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by signing the Budapest Open Access Initiative, supported by Soros' Open Society Institute. You can read about it here http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read

I would be interested in seeing those disparities. I'm not quite sure the numbers will tell the whole story well enough. I know that several factors are at play when sentencing is handed down and among these are history, danger to others and likelihood of repeat offence.

There is plenty of evidence. Please do investigate.

There is a higher rate of imprisonment among black people than white people. What drives that?

That's not what the issue is. The issue is the disparity in sentencing for blacks or latinos versus other races for the same crimes, even when controlling for things like criminal history or severity of the crime. That's hardly the only issue either. The disparity in sentences for crimes that are primarily committed by white people versus those committed primarily by black people (e.g. power cocaine or meth sale versus crack cocaine sale) is another issue. It's hard to respect the law when things are so obviously rigged.

In the USA, our cities which have the strictest gun control laws, are the cities which have the highest homicide rates.

That's a NRA myth. Sort US cities by the murder column in this table:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_cities_by_crime_rate

Take the states of the top 3. Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri.
Louisiana has the 2nd weakest gun control laws. Michigan and Missouri are mid table.
http://www.soros.org/initiatives/usprograms/focus/justice/articles_publications/publications/gun_report_20000401/GunReport_Chart1.pdf

Take the states of the cities with the lowest murder rate. Hawaii,Nebraska,Texas.
Hawaii has extremely strong gun control. Nebraska is mid-table, and Texas has weak gun control.

There's no simple correlation there as the NRA claim. Some cities are more violent and some are less violent for a huge number of social and political reasons. There's nothing in that data to say that weak gun crime means less murder.

"So yeah, I'm exceedingly opposed to letting anyone like Buffett or Soros run anything in the government. They already manipulate it now to their benefit and get rich off tax and bailout bills, so the last thing they need is to be made a "benevolent dictator"."

Soros and buffet are nowhere near in the same league, I've met Mr Soros personally and I can tell you he is not in the same league as your typical billionaire in the slightest. He set up conferences in how the political process of america is manipulated, see here: http://www.linktv.org/programs/orwell_deceiving

He publishes books constantly criticizing the the deficiencies of the capitalist system. (Just google or search on amazon for his name) and he also funds the soros foundation that has done a hell of a lot of good for people in the world and in america - http://www.soros.org/

Just because a person is rich doesn't mean that they are all about money, nor does it mean they are perfect. If you've actually watched interviews of Mr Soros or read any of his books and researched into the man, you'd get a much better picture then the superficial version and vague notions that he is just "some greedy rich dude". People should read some of his books and actually research before they smear a man you know nothing about. He is not perfect, but no one is, and since america is all about hyper belief in capitalism. Americans deserve to get the real world capitalism good and hard - they deserve to get the ideals they worship - greed, status, beauty, hyper individualism and being rich, and therefore deserve a bunch of rich people who believe greed is good ruling them.

If the american people want change they should be ignoring the law, outright revolting and going after these people with mob justice. It is astounding how ignorant most people are of history. Oswald spenglers decline of the west should be required reading for every student before they enter the world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decline_of_the_West

Oswald knew the only thing that can counter greed and oppression of the corruption of the rich is bloodshed and lawless disobedience, like the destruction of property, the intimidation of the corrupt men in the law profession and the corrupt judges, people did this during the depression, but most people today are too comfortable, selfish and individualistic to set aside their differences and fearful for their lives to oust these people. The rich live in a world radically different and sheltered from the real world of the masses and the more distant from this world they become the more myopic and distorted their thinking and vision becomes.

I hate that term, "race card." When you're talking about someone's life, it's not a game... so there's no such thing as a "race CARD." If you're going to bash someone for talking about something you deem meaningless, at least do _some_ research so you don't look like you're talking out of your ass. Start here: http://www.soros.org/initiatives/justice/articles_publications/publications/racial_disparity_20050128/ http://www.sentencingproject.org/IssueAreaHome.aspx?IssueID=3/ Also, what exactly is picking up 20 years of a heavily edited TV show targeted toward a non-affluent, poorly educated demographic supposed to say about jail sentencing disparities? As for not dressing like a criminal if you don't want to get harassed... Let me guess... your idea of rape prevention would be "not dressing like a slut?" Jeez dude, cops harassing people for how they're dressed (punk, hiphop, or whatever) is WRONG. That's not why they're there.

But in this case, where would you draw the line and why?

Well, that question begins with the assumption that this technology would be used to find individual drug users. I very much doubt that is the case. The police seem to be doing just fine already in the USoA, because your fine country now has the highest incarceration rate in the world., beating out Russia and South Africa.

No, this technology will be used by local branches of the DEA and other law enforcement agencies to bolster funding proposals to boost their stable of helicopters, snipers, and sniffer dogs. This is merely an extension of what the War On Drugs is really about; stealing billions of dollars from the public purse to enrich corporations while building a police state.

