I have to waste some mod points to give the reasons. The legislation bans consideration of research where all data is not publicly available without regard for which data is available - like public health studies with anonymized data.

I'm not entirely convinced it is self-correcting. Some scholars have named the MBA phenomenon as a key component in the secular decline of the average rate of profit since mid century. (Yes, profits are higher than ever now, but not the rate of profit).

[1] Brenner, Robert. The economics of global turbulence: the advanced capitalist economies from long boom to long downturn, 1945-2005. Verso, 2006.
[2] Brenner, Robert. "What is Good for Goldman Sachs is Good for America The Origins of the Present Crisis." (2009).

I think they just announced that Spartan will be called Edge. </eyeroll>

Chrome is also the new IE because a bunch of other pages don't work on it at all. I just started switching back to Firefox because I was sick of so many compatibility issues with Chrome. (Other reasons like frequent brief lockups on one computer, the non-freeness, and the Eye of Mordor contributed somewhat).

And the users who occasionally need IE for something specific that still doesn't work in other browsers.

You simply aren't seeing that - instead your wages have been stagnating so the extremely modest inflation we've been experiencing seems increasingly onerous. It's the proportion of your budget these things require has been increasing significantly, not their prices.

Chrome lazy-loads pages once the tabs are actually selected. In Firefox, it's an option you can set in the preferences dialog (turned on by default).

Yes - my post above is very terse, but I want it to be made clear that the problem with the image isn't its content, but solely its provenance.

If the point is that the Playboy empire is so nasty that anything related to it is indelibly tainted by association (a position I'm sympathetic to), then I want to hear arguments supporting that position.

Similarly, if the claim is that the cropped image is pornography itself, then I want to see reasoning to that effect. Are cropped subimages of pornographic images, which themselves do not have pornographic content, nevertheless pornography? The post I replied to above had stated this as fact, without argument (thus my "no it's not").

That's all fine, but I have yet to hear an actual argument for why the provenance of the cropped image should be the deciding factor here, since rational assessment of information is usually based on content rather than provenance. I'm sympathetic to the position, but we are talking about recreating an image which is identical in every way, except for out-of-shot information which cannot be recovered.

If the only argument is that Playboy is so bad that the cropped image is indelibly tainted by association, then I guess I'm fine with that - but the logical foundation seems shaky.

Way too many computer vision papers get through while relying on just one or a few images, or without any real results (e.g. "look at the features!"). I can't count the times a promising-sounding segmentation algorithm turns out to be based on one or two easy images...IMHO if anything you should probably become even more stringent about lazy image selection in your reviews.

From Wikipedia: "An ad hominem (Latin for "to the man" or "to the person"), short for argumentum ad hominem, means responding to arguments by attacking a person's character, rather than to the content of their arguments."

The Lenna image is supposed to be "bad" solely because of its provenance (Playboy) rather than because of any content, so the analogy to an ad hominem argument is pretty clear.

What's the point? The only difference would be the photographer. Just because the Playboy empire specifically is (maybe) bad? I don't see how continuing to use the image helps them, though.

I encounter this all the time - people (especially my fellow millennials) are uncomfortable with any reference to subjectivity without loads of boilerplate ("just an opinion," "someone else might say," etc.). Even obvious statements of personal opinion/taste are frequently taken as offensive/arrogant assertions of objective truth, unless tiresome disclaimers are constantly issued.

Of course - for a single image. But computer vision research should employ a large number of images, and if they are not diverse, then I do object - on technical grounds. I'm working on a face processing algorithm now, where a lot of past work employs almost entirely Chinese face images. The results are noticeably worse for black and white (African/Caucasian, not monochrome) faces. So diversity in image databases for research use is important.