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Also, Penn and Teller aren't exactly unbiased themselves

Cato receives funding from the oil industry, and had Fox News head honcho Rupert Murdoch as a director. Now that's what I call fair and balanced reporting!

You'll be hard pressed to find a "stink tank" that would agree with you. They do claim unbiased analysis. If they weren't trying to at least project the image of being unbiased agents of the truth, they wouldn't be much use would they? By witholding disclaimers in their articles as to who funds them, they're liars and they know it. I'm sure they'd even deny the watered down term of propagandist. Even Slashdot will conscientiously admit to the source of an article being from or involving a parent company to acknowledge the possibility of a conflict of interest. That shows Slashdot is a more honest than these loser "analists".

However, if they aren't for the truth, what are they for? I mean, has anyone stopped to ask what is a "think tank" anyways? Here's a couple definitions.

Incidentally, if you look at other large sponsors of these agencies, you'll see other funding sources they have in common besides Microsoft. It's not like MS is the sole, driving force behind these organizations.

Perhaps not, but it's absolutely clear they are the common funder. And, I bet they're the biggest fish in that scummy pond. It's also crystal clear that the less visibility Microsoft has as a funder, the less likely there will be questions of veracity regarding the "analysis" from these so called "think tanks". As Microsoft practices security through obscurity, so do these "stink tanks" claim unbiased authority by not announcing who paid for their "research". There's a reason why political Ads must have full disclosure as to who paid for what. That's because an uninformed public will make uninformed decisions, and often against their own interests. Paint it anyway you want, but I've got paint thinner.

= 9J =

...at Disinfopedia.

Saying that organization and order can only come from centralism sounds a little, well, ideologically loaded coming from the brother of John Negroponte, the former US Ambassador to Honduras who seems to have formed the opinion that the best way to establish order in fractious Latin countries was to tacitly allow strong men and dictators to terrorise, torture and kill the populace.

And now John Negroponte is Bush's choice for next Ambassador to Iraq, where it seems the current US administration obviously feels a little torture and a few disappeared people is one way to restore "order". How convenient!

About google bombing, does someone know if it works inside a style="display:none"'ed element? I'd like to add some links to the litigious bastards and Alexis de Tocqueville Institution's fake research, but I wouldn't like to have visible links and generate hits for them.

Original Comment: If you're going for Google bombing against fake research, you might be interested to know that a search for Alexis de Tocqueville Institution also leads to a more informative article about AdTI.

Reply: Somebody Mod this guy up to +5 extremely valuable information provided...

Original Comment: If you're going for Google bombing against fake research, you might be interested to know that a search for Alexis de Tocqueville Institution also leads to a more informative article about AdTI.

Reply: Somebody Mod this guy up to +5 extremely valuable information provided...

If you're going for Google bombing against fake research, you might be interested to know that a search for Alexis de Tocqueville Institution also leads to a more informative article about AdTI.

If you're going for Google bombing against fake research, you might be interested to know that a search for Alexis de Tocqueville Institution also leads to a more informative article about AdTI.

Start on the wiki here

Government investment in open source development will accelerate innovation. However, increased investment should be in true open source, open source without any stipulations, other than attribution and copyright notification, not hybrid source.

"Hybrid source code" is a phrase coined by former Tocqueville Chairman Gregory Fossedal. The term refers to any product with a license that attempts to mix free and proprietary source code at the same time.

Gee, I wonder where he gets his information. Obviously this is a verifiable source of unbiased journalistic excellence!

Microsoft

You may also be interested in the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution's Disinfopedia page

Disinfopedia article on Alexis De Tocqueville Institution Reading that kinda puts it all into perspective

Here is a bit of speculation. One guess and two don't count.

Terrorists blow things up and kill about 1/10th the number of Americans who die in highway deaths each year, but in doing do they stiffen our resolve and so never get anywhere near to changing our fundamental America values.

But dissidents and domestic trouble-makers can cause real problems for a regime that calls questioning its mistakes tantamount to aiding America's enemies.

