Looking at that video, that leak was a LOT bigger than I thought it was back in 95.
I mean, I was thinking like, a small spurt of gas then nothing, then everyone evacs, but no -- That video's like "Holy shit, there's a big glowing green cloud coming up from the basement, get the fuck OUT" level of leakage.
Most computers in use today use 512MB ram (with 1GB being prevalent in new machines)480mb is 93% of RAM.
I would almost like to see a survey of that. I haven't seen a system without at least 1GB in use in about a year and a half, and Dell won't even sell a PC with less than 1GB (and urges you to upgrade to 2GB) anymore. I'm pretty sure most other OEMs are similar.
On another note, am I the only one who feels old? Seriously pondering if the average production system has 1024 megs of ram or less? Wow.... and in 20 years, I'll think back to this post when wondering if the average production system at the time has less than 1TB of RAM, and promptly have a mid-life crisis.
Do you want to add a single tag that all other browsers will ignore, or do you want to spend all your time hacking workarounds? I ask because Microsoft is not about to drop compatibility with billions of pages that unfortunately rely on IE6-specific shortcomings and rendering quirks. So you can accept that IE is not going anywhere soon and that this is the only realistic way to handle this problem (admittedly created by Microsoft themselves), or you can go back to the previous crap situation.
I want them to render HTML properly, without me having to put in little "hooks" to remind their piece of shit browser to do it's job.
They should render everything in the IE8 engine unless some poor misguided IE developer adds a meta-tag on their nonstandard websites, then they can use their fake-HTML rendering engines.
The BoingBoing writeup is so irritatingly fragmentary it's hard to tell what it's even saying. Which is a good description of BoingBoing in general, actually.
Alas, I wouldn't know, as my workplace uses Smartfilter, and since BoingBoing was critical of Smartfilter once, they're on a permanent screw-over list -- even though they have more or less the same content as Slashdot, Smartfilter (now endorsed by the Iranian government! Oppress your serfs today!) blocks them as "Nudity".
Ah, to be able to block hundreds of thousands of people critical of me with but a click. Must be nice to be a professional censor.
A weapon that exploits fear 'scents' could backfire just as easily. Traditionally, fear will cause someone to flee or at the very least become nervous and therefore have his/her decision-making skills crippled. But for some, fear is a great motivator. If i'm gonna get into a fight and feel extra fearful because of this exploit, i might come back twice as hard to overcome whatever is in my way.
just a thought....
It'll also work great with protesters. Roll out a few of these "fear grenades" into a crowd, and they'll either panic and flee, or band together and attack. Either way, you can call it a riot and arrest them all for showing up.
You won't even have to bother with a mole to incite a riot anymore. Score!
We are finally starting to move away from a long era of computers with moving parts. Since conventional hard drives will be gone within 10 years (my prediction), all that remains is the media player (CD, DVD, etc). Obviously, I am not taking fans into consideration since I don't consider it to be a part of a computer system like a processor is.
Hopefully computers will be completely free from moving parts in 10 years or so. Now that would make it interesting for laptop owners.
And CD/DVDs can easily be replaced with HVD Cards.
Didn't they learn this lesson as a child? "If you want to sit at the adult table, you have to behave like a big kid."
Actually, from what I understand, they were shoved in a "lesser" press room and cut off from a lot of the things that the "real" press got access to.
So maybe a better idiom would be "If you want to sit at the old rickety crappy table we have out back away from everyone else, you have to act absolutely perfect, or it's back to fish heads in the basement for you."
LL should have had exclusive control over their currency and the exchange thereof to begin with. Allowing other parties to do this for them was an open invitation for them and their users to get shafted.
Morons.
Much like us Americans and our Visa, Mastercard, and small problem with Banks (Sub-prime mortgage, anyone)? We've let other parties value our money for ages -- after all, if a credit card company can add 30-40% interest (in the name of "fees" and crap like that), how's that different then them changing the value?
