I would say it is a larger headache for administrators than for ordinary editors. Articles and content surrounding the sex pages and quasi-legal content (like a Wikibook about making your own bongK/a>) often draw in controversy by themselves. People like Jimmy Wales, when they wade into those controversies, often leave a big wake behind them as well and damages the community in countless ways. BTW, I don't mind Jimmy Wales voicing his opinion in these situations, my beef is when he acts unilaterally ignoring any sort of consensus building process at all.

These kind of pages are often nominated for deletion (the Prykete Bong page received three separate RfD nominations and a minor wheel war on top of that) and often become the source of edit wars as well. Furthermore, even if the content is appropriate for a certain sub-set of pages, trolls and other petty juvenile pranks often throw this kind of content onto other heavy traffic pages as a form of vandalism. Yes, those are easily reverted, but if you admin on Wikimedia projects you eventually become even numb to seeing such junk.

If all you do is edit astronomy and political articles, you will never see this kind of stuff.

I think that is sort of the point: There are some people within the Wikimedia/Wikipedia community who simply don't even want the bit to be added to the MediaWiki software database structure in the first place, particularly as it applies to adult content. It doesn't matter that this is turned off by default or that it is even optional to put on a page or image and can be removed with a simple edit by an ordinary editor.... there are people in the community who simply don't even want the feature at all and will go out of their way to thwart any effort to censor the project.

Jimmy Wales has long since lost the ability to force a decision like this and arbitrarily put a feature like this into the project. He might have been able to do that back in 2003 or so (perhaps as late as 2005), but he can't force this in at the moment. Wikipedia has sort of frozen its policies with just minor tweaks and prods from time to time. A change in this nature is rather significant and likely isn't going to happen without widespread community support.

Then again Wikipedia changed the terms of its content license (from GFDL to CC-by-SA) and blacked out for a day with SOPA, so a determined group of people might be able to make some change like this. It just needs a widespread constituency from within the Wikimedia/Wikipedia community insisting it happen and not back down from those would would fight the change. It just can't happen with the force of will by one person any more.

I'm just saying that an EULA which forces you to waive your ability to independently use an application programming interface or implement functions of that API in a manner like Google did with the Android system would be declared contrary to law and thus be void. An intelligent lawyer writing up an EULA would also put in a separability clause so the whole EULA would not be void in this situation... I'm just pointing out that some stupid company trying to write up an EULA as a way around this ruling would get similarly slapped down by a future judge reading this opinion.

It completely blows away any attempt to legally prevent interoperability by 3rd party software developers through the use of an API. Assuming this case is upheld in appeals (which Oracle would be stupid not to at least try), this legal opinion is going to become pretty solid case law and certainly be referenced in future copyright lawsuits. Permitting reverse engineering for the purpose of interoperability is already statutory law, but this ruling strengthens and affirms that statutory clause and specifically puts the API as a part of that interoperability protection for 3rd party developers.

"stolen", really? :/

This ruling and opinion looks very water tight. If it goes up through the appeals process, I think it is likely to be affirmed the whole way up the food chain.

The ruling goes way beyond even settling the issue of copyright over APIs, but even goes so far as to say that EULAs that restrict the use of APIs are dead in the water and are void in terms of enforceability. This ruling does strengthen the copyright claims of people who write up API libraries as the original implementation of a particular API function is expressly covered under copyright law, but the way data is passed between two different software packages simply can't be copyrighted at all.

The only way this is going to be overturned is to place a stamp of copyright protection on API interfaces directly and hand this whole case to Oracle, giving them everything they ever wanted and more. I just don't see any higher court will do something like that.

Yes, I was being sarcastic. There have been spaceflights to Mir and the ISS which have lasted longer than it would take for Hohmann transfer orbit trip to Mars, both directions. Indeed that was one of the specific goals of the Skylab missions, at least to document what might happen to astronauts if they were in a microgravity situation for the duration of one-way trip to Mars but with the capability of returning to the Earth quickly (since they were in LEO) if there was some sort of problem they discovered along the way.

I don't even have the time to refute the conspiracy nuts who think nobody went to the Moon. My solution to deal with them is the same as Buzz Aldrin: punch them in the face and tell them to go to hell.

There might still be a role for a giant centrifuge, and there simply isn't any knowledge at all about the physiological impact of living in a partial gravity environment at all. There was an ISS module that was supposed to go up with the Shuttle program to specifically investigate potential impacts of a partial gravity environment (which would spin around at about 1 RPM and stow plants and a few small mammals like mice and such) to investigate this very issue, but unfortunately the funding for the module was cut. For myself, I think it is one area of scientific research that is desperately needed and should be studied seriously if people are going to be traveling beyond the Earth, and really should be done before a serious effort to go to Mars is even started. It is also an area of research that could be started today if anybody cared to pay attention to the issue.

For myself and this is pure speculation and conjecture, I think many of the health problems we see in microgravity environments like on the ISS will go away or at least be significantly reduced in a partial gravity environment like on the Moon. There may still be specific health problems for people who live for a long time on the Moon, and there are some hints that came back from the weekend camping trips that the Apollo astronauts performed on the Moon, but it will take actually sending people there to find out eventually. There may not be any problem at all to live in a gravitational environment as found on Mars. Other issues like being isolated from other people and radiation dangers are easily dealt with and are just engineering problems, not really health problems.

Obviously no astronauts have gone beyond low-Earth orbit, nor have been in space for any length of time to figure out how to survive in space beyond a couple of days. I'm glad to see that mankind is condemned to live upon this poor excuse of a rock called Earth.

I'm not complaining to you. This is something the Slashdot editors should have caught as well, as they can even now change the logo away from the NASA meatball.

It all goes back to the notion that obviously everything dealing with space must involve NASA at some point. That is a notion I would like to eventually see dispelled completely so you really aren't to blame in this case. I'm just saying that a more obvious commercial spaceflight logo should be made available to designate activity in space rather than something just related to NASA.

Please don't take this personally.... in fact I'm sort of jealous that you got credit for this story instead of me. At the very least, this is most definitely "News for Nerds" and something which deserved to be on the front page and get the attention of the Slashdot readership, so making a minor mistake like this is really small potatoes. You got the gist of the story down correctly and deserve to get credit for this scoop with a pretty well written summary of what was going on.

Now that would be interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EPICA_delta_D_plot.svg

Columbus had a globe which was about 2/3rd the size of reality, but claimed to be an expert on the topic. When he approached the Portuguese about traveling west to Asia, they laughed at him because they were fully aware of what the true size of the Earth was at the time. Then again, it is arguable that the Portuguese even knew about South America at the time but kept it secret for "national security" reasons. Columbus was contemporary with Henry the Navigator, and arguably the fastest route to Asia by sea from Portugal and Spain was going around Africa... unless you wished to work with the people of the Arabian Peninsula and nearby countries.

What Columbus accomplished though was to establish the notion of regular trips between Europe and America for the purpose of trade. You might be able to argue different people ranging from Irish monks to lost sailors who may have happened upon the shores of one of the American continents, but it wasn't until Columbus made his famous voyage that such trips were common and purposeful. Having Leif Erikson land on the shores of Newfoundland was remarkable, but his accomplishment is more like what happened with Neil Armstrong landing on the Moon. Momentous perhaps and certainly something worthy of recording as a significant historical event, but Neil Armstrong has not led to regular commerce to the Moon, and neither did Leif Erikson.