Today is Memorial Day. I hope that all Americans will take time today to reflect on the costs of freedom and the American men and women in our armed forces who have paid for our freedoms with their service, their wounds, and their lives.

On this Memorial Day, let's really support our troops by following the advice of so many retired officers and men by insisting that "Robert S." Rumsfeld and his band of incompetent chicken-hawks resign -- or be fired.

I found this link to a good def. of confusopolies. Can't seem to track down the actual comic, though, unless I buy the book.

It's also called "astroturf" (as in fake grassroots) in the offline/PR world.

-fren

Anyhow, the Disinfopedia wiki keeps track of organizations such as the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution. It is a wiki, so anyone can add information about them (including you).

But we really don't need a Microsoft link to demonstrate the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution's grotesque ideological bias. While the think-tank positions itself as an independent, libertarian research group designed to "study, promote, and extend the principles of classical liberalism: political equality, civil liberty, and economic freedom," they function, more often than not, as a shill for Big Business and the far political right.

AdTI is a fellow-traveler of neoconservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and shadowy groups like the "Defenders of Property Rights," with whom they are aligned as part of an anti-Clean Air Act hit squad ironically misnamed the Cooler Heads Coalition. These are the folks who have been grinding out the industrialist propaganda which has allowed the Bush Administration to roll back environmental laws a couple of decades.

The Alexis de Tocqueville Institute can always be counted upon for a convenient white paper discounting the risks of tobacco smoking or in favor of vastly expensive weapons programs of dubious utility.

It's tough to source the funding of private institutes, but the folks at Media Transparency have taken a stab at AdTI. Big sugar daddies include the Bradley Foundation, which gives away millions each year to attack social programs and support the privatization of government services. There's also the John M. Olin Foundation, which has lavishly funded a host of robber baron nonprofits over the years.

So it's no surprise that the Alexis de Tocqueville Institiute -- which seems to exist to provide a moral compass for the richest and most powerful interests in the West -- should be seen to carry water for anti-Open Source reactionaries. What's bad for big business must be bad for the nation. Linux must be discredited before it causes more distress for the market planners at Microsoft.

The only freedom being defended by groups like AdTI is the feedom to buy what the Establishment is selling. And at a price they decide.

Richard K. Miller,
President,
Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering

This is a school that is funded by the Olin Foundation, which is one of the largest funders of anti-labor causes in the US. The Olin's are multi-millionaires and fund to the tune of millions a year causes that are the most strident in screwing workers and helping millionaires and billionaires. There are not many wealthy American families on the front lines of what they must perceive as a class war as them. The only other ones I can think of are the Coors family, and to some extent Richard Mellon Scaife.

I read through this article and what is he saying? Nothing but a lot of bullshit. But other people here have mentioned that so I'll just throw up a red flag about who he's connected to (and paid by).

I should also mention that if there's a "problem" they'll always say it is American workers versus Indian workers. As if we're in a race and have to compete - working longer hours for the same amount of money, improving our skills so we generate more profit for the bosses and so forth. What is not mentioned is overwork, that if American workers and Indian workers got overtime pay, unemployment would fall (as people would be cut down to 40 hours work per week), and wages would rise, since supply of IT labor hours would shrink, increasing the price.

I am really tired of hearing the bullshit. The problem is not with the IT workers, we can administrate and program just as well as we could five years ago, if not better. The problem is with the people who control the capital, and their broken-down economic system which has the sole purpose of making profit for them. The only way to fix anything of this for ourselves is to talk to other IT workers who are of a similar mind (which there are many of), organize together and do something together. The sum is greater than the total of all of the parts. There are already nascent efforts out there working towards this, we just have to join up with them and push them along.

You know what I dislike? Governmental reduction of:

* Free expression of opinion.
* Freedom of the press.
* Right to privacy of postal and electronic communications.
* Protection against unlawful search and seizure.

