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They have a new story in which they congratulate themselves over getting Jimbo to act on their behest. Jimbo basically admits he planned this as PR stunt to remove the pressure from him: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-May/057896.html Mike Godwin seems to agree to that strategy: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-May/057936.html

Over 200 votes to remove his founder bit, which gives him sysop powers no all wikis, and only about a third are opposing that. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Remove_Founder_flag

Using inertial dampers?

Tuned mass dampers might be more appropriate.

Wales was the one deleting the images in question. He's also been deleting paintings by artists with enwiki pages that he deems to be porn rather than art.

What does that even mean? So you host porn. And you admit some of it is unnecessary. And the ratio of unnecessary porn to necessary porn is too high? WTF?! Just stop hosting porn, or STFU.

Well, the situation is like this: They've had, for a good while now, a canned warning message for people who upload certain sort of pictures.

Now, imagine what the situation was if the user community would not discourage such activity. Every picture should be accurately categorised, be of sensible quality, have accurate license data, and so on and so forth. And, of course, because of the nature of the images, there should also be a reasonable expectation that the images should be coming from copyright holders and that they're under proper licenses. You know, bog-ordinary routine things that have to be done.

Your job, should you accept it, should be to tend to hundreds of pictures of dongolongos every. blessed. day.

There's got to be some point where you start asking "you know, this is a whole lot of dongolongos. I sure hope we can find proper encyclopedic usage for all this high-quality, well-documented image material."

If you can find a proper, systematic, encyclopedic use for thousands of cockpics, sure, go right ahead and apply that knowledge for best interests to further human knowledge. Folks at Wikimedia Commons, however, appear to have found enough of those pictures for proper encyclopedic use.

Just look at the images (highly NSFW) and count how many "neutrally illustrate the human anatomy". I mean, one file is named "Me and my chucks". Come on.

Great. Guess who lived in the country that is marked as the path for the Nazis on this map:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9/Maginot_Linie_Karte.jpg

ME! (Or rather: My grandparents.)

Way no channel them trough us, dickheads!

But MD5 signed certs don't light up the green bar with the company, because they're not EV Certificates. And who would trust other SSL certificates for anything really important?

I get your point: nothing is completely safe, but I think I'm more likely to get robbed on my way to the bank than doing it online.

One can upload images directly to Wikipedia when they pass Wikipedia standards but not Commons standards. This is most frequently done with fair use images, which are not allowed on Commons. Which Wikipedia articles did you see that had lost informative images? I'll tag them for new ones that pass the no-porn requirement.

Commons has around 6.5 million media files.

Someone who did a run-through of one of the main categories for such images (and its subcategories) gave an estimate of around 67k sex-related images, or at least images categorized as such. Let's assume, for the sake of it, that we're only getting maybe two-thirds of our sex-related images through categorization, and guess that we have 100k such images. With that assumption, convert 0.1M/6.5M to percentage, and you get ~1.5%.

So with a relatively wild overestimate, we get a small quantity, but not a negligible one. We're looking at on the order of 1% of all images. Considering how much importance our society places on sex (whether to embrace it or to revile it), I'm surprised we don't see more.

I'm divided on the issue, though. It's easy to attack Wales as a censor, (and certainly he deserves some attack for the autocratic position he's taking) but there has been a lot of crap content uploaded to Wikimedia Commons that features nudity, and I agree that even if you support porn, there's plenty that ought to be deleted just because the quality is so low. For example, there's a template with boilerplate for telling people off for uploading penis pictures, because after receiving endless craptastic penis pictures (among, hopefully, some decent ones) there is no point in gathering more.

On the other hand, it's easy to attack porn. "Porn" is stigmatized because sexuality is so taboo in our culture. Calling a lot of the images here "porn" is misleading at best. Many of them may be sex-related, but aren't specifically "prurient" (e.g. anatomical images), and many more may be good examples under very particular educational domains, or particular subjects. The risk is that good images will be deleted, ones that do have redeeming value. But when attacking "porn", everything sounds all right, because suddenly one is taking a moral high road.