Seems like LLs aren't the only morons on the block.
why is this better than a gadget that has all that stuff already in it?
The same reason LEGO is better than a toy that's already made.
(If we have to explain it, you wouldn't get it.)
Re:Is there a hidden 3rd party?
on
Negroponte vs Intel
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
What I want to know is... is there a hidden 3rd party pushing Intel *cough*Microsoft*cough*? Intel's device is available with Windows XP. I wouldn't at all be surprised to find out that our "friends" in Redmond are responsible for this in order to get their software into the emerging world instead of Linux.
I think it's more along the lines that the entire portable industry has ignored the "subnotebook" market that the OLPC project has shown to be extremely viable, and are now trying en mass to jockey for position.
They supported Negroponte just far enough to basically test the waters, making sure there really WAS a market, then once the "useful idiot" outlived his usefulness, well, out come the daggers.
That's what innovation means nowadays in the computer industry: Wait for someone else to do something interesting, then steal the idea and market it faster than he/she can. I hope Negroponte's project survives this nonsense.
Given the recent stories related to chairman Kevin Martin, one has to wonder if this is fitting a suddenoutbreakofcommonsense or just that cable companies havent kept up their "lobbying" efforts or stepped on some toes.
I sincerely hope its the former, but i'm cynical enough to expect the latter.
Myself, given how much the current administration is in the pocket of large businesses, I have to wonder if this is a hearing to consider making said content screwovers mandatory for all ISPs.
b: It is irrelevant. Even if Linus loved the GPLv3, there is so much code contributed to the Linux kernel without a transfer of copyright and under GPLv2 only terms that it couldn't be changed anyway.
I was under the impression that the GPLv2 allows anyone to pick any later version of the GPL if they so choose?
Ergo, who cares what he says about GPLv2 or GPLv3, just download it, state to yourself (loudly, proudly, standing at your cube, with a cape blowing in the wind if possible) "I declare this copy of the GPL to be VERSION THREE!" and duck the inevitable nerf darts that will be flying at your head by this point.
Why the hell do you need Windows CE to count votes? Can't you just flash a chip and use basic hardware? The developers of this stuff are too lazy. They just want to open Visual Studio, make some code and then be done with it. They don't see that if you go minimalist, work from the hardware up and just use the bare minimum software needed to count the votes you get even better security.
...as I read it, she wouldn't cut down on game content at all, but the availability to kids of games containing that content.
That makes some sense - just like rating movies.
Ok, But that's what we have NOW. We have a voluntary ratings system that the industry standardizes on. Same as the movie industry.
The catch is they're trying to make it illegal to sell these games to minors, which, well, yeah. That's a bit beyond what they currently have going in the film industry. Yes, if you're 14 you'll been shooed out if you try to see a R rated movie, and most rental stores will stop you from renting "Faces of Death". But it's not outright illegal. And most retailers and rental stores will shoo you away if you're not old enough to buy a M rated game. But again, not illegal if the occasional kid slips through.
Proponents of "video game regulation" aren't really interested in the market, or even protecting kids. They know that 99% of people over the age of 30 think "Pong", "Pac-man", and "Space Invaders" when they think video games, and are exploiting them wanting to make sure the industry stays that way. It's a cheap political ploy, nothing more.
Stop with the kludges and force the developers along. 32 bit came with the 386 era and lasted a good while - a very good run indeed. 64 bit would last beyond our lifetimes anyway, I doubt we will even come close to the limits of addressable memory there (hopefully this isn't the new 640k comment) -- so there is no point in stalling it indefinitely.
Dunno! I have a fun project for you though -- try printing out your comment, popping it into a time capsule, and burying it in your yard. Dig it up in 10 or 20 years and giggle.
For laughs, include some recent computer ads.
Personally, I had a similar moment when buying my first 20 gig HDD about 10 years ago. I remember seeing a 100 GB HDD and marveling at how big it was, and how we'd never, ever use that much space. Now my WinNY/Share (Japanese P2P) folders are over 100 gigs each.