The establishment of an entirely new federal police institution aimed at "protecting the homeland" with extensive powers never before granted.

It's not *worth* it, nor is it particularly effective at stopping terrorism. It is not a reasonable reaction to a terrorist act, even one aimed at governmental infrastructure.

Except I'm not talking about the PATRIOT Act.

I'm talking about the Reichstagsbrandverordnung, or Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of the People and State, which happened 60 years ago, where Hitler first gained full control of the German government. The Nazis insisted that they needed more extensive police powers as an emergency to help stop terrorist acts, after their Reichstag was burned down.

Many people wonder how the Nazis could seize control of Germany. It was amazing -- people kept giving up rights, convinced that their leaders would stop and not continue on out of control. They let their equivalent of the executive branch run amok, unchecked by their legislators, exactly as is happening now. Once they got slightly comfortable with the state of affairs, more rights were taken away, and it became harder and harder to criticize the government in power. Fear of the unknown kept the leaders in control -- they kept claiming that there were enemies everywhere, even within the state, and that they were simply exercising German military strength to ensure that Germany was secure. Exactly as our current administration does. Ashcroft's speech could have been taken straight from an English translation of any of Hitler's attacks on his critics.

Why should I waste my time disputing what you say?

You shouldn't. You should do some investigation of you own. The facts are the facts.

You haven't proved any of it. Your facts are occasionally wrong and definitely imcomplete and your insinuations are unprovable.

Which of these facts are wrong? Incomplete? Of course, you make no effort to prove your assertion.
What did I insinuate?

Did Bush f things up before 9/11? Yes.

Agreed.
You seem to be ignoring the fact that he and his administration systematically dismantled our investigations into terrorism, and specifically the terrorists who attacked on 9/11.

This link discusses
Bush's ambassador to Yemen's refusal to allow the head of the investigation into the USS Cole bombing back in to Yemen. The source is just the first I found in a search, so if you don't like it feel free to find your own. It is a fact, and it has been widely reported. Buried mostly, but reported nonetheless.

This link
reports that the FBI was ordered to "Back off" the Bin ladens and the Saudi royal family.

I don't suppose you remember who Coleen Rowley is? Ashcroft refused to allow a search of the laptop of the 20th terrorist.

Did everyone else? Yes.

As demonstrated above, not everyone else fucked up. Some people were doing quite well before they had their knees taken out.

Further, as I said, We were warned of the specific attacks in advance by the intelligence services of multiple countries. Perhaps this is what you were talking about when you called my facts incomplete? I forgot to mention that Russia and several other Arab countries warned us as well.

You're a contentious fool.
An ad hominem attack is the most base logical fallacy.

You have to prove the spirit of your attacks is true, or I'm not even going to be bothered responding.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. The facts are what they are.

"The time he wasted could have prevented the second WTC plane from hitting." Of course it could have.

So you agree that he could have prevented the second plane from hitting the second tower by taking the simple action of responding to the threat by doing his job rather than joking that That's some bad pilot (aside: My father is a pilot, so I have some slight understanding of how horrified the poor man's wife must have felt to hear Bush ridicule her murdered husband and joke at the deaths of all the innocent passengers and crew of the plane and those immediately killed in the building.)

He then continued to react to the single worst terrorist attack on US soil by going into a classroom and reading a book to a bunch of second graders.

You're a partisan hack to imply that his inaction is somehow his intentional irresponsibility.

Another ad hominem, this time with a red herring thrown in.
You clearly learned your debating skills from some extremist right wing agitator. Refute facts and arguments with hatred. That lesson so many on the right have learned so well has poisoned public discourse in this country. Thanks for helping to propogate it.

What the reasons for his inaction are are irrelevant to the point which you already admitted which was that he could have stopped all of the attacks after the first had he done his job.

