It has always been, as well as the whole Constitution. "The Congress shall make no law..."; well, who's going to stop them? The Supreme Court doesn't have the power, and the States are constantly trying to pass laws pissing on freedom even worse than the Federal Government is
The real power to stop creeps from enacting unconstitutional laws is at the ballot box. If somebody passes an unconstitutional law, they need to have their face pushed into the ground and have that fact exlaimed to all of the voters. Unfortunately once the law is passed and the senator or representative has left, the laws they made are still in force until somebody stands up and says "No!"
Laws can be repealed as well when they are unconstitutional, but the odds of getting 51 senators and 218 representatives to agree to such a repeal on the grounds of constitutional challenge is a much tougher hurdle to make, especially if such a move limits federal authority.
Alcohol is sort of a special situation as the 21st amendment is the governing part of the constitution rather than other sections:
The transportation or importation into any State, Territory, or possession of the United States for delivery or use therein of intoxicating liquors, in violation of the laws thereof, is hereby prohibited.
Congress can regulate how those "intoxicating liquors" are used and transported. I would agree that the abuse of the highway funds allocations is something that should be challenged, on the basis that such a restriction is unconstitutional. Still, setting the minimum age to drink can and should be a state issue entirely.
BTW, I happen to agree and think that supporting Bitcoin is going to be one way to end the cartel control over the world's banking system. Bitcoins are certainly going to be something significant to start using if Dollars and Euros start to go hyperinflationary on us.
I happen to think that is a very real possibility, and there is a whole bunch of reasons to start to worry about the next major crash that is going to slam world curencies: naked shorting on precious metal contracts. I've read stories about how there is now about 100x more metal being sold as contracts than physically exists on the Earth in the form of tangible metal you can hold and use. This is way above and beyond any metal backed currencies which also have this problem.
Bank of America is right in the middle of this fiasco, and it may be one of several things to be revealed in the upcoming document dump. It is something that could potentially shut down the U.S. economy as a whole because it is so bad... worse in some ways than the derivative market fiasco and this time American taxpayers are not going to bail these banks out. That card has been played already with those who voted for that package no longer in political power.
When all hell breaks loose, Bitcoin is going to be looking mighty fine.
On the contrary, members of Congress swear an oath to uphold the constitution. The problem is the sheep who keep electing these guys back into office when they clearly are not honoring that oath and candidates who are so wimpy that they refuse to bring that issue up.
Wikileaks is not disseminating child pornography or anything else even close to that. Furthermore, any officer who enforces such a lame law is IMHO guilty of violating that same law and should be subject to liability for violating that oath.
That will just make it illegal to send money to Bitcoin.
While I've taken a personal stance that sending money to Wikileaks via Bitcoin is a good thing, most of the people on the Bitcoin forums are against the idea and the lead developer wants to stay away from Wikileaks as long as he can. It is already causing grief for the Wikimedia Foundation, especially as Jimmy Wales ended up buying the domains for Wikileaks through a comedy of errors (via Wikia).
The nail in the coffin on the idea of using Bitcoin to send money to Wikileaks is that the Wikileaks guys don't want it either. If you set up an address for Wikileaks, they won't even take the bitcoins. I think they are foolish to do that, but that is their prerogative and not something you can force upon a group like this. Their main complaint is that they can't get the money out to pay their bills... something that is of a concern. You can easily exchange Bitcoins for Liberty Reserve Dollars, but getting your money out from LR Dollars isn't easy either and that seems to be the main sticking point.
Bitcoins certainly isn't ready to process tens of thousands of dollars in daily throughput to and from federal reserve notes... at least yet. There are some volunteers and interested parties trying to get that going, but it isn't there yet, and you certainly can't buy bitcoins with PayPal or a credit card at the moment unless you personally know somebody with a stack of bitcoins willing to sell them in a direct exchange.
About the only thing bitcoins are good for at the moment is to trade Dollars for Russian Rubles and the other way around. It works pretty good that way and I got at least a couple of Rubles via Bitcoin. You can also indirectly trade both currencies for Japanese Yen, although that market is still quite slow as there aren't many in Japan trading bitcoins at the moment. Somebody selling pounds might be a potential market that currently isn't being met either.
Wikileaks is not a terrorist organization and does not fall under the Patriot Act, contrary to the uninformed opinion of some congressmen that try to make up stuff coming out of their hind end.
Besides, there is this strange little document that was written about 200 years ago that says the following:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
I don't know what part of "shall make no law" these congressmen think doesn't apply to Wikileaks, but this is about as cut and dried of a free speech case as I've ever seen. Julian Assange is only guilty of being connected to an organization which is publishing "leaked" materials... just like any responsible news media outlet ought to be doing from time to time too. The guilty party is the people who gave the documents to Wikileaks, not Wikileaks themsevles.
