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Wikipedia Blocks Suspicious Edits From DoJ
kylehase writes "The release of Wikiscanner last year brought much attention to white-washing of controversial pages on the community-generated encyclopedia. Apparently Wikipedia is very serious in fighting such behavior as they've temporarily blocked the US Department of Justice from editing pages for suspicious edits."
Overrules? That word makes as much sense in this context as 'penguinates'.
The captcha is donkeyballs (kidding).
DOJ, You got served!
Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci
Someone stands up to them. Now I think if the RIAA ever comes after me I will overrule them...I guess what I'm trying to say is I for one welcome our Self overruling overlords.
I believe thats what is generally called "rattling the bushes"...
..but what will come out? a paper tiger or a man eater? I cannot see the DOJ taking this lying down.
they've temporarily blocked the US Department of Justice from editing pages for suspicious edits.
Because, y'know, the DOJ only has a single point of entry to the internet, and couldn't possibly get around this block by, say, having people doing it from their home PCs...
Although I'm really not sure what the big deal is, except perhaps the fact that "suspicious" edits were occuring from the DOJ's networks.
Until Wikipedia is served a court order requiring them to remove or alter certain information, they can do whatever the hell they want with their own web site(s) so long as they are law abiding.
The big problem with the Wikipedia comes down to one of opinion.
As long as it is just facts then it seems too work pretty well. When it comes to opinion then things get into trouble.
One persons white washing is somebody elses setting the record straight.
What is funny is bias and opinion can creep into the strangest articles.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Governmental Wikipedia editing around the world:
Japan: "The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam"
USA: "The defense department is in charge of Gitmo"
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Wikiscanner appears to have nothing to do with the department of justice. Besides, If an IP from the DOJ tries to erase a particular scandel from wikipedia or wiki-whatever, doesn't that, in a way, verify the accuracy of the report?
Meet stone.
...and the Wikinews article on the same story.
Should the government have the right to even be on Wikipedia making edits? Isn't that similar to them controling any other media outlet?
Or does the 'openness' of wiki mean that the government is justified in making changes to whatever articles they want?
I personally don't want them even touching it, or influencing any media outlet.
No comprende? Let me type that a little slower for you...
Once a certain kind of edit results in an IP ban, I would guess that the editors of wikipedia would keep an eye on similar edits and anyone trying to make similar edits, irrespective of their location, would get a warning or possible ban. Of course the edit would be reverted.
I really don't see any point in an organization getting someone to push views similar to the ones that caused an IP ban in the first place.
It's consistent. The Department of Defense is responsible for attacking other countries. The Fire Department is responsible for extinguishing fires. Clearly, the Department of justice is responsible for preventing any justice from happening.
I think the real story here isn't that Wikipedia has temporarily suspended the DOJ from article edits. The real story, at least to me, is that the DOJ has demonstrably been involved in a systematic effort to rewrite history. Many of us have been suspecting that the administration was doing that, but this is the kind of damning evidence that we've been looking for.
This needs to be the straw that breaks the PNAC's and neo-conservatism's back, and we can only hope that the Republican party rises from the ashes better and more rational for having done so. They're already making solid progress by picking the McCain horse, if only he would stop selling himself out to the fundies and stick to his old center-right positions. The time of the Religious Right's domination of American politics needs to come to an end, and if we can show their more moderate colleagues just how bad they really are I think there's a solid chance that they'll kick the monkey off of their back for good.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
The DoJ (and all govt entities) are creations of law,NOT any sort of corporation or moral person and are not entitled to any sort of opinion. Any expression of opinion seriously undermines the democratic process since it generally favors incumbents.
There is a clear line between answering questions and trying pro-actively to shape opinion. And they've crossed it. As they have many other lines. :( worst is they appear not to understand why what they've done on these occasions might be wrong and generally justify it as "safety" which is not theirs to decide.
I would have thought that technically, the DOJ can kick Wikipedia's ass on this one, if they were serious enough about it. Are we going to reach the stage where Wikipedia has to roll over or find some kind of safe haven for its servers, a la Pirate Bay?
Maybe there's a market for some small country to become a haven for unpopular websites - I kind of internet equivalent of the Cayman Islands or Monte Carlo.
Of course, if Wikipedia did have to do that, the first amendment is basically busted.