"My distributors tell us that Nintendo has an 'attach rate' and we are often forced to purchase four games with each console. We pay $246 per console. If we sell the console for $249.99 retail, it's a $3.99 markup. If a person pays by credit card we lose money." 1. Why is the Manufacturer Suggested Retail Price (MSRP) so close to the wholesale price? 2. Why doesn't the stores sell it for more than MSRP? The "S" does stand for "Suggested"
1. The MSRP is close to the wholesale price because, well, the manufacturers don't care if the retail chains make money on the consoles, since they let them get away with such huge markups on new games and selling used games (which have a Wholesale price / Cost to the retailer of.. $0.00 -- they're 100% profit).
2. Nintendo won't let them sell for more than the MSRP. Nintendo wants to strictly control the pricing so they can time sales and price cuts to correspond with competitor's price cuts and when their sales start to slump slightly. Not only that, it's not feasable to do -- if Gamestop priced the Wii at $300, everyone would go over to Bestbuy where they're $250.
Go to Cartridge World, or even Walgreens now. They will refill your ink very cheaply. You need to print a couple of pages to get the ink to come out, but after that, it is as good as new.
This is only working so far -- most companies are moving towards cutting off this option. For example, HP's new shiny uber-printers are now rent-only (cause the ink is too cheap to make a profit on), Lexmark's printer cartridges now have an enabling chip and a pagecount on the carts to prevent refilling, etc.
What I want to know is what's going to happen when we get some sorta weird new tech that doesn't USE ink -- like lasers that burn the image onto the paper, or somesuch? What are these companies going to do then?
(Rhetorical question of course -- the logical answer is, "Patent the idea and prevent anyone from ever doing it", of course.)
Are their users restricted to only get what is offered by their ISP? If not, why not just go somewhere else to download?
Its their storage/local bandwidth that is at stake here, why should they support competing products since one is their own? Or am i missing something key here?
Isn't Australia one of those backwards countries who still pay per meg downloaded, unless you're downloading off an official ISP server? If so, pulling a 100 meg file might be a few bucks...
I hate to be Mr. Offended-too-easily. But I was slightly shocked to see the article describe the business model as "pair of sandals to every China man" - a racist epithet that would get you punched in the mouth in the wrong company! The article puts the term in quotes, but a Google search of the term just points back to the article in question. What gives? It's hard to believe a gentleman-CEO on a semi-respectable website would throw racist terminology around.
Unfortunately there are only two forms of bigotry that are still socially acceptable in the mainstream US.
Homophobia of any level ("I just don't feel comfortable letting my children be around them" to "They have a mental disorder and need to be treated") and light racism against Asians.
I may have to add a third to the ol' list. -- it seems to be A-OK to hate Arabic people now. We'll have to work on that.
I remember reading a rather stunning article a while back (would have had to have been 5+ years to be honest) when there was some random manufactured scandal about the Clintons taking money from a Chinese company, or somesuch. Well, a well known magazine at the time decided to run a cover with the Clintons and 1 or 2 other people all in "Chinese-face" -- their faces done up in a over the top parody of Asian facial structure stereotypes (exaggerated slanted eyes, sunken cheeks, etc).
And no one even took a second thought about how, this, you know, could be considered offensive. I myself didn't even catch on until someone asked me point blank if it would be ok if they had Hillary and Bill up in Blackface as a way of mocking them visiting Harlem.
"What? Of course not, that'd be disgusting!"
"Why?"
"Because that'd be completely insensitive to... OH. Oh."
So yeah. It sucks, but what can you do? Although, I have to wonder, would you be as upset if they had said the business model was "a refrigerator to every Eskimo?"
This is a disgrace if true. Basically this sounds like the 'clique' on the mailing list are in control *and* have the support of the foundation. There seems to be no discussion on preventing this. I would say the discussion and exposure of lists like this is very important.
Woah, I see this is your first time encountering Wikipedia.