I'm also not saying that it is necessarily a bank, as if you send some money to a gold bullion dealer and in turn send that gold to a 3rd party who gives that to Wikileaks, is the gold dealer "guilty" of supporting Wikileaks with what should be lawful activity in America (discussing corruption in the government... a very political act and very much political speech)?
I'm certainly not paying Wikileaks to its self-proclaimed "leader" can have sex with random strangers... something that usually has unintended consequences even with the best of circumstances. Julian Assange is also one very arrogant SOB and sort of deserves a bit of punishment for at least being such, and it is that arrogance which got him into that position. Perhaps a little humility and sticking to the free speech issues is what he should be doing instead of porking every girl he meets. That he landed in the bed of a man-hating feminist only shows that he has poor judgment with sexual partners.
Still, I wasn't aware of having a bad one-night stand is something that is criminal according to the Patriot Act in America, especially when the incident wasn't in America and didn't involve any Americans. That is also the only crime that I can think of which applies.
The Kennedy assassinations (both JFK and RFK) are hardly fertile ground anymore and have been beaten to death in so many ways that I find it hard to believe anything more can be said on the topic. Everything from JFK being an alien to a Soviet conspiracy and even involving the New York City mafia groups has been brought up in a rather convincing manner. J. Edgar Hoover and Elvis Presley have even been mentioned in connection with those assassinations. The only person that would be new to introduce would be Barack Obama, and he was just a toddler when JFK died. Perhaps Obama Sr. was the "second gunman" or something stupid like that, and "junior" pulled the trigger, if it was even a remote possibility. I really don't see how anything new could even be brought up that hasn't been hashed and rehashed over and over again.
But it is by far and away better to fight extradition in the judiciary rather than having to fight off potentially the combined strength of the British Army, in the UK. By turning himself in, it becomes strictly a judiciary fight that at least he has the potential of winning, and likely the ability to return home if necessary if he does. If he has to spend the rest of his life traveling only to Commonwealth countries, it wouldn't be the end of the world.
The charges are pretty wimpy as well, and I can't see a judge sentencing him for more than a year or two... during which time he could certainly do quite a bit simply by being there. Going to prison isn't going to be damaging his reputation any more than already has happened, and being incarcerated might even be a resume enhancement considering the line of work that he is involved with. Depending on the prison arrangements, it might even be nice as a coder to spend a few months locked up with a pad of paper and a pencil. Other software developers have produced some amazing software doing just that, not to mention some amazing books that have been written in prison. Besides, Wikileaks will do just fine without Assange and might even improve.
Usually what happens is that the death penalty is removed formally as a possible punishment, something that has been enforced by U.S. Courts in recognition of such extradition agreements. That doesn't stop something stupid like how Jack Ruby ended up killing Lee Harvey Oswald, and it would certainly bring up a whole host of long-term conspiracy theories about how evil and corrupt the U.S. government is if something like that happened, but it wouldn't be an "official act" in terms of an execution.
I, personally, don't see the problem of the death penalty for certain crimes, if there is a higher bar in terms of criminal conviction over and above what is expected for legal "proof of guilt". In other words, I'd need to know for certain that the person really did do the crime and circumstantial evidence would not be sufficient for me. I also reserve the "right" to jury nullification if I was ever asked the question as a juror in terms of imposing such a verdict.
I understand the political opinion of those who feel otherwise and think such acts are a thing of the past. On the other hand, I think that is just a facade for public consumption as I'm sure both the governments of Sweden and the UK would both kill people as an official act by officers of their respective governments if the need ever arose, including assassinations where the "target" isn't an immediate threat to the government. It just doesn't happen through the judiciary. I
Are they going to stop you from sending money to somebody else who may or may not send money to Wikileaks? How many levels deep is that going to go? About the only thing I can see them doing here is to stop a direct transfer to a known account, and shy of a judicial order I don't see how they can legally prevent you from performing such a transfer. You may have to go a couple more steps to do something like that, but that is all.
This is also becoming a political event, something I would hope Bank of America would not want to get involved with.
Bernie Madoff and his scheme had nothing to do with Bank of America. Also Bank of America had very little to do with MBS, and only got bigger because by buying up those collapsed companies.
Bank of America purchased Countrywide Mortgages, which were right in the thick of the whole mortgage-backed security mess and practically started the system in the first place. When they purchased that company, they took on all of the liabilities including the responsibility to clean up the mess that the company made in the first place. In this sense, Bank of America is Countrywide Mortgages, one of the most notorious lenders of underwater property in America. Their hands are certainly not clean with this mess.