Maybe the DoJ and all other government agencies should be permanently banned. Not as a punishment, but as a matter of appropriateness. Think of the recent upset when it was discovered that the "military analyst" on most news shows was just a Pentagon mouthpiece. Why was that bad? Because in order for a democracy to function well, the people need access to clear unbiased information. While most everyone knows that various News programs have a slant, Wikipedia wants to (and should continue to) maintain as balanced a voice as possible. The more that Wikipedia become the first place many people go for information, the more important it becomes in having a well informed public. After all a well informed public is what things like "freedom of the press" is about, right?
We are all just people.
Having the same issues.
A true conservative, in the same style as Barry Goldwater, would find all of this governmental involvement abhorrent and would love to see the size of government shrink and people start taking responsibility for themselves and their actions again.
OCO is Loco
Wikipedia -- the encyclopedia anyone can edit... as long as Honest Jimbo and his Admin Regime agrees with you. All else is vandalism and must be dealt with harshly.
Also, Wikipedia recently got a grant from the Sloan Foundation. On the board of the Sloan Foundation are several General Motors execs. So... hands up anyone who is naive enough to think that Wikipedia's General Motors pages will be 100% POV.
4 legs good, 2 legs better.
I've no iterest in whether Wikipedia shows you in a favourable or defamatory light. As such, i'm willing to edit your posts for you, as you require.
I'll obviously be billing you for "consultancy", and do not guarantee any level satisfaction from this service.
I look forward to hearing from you,
Jimmy Wales.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
The Department of Justice has almost 130,000 employees, and as much as some conspiracy theorists would like to believe otherwise, I seriously doubt that they're able to keep track of the individual actions of every single one of them. As even the article has pointed out, these questionable edits are most likely the action of an individual employee making edits on their lunch break, a personal effort instead of an organized one. If this were a coordinated and malicious conspiracy by the government, don't you think they'd be a little more creative in covering their tracks, especially after all the exposure from Wikiscanner last year?
I find the ban on the DoJ's IP address more humorous than anything else. If there's some sort of action in DoJ over the incident, it'll probably be a crackdown on Internet usage for productivity purposes.
As for whether or not "the government" is qualified to edit Wikipedia, who is? Nearly everyone will have some sort of conflict of interest, whether due to their employer, religious creed, or civic affiliation. I don't see why any of over fourteen million Federal civil servants and contractors, let alone the tens of millions of state and local government employees, should be less qualified to edit Wikipedia than any other netizen.
Wikipedia can take this as a compliment. The wiki can be useful or dubious, but it appears to be playing an important role in this new information age. I fully welcome the gubment to make use these tools, since the enemy already is.
Bearded Dragon
I wonder if their definition of "suspicious edits" is "Edits that don't reflect our view".
That seems to be their speed.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
The Reg did a good job of summarizing the issue. The Slashdot "article" does not.
The main dispute regarding CAMERA's lobbying campaign is summarized on Wikipedia. That effort did not involve DoJ. (CAMERA, the "Committee for Accuracy in Middle-East Reporting", is an advocacy organization for Israel. CAMERA sometimes claims to be neutral, but even the Israeli press says they're pro-Israel.)
After the CAMERA lobbying effort had been detected, and edits related to CAMERA were being closly scrutinized, someone using a DOJ IP address made an somewhat suspicious edit which deleted information about CAMERA's Wikipedia lobbying effort from the CAMERA article. As I wrote at the time, IP address [149.101.1.130] resolves to "wdcsun30.usdoj.gov". A whole series of "wdcsun*.usdoj.gov" machines appear in various logs, so it's probably an outgoing web proxy. If you try a traceroute, you get a "destination unreachable" at exit from QWest's network. That machine seems to be a source of miscellaneous browsing traffic by DC employees; "wdcsun30.usdoj.gov" comes up in blogs for Mini Cooper owners. --John Nagle (talk) 20:29, 24 April 2008 (UTC)
So either it's a DoJ employee browsing from work, or DoJ's proxy servers are open and can be abused from the outside. Probably the former. It would be interesting to make a Freedom of Information request of DoJ for the user information associated with that use of the proxy server. After all, DoJ is taking the position that ISPs should be required to retain such information, so it would be useful to see whether DoJ does so for their own servers when they're acting as an in-house ISP.
