another crime, I'd have my shovels and pitchforks out, too.

And most of these "special circumstances" are not ignored by the courts. While they are ignored as "issues" by the media, they are ignored by them because they are uncontroversial ... except for hate crimes.

Which is precisely my point.

It certainly does harm to that larger community, particularly for communities that have a history of being targeted for violence, that is over and above the other sorts of harms that are done by the fire. It's a threat to anyone with half a brain, and threats of violence are usually uncontroversial, except for some reason in cases like these.

I don't see what is so hard about the idea that providing additional damages for additional harms. My state finds "additional harms" when murders are committed if you did it for money (your motivation is, remember, a "mindcrime"), if you kill a cable car operator, if you use poison instead of some other method, and so on, and recognizes those special harms as "special circumstances" which drastically change how someone can be penalized? Why do we never, ever, not frigging once hear about all of these inequalities in the law, and how some are mindcrimes?

Why is that?

I have a pretty easy explanation, which I'm sure is obvious, but seriously, anyone who thinks that hate crimes laws are a travesty of justice, ... defend your quiet in regards to hundreds of other laws that fit the pattern you rail at. Bueller? Bueller? Anyone?