As for Bernie Madoff, I don't think Bank of America was necessarily active in terms of any of its officers directly involved with setting up the ponzi scheme, but to say that Bank of America was completely uninvolved is sort of a lie as well. I don't know the full extent of how they were involved, if any, but I'm sure at least some money that Madoff used went through one or more Bank of America accounts. They are too big of a bank not to be completely uninvolved with the kind of money and the number of clients involved. It was a bit unfair, however, to even invoke Madoff as the MBS mess and loans to illegal immigrants (at the insistence of many within the Democratic Party leadership in Congresss) and other "disadvantaged minorities" with little by way of credit worthiness or ability to pay off the loans routinely did happen with this bank, and that is sufficient to show how corrupt the system got. Madoff is a side show, not the main event, and may even be shown in the long run as a hero as he was at least up front in the end that he was running a ponzi scheme. These banks are doing much worse and getting away with it too.
To put this into greater perspective, when the "Big E" was made most of the ships in the U.S. Navy were replaced on a regular 20-30 year schedule, where ships launched during World War II were only about 20 years old at the time. A good example of such a ship is the USS Yorktown that continued to see service for more than a decade after the "Big E" was commissioned. Even that was considered at the time a very lengthy term of service for such a ship.
In terms of what is going to replace the Enterprise after she retires is a good question, and that she has lasted this long is a testament to the skill of the engineers who put her together.
I think that many of the problems in scientific research stem from the fact that politics is getting too involved in the allocation of scientific funds. I could mention a few hot-button issues right now that would likely get this post modded down strictly because I'm goring somebody's ox, so I won't give any specific examples.
My point is that by injecting politics into science through the government grant process, it is wasteful spending and something that really shouldn't be done... for the sake of advancement of science in general. There were and I believe can be some genuine scientific research developed that doesn't need the overhead of the massive government granting process. I'm not saying that there shouldn't be any sort of government scientists either as there certainly are some benefits for that too, but put them on the government payroll directly if that is to be the case if there is some real need for research that can benefit government programs directly.
Yes, there is a need to take out some other huge spending programs, but not too many people want to take on the Veteran's Administration, Head Start, or Social Security. If you cut all discretionary spending entirely, including the entire Department of Defense, you still can't balance the current federal budget due to "non-discretionary funds" and interest on debt.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
I don't know what part of establishing a regulatory body falls under "making no law" makes sense here, but then again the principles of the convention of 1787 have all but been ignored anyway. Since you mention ICE and the Border Patrol, I am assuming that you were referring how it could happen in America.
Making "no law" means you can't make a law at all. It is an unregulatated enterprise entirely and enforcement laws simply can't be done... at least if you even pay lip service to this document. To suggest there is something different between a printing press and a website is really stretching the imagination.
Then again it could be argued that most Americans are merely well-paid serfs in the American empire and their opinions on these matters are moot and irrelevant as well.
In terms of China, no such principle even applies remotely. The Chinese Bill of Rights is essentially "You have the right to be shot by the police, and your family will be forced to pay for the bullets used." In spite of that the principle remains: the information isn't being stopped. Comparing the smuggling of information to smuggling other kinds of bulk goods is quite disingenuous here as well, but moving drugs certainly doesn't get the passion coming from trying to express your political opinion or more so your religious opinion on what matters. Dying for your god is a time-honored tradition for humanity, where people will certainly take risks that most drug runners would turn white even thinking about. It isn't the same thing.
As far as Julian Assange is concerned, he was an arrogant idiot who didn't keep his pants zipped up. I don't have too much sympathy for him at the moment, even though I do think the prosecution is being done because of political motivations. If you want to practice "free love" and sleep around, at least do so with women (or men... as it may be with your preference) that aren't going to stab you in the back afterward and try to know that person a little bit before you drop your undergarments. Having sex with random strangers is likely to screw up your life in more ways than one. The guy didn't even bother with a condom, which seems to be the main basis for the complaint in his case too.
But how is the experiment working out? This is my question.
I've known many people who have at least temporarily driven an automobile without a license and a whole bunch that drive without automotive insurance. In fact, there are so many laws that govern you life that it is possible that you are breaking the law right now, and not really being aware of that.
The point of the Chinese control over the internet is to stop the flow of "subversive" information spreading around. Surprisingly, it is pornography that the Chinese crack down almost as hard as dissident speech, yet I'd like you to convince me that somebody who is at least somewhat motivated can't obtain some porn in the middle of China. I wouldn't show it off to some government official, but I'm sure you can find it and it wouldn't even be all that hard. With encryption and peer to peer networks like freenet and Tor, how is even this sort of stuff even regulated at all?
You asked for some specific examples of why "the Wikipedia organization itself is pissing people off". Those are your words, not mine. I gave some specific examples here, and some more general issues that also impact people using Wikipedia and trying to contribute.
BTW, there is no "Wikipedia organization" at least under that name. It is the Wikimedia Foundation that sets policies and has overall control over the project, although there is also some specific in-project hierarchy that sort of runs the show as well, but you will find considerable overlap from one project to the next and blurring of lines in terms of who is in charge on that level. It also isn't a strict hierarchy especially with principles of "all editors are equal" applying as well.