So I wouldn't worry about peeing on your neighbours lawn if I were you, I'd be looking at emigrating to somewhere that isn't a facist oligarchy while you still can.

Best of luck!

"Bowling for Columbine" tried to make a point like that, but is it valid?

I'm not convined that there are "more guns than people in Canada." The population of Canada is 32 million. The number of guns is difficult to determine, but is in the range of 7 to 11 million (corroborated here, and numbers of 7-16 million are used in some official canadian government rhetoric). That's alot of guns... but not more guns that people. It's 0.28 guns per person, on average.

The population of the US is about 295 million. The number of guns in the US (also hard to estimate) is, according to one estimatem, around 200 million (corroborated here, although that includes estimates of undeclared guns; a different site indicates at least 60 million declared guns). That's 0.68 guns per person, on average.

Those stats are debatable, of course. Estimating such things is hard. I also fully acknowledge that the websites I pointed to are not especially trustworthy sources (some are about gun-control, hence they will typically use the biggest stat for number of guns to make their point). However, the take-home message is that, indeed, there are lots of guns both in Canada and in the United States, yet the number of gun-related deaths (per person) in the US seems worse than in Canada. This is the point that "Bowling for Columbine" was trying to make... however it is a great exagerration to say that there are "more guns than people" in Canada.

Quote: "execute all the pedophiles, murderers and rapists, problem solved."

What about cases where the convicted are later found innocent of the crime?

As for the incarceration rate, this paper (http://www.soros.org/initiatives/justice/articles _publications/publications/intl_incarceration_2003 0620/intl_rates.pdf) I discovered generally suffices: "In this regard, the U.S. rate of
incarceration of 702 inmates per 100,000 population represents not only a record high,
but situates this nation as the world leader in its use of imprisonment. The continuous
rise in the prison population in the U.S. has vaulted this country ahead of our old Cold
War rival Russia to become the world's leading incarcerator.

"For comparative purposes, the U.S. now locks up its citizens at a rate 5-8 times
that of the industrialized nations to which we are most similar, Canada and western
Europe. Thus, as seen in the accompanying chart, the rate per 100,000 population is 139
in England/Wales, 116 in Canada, 91 in Germany, and 85 in France."

Furthermore, according to http://www.prisonstudies.org/ this rate is relatively similar; with "293.66 million at 1.7.2004 (U.S. Census Bureau)" and 2,131,180 held in prison/jail reaches a ratio of 726 per 100,000. If, however, jail is not counted then the ration drops to 486 as reported by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. So, I suppose one would have to settle on including those in jail or not.

Whether it is a result of our culture or not is not so important as how can those people be helped back into society so they wont need to commit criminal acts or feel the compunction to do so (for whatever reason they do it). I imagine the growing wealth gap certainly doesn't help some of those incarcerated, nor the heavy penalties for drug use compared to more violent acts.

Open Access finally arrives at IEEE, after it is being discussed since years in the biomed field (where access is crucial for developing countries).
Some info at the Budapest Open Access Initiative (http://www.soros.org/openaccess/.
For me as a scientist, I still have to get used to that, but everygrant has a part for publication expenses, often not used or used just to buy offprints. If I think at the library budget devoted to subscriptions at my university, well, that money can be easily spent for paying publication instead.

Oops - those broken links were:
The Gates Foundation
and
The Open Society Institute/Soros Foundation

In related news, The Soros Foundations recently commissioned a study of Skype's security features with an eye towards using the software in civil society sectors. An interesting read: http://www.soros.org/initiatives/information/artic les_publications/articles/security_20050107/

Open Access News blog
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html

SPARC Open Access Newsletter
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/arch ive.htm

Timeline of the open access movement
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm

What you can do to promote open access
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/lists.htm#do

Budapest Open Access Initiative
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/

FAQ from the Budapest Open Access Initiative
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm

Disclaimer: I'm associated with all of the sites above.
Peter Suber

George Soros made a lot of money out of his financial speculations (including that one against the pound). He doesn't have the Bill Gates level of wealth because his charitable organisations (Soros Foundation and Open Society Institute) have been eating between 300 and 500 million dollars pro year since about 1989. Check out their web site for further details. His contributions are totally unrelated to his commercial activities.

I've never heard anyone who has actually used one of their products say "S-C-O"

We chiefly looked at Sun and SCO as solutions. Sun hardware was just prohibitively expensive. So we went with SCO. In about a year, we migrated to NetBSD. By 1995 most things were moved over to Linux.

I'd had a personal copy of SCO Xenix for a 286 for a while.

So I have used, purchased and managed SCO systems.