Go try to post something that the mod-mob doesn't like. Like, say, a Webcomic article (that's alreadybeendiscussedseveralplaces.) Or, try to link to a site that follows all the guidelines, but the random twit who happens upon it decides that you can't do that, and since he owns Wikipedia, you had better stop stop stop you bad bad man.
I ran into something similar trying to add two links to a Warhammer 40k article -- a robot (which are apparently A-OK if the clique is using them, but not you, you bad bad man) started removing the entire edit because one of the URLs was to a banned domain. Then, after trying to fight off the robo-stupid for a while, I started getting random threats from the robot's handler. Later, once I worked around the dumb, another self-stylized mod-mob member removed them again, sending me a threatening post on my user:talk page, quoting nonexistent policies that ban "Fan Created Sites" and incorrectly quoting the Foreign Language Link policy.
Pointing this out to him, of course, didn't help. After all, he owns Wikipedia, and I'm a bad bad man.
So yeah. There are cliques in control on Wikipedia. They are legion. And they are stupid.
The only place I've seen worse cliquey-admin abuse is Deviantart, wherein it's A-OK to draw "Sonic the Hedgehog" fanart -- and even sell posters of such -- but don't you dare post any files, with permission, following the Deviantart rules for such (which include re-reposting the art as a zip file containing a "signed text file" granting yourself permission to do so), of art of your own original creations being drawn by someone else.
I.e., Fanart. Of your own character. Which isn't ok. But making money off of ripped off Sonic the Hedgehog stuff is just super.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh... wow.
Looking at that video, that leak was a LOT bigger than I thought it was back in 95.
I mean, I was thinking like, a small spurt of gas then nothing, then everyone evacs, but no -- That video's like "Holy shit, there's a big glowing green cloud coming up from the basement, get the fuck OUT" level of leakage.
No wonder they tried to cover that up.
Most computers in use today use 512MB ram (with 1GB being prevalent in new machines)480mb is 93% of RAM.
... and in 20 years, I'll think back to this post when wondering if the average production system at the time has less than 1TB of RAM, and promptly have a mid-life crisis.
I would almost like to see a survey of that. I haven't seen a system without at least 1GB in use in about a year and a half, and Dell won't even sell a PC with less than 1GB (and urges you to upgrade to 2GB) anymore. I'm pretty sure most other OEMs are similar.
On another note, am I the only one who feels old? Seriously pondering if the average production system has 1024 megs of ram or less? Wow.
Do you want to add a single tag that all other browsers will ignore, or do you want to spend all your time hacking workarounds? I ask because Microsoft is not about to drop compatibility with billions of pages that unfortunately rely on IE6-specific shortcomings and rendering quirks. So you can accept that IE is not going anywhere soon and that this is the only realistic way to handle this problem (admittedly created by Microsoft themselves), or you can go back to the previous crap situation.
I want them to render HTML properly, without me having to put in little "hooks" to remind their piece of shit browser to do it's job.
They should render everything in the IE8 engine unless some poor misguided IE developer adds a meta-tag on their nonstandard websites, then they can use their fake-HTML rendering engines.
From TFA:
"The system is very responsive, using barely 480MB of memory after boot."
I've obviously been in *nix land for too long, I'm still of the impression that 256 Mb is pretty much all one needs for most tasks. Even EMACS!
Bloat is relative. Compared to Vista, 480MB is freaking Calista Flockhart-level of skinny.
The BoingBoing writeup is so irritatingly fragmentary it's hard to tell what it's even saying. Which is a good description of BoingBoing in general, actually.
Alas, I wouldn't know, as my workplace uses Smartfilter, and since BoingBoing was critical of Smartfilter once, they're on a permanent screw-over list -- even though they have more or less the same content as Slashdot, Smartfilter (now endorsed by the Iranian government! Oppress your serfs today!) blocks them as "Nudity".
Ah, to be able to block hundreds of thousands of people critical of me with but a click. Must be nice to be a professional censor.