Ask, and ye shall receive. This is what you asked for, so why are you so pissed at me personally for giving you examples? You seemed a little uninformed simply from your comment about how it appeared there is some god-king running Wikipedia, forgetting that the king has been removed by a coup-d'etat and is now being run by mostly a democratic-like mobocrachy. That sort of works for something like Wikipedia, but it also makes it hard to point to a specific person.
And anyone who says you can't regulate the internet is dreaming. Ask the chinese.
How has that experiment been working out? That isn't exactly regulating the internet so much as doing the equivalent of registering all of the typewriters in a country and requiring a license to own one.
It is still possible to "distribute" anti-government information within China about the Chinese Politburo or to discuss frankly the events of the 1989 Tiananmen square massacre in Chinese. It isn't exactly easy, but it can be done and in spite of insane levels of government interference in trying to deal with the issue it seems to only get harder to stop that from happening.
Such levels of regulation also haven't hit a people who is used to freedom of expression and the willingness to tell off the government in large numbers. This is one genie that is going to be very hard to stuff back into a bottle now that it is out, which is exactly what some of these governments are trying to do.
The drop off happened rather suddenly, with a specific month and year that can be noted. I think it is about October 2007 as the point where Wikipedia stopped growing. Wikipedia has been able to maintain itself since but it hasn't been collecting more editors and contributors than it has been losing.
Until that point, the growth of Wikipedia was geometric with a definite upward slope in terms of new contributors. Oh, there have also been seasonal fluctuations, but those seasonal fluctuations have always stayed at about the same levels since too. If you look at various sorts of statistical graphing of Wikipedia activity, it all seems to hit that wall about the same time.
I've tried to identify what might have been the deciding factor as a magical event for that time period. Some of it might have been that it is now harder to find new subjects for Wikipedia, but for it it hit a certain month as a dropoff point doesn't seem to explain that... you would think it would be more asymptopical to a certain maximum and possibly a general decline in the number of new articles created and accepted. Instead, what you find is more of a steady rate of growth with roughly the same number of new articles being created and the number of edits staying roughly stable, but not increasing or decreasing.
Basically I don't think it is for a lack of things to write about, the issue is that editors aren't showing up to edit Wikipedia anymore in large numbers.
A good argument that has been made is that about that time Wikipedia participation leveled off (October 2007) is about when Facebook went live as well as Twitter and a number of other "social media" websites that are sucking the life out of places like Wikipedia that were once upon a time the hot spot for on-line socializing. Wikipedia also instituted a number of interesting policy changes at the same time too, and it was about that same time that the Wikimedia foundation got much more formal... and IMHO much more distant from the ordinary contributors too.
I'm sure all of those factors have played a role and perhaps some other things I haven't considered. I do on occasion find topics that haven't been described on Wikipedia, and certainly several that I think are poorly described, but then again I am a regular contributor to Wikipedia as well and have written a few articles myself over the years. It is still something to think about. I do think that some changes could happen to Wikipedia that could encourage some additional growth that isn't happening right now.
It does seem to be that the more money that the Wikimedia Foundation seems to get, the more places they seem to find to put it. They now get donations on the order of several million per year, and it certainly exceeds the basic needs for running the basic infrastructure such as the server farms (yes, plural) and dealing with network hosting costs. In theory they certainly could be building up such a trust funding account, even if it is just a few thousand dollars per year at the moment they would be receiving. The point would be to grow that trust fund in such a way that it could be perpetual and diminish the need for additional fund raising in the future, at least for basic services.
A few organizations have been able to pull off something like that, but it is rare.
If you want to see what an advertiser-based Wikipedia would look like, go to the Klingon-language edition of Wikipedia, now hosted on Wikia since it got kicked out of the Wikimedia project circle. It isn't completely tasteless, although Wikia has gone the rounds with some really lousy advertisers and some significant defections of some of the contributors over the years in part due to the advertising. A slightly better representative would be to look at how advertising is currently being used on the World of Warcraft Wiki, which does include some targeted advertising based upon certain content pages too.
There are some problems with advertisements, and Wikia certainly has had its problems with them too. Considering that Wikia was also set up by Jimmy Wales, the differences between these sites and Wikipedia is all that more interesting too, even more considering there is certainly a whole bunch of cross-pollination between Wikipedia and many of these Wikia websites including many common volunteers.
Yes, that is a problem. The main thing however is that with donors the amount represented by a single donor can be minimized by simply having lots of smaller donations from a great many people and perhaps even putting caps on the size of donations which will be accepted precisely to stop that sort of practice. If the founder of Ebay offers a million dollars with the proviso that his assistant gets full editorial control over the article about Ebay, it would be tempting... but if you simply say "sorry, but donation over $1k are not accepted" also makes it easy to turn down such requests too.
