evidence? here are a few books written in the past 5 years.
Fool's Gold, by Gillian Tett The Zeroes, by Randall Lane Too Big to Fail, by Andrew Ross Sorkin The Trillion Dollar Meltdown, by Charles R Morris All the Devils are Here, by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera A Colossal Failure of Common Sense, by Lawrence McDonald with Patrick Robinson Devil's Casino, Vicky Ward House of Cards, by William D Cohan Crash of the Titans, Greg Farrell Street Fighters, Kate Kelley Confidence Game, Christine S Richards EConned, Yves Smith The Asylum, McGrath Goodman Inside Job, Charles Ferguson (film)
Some of these CEOs are not upstanding, concernced citizens. Many of them are highly reckless, thrill seeking individuals, who use drugs and prostitutes, and who took enormous amounts of money from their own organizations while those organizations fell apart, and were then bailed out by the taxpayers.
Obama has 6 espionage act prosecutions going against people for talking to journalists. thats more than we have had since circa 1919 when the Sedition Act was part of the espionage act.
You have to realize that several of these cases also involve the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, specifically subparagraph (a)(1), the "Comptuer Espionage" law.
When they came down on manning for the Collateral Murder video, this was one of the laws they used.
When Thomas Drake plead guilty to a misdemeanor, for simply accessing UNCLASSIFIED documents on an NSA network, the misdemeanor he plead guilty to was under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
If you read that act, it is a back-door way to trash the first amendment, by simply putting "on a computer" after a whole bunch of innocuous stuff that wouldn't otherwise ever have been illegal.
ok actually andrew carnegie used this phrase, and so did some other industrialists in the early 1900s, when they did things like Henry Ford raising the wages of all of his workers something like five fold.
somewhere between the computer lab (funded by HP), the new classroom (funded by BP), the endowed professor chair (funded by Motorola) and the John Witherspoon Sciences Annex (heir of an oil fortune), i managed to see one little girl on a hunger strike about some nigerian dictator killing his people so that he could steal their land for an oil pipeline.
i told her to stop this silliness, and think about all the 'free enterprise' this nigerian fellow (im sure that 'dictator' is a stretch. he only killed a few people who were rioting, obviously criminals trying to abuse the police). the real villians are the brainwashed academics, like my professor of differential equations, who keeps going off about some guy named 'einstein', apparently an icon to liberals and other communist types.
1. omniscient 2. effectively immortal, considering the life cycle of milliseconds vs a life cycle of 90 years 3. there could be a command called 'hell' and 'heaven', both programmed in various ways 4. loves them? yes, even that is possible.
IIRC, there are some wikis out there that do attribute every author on every page - they modify the mediawiki PHP code to spit out a list of editors for each page at the bottom of each page. its actually not that hard IIRC, a day's work or two for a hobbyist programmer.
As for derivative works, well, I am no lawyer, but as far as i can tell, someone could definitely make the argument you make. What counts as 'appropriate attribution' appears to be somewhat uncertain in legal terms. I could see someone who was a real stickler deciding that a 4-th derived work of their wikipedia work needs to be attributed to them directly. It reminds me of how copyright works in some open source computer code - the copyright of the original work, which may have been made ten years ago, is retained, and subsequent authors add their names on the top.
I believe reality is different. lets take me for example, and two cases of my wikipedia writing showing up elsewhere.
Frst, lets take the garbage-books on Amazon.com that are print-on-demand "books" that are simply copy-and-pasted collections of various loosely-connected wikipedia pages. i have seen some of my wikipedia articles end up in those things. i know that the "books" attribute wikipedia. But i am not sure if they attribute me. However, i simply don't care. I want to have nothing to do with these people - they don't even edit the works for coherence or quality, they just slap them together at random apparently using a computer algorithm. I have no energy to go chasing them down and demand they attribute my work. Considering that anyone unfortunate enough to buy one of these "books" will probably just throw it in the garbage in anger, im not sure that i want my pseudoname attached to it anyways.
Second, lets take the situation where people quote my wikipedia articles in discussion boards or blogs. This even happens on slashdot from time to time. They attribute the sources as 'wikipedia'. do i have a problem with this? do i want them to use my pseudoname? Am I outraged? No. First of all, its almost impossible to track down who wrote what in a wikipedia quote, the 'wikiblame' tool doesnt really work very well sometimes, and the 'view history' tool is a pain in the butt to use for that purpose. Second of all, i kind of implicitly decided that my wikipedia writing is somewhat anonymous. If people really care about who wrote it, they can find out. Otherwise, 99% of people will just be reading the content instead of worrying about who made it. Which is kind of an interesting feeling.