A weapon that exploits fear 'scents' could backfire just as easily. Traditionally, fear will cause someone to flee or at the very least become nervous and therefore have his/her decision-making skills crippled. But for some, fear is a great motivator. If i'm gonna get into a fight and feel extra fearful because of this exploit, i might come back twice as hard to overcome whatever is in my way.
just a thought....
It'll also work great with protesters. Roll out a few of these "fear grenades" into a crowd, and they'll either panic and flee, or band together and attack. Either way, you can call it a riot and arrest them all for showing up.
You won't even have to bother with a mole to incite a riot anymore. Score!
By 2038, no major consumer cpu manufacturer will be producing anything but 64 bit chips.
My good sir, by 2038, no major consumer CPU manufacturer will be producing anything but 256 bit chips. At the very least.
Technology is advancing far faster than the understanding humans have of themselves.
Some people have made a belief system(?) around that very notion.
Hint: If he's right (and so far it appears he is), it's going to get a whole lot better (worse?).
Can you imagine what porn will look like with that kind of resolution!
Yuck. There are some things not worth looking at in Ultra-HDTV.
We are finally starting to move away from a long era of computers with moving parts. Since conventional hard drives will be gone within 10 years (my prediction), all that remains is the media player (CD, DVD, etc). Obviously, I am not taking fans into consideration since I don't consider it to be a part of a computer system like a processor is.
Hopefully computers will be completely free from moving parts in 10 years or so. Now that would make it interesting for laptop owners.
And CD/DVDs can easily be replaced with HVD Cards.
Plus, I don't think they even have broadband on that island.
/b/tard.
Your forgetting how the Professor made a Satellite Modem and TV out of coconuts in Season 5.
Gilligan was a
Didn't they learn this lesson as a child? "If you want to sit at the adult table, you have to behave like a big kid."
Actually, from what I understand, they were shoved in a "lesser" press room and cut off from a lot of the things that the "real" press got access to.
So maybe a better idiom would be "If you want to sit at the old rickety crappy table we have out back away from everyone else, you have to act absolutely perfect, or it's back to fish heads in the basement for you."
LL should have had exclusive control over their currency and the exchange thereof to begin with. Allowing other parties to do this for them was an open invitation for them and their users to get shafted.
Morons.
Much like us Americans and our Visa, Mastercard, and small problem with Banks (Sub-prime mortgage, anyone)? We've let other parties value our money for ages -- after all, if a credit card company can add 30-40% interest (in the name of "fees" and crap like that), how's that different then them changing the value?
Seems like LLs aren't the only morons on the block.
why is this better than a gadget that has all that stuff already in it?
The same reason LEGO is better than a toy that's already made.
(If we have to explain it, you wouldn't get it.)
What I want to know is ... is there a hidden 3rd party pushing Intel *cough*Microsoft*cough*? Intel's device is available with Windows XP. I wouldn't at all be surprised to find out that our "friends" in Redmond are responsible for this in order to get their software into the emerging world instead of Linux.
I think it's more along the lines that the entire portable industry has ignored the "subnotebook" market that the OLPC project has shown to be extremely viable, and are now trying en mass to jockey for position.
They supported Negroponte just far enough to basically test the waters, making sure there really WAS a market, then once the "useful idiot" outlived his usefulness, well, out come the daggers.
That's what innovation means nowadays in the computer industry: Wait for someone else to do something interesting, then steal the idea and market it faster than he/she can. I hope Negroponte's project survives this nonsense.
Given the recent stories related to chairman Kevin Martin, one has to wonder if this is fitting a suddenoutbreakofcommonsense or just that cable companies havent kept up their "lobbying" efforts or stepped on some toes.
I sincerely hope its the former, but i'm cynical enough to expect the latter.