So far the WMF hasn't seemed to turn down such donations, so as a matter of practice I'd agree that at the moment the difference really is more of semantics than anything substantive.
Notability is always a slippery slope. It isn't really even the size of the organization, but being able to prove that whatever it is that you may write about on Wikipedia is something worth keeping on Wikipedia.
There are some fanatics who really push the issue and get angry when you claim notability but they don't believe it.
While she succeeded Jimmy Wales as "chair" of the Wikimedia Foundation, she didn't really replace him as founder... a sort of ambiguous sort of position that still gives him a seat on the governing board and more significantly gives him free reign to do whatever he wants to do on the projects including appointing himself as admin or bureaucrat on any project at any time without even a vote. This is something he has chosen to do several times in the past, effectively giving himself complete control over content and user rights privileges on any project.
Jimbo claims that he won't do that any more and will respect community wishes, but I'll believe it when I see it. He still retains essentially the final word on the English language edition of Wikipedia. As a general rule of thumb he seldom exercises that authority and generally stays away from the general politics of the site, but those user rights are still there.
Some of this made sense when he was personally footing the site hosting bill for Wikipedia when he was legally responsible for the operations and content on Wikipedia. As a board member, he still has a fiduciary responsibility for the content of Wikipedia, so it is still somewhat of a concern... but there are other ways to deal with those few issues that come up from time to time and he really doesn't need such direct control any more.
Riiiiight..... and the book publishing business is falling apart now that we have computers, where there is no need at all for something written down and put on dead trees with a cover of some kind.
There will always be a demand for quality books, which is exactly what is being proposed here. If anything, the advent of computer technology has been a blessing to the book publishing industry by both making it cheaper to print books and to print them in smaller quantities (print-on-demand publishers) as well as to increase the number of titles and the number of authors who are available to publish.
I don't know how something like the Kindle is going to change the book publishing industry, but even that requires something a little bit better prepared than some of the tripe that sometimes gets put into Wikipedia articles. That requires some real effort. Besides, e-books have typically failed to pan out with their promise, where e-books were predicted to completely replace paper books several decades ago yet seldom seem to ever happen.
Instead, Wikipedia is outsourcing the book selling. I don't know what financial arrangements are currently being made between PediaPress and the Wikimedia Foundation, but there has been some arrangement which has been made and it is at the moment an exclusive arrangement so far as publishing a "book" containing Wikipedia content in a book form (and they are also doing this with the other Wikimedia sister projects as well).
I do think that some kind of more formalized book preparing volunteer group could be organized to separate out the spam from the quality materials on Wikipedia and to prepare what I think would be a high quality book of Wikimedia material... where the results would be to have something of a "product" that people would be willing to buy. Publishing content is much more than simply throwing some random text on a web page and throwing on a picture or two. You may even need a professional coordinator or two for the effort, but the main end-task would be to set up something that would be of comparable quality to something like say the CRC handbook or some other non-fiction reference guide.
My largest problem with trying to get an effort like this going has been trying to find a proper forum to present my ideas. I've tried to propose this idea on the Wikimedia Meta website and the Wikimedia Foundation mailing list, but those who happen to be regular readers of those forums are not really interested in being involved at that level. The Wikipedia Village Pump has also similarly fallen flat with any sort of response to setting something like this up. I know that efforts like Distributed Proofreaders exist that are somewhat similar and seem to bring in people with talent and abilities to do the "post-editing" document preparation that would be needed to turn quality Wikipedia articles or featured Wikibooks into a finished book, but I haven't been able to figure out how to do that either.
Another issue is that there seems to be a group that wants to automate the process of creating books entirely. While I applaud that effort so far as something is better than nothing at all, I think something is missing when the whole process is automated. The books I see are certainly of inferior quality to books which are hand-made with a little extra TLC which has been put forward into its preparation... and I've seen some amazing quality books based upon Wikimedia project content which has been put together. The question is how to set that up, and for those parts that could use some assistance through automation perhaps could be used but also there should be the ability to "step in" and tweak that automation as well to refine the process and make it better.
On the whole, I do think this is a missed opportunity for the Wikimedia Foundation.
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The real power to stop creeps from enacting unconstitutional laws is at the ballot box. If somebody passes an unconstitutional law, they need to have their face pushed into the ground and have that fact exlaimed to all of the voters. Unfortunately once the law is passed and the senator or representative has left, the laws they made are still in force until somebody stands up and says "No!"
Laws can be repealed as well when they are unconstitutional, but the odds of getting 51 senators and 218 representatives to agree to such a repeal on the grounds of constitutional challenge is a much tougher hurdle to make, especially if such a move limits federal authority.