Having same problems in the UK.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
I don't know how we could go about throwing out the entire legislative branch.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
wikipedia can't "overrule" the DOJ since it's their own fucking website. who is going to rule against them, santa claus? maybe Elvis?
how about we try dropping the sensationalist headlines for a day ok.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Modding Trolls +1 inciteful since 1999
You can't really be so paranoid as to think that screwing around in Wikipedia was a serious policy initiative by DOJ.
All this means is the bored interns who were pushing their politics have to stop now, and get back to collating and stapling memos like they should have been doing in the first place. I assure you, major branches of the US Government are not sitting around making policy decisions regarding unflattering press in Wikipedia. They get a lot more flak from much bigger players, and they *do* take it lying down because that's their job.
I've always thought that a direct democracy, in which everyone has the right to vote on every issue, would be a good base.
It's historically been determined to be impractical because most of the population works at labour and doesn't have access to information, and because the capacity to communicate your vote in a timely fashion was too impractical.
However, with the current state of technology being what it is, these issues are no longer the barriers that they once were.
As a way to deal with the information overload, after the baseline system has been established, citizens should be able to nominate a representative to cast their vote on their behalf. Not someone who has chosen to run, but anyone who they feel they trust most.
This should be revocable at any time.
If we did this, during times of crisis, the natural pack tendencies of humans will cause them to self-organize into something resembling the modern political structure because it is efficient and a powerful tool to deal with problems.
However, there would be a built in mechanism in the system to allow that consolidation of power to cease when the threat is gone, allowing greater autonomy.
Basically, a new constitution is needed that lays all this out, and supporting infrastructure needs to be built.
This is a practical solution to the problems of corruption. It won't, of course, protect people from their own stupidity, but then, nothing ever does...
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
There might be a UK<->USA link problem, Some Americans have been complaining about trouble accessing EVE Online for a few hours, and the servers for that are in the UK.
I'm in the UK, and haven't been able to read Slashdot all day until about an hour ago.
Coincidence?
No, unlikely.
I'm in the US and I've been having similar issues.
Guess I'm wrong: News: Unexpected Slashdot Downtime
They're taking a big risk here, going up against the DoJ. After all, the number of Departments of Justice has tripled in the past six months.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
This looks like a classic case of "nobody new comes to wikipedia" corrupt behavior on the part of wikipedia's admins.
I've dealt with AGK and other admins, they're classically anti-semitic as well as usually friends with a bunch of anti-semitic people. It's no surprise any article involving Israel or the middle east has such a problem, they have people for whom the whole purpose of editing is to make "the Jews" look as evil/bad as possible.
I have no surprise this was the response parent poster got from their arbitration committee, either. Corruption on wikipedia flows from the top down, not the other way around. And the last thing they want to do is investigate malfeasance on the part of an admin, because that would set precedent to investigate their own behavior as well.
The problem is that 99% of people are idiots. Not only do very few people have the brains to actually understand what they're voting on, but the ones who do are generally too busy living their lives to read, say, 5,000 pages of a tax bill.
BTW, who is to write all this legislation? Certainly not Joe Sixpack. Lawyers write laws for a reason - it's a complicated undertaking, full of technical language which must be written to survive testing in courts. Letting the general public write laws would quickly swamp the country in unintended consequences.
Don't get me wrong - representative democracy sucks. The reality is that there is no good form of government where humans are involved.
As a way to deal with the information overload, after the baseline system has been established, citizens should be able to nominate a representative to cast their vote on their behalf. Not someone who has chosen to run, but anyone who they feel they trust most. This should be revocable at any time.
Baseline system: constitution in 1789. Representative to cast votes: congressman. Revocable: elections. Your proposal is a distinction from our modern system without much of a difference. If you think what you propose wouldn't quickly descend into a similar system of corruption, lobbying, and abuse, you don't know humans.
Advice: on VPS providers
There has to be a "senate" of some kind to block the excesses.
Pure direct vote democracy is probably the second quickest ways to pure evil.
Give everyone a certain number of Veto votes per year. If any election has a 10% veto vote count, then the issue is cancelled. Problem-- the radical masses then just put the same issue up with slightly different wording for another vote.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
Too far,
We cant even get proportional representation (in the UK not sure how it would work in the US, perhaps proportional per state)
Hell even 2nd preference is key, as otherwise no matter what happens your vote is wasted.
I think if governments were not so self serving a good first step in symbolic giving back of power, (i cant picture it having much practical effect) would be to setup a secure voting system that allows an area to veto thier representative vote on any issue, if more than 50% of registered voters disagree.