I don't know if any of this is useful to you, i am an isolated case and not a wikipedia admin or anything.
eugenics was a real practice, taken to it's height in the Nazi "T4" program and "Genetic Health" program.
they were purposely trying to 'artificially select' the human race so as to 'improve' society.
and of course Magneto, according to one comic book series, grew up in Auschwitz, where his life was spared only because he found a job running the ovens.
ever since the dawn of modern agriculture, protein has come largely from beans.
especially in the America's where cows and pigs did not exist until circa 1500 AD when the europeans introduced them (along with their zoonotic diseases).
too bad they never really evolved that much from their simian ancestors. 200,000 years of evolution and they are still trying to prove whose dick is bigger.
great point about the holding of copyright. id add that the reason wikipedia doesnt hold copyright, is because if it did, then it would be getting sued all the time for defamation and libel. if they dont hold copyright, they can use the 'shield law' in the US, which makes them basically a 'service provider' and thus immune to lawsuits over the content they hold. thats my theory anyways (and i dont know much, but i have a hunch).
instead, when someone wants to sue over a wikipedia article, they sue a john doe who wrote it (or the part they object to). IIRC some famous actor did this over the article written about him.
so if you have an article written by 50 people, then 50 different people own the copyright. you have to figure out who is responsible for which bits... which involves a lot of mucking around with article history to see who made what. (although theoretically there is a tool called wikiblame)
--
however there is the possibility of deleting a wikipedia account. i think it is called something like the 'right to disappear' from wikipedia. you will find accounts on there sometimes with these weird, generic names, i cant remember what it is exactly but its something like Dissappeared User 225 or something.
great point about 'projected profits'. it is exactly the same sort of thing that JP Morgan, Goldman, Merrill / BoA, and Morgan Stanley pulled in the CDO business....
those are the same companies bookrunning this IPO.
also all had excellent credit ratings and good numbers.
right before they didn't.
----
look at who is bookrunning the zynga deal. the same companies who bookran the CDO business. the same companies who bookran the subprime mortgage business.
its probably even the same people inside those same companies. the CDO market dried up - move those people to the IPO business! it worked in 2000, by 2011 everyone will have forgotten and a whole new wave of suckers is born.
as the book EConned by Yves Smith and the film Inside Job by Ferguson have demonstrated, the 'study of ecnomics' is somewhat corrupt and lacking in the rigor that one might find, say, in the field of, say, art history.
i.e. you cannot write an article about an 11th century cathedral and claim that it proves that christianity is the best religion. but that is the sort of thing going on all the time in economics journals.
why? the professors are payed off by business interests to push this crap, so that politicians and other business people will buy into scams. Inside job has the perfect example: payed-for 'academic' studies of the Icelandic banks written to convince policy makers in Iceland and elsewhere to accept the 'revolution' of privatization circa the turn of the 21st century. result - iceland was technically bankrupty and the UK used anti-terrorism laws to seize icelandic property.
it is not just that the average person is stupid.
its that the average person is being lied to by a well funded, well oiled PR machine, masquerading as a science.
rescued at the last minute by a japanese bank. was a hairs breadth from becoming another Lehman level bankruptcy
BoA Merrill -
a shotgun wedding, after Merrill drove itself over the CDO cliff by firing the risk managers for a few short years of record profits. they fire the CEO, then hire a new CEO who does a million-dollar refit of his office, then dithers around a whole year before doing the exact same thing the fired CEO wanted to do - sell the company to Bank of America (except this time at something like 1/4 the price).
Goldman Sachs -
Not alone, but a very prominent company that sold bad products to some customers, so that other customers could place bets (credit default swaps) that the products you just sold to the first customers would lose their value. also involved in the Food bubble through Goldman Sachs Commodity Index Fund. also spawned people like Robert Rubin & others who helped stop Brooksley Born from regulating CDS and CDOs back in the late 90s when she tried to.
Barclays -
CDO business.
JPM -
We just found out recently they were behaving almost exactly like Goldman Sachs in some of their CDO dealings - the hedge fund was not John Paulson though, it was Magnetar Capital.
----
These are the people 'bookrunning' this Zynga IPO. These are the people who will take millions of dollars that investors have put into this IPO, and they will take those millions as profit for 'arranging the deal'. These are the people who will carve off special chunks of the IPO stock and dole it out as pseudo-political favors to various hedge fund managers ( i recommend Trading with the Enemy and Running Money for details about how this works).