Sanger was trying to take a moral high road earlier, saying "OMG CHILD PORN" when there was nothing illegal about (certainly the FBI doesn't seem to care, so far). It's easy to attack something by labelling it as something widely reviled, because by labelling the problem as some such thing you change the focus of the argument. Anyone who says "well, is that actually porn/child porn/whatever?" can be labelled as supportive of porn/child porn/whatever, and the target is put on the defensive, because there is already a social acceptance of attacks on these things (whether that social acceptance is right or wrong—though certainly in the case of child porn it seems obviously right) and the attack merely consists of conflating the undesired idea with the target of the attack. It's fortunate that Sanger was so clumsy in his attempt, taking all-too-obvious pains to mention his (failing?) rival project and to publicize the letter, because through that we can recognize the obvious interest he has in making Wikipedia/Wikimedia out to be evil.

I'm inclined, for now, to let the campaign against "porn" on Commons go. Is it the best road? No, certainly not, because it's based on emotion, not particular objective criteria. But in the long run, an emphasis against poor-quality images portraying sex-related topics is probably a good thing: high-quality images should be preferred, and a strict limit lets the project take its own moral high ground against these sorts of "OMG PORN KILL IT WITH FIRE" discussions. Even if there's a huge purge today, there's always the potential to re-upload this stuff if it's worth the effort.

I don't want to take a particular stand either way on the definition of porn or whether it should be around, but what I urge is a rational consideration of the merits of either approach, without giving so much credence to purely emotive (or moralistic) arguments.

If there's any point I'd like to end with, it's that no solution will satisfy everyone. There will always be the purists who think that all porn is evil, and on the other side the purists who want to avoid all censorship, and every number of points of middle ground.

Disclosure: I'm a volunteer admin on Wikipedia (but *not* on Wikimedia Commons).

Nopenis.svg

Thank you for your interest in contributing to Wikimedia Commons, a non-profit media repository with the primary scope of providing educational and informative images and media. Submissions that are low quality or do not fall into Commons' scope may be subject to deletion. One or more of your recent contributions has been identified by another Commons user as a possible image not in Commons' scope. Commons has guidelines on nudity, as a result of already having a large number of photos of genitalia, specifically the male reproductive system and the penis. If you have objections to the proposed deletion of your image(s), please see the links to the relevant deletion discussion(s) (listed above or below this message box). This message is not intended to be taken personally. Thank you for your understanding. --Explodicle


This is a real warning people get for uploading too much cock onto Commons.

Nopenis.svg

Thank you for your interest in contributing to Wikimedia Commons, a non-profit media repository with the primary scope of providing educational and informative images and media. Submissions that are low quality or do not fall into Commons' scope may be subject to deletion. One or more of your recent contributions has been identified by another Commons user as a possible image not in Commons' scope. Commons has guidelines on nudity, as a result of already having a large number of photos of genitalia, specifically the male reproductive system and the penis. If you have objections to the proposed deletion of your image(s), please see the links to the relevant deletion discussion(s) (listed above or below this message box). This message is not intended to be taken personally. Thank you for your understanding. --Explodicle


This is a real warning people get for uploading too much cock onto Commons.

Nopenis.svg

Thank you for your interest in contributing to Wikimedia Commons, a non-profit media repository with the primary scope of providing educational and informative images and media. Submissions that are low quality or do not fall into Commons' scope may be subject to deletion. One or more of your recent contributions has been identified by another Commons user as a possible image not in Commons' scope. Commons has guidelines on nudity, as a result of already having a large number of photos of genitalia, specifically the male reproductive system and the penis. If you have objections to the proposed deletion of your image(s), please see the links to the relevant deletion discussion(s) (listed above or below this message box). This message is not intended to be taken personally. Thank you for your understanding. --Explodicle


This is a real warning people get for uploading too much cock onto Commons.

Nopenis.svg

Thank you for your interest in contributing to Wikimedia Commons, a non-profit media repository with the primary scope of providing educational and informative images and media. Submissions that are low quality or do not fall into Commons' scope may be subject to deletion. One or more of your recent contributions has been identified by another Commons user as a possible image not in Commons' scope. Commons has guidelines on nudity, as a result of already having a large number of photos of genitalia, specifically the male reproductive system and the penis. If you have objections to the proposed deletion of your image(s), please see the links to the relevant deletion discussion(s) (listed above or below this message box). This message is not intended to be taken personally. Thank you for your understanding. --Explodicle


This is a real warning people get for uploading too much cock onto Commons.