Its not exactly what your suggesting but the system as it is now
1) Doesn't give you any power with your vote (only the people that go round preaching vote * are really the only people that can have any effect)
2) discriminates against smaller parties, nobody even bothers voting green if their vote doesn't count
3) Doesn't let you have your say on individual issues (I mean if you have to choose between somebody who sucks on environmental policies and one that sucks on economics, your going to have to vote for the wrong candidate in one of those fields)
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
Maybe the DOJ stopped donating to the Wikimedia Foundation.
Note that "Department of Defense" is a Cold War invention. Before that, we called it the "War Department". I assume the change was meant to be some sort of PR bullsh*t so as to avoid offending the sensibilities of the idiots out there....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I consider the fact that laws are written in language that only the lawyers can understand to be one of the fundamental problems that needs to be put a stop to. How can you possibly be in control of your political power when you don't even understand the laws that are passed? If Joe Sixpack can't understand it, it needs to be rewritten in such a fashion that he can, or it should not exist.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Huzzah for dictators who have a monopoly on information, for they will soon have a monopoly on our freedom.
Seriously...
I consider the fact that laws are written in language that only the lawyers can understand to be one of the fundamental problems that needs to be put a stop to.
Why do you think legislation is less complicated than, say, source code? Joe Sixpack should be able to tell his computer what to do and it just does it without all the need for this fancy programming, right?
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The real problem with true democracy is this: you, me and joe represent the people... I look at joe and say hey I think joe and I should split your paycheck... lets vote.... All in favor? Joe and I raise our hand.. the ayes have it... you're paycheck now goes to joe and I
Professor bernardo de la paz (I'm sure I slaughtered his name) Came up with the system you are looking for. For details, go to your favorite book retailer and pick up a copy of "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress."
---- Liquid was a patriot ----
Actually it wouldn't be slander, it would be libel. Slander is spoken and libel is in print.
I don't think that a direct vote is good any more. I used to think Democracy was obviously a good idea and the Founding Fathers were high, but after seeing more people I realized that, "people" can be SEVERLY wrong (note the last two elections).
Now I think the solution is to keep the power as low as possible. The problem is that the bulk of our tax $ (a direct representation of power) goes to the federal. The federal government uses it to increase their own power.
If the bulk of our money went to, say, the city level--then all the cities in a county could get together and vote on county needs (funding those needs as well). The counties could get together and vote on state needs (funding those needs) and the states could get together and vote on federal issues--so the only way the most distant part of the government is to pass it through all the other pieces.
This increases the problem of redistribution of wealth between high tax base and low tax base areas. Every child should have the same chance at schooling, so all schools should be funded equally--stuff like that.
No matter what you came up to patch the problems that such a system would cause, it can't be worse than it is now.
You write source code in the way you do because it has a specific audience that is intended to be able to understand it and behave according to that understanding. That audience is a computer.
You write laws because there is a specific audience that is intended to be able to understand them and behave according to that understanding. That audience is a citizen.
These facts being true, which they are, I have two questions for you:
a) What makes you think it's impossible to craft laws in a way that the citizen can understand when it's possible to craft programs that a hunk of silicon can understand?
b) What makes you think it's important to dedicate such efforts to creating programs that a computer can understand, and yet not worth the trouble to make sure the laws that govern your behavior are understandable to you?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
I've always liked the way that Switzerland does it. The government is still basically representative, but when the government passes a law that's really not what anybody wants, there are mechanisms in place to get the law overturned by referendum. You get all the benefits of a representative democracy with a little added protection against stupid or greedy lawmakers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland#Direct_democracy
What makes you think it's impossible to craft laws in a way that the citizen can understand when it's possible to craft programs that a hunk of silicon can understand?
I understand that it's illegal to murder someone. But the law regarding murder in my state runs to many pages, and necessarily so...what kind of murder? What are allowed defenses? Circumstances, penalties, etc. It all has to be spelled out in precise detail. And murder is a simple case. Now apply that process to something like rules of evidence, or under what circumstances companies are allowed to deduct expenses from prior years, or how probate is handled when a man dies intestate with a child by his wife and by a girlfriend, or rules for immigration, etc. The law is every bit as complicated as source code because humans are complicated. If you want to be ruled by law, then you need to spell it out to the Nth detail so there are no questions or loopholes...even lawyers who are pros sometimes don't get that right.