Alcohol is sort of a special situation as the 21st amendment is the governing part of the constitution rather than other sections:
Congress can regulate how those "intoxicating liquors" are used and transported. I would agree that the abuse of the highway funds allocations is something that should be challenged, on the basis that such a restriction is unconstitutional. Still, setting the minimum age to drink can and should be a state issue entirely.
BTW, I happen to agree and think that supporting Bitcoin is going to be one way to end the cartel control over the world's banking system. Bitcoins are certainly going to be something significant to start using if Dollars and Euros start to go hyperinflationary on us.
I happen to think that is a very real possibility, and there is a whole bunch of reasons to start to worry about the next major crash that is going to slam world curencies: naked shorting on precious metal contracts. I've read stories about how there is now about 100x more metal being sold as contracts than physically exists on the Earth in the form of tangible metal you can hold and use. This is way above and beyond any metal backed currencies which also have this problem.
Bank of America is right in the middle of this fiasco, and it may be one of several things to be revealed in the upcoming document dump. It is something that could potentially shut down the U.S. economy as a whole because it is so bad... worse in some ways than the derivative market fiasco and this time American taxpayers are not going to bail these banks out. That card has been played already with those who voted for that package no longer in political power.
When all hell breaks loose, Bitcoin is going to be looking mighty fine.
On the contrary, members of Congress swear an oath to uphold the constitution. The problem is the sheep who keep electing these guys back into office when they clearly are not honoring that oath and candidates who are so wimpy that they refuse to bring that issue up.
Wikileaks is not disseminating child pornography or anything else even close to that. Furthermore, any officer who enforces such a lame law is IMHO guilty of violating that same law and should be subject to liability for violating that oath.
That will just make it illegal to send money to Bitcoin.
While I've taken a personal stance that sending money to Wikileaks via Bitcoin is a good thing, most of the people on the Bitcoin forums are against the idea and the lead developer wants to stay away from Wikileaks as long as he can. It is already causing grief for the Wikimedia Foundation, especially as Jimmy Wales ended up buying the domains for Wikileaks through a comedy of errors (via Wikia).
The nail in the coffin on the idea of using Bitcoin to send money to Wikileaks is that the Wikileaks guys don't want it either. If you set up an address for Wikileaks, they won't even take the bitcoins. I think they are foolish to do that, but that is their prerogative and not something you can force upon a group like this. Their main complaint is that they can't get the money out to pay their bills... something that is of a concern. You can easily exchange Bitcoins for Liberty Reserve Dollars, but getting your money out from LR Dollars isn't easy either and that seems to be the main sticking point.
Bitcoins certainly isn't ready to process tens of thousands of dollars in daily throughput to and from federal reserve notes... at least yet. There are some volunteers and interested parties trying to get that going, but it isn't there yet, and you certainly can't buy bitcoins with PayPal or a credit card at the moment unless you personally know somebody with a stack of bitcoins willing to sell them in a direct exchange.
About the only thing bitcoins are good for at the moment is to trade Dollars for Russian Rubles and the other way around. It works pretty good that way and I got at least a couple of Rubles via Bitcoin. You can also indirectly trade both currencies for Japanese Yen, although that market is still quite slow as there aren't many in Japan trading bitcoins at the moment. Somebody selling pounds might be a potential market that currently isn't being met either.
Wikileaks is not a terrorist organization and does not fall under the Patriot Act, contrary to the uninformed opinion of some congressmen that try to make up stuff coming out of their hind end.
Besides, there is this strange little document that was written about 200 years ago that says the following:
I don't know what part of "shall make no law" these congressmen think doesn't apply to Wikileaks, but this is about as cut and dried of a free speech case as I've ever seen. Julian Assange is only guilty of being connected to an organization which is publishing "leaked" materials... just like any responsible news media outlet ought to be doing from time to time too. The guilty party is the people who gave the documents to Wikileaks, not Wikileaks themsevles.
I'm also not saying that it is necessarily a bank, as if you send some money to a gold bullion dealer and in turn send that gold to a 3rd party who gives that to Wikileaks, is the gold dealer "guilty" of supporting Wikileaks with what should be lawful activity in America (discussing corruption in the government... a very political act and very much political speech)?
I'm certainly not paying Wikileaks to its self-proclaimed "leader" can have sex with random strangers... something that usually has unintended consequences even with the best of circumstances. Julian Assange is also one very arrogant SOB and sort of deserves a bit of punishment for at least being such, and it is that arrogance which got him into that position. Perhaps a little humility and sticking to the free speech issues is what he should be doing instead of porking every girl he meets. That he landed in the bed of a man-hating feminist only shows that he has poor judgment with sexual partners.
Still, I wasn't aware of having a bad one-night stand is something that is criminal according to the Patriot Act in America, especially when the incident wasn't in America and didn't involve any Americans. That is also the only crime that I can think of which applies.
