I don't really know enough about Sanger's history to comment intelligently, I speculated, but tried to mark it as that, and tried to allow that it's pretty easy to have strong feelings about really gross sexual content. And I do understand some desire to keep inappropriate material from children.

The NPOV thing : The simplest example I can provide will be US-centric editors marking any form of non-sexual intimacy between two people of the same sex as content inappropriate for children. While that may not go as far as handholding, we will see (as we've seen in any filtering software ever deployed, particularly crowd-sourced ones) unequal application of what does and doesn't constitute "adult content".

A filter marking some images as "adult" and some not is a Wikipedia imposition of a point of view on a contentious subject--and it's not just "penises are adult", it will be, if every bit of past experience is an guide whatsoever, a situation where "male-male kisses are adult, female-female kisses are sometimes okay, male-female kisses aren't". You'll probably be able to see differences in the applications of these rules based on race or combinations of race too, there's a surprising percentage of people in the US who would ban interracial marriage--look it up.

I'd be less bothered by filters that said "has a penis", "has a boob", etc. But "adult content", "inappropriate for children", that's a fussy, subjective, and even in this thread highly-contested bar.

Then they'll get http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coddle, not the link you provided.

So, tell me what encyclopedia article that's used in?

Take a deep breath, and point at a specific file, since you pointed at several. And also--this is a question of what shows up in the encyclopedia. You're going around to the back of the image hosting, but not every image in that image host is actually used in an encyclopedia article. Go ahead and tell me where one of those images is used in the encyclopedia, and then perhaps we can begin to have a discussion.

"random media searches run on Wikipedia,"

Right, as opposed to regular searches, which is what the vast majority of users on the encyclopedia are going to even know how to do.

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.