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And in conclusion Mr. Smith you should elect me as your personal representative because if you don't then I would be forced to terminate your employment. Also Mr. Smith you should consider how only my protection keeps you safe in that dangerous neighborhood you live in. All those ruffians running around, anything could happen.
The protections we have in place on elections are there for a reason.
It could be argued that "legalese" is (and in the larger sense, all functions of government are) so inaccessible to "Joe Sixpack" is the root of Mr. Pack's disinterest in / alienation from the government that is supposed to represent him.
An example: in some areas, there is apparently a law that all leases be written in Plain English. (Don't know the details, but I've run into a few of these leases myself.) I assume they work equally as well as the ones that are thirty pages of gibberish. Which raises the question: Which is more useful, a law that satisfies the pointy-headed few that have law degrees, or one that is understood by the millions of people who have to obey it?
Obviously, this doesn't work in all cases, and I'm not arguing that it should (so don't bother hitting me with extreme counter-examples). I'm just saying that the "people are idiots" argument doesn't imply that "people have no right to understand their government".
Oh - and btw, I agree with you on your last point as well: The problem isn't with representative democracy, it's with human nature. Give a human a rule, and the first thing he'll do is try to work around it. It's how we're built, and probably explains a lot of the great technology we've got lying around all over the place.
Clearly, in a system where people have the capacity to wield their political power without the possibility for corruption, they would want to get rid of economic power, which is unilaterally wielded to the detriment of the common good.
If there was a properly operating democratic system that doesn't contain within it convoluted mechanisms to separate people from their political power, then there would be no need to let Mr Smiths boss push people around.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
The problem is that 99% of people are idiots.
That's not a problem, that's a feature!
Indeed. I remember during the 2004 presidential election hearing a girl ask "Mom, I forget, which one are we again? R or D?"
It's congestion on SBC and Cogent backbones. Lots packets are getting lost between the two of those.
http://www.internetpulse.net/
Got a lot better than this morning.
For example LA to Chicago on SBC has a 66.60% network availability.
Firstly, revocable at any time
Secondly, it occurs to me that the first term a politician is voted into office they are voting their conscience. But by the time the 2nd term runs around, they're canvassing their base and asking them how they think he/she should vote. At this point he's largely indistinguishable from the previous office holder. The OP's system, on the other hand, has the possibility that "my designate" could always be voting his conscience. Especially if I can revoke it at any time and pick anyone who's a valid voter and even further... do it in secret (so my designate doesn't know I'm letting him/her cast my vote too).
You raise a good point about the actual WORK of legislators and that will still need to proceed as you say, but I didn't interpret the OP's system as being a replacement for legislators, more like a replacement for common-man voters.
Lastly... I'd like to see a website where people can answer questions about how they'd vote for something and then that site would spit out their local representative who best matches that voting pattern.
What would you do about prejudice? Complete democracy does not lead to equal rights.
Because colorful commentary like "pariah" and "ass-covering" are important POV verifiable facts that should be in biographical articles about living people. Censorship oh noes.
We don't live in a democracy. It's a rebuplic. No matter, our rights went out the window when the Government gave itself the power to tax our income and labor. So our government can basically do whatever it wants, and hide whatever it wants.
In reality during the first term a representative is most vulnerable to being ousted, an incumbent always enjoys and advantage, but that advantage grows with time. In many cases a safe senior representative is more likely to vote his conscience than the freshman, who is more likely to pander for votes. (this of course cuts both ways, many a senior legislator votes his severely warped conscience because he doesn't fear being voted out.)
Being revocable "at any time" basically means a vote of no confidence. If the British parliamentary system has taught us anything it is that we are less likely to continue to confirm someone we don't like than we are to hold a vote to tell someone to screw off.
Easy. Think of terms in office as contracts. The senators have 2 year "terms" or two year contracts.. 4 dollars an hour for an 8 hour day comes to 32$ a day...times 256 is 8192 dollars a day. We could simply outsource congress to India. :)
Remember, it's not paranoia if they really ARE out to get you...
What's your wikipedia username? This looks an awful lot like the usual wikitroll canned response.
Of course, I'm not saying you're a wikipedian, but the evidence certainly points that way.
Of course, if you look at the history of the abuser in question's talk page (warning: he's a serial "archiver" to make it harder to trace things) you get a pretty good sense: constant pushing to have the complainer removed by POV-pushers Tiamut and Jd2718, who have a long history of pretty biased edits and who were edit-warring to try to remove Hebrew language references and Israeli culture references from food articles along with a string of nasty and abusive sockpuppets at their disposal.