I also went to school with some of the founders or SCO (back when it was in Santa Cruz). I'd foolishly passed up the opportunity to invest back then (1984).

Anyway, as you can imagine, as someone who had some (minimal) connection to SCO twenty years ago, I am not at all please by the litigious bastards they are now.

The launching of PLoS Biology -- http://www.plosbiology.org/-- an outcome of Harold Varmus's highly influential 1999 Ebiomed Proposal -- http://www.nih.gov/about/director/ebiomed/ebiomed. htm -- is a very important event for research and researchers, for two reasons:

(1) It is another step forward in providing open access to peer-reviewed research, a major step.

(2) It both demonstrates and will further stimulate the research community's growing consciousness of both the need for open access and the possibility of attaining it.

It is all the more important, therefore, that on this auspicious occasion for the open-access publication strategy (BOAI-2) we not forget or neglect the other, complementary open-access strategy, open-access self-archiving (BOAI-1) --http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml -- particularly because systematically supplementing BOAI-2 with BOAI-1 has the power to bring us so much more open-access, so much more quickly.

A KEY-STROKE KOAN FOR OUR OPEN-ACCESS TIMES

Here is an extremely conservative calculation that will give you an (I hope unforgettable) intuition for the importance of not neglecting the other road to open access:

If, in addition to signing the PLoS open letter (pledging to boycott toll-access publishers unless they become open-access publishers http://www.plos.org/support/openletter.shtml), not even all the 30,000 PLoS signatories had self-archived not even all their own toll-access articles, nor even the 55% corresponding to the proportion of blue/green (self-archiving-friendly) toll-access journals -- http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/rcoptable. gif-- but only the 18% of signatories corresponding to the proportion of postprint-green journals had self-archived just one of the articles they had published in just one of those toll-access journals, the resulting 5400 articles that had been made openly accessible by this act would still have been 5 times as many as PLoS Biology will publish in 5 years (1200 articles, assuming 20 articles per PLoS issue at $1500 a pop). And at the cost of only a few keystrokes more than what it cost to sign the petition.

Yet all researchers did was sign the PLoS open letter, and then wait, passively, for toll-access journals to turn into open-access journals in response to the petition. And now researchers seem ready to wait yet again, passively, with the popular press now cheering from the sidelines, for more open-access journals like PLoS Biology to be created or converted, one by one.

As we make our estimate less conservative and arbitrary, and scale it up first to 55% of all annual biology articles, and then beyond that, to the many journals that will support self-archiving if asked, I hope the scales will at last begin to drop from the eyes of those who have not yet noticed the tunnel vision and paralysis involved in focusing only on open-access publishing, when it is *open access* that is our target.

And perhaps then we will be less surprised that the 23,500 toll-access publishers did not take our boycott threat seriously -- and, by the same token, that they still have no reason to take the handful of open-access journals created since the beginning of the '90s (of which PLoS Biology is about the 543rd) seriously -- if that's all we're prepared to do to demonstrate our need for and commitment to open access for our research, as we just keep sitting on our hands instead o

FYI - the Soros Foundation is sponsoring a new round of grants for social software development. Open Source Projects are encouraged. For more information check out: http://www.soros.org/ip/item_doc.php?area=18&type= 5&id=158

PLoS is one of the leading initiatives for open access to science. For the other major program, see the Budapest Open Access Initiative and its FAQ. PLoS supports BOAI and vice versa.

For breaking news on these issues see the FOS News blog. (FOS stands for Free Online Scholarship.)

Peter

OSI, it turns out, is *opposed* to initiatives and referendums, period. Hmmm... opposed to expanding public participation in the formulation of public policy. Doesn't sound like an "Open Society" to me. Rather, it sounds like they're working to build a more closed society that reflects only the views of OSI and, at the same time, doesn't have the democratic ability to challenge those views.

No, Mr. Soros is a ferocious advocate of open markets. Big difference.

No, Mr. Soros is a ferocious advocate of open societies. From the bio on his website:

Today he is Chairman of the Open Society Institute and the founder of a network of philanthropic organizations that are active in more than 50 countries. Based primarily in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union--but also in Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the United States--these foundations are dedicated to building and maintaining the infrastructure and institutions of an open society.

"promote the development and maintenance of open societies around the world. OSI does this by supporting an array of activities dealing with educational, social, legal, and health care reform, and by encouraging alternative approaches to complex and controversial issues."

From what I understand, he is committed personally and professionally to helping ensure that globalization proceeds in an open, democratic (in a broad sense) manner.

"promote the development and maintenance of open societies around the world. OSI does this by supporting an array of activities dealing with educational, social, legal, and health care reform, and by encouraging alternative approaches to complex and controversial issues."

From what I understand, he is committed personally and professionally to helping ensure that globalization proceeds in an open, democratic (in a broad sense) manner.