Where the partisanship comes in with expecting the President of the United States to do his job rathe

MediaWiki in particular implements many ideas that were already envisioned by Ted Nelson and Doug Engelbart. It does show backlinks, but perhaps more importantly, it also allows dynamic inclusion of any page in the current development version. For example, you could have a header and footer in your documentation that is the same for every page. What's more, you can add parameters to these templates to dynamically search and replace patterns of text in the template before transcluding it. This will allow us to replace the currently statically hacked Wikipedia infoboxes with dynamically included and parametrized templates, for example. One long term feature that might be worth hacking on top of this would be transclusion of labeled sections from another page, or interwiki transclusion.

Check out the current feature list and the development roadmap. Subscribe to wikitech-l to help us in improving the software. In true wiki spirit, we are fairly liberal at handing out CVS access (over 40 developers with CVS access at present), so please do ask if you want to work on a larger project.

There are many other wiki engines that are worth working on, such as TWiki and MoinMoin. Their main deficiency, in my opinion, is that they do rely primarily on the traditional wiki link pattern of CamelCase, which is nice for geeks but very ugly for everyone else, and also useless for search engines. MediaWiki uses [[free links]] instead, which are harder to type, but look just like normal links to the reader. Still, working on any other wiki engine is a lot better than starting yet another one.

A collaborative tool which is badly needed is a free software clone of SubEthaEdit. Combine wikis with real-time editing and the fun really begins. I imagine something like that might be hackable on top of a powerful graphical editor like Kate. For now WebDAV-support for MediaWiki would also be very cool, as Kate/KDE already supports editing WebDAV resources. So many worthwhile hacks, so little time.

This is an area where open source coders can make a big difference while corporations are still bewildered by the fact that open wikis can produce useful content. So please, let's work together on these tools.

if the intelligence that Bush got also said they existed, and Bush
repeated this, as he did.. is he really lying? Sure, but he didn't fabricate
the lie, he just went on the intelligent his spooks got wrong.

Bush is no great leader, but if US intelligence can't even get shit right,
how can he relay the 'truth'?

"US intelligence" didn't get it factually correct because under the careful supervision of The White House through Cheney and the Office of Special Plans among others, "US intellegence" was never meant to get it factually correct. They were tasked with massaging any available data to fit The White House's preconcieved view-point that Iraq was a serious threat to the security of the United States. At the level of The White House, any data which confilicted with that view-point was systematically changed, deemphasized, discarded, or sent back to the CIA to be reevaluated.

This was done in the same general manner as so-called Creation Science[sic] attempts to massage data to support their preconcieved viewpoint that the Earth is relatively young and was created by their god, or their preconcieved viewpoint that evolution is a lie. In the cases of how both The White House and Creation Science[sic] adherents selectively pick and discard data it is the outcome which matters, not the facts. The facts, being inconvienent to them, have nothing to do with it.

MediaWiki is also used by non-Wikimedia projects. Among the more interesting ones is Disinfopedia, an encyclopedia of propaganda, and Wikitravel, a travel guide. Star Trek fans will want to take a look at Memory Alpha.

Because of Wikipedia's constant server problems, MediaWiki has been refined to be very scalable. It caches almost everything and uses Livejournal's memcached to keep important data in memory. It also has support for Squid proxy servers. Aside from that MediaWiki comes with a huge set of features, many of which are found in few other wikis:

• section editing - edit not a whole page, but just a small subsection of it (great for large pages)
• automatic image rescaling
• LaTeX support for mathematic formulas
• message transclusion - create messages that can be used
• namespaces to separate article content, user pages, image descriptions and discussions; message notification for user-to-user messages
• plenty of query functions to examine the relationships between articles (articles which have many links to them but don't exist, articles which have no links to them, very long/short articles etc.)

Here are some great sources for news online:

Financial Times - FT a good example of actual "news reporting" (as opposed to "news creating" exhibited by most companies). As a result of the commercial influence in all aspects of society nowadays, it makes perfect sense that some of the financial news sources may now be the most objective source of information. Check out this wonderful site and newspaper.

