I'm assuming that he's filing suit in California because the Wikimedia Foundation headquarters is there, and it's easier to do it that way than to file fifty-four separate suits (four named editors plus 50 John Does) in 54 different jurisdictions. Further, Barry's lawyers can argue (don't know if it will work) that personal jurisdiction exists for all the defendants, as all of them were engaged in a relationship with the Foundation. Otherwise their case gets a lot messier and a lot more expensive.

Of course, not every lawsuit that is filed is followed through to trial and judgement. (Just as a general observation not related to this particular case -- not every lawsuit is filed with the expectation or intent to follow it through to trial. Lawsuits are often part of PR strategies, sometimes simply to chill public discussion on a particular topic. A big flashy statement of claim is sometimes just a route to a quiet small- or no-money settlement and a gag order.)

And heck, your original point stands. Suing U.S. defendants in a U.K. court would be pretty transparent libel tourism; it wouldn't have a beneficial PR effect, and judgements wouldn't be readily enforceable in the States.

Er...what does the warrantless, essentially-unrestricted search and/or seizure of personal electronic devices - generally belonging to U.S. citizens, legal residents, and legitimate travellers - have to do with immigration policy?

That wasn't the worst sentence in history, but it's got to be right up there.

I'll leave aside your amusingly delusional implication that unwarranted invasions of privacy somehow didn't happen - or weren't attempted by law enforcement with similar enthusiasm and vigour - under the preceding 43 Presidents...

Nuclear is for a big chunk of base load capacity--plants that take days or weeks to start up and shut down, and so run essentially continuously at their rated output. (Coal plants fill essentially the same niche in fossil-fuel-based generation.) Wind (and solar) stack on top of that; these are variable output plants that can be switched in and out of service quickly as needed to meet demand. Gas turbines, while not emission free, are more efficient (in terms of energy output per ton of carbon emissions) than coal or oil burners, and can be spun up relatively quickly (in a few minutes) to meet spikes in demand. They're a compromise - good fuel efficiency but also high cost - that would be used for a few hours a day, or a few days a month, to fill in gaps in supply.

That is true, and interesting...but beside the particular point at issue here. The SPEECH Act (ugh) deals with defamation suits against U.S. citizens and residents filed in foreign courts. The case here is the mirror image situation: a case filed in the U.S. against a (hypthetical) overseas defendant.

There is, however, an expectation that Wikipedia editors will present information about a person (or any topic, for that matter) in a way that is proportionate to its relevance and importance. Under- or (especially) over-stating the importance of particular facts to give a coloured perspective isn't on; see the section of Wikipedia's neutral-point-of-view policy on Due and undue weight.

In other words, if George W. Bush's biography opened with

It would be an undeniably true statement that nevertheless failed to comply with Wikipedia policy.

Similarly, Wikipedia's policy against using Wikipedia as a venue to publish original research specifically forbids "synthesis of published material". That is, you can't cherry-pick a bunch of sources (or parts of sources) and use them to state - or imply - a particular novel conclusion that hasn't been presented by a reliable, independent source. I could go on at length, but suffice it to say that Wikipedia content is ruled by far more than "It appeared in the newspaper so we have to put in Wikipedia".

[citation needed].

Here's the current article: Medieval Warm Period. It has a couple of pages of detailed text, a pair of graphs of temperature records, and three photographs of locations or artifacts relevant to the MWP's effect on human history. The article has 41 footnotes, mostly to peer-reviewed journal articles.

Five years ago: 2009 version. A little over a page, one graph, one photo. 25 footnotes.

For fun, ten years ago: 2004 version. Six paragraphs (three of which are a single sentence). Zero figures, zero photographs. Just 4 inline references.

Scrolling through the article's editing history I don't find any period where anyone "erased" the MWP, aside from some short-lived vandalism. At no point is there any intimation in the article that the MWP didn't occur or was otherwise not a real thing. The article appears to have grown steadily in length, quality, and detail over the last decade, but its central points appear to have remained essentially unchanged. Your comment, however, appears quite typical of climate change deniers--boldly stating things that are patently untrue in order to gain the emotional support of people who don't fact-check you, while wasting the time of the people who do.

The defamation laws and precedent which apply depend on the jurisdiction in which suit was filed, not on where the defendants live. And the second sentence of the article indicates that suit was filed in Ventura County Superior Court: in other words, California.

(Indeed, it might be preferable for a defendant to live in the UK; depending - very much - on the particular details of the case, a California court may dismiss a defamation suit against a UK defendent due to the court's lack of personal jurisdiction. Or, in the event of judgement in favour of the plaintiff against a large number of defendants, the plaintiff may decide that actually trying to extract payment from a person in another country isn't worth the time, effort, and additional billable hours.)

I've played a lot of BF, since owning 1942 on release day. I can't think of a version I've missed (though I've stopped buying expansion packs).

That said, I stopped buying on release day a while ago. My gaming time is maybe 2% of what it was a decade or so ago, so it's valuable and not to be wasted on buggy releases and bad games.

I'm embarrassed to say that I pledged $70. I thought being on Kickstarter provided some level of protection against this, and that no one would be so brazen as to hijack people's names and credentials, and post them a popular website to promote their claims.

Thanks, Slashdot. I promise I'll be more careful next time.

If someone tells me the PowerUp 3.0 remote-controlled airplane is a hoax, I'll be devastated...

What (if anything) do you regret about your fame as a champion video game player?

Yeah, man. And why do all those scientists keep working on pointless things that aren't a cure for cancer?

Please don't confuse "wealth" (i.e. cars, homes, and other assets) with "income" (i.e. wages and salaries). In fact, your video even illustrates this about 4:40 in: the top "1 percent" have 40% of the wealth and 24% of the income. Hell, even if the video producer hadn't done so, there's a reasonable shot the surveyed individuals did.

Or, if you'd prefer a video response, I found this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... "I'll just leave this here" indeed.

So, not just the price of the building permit, then?

The purpose of development charges is to defray (some of) the costs to local government that they would otherwise incur for doing things like connecting your new home to the water, sewer, electrical, and any other utilities; construction of roads and streetlights; construction and purchase of additional emergency services equipment (fire trucks and fire houses, etc.); construction or enlargement of water reservoirs, sewage treatment plants, and electrical substations....

In other words, there's a heck of a lot of new infrastructure capital costs associated with new expansion of a community--costs that wouldn't be incurred without the new construction. (The rest of your comment notes how precious a commodity water is, and how difficult it is to secure access to more of it.) Instead of loading those costs on to people already living in town, the municipalities put the costs on the developers, who in turn pass them on to the new home buyers.

If you were to instead demolish an existing home and replace it with a new one of similar size, the building permit costs would be far less than $30,000, since the home would already have water, sewer, roads, electrical service....

Yes. Also, yes.

With conventional, mechanically-linked, non-variable steering, if I twitch the wheel at 2 mph while creeping into a parking space, nothing happens. If I twitch the wheel the same amount on the highway at 60 mph, I lurch sickeningly across a couple of lanes of traffic.

A sensible system would allow me to make moderately-sized inputs at whatever speed I'm travelling, and convert those to appropriate adjustments of the wheels of the car: big deflections of my tires with lots of power assist when I'm parallel parking, tiny deflections when I'm changing lanes on the highway.