Soros is quite an interesting character/organization... we need more of these people.

Soros is quite an interesting character/organization... we need more of these people.

Trying to follow the links can be tedious, but the structure is interesting (snippets cut and pasted from the various websites).

George Soros funds a network of foundations. Among them, Media Development Loan Fund (MDLF) assists independent news organizations working in difficult economic and political climates. Of which Center for Advanced Media-Prague (C@MP) has been bringing new-media concepts and solutions to independent news organizations worldwide since 1998

Camp is developing and diffusing cost-effective, open-source solutions to independent media through its CAMPWARE initiative. Which brings us to another open source ongoing development project: CAMPSITE, an automated web-publishing environment for news media.

/philippe

• Human Development Report 2001 from the United Nations Development Programme.
• Universal Access and the Developing World by Jonathan Peizer
• surely there are many other sources of information (just ask Google)

It doesn't matter if this article is true or not but the point it reaches is a fact!

Are there any organizations that could raise up money to get computers and internet connections over there? People need to open and expand their minds there because you don't want anybody to fall back to being lied to by some fanatics!

You can't give everybody there a computer but you can definately open series of internet cafes in central locations. Is that really that expensive? The cost for that is a lot lower then the cost of fanatics running around destrying buildings and killing people!

I've got online with the help of an Organization that raised funds in that way (Soros foundation for an Open Society) while I was living in Romania and it helped me more then anything ever did.

The access to real and true information is the ultimate in personal improvement!

felix stalder, the author of the telepolis articles is involved in an open source business called openflows.

How about another even more outrageous reflexive relationship? If the BSA is successful at international enforcement of U.S.-based licenses, they will be able to extract rather large amounts of capital from rather poor countries. The trade balance will swing in favor of the U.S. and result in a stronger US$ (currency strength always follows the balance of trade). A stronger US$ in turn requires these countries to pay out even more for software licenses and swing the trade balance even further in favor of US commercial software publishers.

Soros's reflexivity theory explains boom and bust market cycles. It also explains why booms build slowly, reach a frenzied climax, and then bust violently (like the dot-comedy). Usually, some new factor (a disruptive technology) enters the picture and reverses the direction of the circle, changing beneficiaries into victims and vice-versa. It's no wonder Microsoft abhors free software alternatives. There are many such vicious circles in the software industry that are fueled by the current commercial software model. Microsoft's entire business model depends on these circles remaining intact. And as you know, free software is the only realistic way that these circles can be reversed.

Note that no "globalist conspiracy" is required to generate coherent action toward these ends -- merely the incentives inherent in global mobility.

To take a simple example, multidrug resistant strains of TB have arisen due to the abuse of antibiotics in the Former Soviet Union. Soros has been promoting an "Open Society" in Russia and, in so doing, is now privy to the data on incidents of multi drug resistant TB transmission occuring during air travel within the FSU. The threat of this epidemic spreading to other parts of the world is profound, yet Soros and his globalist cohorts can't seem to come to grips with the fact that in their push for putting the globe through a mix-master as fast as the societies can stand -- they not only run the risk of reactionary backlash, they are setting the stage for a variety of epidemics of not only biological disease, but of criminal activities and political degeneration that is so rapid, the social control structures of civilization simply will not be able to withstand the onslaught.

In Soros's case, he at least recognizes some of his responsibility to do something about multidrug resistant strains of TB, but this sort of after-the-fact reaction to a manifest problem has not influenced him to recognize his underlying ethical conflict-of-interest in putting the world at greater risk through ill-considered mobility.

One of the primary reasons for local communities is to allow experimental controls -- a societal laboratory in which many diverse ideas and structures can be tried and tested in isolation from one another lest the lessons learned be obscured by too great a number of variables in too short a time.

People say they want security, and I believe them -- but I do not believe it when globalists say they want global security. What they want is to secure their own position by increasing the necessity for globalists -- even if that puts the entire globe at unacceptably high levels of risk.

Network Startup Resource Center is a good starting point for exploring Internet prolifaration in the developing word - in many cases the information is outdated, because the local Internet grew too much to keep pace with. There was number promoting, funding and training activities to help Internet development in poor countries. Check out NSRC workshop page, Internet Society Network Technology Workshop, and other activities, UNDP's SDNP Programme, Soros Foundation Internet Project, AfNOG page and others.

Some of these activites explicitely aim at Internet accessible to general public (with programs supporting Internet in education, public Internet kiosks etc), but in general the idea is the more networking the better. Frankly, the discussion whether Internet creates new division lines between information haves and have-nots etc sounds a bit pretentious and academic if the only alternative is equality in isolation and poverty. Personally I know a lot of people from developing countries, to whom even very limited Internet presence brough enormous benefits in both knowledge and better living, and that's a good thing. Period.

Honza Jirousek