The Kennedy assassinations (both JFK and RFK) are hardly fertile ground anymore and have been beaten to death in so many ways that I find it hard to believe anything more can be said on the topic. Everything from JFK being an alien to a Soviet conspiracy and even involving the New York City mafia groups has been brought up in a rather convincing manner. J. Edgar Hoover and Elvis Presley have even been mentioned in connection with those assassinations. The only person that would be new to introduce would be Barack Obama, and he was just a toddler when JFK died. Perhaps Obama Sr. was the "second gunman" or something stupid like that, and "junior" pulled the trigger, if it was even a remote possibility. I really don't see how anything new could even be brought up that hasn't been hashed and rehashed over and over again.
But it is by far and away better to fight extradition in the judiciary rather than having to fight off potentially the combined strength of the British Army, in the UK. By turning himself in, it becomes strictly a judiciary fight that at least he has the potential of winning, and likely the ability to return home if necessary if he does. If he has to spend the rest of his life traveling only to Commonwealth countries, it wouldn't be the end of the world.
The charges are pretty wimpy as well, and I can't see a judge sentencing him for more than a year or two... during which time he could certainly do quite a bit simply by being there. Going to prison isn't going to be damaging his reputation any more than already has happened, and being incarcerated might even be a resume enhancement considering the line of work that he is involved with. Depending on the prison arrangements, it might even be nice as a coder to spend a few months locked up with a pad of paper and a pencil. Other software developers have produced some amazing software doing just that, not to mention some amazing books that have been written in prison. Besides, Wikileaks will do just fine without Assange and might even improve.
Usually what happens is that the death penalty is removed formally as a possible punishment, something that has been enforced by U.S. Courts in recognition of such extradition agreements. That doesn't stop something stupid like how Jack Ruby ended up killing Lee Harvey Oswald, and it would certainly bring up a whole host of long-term conspiracy theories about how evil and corrupt the U.S. government is if something like that happened, but it wouldn't be an "official act" in terms of an execution.
I, personally, don't see the problem of the death penalty for certain crimes, if there is a higher bar in terms of criminal conviction over and above what is expected for legal "proof of guilt". In other words, I'd need to know for certain that the person really did do the crime and circumstantial evidence would not be sufficient for me. I also reserve the "right" to jury nullification if I was ever asked the question as a juror in terms of imposing such a verdict.
I understand the political opinion of those who feel otherwise and think such acts are a thing of the past. On the other hand, I think that is just a facade for public consumption as I'm sure both the governments of Sweden and the UK would both kill people as an official act by officers of their respective governments if the need ever arose, including assassinations where the "target" isn't an immediate threat to the government. It just doesn't happen through the judiciary. I
Are they going to stop you from sending money to somebody else who may or may not send money to Wikileaks? How many levels deep is that going to go? About the only thing I can see them doing here is to stop a direct transfer to a known account, and shy of a judicial order I don't see how they can legally prevent you from performing such a transfer. You may have to go a couple more steps to do something like that, but that is all.
This is also becoming a political event, something I would hope Bank of America would not want to get involved with.
Bernie Madoff and his scheme had nothing to do with Bank of America.
Also Bank of America had very little to do with MBS, and only got bigger because by buying up those collapsed companies.
Bank of America purchased Countrywide Mortgages, which were right in the thick of the whole mortgage-backed security mess and practically started the system in the first place. When they purchased that company, they took on all of the liabilities including the responsibility to clean up the mess that the company made in the first place. In this sense, Bank of America is Countrywide Mortgages, one of the most notorious lenders of underwater property in America. Their hands are certainly not clean with this mess.
As for Bernie Madoff, I don't think Bank of America was necessarily active in terms of any of its officers directly involved with setting up the ponzi scheme, but to say that Bank of America was completely uninvolved is sort of a lie as well. I don't know the full extent of how they were involved, if any, but I'm sure at least some money that Madoff used went through one or more Bank of America accounts. They are too big of a bank not to be completely uninvolved with the kind of money and the number of clients involved. It was a bit unfair, however, to even invoke Madoff as the MBS mess and loans to illegal immigrants (at the insistence of many within the Democratic Party leadership in Congresss) and other "disadvantaged minorities" with little by way of credit worthiness or ability to pay off the loans routinely did happen with this bank, and that is sufficient to show how corrupt the system got. Madoff is a side show, not the main event, and may even be shown in the long run as a hero as he was at least up front in the end that he was running a ponzi scheme. These banks are doing much worse and getting away with it too.
To put this into greater perspective, when the "Big E" was made most of the ships in the U.S. Navy were replaced on a regular 20-30 year schedule, where ships launched during World War II were only about 20 years old at the time. A good example of such a ship is the USS Yorktown that continued to see service for more than a decade after the "Big E" was commissioned. Even that was considered at the time a very lengthy term of service for such a ship.