This is what this new 'industry' is made of. These are the people in charge. These are the men behind the curtain, turning the gears of the media so that big stories about the big success of big innovative companies will drive buzz and suckers to come to the circus and pay their three bucks on a horse in the sideshow.
what policy will save the planet? if the United States cut its carbon emissions by 50% tomorrow, it would have absolutely zero effect on the future of global warming. The Communist Party of China is not going to stop building coal fired power plants, or keeping around old, inefficient manufacturing processes, because they make tons of money off of it. In fact, they will build more of them, faster, and US manufacturers will move every last slip of production there, overnight.
You want to have China do something? Fine, good luck with that. A guy who ran a website about the poisoned baby-milk scandal got several years in prison recently. If they do that to someone who complains about the state producing poisoned baby milk, I wonder how they would treat someone who complains about the state producing too much Co2?
Then there are dozens of other countries in similar boats. Dictatorships who make tons of money off of fossil fuels. Passing a carbon tax in the United States would do nothing to them.
The 'carbon trading' system is going to be run by the same geniuses who run the Credit Default Swap market and the CDO market, not to mention the Catastrophe Bonds market and the Longevity Swaps market. They not only caused the Great Recession, they are also the geniuses who jacked the price of oil and food up by several times in 2008, causing world wide food riots and in some places mass malnutrition and starvation. That's who is going to be in charge of your carbon trading system.
1. failure to cite a source 2. failure to cite a reliable, verifiable source (not a blog, not youtube, not a fan site) 3. failure to cite a secondary source (as opposed to a primary source)
however. i have to agree there are a lot of pointless 'reverts' and deletions.
i think i have subconsciously just learned to avoid those articles and work on others.
Slashdot Mirror
evidence? here are a few books written in the past 5 years.
Fool's Gold, by Gillian Tett
The Zeroes, by Randall Lane
Too Big to Fail, by Andrew Ross Sorkin
The Trillion Dollar Meltdown, by Charles R Morris
All the Devils are Here, by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera
A Colossal Failure of Common Sense, by Lawrence McDonald with Patrick Robinson
Devil's Casino, Vicky Ward
House of Cards, by William D Cohan
Crash of the Titans, Greg Farrell
Street Fighters, Kate Kelley
Confidence Game, Christine S Richards
EConned, Yves Smith
The Asylum, McGrath Goodman
Inside Job, Charles Ferguson (film)
Some of these CEOs are not upstanding, concernced citizens. Many of them are highly reckless, thrill seeking individuals, who use drugs and prostitutes, and who took enormous amounts of money from their own organizations while those organizations fell apart, and were then bailed out by the taxpayers.
Obama has 6 espionage act prosecutions going against people for talking to journalists. thats more than we have had since circa 1919 when the Sedition Act was part of the espionage act.
You have to realize that several of these cases also involve the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, specifically subparagraph (a)(1), the "Comptuer Espionage" law.
When they came down on manning for the Collateral Murder video, this was one of the laws they used.
When Thomas Drake plead guilty to a misdemeanor, for simply accessing UNCLASSIFIED documents on an NSA network, the misdemeanor he plead guilty to was under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
If you read that act, it is a back-door way to trash the first amendment, by simply putting "on a computer" after a whole bunch of innocuous stuff that wouldn't otherwise ever have been illegal.
..
ok actually andrew carnegie used this phrase, and so did some other industrialists in the early 1900s, when they did things like Henry Ford raising the wages of all of his workers something like five fold.
somewhere between the computer lab (funded by HP), the new classroom (funded by BP), the endowed professor chair (funded by Motorola) and the John Witherspoon Sciences Annex (heir of an oil fortune), i managed to see one little girl on a hunger strike about some nigerian dictator killing his people so that he could steal their land for an oil pipeline.
i told her to stop this silliness, and think about all the 'free enterprise' this nigerian fellow (im sure that 'dictator' is a stretch. he only killed a few people who were rioting, obviously criminals trying to abuse the police). the real villians are the brainwashed academics, like my professor of differential equations, who keeps going off about some guy named 'einstein', apparently an icon to liberals and other communist types.
still havent figure out how jesus fits into the picture.
in theory, the operator of a computer is
1. omniscient
2. effectively immortal, considering the life cycle of milliseconds vs a life cycle of 90 years
3. there could be a command called 'hell' and 'heaven', both programmed in various ways
4. loves them? yes, even that is possible.
and they declare that some other intelligent being designed them, then wont they be right?
IIRC, there are some wikis out there that do attribute every author on every page - they modify the mediawiki PHP code to spit out a list of editors for each page at the bottom of each page. its actually not that hard IIRC, a day's work or two for a hobbyist programmer.
