When I look to assess whether it's a few fringe conservative religious whackjobs running the GOP, or a large part of the base, I look to the results of individual ballot measures that touch on the questions that matter most to those folks--generally social conservative touchstones such as same-sex marriage, gay/lesbian employment discrimination measures, abortion, and so forth.

Those measures, even when they fail, pull 40%+ support.

I really see no way of explaining this as being a function of a tiny minority of the GOP.

In this election, I was able to find six high-profile races that touched on "Christian value" issues. The percentage of voters taking the "pro-theocrat" position on these individual issues is indicated below.

• Florida abortion funds: 44.9%
• Florida religious school funding: 44.5%
• Maine same-sex marriage: 47.1%
• Maryland same-sex marriage: 47.9%
• Minnesota same-sex marriage ban: 47.6%
• Washington same-sex marriage: 48.3%

These numbers are more or less consistent with each other and history, and in every case above, the individual voting patterns are highly party-aligned.

What they are not consistent with is the idea that the theocrats are a tiny minority of the GOP.

"small fringe" is sadly not, to my mind, a plausible interpretation of the evidence

When you look at many votes on questions touched on by the theocrats, it's pretty clear that they enjoy substantial support from large segments and often majorities of the GOP electorate.

I'm very sorry that the somewhat more sensible Republican party of the past is no longer with us. But that's the case, and it's time for people who supported a more sensible GOP to either figure out a way of more effectively persuading people to your view (because the theocrats are winning that war, despite last night's results), or, alternatively, get themselves a more sensible party of their own.

Stop it? Don't be silly.

They've added to it.

Well, they're semi-effective at catching TSA employees who steal iPads, laptops and expensive camera gear.

No, they're not. There are occasional busts, but most go unreported or unaddressed.

Fun fact: The TSA refuses to report such thefts to local authorities, as a matter of policy.

Thank you, that's interesting and, at least in theory potentially useful to me some day.

(Only had one real copyright claim, someone used one of my images on the cover of their death metal CD and was selling it. No returned phone calls for weeks. Good thing it was the cover, Eventually I DMCA'd the album cover from Amazon's web site, got a call back in *minutes*, whole matter was settled an hour or two later. If they'd counterclaimed, or just used m images inside the CD booklet, ... well, anyway. Weird how these things work.

Anyway, thanks again for the data.

One other thing: The copyright office has an RfC or the like on making a copyright small claims court. I think something like that might be sensible, but IANAL. Anyway, FYI, http://www.copyright.gov/docs/smallclaims/

There is no US federal small claims court. In the US, copyright law is federal. This poster is pretty much f'd without a lawyer.

There is no federal small claims court. Copyright law is federal. Roughly speaking, this poster is f'd.

As long as they're filters created by individuals, I don't see a problem for me.

But practically speaking, user's aren't going to want to configure that, which is why the design mockups just had a single pushbutton, as I recall, for adult content.

As I recall, there was a lot of negative pushback on that idea on the basis of usability, but I don't have the links at hand.

Since you're clearly experienced with Wikipedia, I'll put it in Wikiparlance.

You can't define "mature content" without a POV.

That's the fundamental problem. Now, as it turns out, I happen to believe in a few cases (particularly with respect to the popular American idea that the EXISTENCE of gay people is a mature topic), it's a particularly egregious concern with respect to NPOV. But the fundamental problem is simply that it's POV.

So, you're entirely okay with complete descriptions of those subjects, no problem whatsoever, it's just the illustrations of it you object to.

I'm genuinely surprised. In my experience, most people who have an objection to one have an objection to both.

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.