AGK goes along with it, continually verbally abusing the poor person who was trying to keep the articles neutral under the barrage of anti-semitic editing and sockpuppetry attacks (which wikipedia claims to be against, except when it's to push a point of view supported by a certain admin...), and eventually bans the user entirely for exposing the sockpuppets and insisting wikipedia's procedures be followed.
Looks a heck of a lot like this typical wikipedian admin-abuse playbook, doesn't it?
I don't doubt that AGK sent the gloat email. Part of the underlying joke of wikipedia is the number of blatantly biased, aggressive, asshole-ish people who've been made admins just to POV push with authority to ban. In the Register article Slashdot links above, they now claim people were trying to be "stealth" admins to push pro-Israeli POV - and yet there have been dozens of admins coined over and over again for all sorts of POV-pushing reasons, usually because they "helped against vandals" (read: drove away newcomers and bit the newbies fast enough to prevent a consensus change) on topics that certain admins wanted to keep slanted a certain way.
I would say your argument amounts to "It doesn't matter that I don't really understand what I'm supposed to do precisely, as long as someone understands how I'm supposed to be punished properly."
Here's a piece of wisdom for you: A system is supposed to suit its participants. The less it suits its participants, the more enforcement cost is involved, until a tipping point is reached, at which point the system collapses.
How do you think your current system measures up? Consider, your nation imprisons and executes more of its citizens that just about any other. It can't even manage to rally its people to work together effectively in the face of a natural disaster, which is something most humans are hard-wired to agree is important enough to set petty differences aside. Your birth rates have been below replacement levels for decades. Does this really sound like something that is working, and serving your interests?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
No. Simply allowing people to propose and vote on legislation won't work because people will then push through all sorts of unfunded mandates. We've seen this in California, where the initiative system was gamed by special interests who pushed through mandates forcing the government to provide all kinds of services. At the same time, though, none of the voters acted to support the tax increases needed to fund the initiatives. The state was then faced with the double bind of being legally required to provide services, but being unable to raise taxes in order to pay for them.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
Do you always code alone?
That aside, a computer as an audience is deterministic, discrete and fully knowable in operation. Can that be said for the entity that is a body of people?
Yet, in fact, laws are often written a lot like code; formally and in great detail. There is scope for them to be much more complicated because they (only partially) govern a far more complex system.
MP
On a serious note (IANAL), laws have to be much more carefully written than source code. In a program, you can limit, control, validate and sanitize the inputs, and the operations performed on them if necessary. Those are basically all you have to worry about to prevent disaster. In a law, every single word has the potential to be a wide-open vulnerability that will exploit at least a large part of your "program" with disastrous results. Imagine you wrote a simple program that appears bulletproof, but because you, say, chose to use a while loop instead of a do-while loop, someone finds a way to turn your little number crunching app into a self-propagating rootkit. Of course this example is absurd, but it conveys the attention to detail required. For examples, see any discussion involving the U.S. Constitution.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Keep in mind that anti-semitism is pretty rampant. I'm a gamer and I frequently see it in the gaming world where anonymous people think that being anti-semitic or racist is perfectly fine. It's even more surprising how few people call them on their bullshit.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
is asking where he should post evidence. You should probably respond to him. That is, if you're serious at all and your "please provide evidence" wasn't just wikitrolling.
Let's see... "hearsay" is telling a court of law something that you overheard. In this case, the person has direct written correspondence that can be transmitted.
YOU, meanwhile, are trolling trying to discredit it. Based on that and based on your ignoring their request for an acceptable method by which to send the info, I don't buy your claim that you're not a wikipedian.
If the government were set up in this way, we would have nuked Iraq on September 12th. Repeatedly.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I don't consider the ADL representative of jews at large, just as I don't consider al-qaeda representative of muslims at large. But the ADL seems to dominate a lot of public discourse about judaism in a manner similar to the way muslim extremists dominate a lot of public discourse about islam.
...articles delete YOU!
Have gnu, will travel.
Surest sign of a wikitroll - Ahabswhale signed out to swear and troll, so he wouldn't lose karma by being modded for the troll he is.