As for derivative works, well, I am no lawyer, but as far as i can tell, someone could definitely make the argument you make. What counts as 'appropriate attribution' appears to be somewhat uncertain in legal terms. I could see someone who was a real stickler deciding that a 4-th derived work of their wikipedia work needs to be attributed to them directly. It reminds me of how copyright works in some open source computer code - the copyright of the original work, which may have been made ten years ago, is retained, and subsequent authors add their names on the top.
I believe reality is different. lets take me for example, and two cases of my wikipedia writing showing up elsewhere.
Frst, lets take the garbage-books on Amazon.com that are print-on-demand "books" that are simply copy-and-pasted collections of various loosely-connected wikipedia pages. i have seen some of my wikipedia articles end up in those things. i know that the "books" attribute wikipedia. But i am not sure if they attribute me. However, i simply don't care. I want to have nothing to do with these people - they don't even edit the works for coherence or quality, they just slap them together at random apparently using a computer algorithm. I have no energy to go chasing them down and demand they attribute my work. Considering that anyone unfortunate enough to buy one of these "books" will probably just throw it in the garbage in anger, im not sure that i want my pseudoname attached to it anyways.
Second, lets take the situation where people quote my wikipedia articles in discussion boards or blogs. This even happens on slashdot from time to time. They attribute the sources as 'wikipedia'. do i have a problem with this? do i want them to use my pseudoname? Am I outraged? No. First of all, its almost impossible to track down who wrote what in a wikipedia quote, the 'wikiblame' tool doesnt really work very well sometimes, and the 'view history' tool is a pain in the butt to use for that purpose. Second of all, i kind of implicitly decided that my wikipedia writing is somewhat anonymous. If people really care about who wrote it, they can find out. Otherwise, 99% of people will just be reading the content instead of worrying about who made it. Which is kind of an interesting feeling.
I don't know if any of this is useful to you, i am an isolated case and not a wikipedia admin or anything.
i mean. here we are, intelligent creatures.
we are creating life. sure, we are using evolution as a tool to do it, but we have the final say in what lives and what dies.
eugenics was a real practice, taken to it's height in the Nazi "T4" program and "Genetic Health" program.
they were purposely trying to 'artificially select' the human race so as to 'improve' society.
and of course Magneto, according to one comic book series, grew up in Auschwitz, where his life was spared only because he found a job running the ovens.
ever since the dawn of modern agriculture, protein has come largely from beans.
especially in the America's where cows and pigs did not exist until circa 1500 AD when the europeans introduced them (along with their zoonotic diseases).
it was a nice species, while it lasted.
too bad they never really evolved that much from their simian ancestors. 200,000 years of evolution and they are still trying to prove whose dick is bigger.
great point about the holding of copyright. id add that the reason wikipedia doesnt hold copyright, is because if it did, then it would be getting sued all the time for defamation and libel. if they dont hold copyright, they can use the 'shield law' in the US, which makes them basically a 'service provider' and thus immune to lawsuits over the content they hold. thats my theory anyways (and i dont know much, but i have a hunch).
instead, when someone wants to sue over a wikipedia article, they sue a john doe who wrote it (or the part they object to). IIRC some famous actor did this over the article written about him.
so if you have an article written by 50 people, then 50 different people own the copyright. you have to figure out who is responsible for which bits... which involves a lot of mucking around with article history to see who made what. (although theoretically there is a tool called wikiblame)
--
however there is the possibility of deleting a wikipedia account. i think it is called something like the 'right to disappear' from wikipedia. you will find accounts on there sometimes with these weird, generic names, i cant remember what it is exactly but its something like Dissappeared User 225 or something.
---
great point about 'projected profits'. it is exactly the same sort of thing that JP Morgan, Goldman, Merrill / BoA, and Morgan Stanley pulled in the CDO business....
those are the same companies bookrunning this IPO.
also all had excellent credit ratings and good numbers.
right before they didn't.
----
look at who is bookrunning the zynga deal. the same companies who bookran the CDO business. the same companies who bookran the subprime mortgage business.
its probably even the same people inside those same companies. the CDO market dried up - move those people to the IPO business! it worked in 2000, by 2011 everyone will have forgotten and a whole new wave of suckers is born.
as the book EConned by Yves Smith and the film Inside Job by Ferguson have demonstrated, the 'study of ecnomics' is somewhat corrupt and lacking in the rigor that one might find, say, in the field of, say, art history.
i.e. you cannot write an article about an 11th century cathedral and claim that it proves that christianity is the best religion. but that is the sort of thing going on all the time in economics journals.
why? the professors are payed off by business interests to push this crap, so that politicians and other business people will buy into scams. Inside job has the perfect example: payed-for 'academic' studies of the Icelandic banks written to convince policy makers in Iceland and elsewhere to accept the 'revolution' of privatization circa the turn of the 21st century. result - iceland was technically bankrupty and the UK used anti-terrorism laws to seize icelandic property.
it is not just that the average person is stupid.
its that the average person is being lied to by a well funded, well oiled PR machine, masquerading as a science.
