@JimmyHoffa thanks for your comment on meta, I agree with it and may update my answer later to weave what you've said into it :)

and your comment about sifting through SO to find interesting questions is one of the reasons I've stopped reading SO really and came to PSE instead.. I like the questions here mostly, and I hope I've provided some good answers too

just noticed that. it appears so

he put a lot of work into the site. i'm sorry to see him go

Me too

I wonder why he left

Mark... "user8" freaking sad to hear that. his MSO profile says "No longer here."

All of his profiles have said that for a while now.

the new thing i noticed was that his SE network profile now says "please delete me"

I think i can even say when he was removed from P.SE: yesterday my reputation has a drop labeled "User was removed", I thought who could that be. Most likely it was him.

@gnat Hrrmmm I only got back 4 rep 10 hours ago from undownvotes

@Rachel I guess it was pretty hard to deserve his upvotes, eg my own "Mark-score" appears to be pitiful 2 (of about 200 answers, go figure)

Huh, I was argueing with him just the day before yesterday on meta

@YannisRizos So I take it based on the "status-declined" tag on my proposal that's SE's way of saying to go blow

I still don't understand how they can be lacking in resources to do the task though, the engagement they have from so many communities I'm confused why they don't allow communities to create their own designs

Just seems silly that they tap thousands of people to answer complex technical questions in a great deal of fields, with the prize of arbitrary points, but refuse to make open requests for people to do some simply design work with the prize of non-arbitrary prize of public display of works

@JimmyHoffa It's still their brand though.

@MichaelT I can understand that, but that's really only an issue if they accept a design which they don't first make the creator hand over all rights to, which if an author is doing that for the community they'd probably be happy to do. They just need to have their legal team write up something that they force people to sign before accepting and using their designs, and perhaps forcing them to have specific license header in the design before handing it over.

A little paper work that's the same for every design they accept is a O(1) cost for all the designs they get out of it, vs. the O(n) cost of their current approach where n = number of site designs

Ok, now that is a very good point

your first point was a bit weak :P but the liability aspect didn't occur to me

And unfortunately due to the fashion of copyright/trademark law and how frenzied people get in attacking any potential violators, they couldn't comfortably disavow themselves of the wrongdoing of any contributors... Or I wouldn't think, but then that makes me wonder how shirt.woot handles such issues.. I do recall having seen a couple times they had to remove the shirt halfway through the day due to getting complaint from a copyright holder

They could always make the contributors sign something agreeing that they are the responsible party for any wrongdoing, but that really wouldn't fly when copyright holders tend to scream bloody murder in every direction they can in this country

I think I understand the general idea of dependent types, but I usually find out these super-math concepts I feel I have a general understanding of I am way off on... Or at least my vocabulary is so far off from the people who do know it that I can't understand them or vice versa