PR Watch - This site is run by the Center for Media & Democracy is a nonprofit, public interest organization funded by individuals and nonprofit foundations and dedicated to investigative reporting on the public relations industry. The Center serves citizens, journalists and researchers seeking to recognize and combat manipulative and misleading PR practices. There is an excellent weekly newsletter you can subscribe to from this site which summarizes news stories and special issues where media coverage was manipulated.

Disinfopedia - a collaborative project to produce a directory of public relations firms, think tanks, industry-funded organizations and industry-friendly experts that work to influence public opinion and public policy on behalf of corporations, governments and special interests. More than 2500 articles outlining information and credentials on key individuals and entities involved with public policy and other areas. This is a great resource to look up the history of people in the news.

Link TV - The first national network offering a global perspective on news, current events and culture, presenting viewpoints seldom covered in the U.S. media. We present first-run documentaries on global issues, current affairs series, international news, classic foreign feature films, and the best of world music. Link TV's programming, combined with innovative use of two-way digital link-ups and our participatory web site, deepens audience engagement and encourages active participation. If you have DirecTV, this network is channel 375 - ask your cable provider if they do not make this network available - it's worth it!

Democratic Underground - What has turned out to be a polarized web site has become a watchdog for the mainstream media, the Democratic Underground exposes the hypocrisy and sleaziness in the media. Check this site out folks -- with references (something you do not find on conservative sites)

CorpWatch - A great site for information on the nefarious activities of multinational corporations. Want to find out who's paid off whom? Which governments are under the influence of which corporations? Little-known corporate relationships that explain unusual social or political events? This is the site to check.

Adbusters - In our society it has become increasingly difficult to separate editorial from advertising and many argue there is no longer a distinction. This site addresses the social changes in how people are educated by addressing the impact of news and the advertising media and exposes the propaganda campaigns. Very good reading, and in many cases, shockingly thought-provoking!

Common Dreams News Center - Billed as "Breaking news & views for the Progressive community",
this site endeavors to carry stories that the mainstream media may either not be reporting, or not telling all sides.

Canadian Broadcast Corporation - Canada's state-owned news service is widely regarded as one of the most objective sources of information.

Independent Media Center - A good source for news stories that the mainstream doesn't pick up. This site is particularly sensitive to the influence corporate America has over what is and is

Initators of ENISA are software patent lover Arlene McCarthy (UK labour) and the doubtful European Internet Foundation (see disinfopedia).

Association Electronic Libre (Belgium) has monitored the ENISA situation .

It is probably initiated by Business Software Alliance. Many observers regard the EIF as a parliaments prostitution camp. This may be a strong comment. However, I guess ENISA will promote Digital Rights Magemenent, Palladium and so on. It will not compare to well respected security institutions like German BSI.

I know the key persons and we knwo the aganda.

I don't like e-voting any more than you do, as most of the e-voting that's around today is dangerously badly implemented, and ultimately anti-democratic. However, you argue instead that we need representative democracy because...

1. Because mob-rule (pure democracy) is a bad idea.
Mob rule is a bad idea, agreed, but please explain how is mob rule "pure democracy"? Do mobs hold votes on which person to lynch or which building to burn? Mob rule is pure feudalism, not pure democracy.

2. Because most people don't even give a shit about who's PRESIDENT, let alone every minor issue our representatives get paid (well) to address.

Most people in Zimbabwe, Iraq, Palestine, Venezuela etc. care very deeply about who's president. You must be talking about "most people in the USA", right? The evidence certainly supports you there, but there is the matter of the other 6 billion people on the planet.

Also, the MIT site should put the dang searchbox on the dang frontpage, dang it.

How is spamming still profitable? Are there that many people out there that are into having sex with farm animals? Or believe their are pills that increase life span? Who the hell are these people?

Probably the same that now believe that the planes crashing in the Twin Towers at Sep. 11th were piloted mostly by iraqies (which is not the case). It's been on TV, so it must be true!
It's just another form of disinformation as it is used now in the war on iraq. Check out http://www.disinfopedia.org/ for more information.