Myself, given how much the current administration is in the pocket of large businesses, I have to wonder if this is a hearing to consider making said content screwovers mandatory for all ISPs.
b: It is irrelevant. Even if Linus loved the GPLv3, there is so much code contributed to the Linux kernel without a transfer of copyright and under GPLv2 only terms that it couldn't be changed anyway.
I was under the impression that the GPLv2 allows anyone to pick any later version of the GPL if they so choose?
Ergo, who cares what he says about GPLv2 or GPLv3, just download it, state to yourself (loudly, proudly, standing at your cube, with a cape blowing in the wind if possible) "I declare this copy of the GPL to be VERSION THREE!" and duck the inevitable nerf darts that will be flying at your head by this point.
Why the hell do you need Windows CE to count votes? Can't you just flash a chip and use basic hardware? The developers of this stuff are too lazy. They just want to open Visual Studio, make some code and then be done with it. They don't see that if you go minimalist, work from the hardware up and just use the bare minimum software needed to count the votes you get even better security.
I think you're missing the point.
That makes some sense - just like rating movies.
Ok, But that's what we have NOW. We have a voluntary ratings system that the industry standardizes on. Same as the movie industry.
The catch is they're trying to make it illegal to sell these games to minors, which, well, yeah. That's a bit beyond what they currently have going in the film industry. Yes, if you're 14 you'll been shooed out if you try to see a R rated movie, and most rental stores will stop you from renting "Faces of Death". But it's not outright illegal. And most retailers and rental stores will shoo you away if you're not old enough to buy a M rated game. But again, not illegal if the occasional kid slips through.
Proponents of "video game regulation" aren't really interested in the market, or even protecting kids. They know that 99% of people over the age of 30 think "Pong", "Pac-man", and "Space Invaders" when they think video games, and are exploiting them wanting to make sure the industry stays that way. It's a cheap political ploy, nothing more.
Stop with the kludges and force the developers along. 32 bit came with the 386 era and lasted a good while - a very good run indeed. 64 bit would last beyond our lifetimes anyway, I doubt we will even come close to the limits of addressable memory there (hopefully this isn't the new 640k comment) -- so there is no point in stalling it indefinitely.
Dunno! I have a fun project for you though -- try printing out your comment, popping it into a time capsule, and burying it in your yard. Dig it up in 10 or 20 years and giggle.
For laughs, include some recent computer ads.
Personally, I had a similar moment when buying my first 20 gig HDD about 10 years ago. I remember seeing a 100 GB HDD and marveling at how big it was, and how we'd never, ever use that much space. Now my WinNY/Share (Japanese P2P) folders are over 100 gigs each.
Time is odd.
"My distributors tell us that Nintendo has an 'attach rate' and we are often forced to purchase four games with each console. We pay $246 per console. If we sell the console for $249.99 retail, it's a $3.99 markup. If a person pays by credit card we lose money."
1. Why is the Manufacturer Suggested Retail Price (MSRP) so close to the wholesale price?
2. Why doesn't the stores sell it for more than MSRP? The "S" does stand for "Suggested"
1. The MSRP is close to the wholesale price because, well, the manufacturers don't care if the retail chains make money on the consoles, since they let them get away with such huge markups on new games and selling used games (which have a Wholesale price / Cost to the retailer of
2. Nintendo won't let them sell for more than the MSRP. Nintendo wants to strictly control the pricing so they can time sales and price cuts to correspond with competitor's price cuts and when their sales start to slump slightly. Not only that, it's not feasable to do -- if Gamestop priced the Wii at $300, everyone would go over to Bestbuy where they're $250.
Go to Cartridge World, or even Walgreens now. They will refill your ink very cheaply. You need to print a couple of pages to get the ink to come out, but after that, it is as good as new.
This is only working so far -- most companies are moving towards cutting off this option. For example, HP's new shiny uber-printers are now rent-only (cause the ink is too cheap to make a profit on), Lexmark's printer cartridges now have an enabling chip and a pagecount on the carts to prevent refilling, etc.