Nopenis.svg

Thank you for your interest in contributing to Wikimedia Commons, a non-profit media repository with the primary scope of providing educational and informative images and media. Submissions that are low quality or do not fall into Commons' scope may be subject to deletion. One or more of your recent contributions has been identified by another Commons user as a possible image not in Commons' scope. Commons has guidelines on nudity, as a result of already having a large number of photos of genitalia, specifically the male reproductive system and the penis. If you have objections to the proposed deletion of your image(s), please see the links to the relevant deletion discussion(s) (listed above or below this message box). This message is not intended to be taken personally. Thank you for your understanding. --Explodicle


This is a real warning people get for uploading too much cock onto Commons.

Nopenis.svg

Thank you for your interest in contributing to Wikimedia Commons, a non-profit media repository with the primary scope of providing educational and informative images and media. Submissions that are low quality or do not fall into Commons' scope may be subject to deletion. One or more of your recent contributions has been identified by another Commons user as a possible image not in Commons' scope. Commons has guidelines on nudity, as a result of already having a large number of photos of genitalia, specifically the male reproductive system and the penis. If you have objections to the proposed deletion of your image(s), please see the links to the relevant deletion discussion(s) (listed above or below this message box). This message is not intended to be taken personally. Thank you for your understanding. --Explodicle


This is a real warning people get for uploading too much cock onto Commons.

Nopenis.svg

Thank you for your interest in contributing to Wikimedia Commons, a non-profit media repository with the primary scope of providing educational and informative images and media. Submissions that are low quality or do not fall into Commons' scope may be subject to deletion. One or more of your recent contributions has been identified by another Commons user as a possible image not in Commons' scope. Commons has guidelines on nudity, as a result of already having a large number of photos of genitalia, specifically the male reproductive system and the penis. If you have objections to the proposed deletion of your image(s), please see the links to the relevant deletion discussion(s) (listed above or below this message box). This message is not intended to be taken personally. Thank you for your understanding. --Explodicle


This is a real warning people get for uploading too much cock onto Commons.

Nopenis.svg

Thank you for your interest in contributing to Wikimedia Commons, a non-profit media repository with the primary scope of providing educational and informative images and media. Submissions that are low quality or do not fall into Commons' scope may be subject to deletion. One or more of your recent contributions has been identified by another Commons user as a possible image not in Commons' scope. Commons has guidelines on nudity, as a result of already having a large number of photos of genitalia, specifically the male reproductive system and the penis. If you have objections to the proposed deletion of your image(s), please see the links to the relevant deletion discussion(s) (listed above or below this message box). This message is not intended to be taken personally. Thank you for your understanding. --Explodicle


This is a real warning people get for uploading too much cock onto Commons.

It's not an encyclopedia. Wales is discussing Wikimedia Commons, a related but seperate project from Wikipedia. They've already got a whole team of people who debate over what is acceptable or not at Commons:Deletion requests. This isn't about what should or should not be included - porn with no informative purpose is already subject to deletion. What Wales is calling for is a greater effort to reduce them.

It's not an encyclopedia. Wales is discussing Wikimedia Commons, a related but seperate project from Wikipedia. They've already got a whole team of people who debate over what is acceptable or not at Commons:Deletion requests. This isn't about what should or should not be included - porn with no informative purpose is already subject to deletion. What Wales is calling for is a greater effort to reduce them.

Well, of course, it all depends on what you consider 'porn', doesn't it? For example, on the People page for Quality images, it has this picture (NSFW?). Is that porn? I don't think so. However, it shows (gasp!) breasts. Therefore, some people will consider it porn and/or offensive. They might even call it child porn, since I have no idea of the woman's age. They are morons IMHO, but still, what can you do?

If only you could switch your door locks to electronic locks then you could have one ring to rule them all ;-) http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Java_Ring.jpg

or have spock vaporise it

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fe/Rock_Paper_Scissors_Lizard_Spock_en.svg

Hollywood [thinks] having computers do such things in a story usually [...] makes it easier or faster to tell the story the way it is intended [...]

Unfortunately, it also makes it easier and/or faster to lose suspension of disbelief.

I think there are still enough daredevil kids. Youtube is filled with video of kids doing stupid things. However, It's a wonder I am still alive with the crap I did as a kid. Poring gasoline in the alley and lighting it on fire so we could ride out stingray bikes through a wall of flames. Having bb gun wars in the woods and using fire crackers as hand grenades. Taking the catwalk out to the middle of the bridge crossing the river and then riding it when the bridge opened up for a barge. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/ce/Ftmadisontollbr.jpg

etc. etc...