Hmmm. I had always assumed the change was meant to be some sort of PR bullshit so as to avoid the question of why we need a department of war if we're not at war. You know, "idiots", as you call them, can get rather sensitive about a nation having a governmental department whose sole purpose is aggrandizement via violence.
Nathan's blog
Perhaps this will help.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
What is your nationality? Actually, it's pretty irrelevant - NO ONE lives in a place where the laws are written in plain language, because there is no such country.
The reason is that human languages, unlike computer "languages", are imprecise. Computer languages are artificial contructs, where the meaning of any given command is wholly consistent within that language. No such thing in ANY human language.
Let's take the simple word "or". In English, it can mean an exclusive choice - either A or B - or inclusive - a or b or both. The meaning is determined in context. Computer languages get around that, by simply creating XOR to signify the first case, and delaring that OR means the second. But the law doesn't have that ability, so things get verbose - you must expand on meanings, or else you can have a conflict where both parties believe they are correct, and justifiably so.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Seriously, this needs a mod-up.
"Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work." -Flaubert
There are laws written for easier reading. For example, I'm not a lawyer and my Chinese is just average (below high school) but I find their laws, like this Corporation Law rather easier to read compared to the U.S. laws that I have read.
Their laws have much less technicalities. but this ambiguity also gives too much power to various level of governments to impose arbitrary restriction or questionable relaxation of the laws. And it also allows greater amount of corruption in the legal system.
In the U.S. system, on the other hand, lawyers can easily abuse the laws based on technicalities. And it allows very profitable lobbying for the law makers.
The GP is right about human nature: different systems, same results -- someone will find ways to abuse the systems.
99% of people are idiots... so you would be in the 1%, I guess?
I guess I'm a bit more hopeful, because most of the people I know, even ones whose judgement I would never trust, aren't idiots - they are stressed, overworked, bombarded with propaganda (political and commercial) and their educations have been structured (not necessarily intentionally, though it certainly benefits the powerful) to produce obedient workers and "consumers", not free-thinking, critically-minded citizens.
Moreover, aside from those people who are driven to make politics or activism the central part of their lives (which, given work and stress, etc., simply isn't possible for many even if the desire is theere) for most people the sole opportunity to engage directly in politics comes one day every couple years. And the lead up to that day rarely includes much open-ended discussion; rather its shaped by intense propoganda carpet bombing.
There are lots of other factors; I think that one is automobile-oriented culture, which for all its possible benefits, has hurt democracy as well. For most people, casual daily contact with strangers is non-existent; when "community" becomes an abstract concept rather than a lived-in, concrete reality, how realistic is it to expect the average person to feel, at a deep level, a need to think or care about things outside their family, friends and job? Television, aside from its propaganda uses, produces similar effects (interfacing with reality and the community through media rather than concrete, face-to-face experiences).
The bottom line is that "most people" are perfectly capable of making informed and intelligent decisions about important issues, if they have time to think about them, the opportunity to discuss them, and have receieved (formally or just through life experience) an education that includes some real critical thinking skills
OK, rant off.
One final thing - the parent says "Representative to cast votes: congressman." in response to the previous post's suggestion of designated representatives in a direct democracy system. I read that suggestion very differently:
In place of (or in addition to) officials elected to a congress, one could have people you knew and trusted (your very politically knowledgeable friend, for example) act as proxies in a direct democracy system. For example, most of my friends don't really care about copyright law (except to the degree that they think RIAA lawsuits are total BS), but they know I'm interested and reasonably knowledgeable about it. If direct democracy meant people voted on every issue, you could conceive a system where my friends could grant me proxy power on copyright issues, subject to their review of my decisions.
I can see some dangers (e.g., an abusive husband demanding his wife's vote), although these dangers would probably be the same as in any absentee voting system. This seems like a pretty interesting idea.
Hear hear!
I for one welcome our hands-off overlords.
MOD PARENT UP!
Calling people names really shouldn't be illegal, I don't care what the content is, particularly when its trash talk. I'm not a proponent of PC, obviously. Also, I don't think that saying things like "I got Jewed out of " is necessarily indicative of someone being anti-semitic, than "stupid faggot" is indicative of someone being homophobic. Again, particularly in trash talking. Take that far enough and calling people "idiots" is discriminatory against people who are stupid, and "waste of skin" is racist against humans.
As for the rest of the comment, I was primarily addressing the JDL and it's thin skin. I understand the whole "never again" bit, but by overreacting to every little thing, they just give hardcore anti-semites more ammunition, and risk alienating those who previously didn't care either way.