What I want to know is what's going to happen when we get some sorta weird new tech that doesn't USE ink -- like lasers that burn the image onto the paper, or somesuch? What are these companies going to do then?
(Rhetorical question of course -- the logical answer is, "Patent the idea and prevent anyone from ever doing it", of course.)
Are their users restricted to only get what is offered by their ISP? If not, why not just go somewhere else to download?
Its their storage/local bandwidth that is at stake here, why should they support competing products since one is their own? Or am i missing something key here?
Isn't Australia one of those backwards countries who still pay per meg downloaded, unless you're downloading off an official ISP server? If so, pulling a 100 meg file might be a few bucks...
I hate to be Mr. Offended-too-easily. But I was slightly shocked to see the article describe the business model as "pair of sandals to every China man" - a racist epithet that would get you punched in the mouth in the wrong company! The article puts the term in quotes, but a Google search of the term just points back to the article in question. What gives? It's hard to believe a gentleman-CEO on a semi-respectable website would throw racist terminology around.
... OH. Oh."
Unfortunately there are only two forms of bigotry that are still socially acceptable in the mainstream US.
Homophobia of any level ("I just don't feel comfortable letting my children be around them" to "They have a mental disorder and need to be treated") and light racism against Asians.
I may have to add a third to the ol' list. -- it seems to be A-OK to hate Arabic people now. We'll have to work on that.
I remember reading a rather stunning article a while back (would have had to have been 5+ years to be honest) when there was some random manufactured scandal about the Clintons taking money from a Chinese company, or somesuch. Well, a well known magazine at the time decided to run a cover with the Clintons and 1 or 2 other people all in "Chinese-face" -- their faces done up in a over the top parody of Asian facial structure stereotypes (exaggerated slanted eyes, sunken cheeks, etc).
And no one even took a second thought about how, this, you know, could be considered offensive. I myself didn't even catch on until someone asked me point blank if it would be ok if they had Hillary and Bill up in Blackface as a way of mocking them visiting Harlem.
"What? Of course not, that'd be disgusting!"
"Why?"
"Because that'd be completely insensitive to
So yeah. It sucks, but what can you do? Although, I have to wonder, would you be as upset if they had said the business model was "a refrigerator to every Eskimo?"
This is a disgrace if true. Basically this sounds like the 'clique' on the mailing list are in control *and* have the support of the foundation. There seems to be no discussion on preventing this. I would say the discussion and exposure of lists like this is very important.
Woah, I see this is your first time encountering Wikipedia.
Go try to post something that the mod-mob doesn't like. Like, say, a Webcomic article (that's already been discussed several places.) Or, try to link to a site that follows all the guidelines, but the random twit who happens upon it decides that you can't do that, and since he owns Wikipedia, you had better stop stop stop you bad bad man.
I ran into something similar trying to add two links to a Warhammer 40k article -- a robot (which are apparently A-OK if the clique is using them, but not you, you bad bad man) started removing the entire edit because one of the URLs was to a banned domain. Then, after trying to fight off the robo-stupid for a while, I started getting random threats from the robot's handler. Later, once I worked around the dumb, another self-stylized mod-mob member removed them again, sending me a threatening post on my user:talk page, quoting nonexistent policies that ban "Fan Created Sites" and incorrectly quoting the Foreign Language Link policy.
Pointing this out to him, of course, didn't help. After all, he owns Wikipedia, and I'm a bad bad man.
So yeah. There are cliques in control on Wikipedia. They are legion. And they are stupid.
The only place I've seen worse cliquey-admin abuse is Deviantart, wherein it's A-OK to draw "Sonic the Hedgehog" fanart -- and even sell posters of such -- but don't you dare post any files, with permission, following the Deviantart rules for such (which include re-reposting the art as a zip file containing a "signed text file" granting yourself permission to do so), of art of your own original creations being drawn by someone else.
I.e., Fanart. Of your own character. Which isn't ok. But making money off of ripped off Sonic the Hedgehog stuff is just super.