No you won't.

But you may see kWh .

Quick Quetzal

I remember my friend telling me about the AT-4 and its included instructions. Check out the label on the front of the launcher. Not quite "this end to enemy," but it's close.

Yeah, that sounds bad and shit, except that's not standard operating procedure.

Paper companies use the same plots over and over again for decades, cutting down the trees in the treefarm, replanting them, then coming back years later to repeat. They don't buy a new "old forest" every time they want to plant a batch of trees, it's just not economically feasible.

Really, all of this "the paper industry cuts down old forests" stuff is nonsense, the majority of it was clear-cut nearly a century ago for timber and land to farm on. The paper industry is responsible for an absurdly low percentage of deforestation, even completely ignoring the fact that they replant trees.

Instead of railing on people to stop using paper, you should encourage people to build and buy houses made of alternative construction materials, only farm in regions that have traditionally been free of wildlife. Of course that will never happen because although environmentalists hate logging, they love things made out of wood and farming just seems like such an "earthy and in-tune" thing to do... Hell, lets all support local farmers who have to clear-cut forests for their fields instead of buying food shipped in from the midwest! Yay environmentalism!

The two industries start from different premises, so that's why software can be free whereas media cannot.

Your opinion is belied by the fact that there is plenty of free media out there.

Every time I see pictures of the soviet rovers, I can't help but think how bizarre the things look. Like a combination of a bathtub and a baby carriage.

wiki article about one of the rovers.

I found it neat that it had some decaying isotope, and a lid, to close and keep the internals warm during lunar night. Too bad they didn't have lithium ion batteries back then eh? Not sure what they used, but 1970's era rechargeable batteries tend to suck period.

The wheels are especially weird looking, like something from a nightmare.
wheel closeup picture

The "star filters" you mention are actually diffraction spikes caused by the rods that support the secondary mirror of the telescope. They are an intrinsic quality of the telescope. If you look at the left side of this image of the Hubble under construction you can see three (of the four) black spokes that connect the outer cylindrical support to the cylinder in the middle (this is where the secondary mirror is mounted to). It is the light diffracting off of these spokes that cause the starburst pattern that you noticed.

JPEG2000 never took off because it has problems with it's wavelet compression, details just blur out. Have a read: http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=317

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/JPEG_JFIF_and_2000_Comparison.png

It's recent move toward Linux on their Pre device seem to position them perfectly to build a device like this. For some reason, OLPC dropped support for what appears to be a killer form factor- one that matches real world printed books. Even though there have been some setbacks, probably due to the recession and technology saturation, I still think form could become a dominant affordable device. It could fullfill the potential promise of the hype behind the iPad rollout. One thing that a "book" form factor has is a left and right page. If rotated one way, the device switches the bottom page to a keyboard automatically, al-a the iPhone. Also, because it can be folded, that protects the device when not in use. The ability to customize the software makes this _way_ better than any iPad-like device. Advice to Palm, or anyone else entering this space, make sure that the device has these features:
3G and wifi, camera, and skype compatible web cam.

If Google were a person, they'd be a Mad Scientist.

If an officer of the law requests to see your ID, you must present it.

According to Wikipedia, Washington does not have a "stop and identify" statute. So, unless there's other relevant legislation, no. You don't.

Heh, yeah, until quite recently the police at my place didn't look that much different from those guys, the main differentiating things being different shoes and more toned down (black...) colors. Plus reflective area with "POLICE" (well, local version of the name). Here are main variants of what I'm talking about. Though lately they got new uniforms...on one hand some elements go "back" in the right direction, on the other it's even more meh, even more like tracksuit

It really isn't so hard, as this one example from just across my border shows... (to be fair even there it's not the norm)

Even worse thing is happening to police cars. The old scheme is very distinct, the new, badly implemented EU guideline is just a silver car with reflective stripe attached...
Similar destruction of damn good scheme happened in Germany, though at least their new blue stripe is definatelly wider...