Morgan Stanley -
rescued at the last minute by a japanese bank. was a hairs breadth from becoming another Lehman level bankruptcy
BoA Merrill -
a shotgun wedding, after Merrill drove itself over the CDO cliff by firing the risk managers for a few short years of record profits. they fire the CEO, then hire a new CEO who does a million-dollar refit of his office, then dithers around a whole year before doing the exact same thing the fired CEO wanted to do - sell the company to Bank of America (except this time at something like 1/4 the price).
Goldman Sachs -
Not alone, but a very prominent company that sold bad products to some customers, so that other customers could place bets (credit default swaps) that the products you just sold to the first customers would lose their value. also involved in the Food bubble through Goldman Sachs Commodity Index Fund. also spawned people like Robert Rubin & others who helped stop Brooksley Born from regulating CDS and CDOs back in the late 90s when she tried to.
Barclays -
CDO business.
JPM -
We just found out recently they were behaving almost exactly like Goldman Sachs in some of their CDO dealings - the hedge fund was not John Paulson though, it was Magnetar Capital.
----
These are the people 'bookrunning' this Zynga IPO. These are the people who will take millions of dollars that investors have put into this IPO, and they will take those millions as profit for 'arranging the deal'. These are the people who will carve off special chunks of the IPO stock and dole it out as pseudo-political favors to various hedge fund managers ( i recommend Trading with the Enemy and Running Money for details about how this works).
This is what this new 'industry' is made of. These are the people in charge. These are the men behind the curtain, turning the gears of the media so that big stories about the big success of big innovative companies will drive buzz and suckers to come to the circus and pay their three bucks on a horse in the sideshow.
This is what our 'economy' has become.
is anything to judge the UN by, then 'carbon reduction' treaties at the UN will be not only corrupt, but completely dishonest.
the problem is not always about denial.
what policy will save the planet? if the United States cut its carbon emissions by 50% tomorrow, it would have absolutely zero effect on the future of global warming. The Communist Party of China is not going to stop building coal fired power plants, or keeping around old, inefficient manufacturing processes, because they make tons of money off of it. In fact, they will build more of them, faster, and US manufacturers will move every last slip of production there, overnight.
You want to have China do something? Fine, good luck with that. A guy who ran a website about the poisoned baby-milk scandal got several years in prison recently. If they do that to someone who complains about the state producing poisoned baby milk, I wonder how they would treat someone who complains about the state producing too much Co2?
Then there are dozens of other countries in similar boats. Dictatorships who make tons of money off of fossil fuels. Passing a carbon tax in the United States would do nothing to them.
The 'carbon trading' system is going to be run by the same geniuses who run the Credit Default Swap market and the CDO market, not to mention the Catastrophe Bonds market and the Longevity Swaps market. They not only caused the Great Recession, they are also the geniuses who jacked the price of oil and food up by several times in 2008, causing world wide food riots and in some places mass malnutrition and starvation. That's who is going to be in charge of your carbon trading system.
So good luck.
i dont know if you have ever visited a wing of a school named after a business man, but there are tons of them.
and 'endowed chairs', and donated computer labs, and so forth and so on.
not to mention all of the projects that professors work on outside of school, you can search their CVs .
i had a shift that started on sunday night and ended monday morning.
our timesheets were constantly screwed up.
dont get me started on holidays, 'premium hours', overtime thats not really overtime, etc etc etc.
if any vendor had ever worked one of those types of jobs, they might get it.
or something like that, because linux machines are constantly running grub to rewrite the bootsector
you could rewrite part of the kernel binary so that it would lie to grub i guess.
or you could rewrite the grub binary to lie to the user.
those two things are kind of non-trivial because linux is increidbly diverse.
now that i think of it, perhaps Windows becoming 'diverse' is a way to prevent some of this junk from happening.
or brad dourif?
often, the problem boils down to
1. failure to cite a source
2. failure to cite a reliable, verifiable source (not a blog, not youtube, not a fan site)
3. failure to cite a secondary source (as opposed to a primary source)
however. i have to agree there are a lot of pointless 'reverts' and deletions.
i think i have subconsciously just learned to avoid those articles and work on others.
a lot of people get paid to edit wikipedia.
its the top 10 hit on virtually any google search.
imagine it from the corporate PR perspective - how can they NOT pay someone to keep an eye on it?