Wikipedia overulling the governement? OMG!
signature is pants
No, this is a common design flaw. You cannot code for every eventuality or you'll end up with a crufty codebase, whole sections nearly duplicated but with subtle differences, conflicting exceptions without clear rules for precedence, etc.
You probably don't even have tests, real user requirements, code reviews, or even consistent metrics to test against.
The concept of defense for example should be pulled out of every individual law and made into a module - defenses to a crime requiring intent are similar, from murder to shoplifting.
There's a LOT of work to be done before the legal system was self-correct, let alone as functional as a third-world airline.
The Gospel according to lolcat
$9.3 trillion and growing, brought to you by sober, enlightened representatives.
While that is an important email, and pretty damning as well, what were the changes being pushed that caused that response?
To be honest, I probably will forget to come back and check a reply, I'm just saying that there are two sides here and seeing both may give more information (or as seems likely, prove the email is completely unwarranted and there's a real problem with Wikipedia).
I think your post should be modded up as relevant.
Anybody notice that wikipedia org is down? Alertra is showing no connectivity at this time from anywhere. Maybe the US DOJ is trying to have the last laugh on this one?
The quickest way to evil is of course to deliberately fail to achieve the Primary Main Objective
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
It's telling. I suppose, that the geek sees his audience as the machine and not the user.
Moving on...
The programmer's audience is more likely to be a compiler.
It is rare these days to be less than one, two or three steps removed from the machine itself - and that distance is growing.
It is equally rare for a programmer to understand and participate in more than a tiny fraction of the development of a non-trivial program - and a program is always more than the code.
It's everything that sums up the difference between the tech demo that is Doom 3 and a game like Grand Theft Auto.
What makes you think it's impossible to craft laws in a way that the citizen can understand when it's possible to craft programs that a hunk of silicon can understand?
That hunk of silicon understands nothing.
It responds to a very narrow range of inputs in [easily?] definable ways. It is wholly unaware and disengaged from the actions it performs. It exists in a single moment of time. It has no past and no future.
It has no goal or purpose in life.
It does not know or comprehend "the other." It cannot understand conflicts in ideas or values. It is not a social being.
The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience. The law embodies the story of a nation's development...it cannot be dealt with as if it contained the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics. - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Perhaps we can help here, with open source programs that can go some way to crossreferencing legislation and case law and deciphering legalese, and presenting the data to citizens in a format that they can digest.
Since the raw data is mostly available to the public in some form, and more and more of it is directly and freely available on the internet, you'd think the various law reform societies around the world would be keen to collaborate with computer scientists to build something along these lines that would be immediately usable to the citizen and professional alike, as well as being a potentially useful tool for studying effects of proposed changes in a quantifiable way.
I'm not saying that today we can use natural language techniques of advanced AI, but there are a lot of pieces of technical jargon that could be demystified by a hypertext link or three, and rewriting rules could be used to make the text more understandable in places where it is currently impenetrable to those who have no legal training.
I assume there are commercial concerns whose job it is to provide a related service, but perhaps we could 'steal a march' on them, before they get wind of this post and get a bogus patent on the idea.
A Web 2.0 OpenLaws project, anyone?
I've done little research on this, so if anyone knows of such a project, please do tell.
Regards, Non.
There is another theory that states that this has already happened.
This isn't evidence of anything other than AKG thinks you're using anti-Muslim hate speech. Can you post some of the edits AKG is complaining about?
I did find one interesting edit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Council_on_American-Islamic_Relations&diff=196579217&oldid=196564079#_ref-CAIR-25FACTS_0
In this edit you describe CAIR as "radical" and "left-wing".
You also attacked a number of food pages claiming hummus and falafel are Jewish, not Arab dishes. As far as racism goes this seems REALLY petty to me and appears to be the main reason why you were blocked.
Based on your posts and my experience (going way back) on BBS' and other forums AKG was being extraordinarily kind, holding your hand in IRC and giving you many opportunities to change your behavior.
Nonetheless, we got the Joint Chiefs of Staff out of the Deal, which at least made it easier to find out what the Real Enemy was up to, and the combination got stuck with the label "War Department" (an Army victory, to be sure, but obvious - no way were they naming a combined command the "Navy Department").
Later, we changed that to Defense Department (A Navy victory, to be sure, but also obvious - we weren't at war or anything).
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"