Heh, yeah, until quite recently the police at my place didn't look that much different from those guys, the main differentiating things being different shoes and more toned down (black...) colors. Plus reflective area with "POLICE" (well, local version of the name). Here are main variants of what I'm talking about. Though lately they got new uniforms...on one hand some elements go "back" in the right direction, on the other it's even more meh, even more like tracksuit

It really isn't so hard, as this one example from just across my border shows... (to be fair even there it's not the norm)

Even worse thing is happening to police cars. The old scheme is very distinct, the new, badly implemented EU guideline is just a silver car with reflective stripe attached...
Similar destruction of damn good scheme happened in Germany, though at least their new blue stripe is definatelly wider...

Heh, yeah, until quite recently the police at my place didn't look that much different from those guys, the main differentiating things being different shoes and more toned down (black...) colors. Plus reflective area with "POLICE" (well, local version of the name). Here are main variants of what I'm talking about. Though lately they got new uniforms...on one hand some elements go "back" in the right direction, on the other it's even more meh, even more like tracksuit

It really isn't so hard, as this one example from just across my border shows... (to be fair even there it's not the norm)

Even worse thing is happening to police cars. The old scheme is very distinct, the new, badly implemented EU guideline is just a silver car with reflective stripe attached...
Similar destruction of damn good scheme happened in Germany, though at least their new blue stripe is definatelly wider...

Heh, yeah, until quite recently the police at my place didn't look that much different from those guys, the main differentiating things being different shoes and more toned down (black...) colors. Plus reflective area with "POLICE" (well, local version of the name). Here are main variants of what I'm talking about. Though lately they got new uniforms...on one hand some elements go "back" in the right direction, on the other it's even more meh, even more like tracksuit

It really isn't so hard, as this one example from just across my border shows... (to be fair even there it's not the norm)

Even worse thing is happening to police cars. The old scheme is very distinct, the new, badly implemented EU guideline is just a silver car with reflective stripe attached...
Similar destruction of damn good scheme happened in Germany, though at least their new blue stripe is definatelly wider...

Heh, yeah, until quite recently the police at my place didn't look that much different from those guys, the main differentiating things being different shoes and more toned down (black...) colors. Plus reflective area with "POLICE" (well, local version of the name). Here are main variants of what I'm talking about. Though lately they got new uniforms...on one hand some elements go "back" in the right direction, on the other it's even more meh, even more like tracksuit

It really isn't so hard, as this one example from just across my border shows... (to be fair even there it's not the norm)

Even worse thing is happening to police cars. The old scheme is very distinct, the new, badly implemented EU guideline is just a silver car with reflective stripe attached...
Similar destruction of damn good scheme happened in Germany, though at least their new blue stripe is definatelly wider...

I suspect that even in the UK (which has a much higher population density than the US) the majority of people live more than 1km from an exchange ...and this assumes that the copper is relatively new and has clean connections ....

It's not distance from the CO building that matters, but from the DSLAM, which are easy to deploy in any densely populated area, and relatively cost effective.
The ~1.5 Km range is from one of these

Actually, for years they had Muhammad in the opening of the show. Low res, I know, but he's to the right of Kenny and the sign near the alien.

not quite,

this 6-core still has only 6mb of l3 cache, the same as the 4-core, meaning the 6 core doesnt just take 150% of the die-size of a 4-core. Also the memory controller and interface logic dont suddenly swell up. All that is needed is two chunks of extra l2 cache, and 2 execution cores (and perhaps some extra internal bus logic)

the following die schematic for a phenom II die suggests adding two cores would probably take 25% extra die space:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Phenom_II_Deneb_-_Sch%C3%A9ma_Die.svg

More a fault of the article submitter; they should've linked to the Wikimedia Commons page, which can play it in the browser most OS/browser combinations.

Anyone else hit Eyjafjallajökull about 15 times?

I don't care much for the iPhone, but I've always admired the Functionalist qualities of Braun's product lines, and their (at least historically) good production quality. I'm not sure that this prototype phone follows his famous ten principles, but Dieter Rams is a clear influence on Jonathan Ive; I wish Ive and others would follow his lead a little more closely and maybe let form follow function for a change.
for example, A label for every button!

Even worse: this is how it's pronounced. Wowsers!

(Plus, Kin Sexting sounds a bit incestuous...)

(To appease Pratchett fans, perhaps the next Android phone will be the "-ing"...)

Hey, the REAL Pratchett fans are already happy with Kin.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/Gynecomastia_001.jpg