In terms of what is going to replace the Enterprise after she retires is a good question, and that she has lasted this long is a testament to the skill of the engineers who put her together.
I think that many of the problems in scientific research stem from the fact that politics is getting too involved in the allocation of scientific funds. I could mention a few hot-button issues right now that would likely get this post modded down strictly because I'm goring somebody's ox, so I won't give any specific examples.
My point is that by injecting politics into science through the government grant process, it is wasteful spending and something that really shouldn't be done... for the sake of advancement of science in general. There were and I believe can be some genuine scientific research developed that doesn't need the overhead of the massive government granting process. I'm not saying that there shouldn't be any sort of government scientists either as there certainly are some benefits for that too, but put them on the government payroll directly if that is to be the case if there is some real need for research that can benefit government programs directly.
Yes, there is a need to take out some other huge spending programs, but not too many people want to take on the Veteran's Administration, Head Start, or Social Security. If you cut all discretionary spending entirely, including the entire Department of Defense, you still can't balance the current federal budget due to "non-discretionary funds" and interest on debt.
I don't know what part of establishing a regulatory body falls under "making no law" makes sense here, but then again the principles of the convention of 1787 have all but been ignored anyway. Since you mention ICE and the Border Patrol, I am assuming that you were referring how it could happen in America.
Making "no law" means you can't make a law at all. It is an unregulatated enterprise entirely and enforcement laws simply can't be done... at least if you even pay lip service to this document. To suggest there is something different between a printing press and a website is really stretching the imagination.
Then again it could be argued that most Americans are merely well-paid serfs in the American empire and their opinions on these matters are moot and irrelevant as well.
In terms of China, no such principle even applies remotely. The Chinese Bill of Rights is essentially "You have the right to be shot by the police, and your family will be forced to pay for the bullets used." In spite of that the principle remains: the information isn't being stopped. Comparing the smuggling of information to smuggling other kinds of bulk goods is quite disingenuous here as well, but moving drugs certainly doesn't get the passion coming from trying to express your political opinion or more so your religious opinion on what matters. Dying for your god is a time-honored tradition for humanity, where people will certainly take risks that most drug runners would turn white even thinking about. It isn't the same thing.
As far as Julian Assange is concerned, he was an arrogant idiot who didn't keep his pants zipped up. I don't have too much sympathy for him at the moment, even though I do think the prosecution is being done because of political motivations. If you want to practice "free love" and sleep around, at least do so with women (or men... as it may be with your preference) that aren't going to stab you in the back afterward and try to know that person a little bit before you drop your undergarments. Having sex with random strangers is likely to screw up your life in more ways than one. The guy didn't even bother with a condom, which seems to be the main basis for the complaint in his case too.
But how is the experiment working out? This is my question.
I've known many people who have at least temporarily driven an automobile without a license and a whole bunch that drive without automotive insurance. In fact, there are so many laws that govern you life that it is possible that you are breaking the law right now, and not really being aware of that.
The point of the Chinese control over the internet is to stop the flow of "subversive" information spreading around. Surprisingly, it is pornography that the Chinese crack down almost as hard as dissident speech, yet I'd like you to convince me that somebody who is at least somewhat motivated can't obtain some porn in the middle of China. I wouldn't show it off to some government official, but I'm sure you can find it and it wouldn't even be all that hard. With encryption and peer to peer networks like freenet and Tor, how is even this sort of stuff even regulated at all?
You asked for some specific examples of why "the Wikipedia organization itself is pissing people off". Those are your words, not mine. I gave some specific examples here, and some more general issues that also impact people using Wikipedia and trying to contribute.
BTW, there is no "Wikipedia organization" at least under that name. It is the Wikimedia Foundation that sets policies and has overall control over the project, although there is also some specific in-project hierarchy that sort of runs the show as well, but you will find considerable overlap from one project to the next and blurring of lines in terms of who is in charge on that level. It also isn't a strict hierarchy especially with principles of "all editors are equal" applying as well.
Ask, and ye shall receive. This is what you asked for, so why are you so pissed at me personally for giving you examples? You seemed a little uninformed simply from your comment about how it appeared there is some god-king running Wikipedia, forgetting that the king has been removed by a coup-d'etat and is now being run by mostly a democratic-like mobocrachy. That sort of works for something like Wikipedia, but it also makes it hard to point to a specific person.
And anyone who says you can't regulate the internet is dreaming. Ask the chinese.
How has that experiment been working out? That isn't exactly regulating the internet so much as doing the equivalent of registering all of the typewriters in a country and requiring a license to own one.
It is still possible to "distribute" anti-government information within China about the Chinese Politburo or to discuss frankly the events of the 1989 Tiananmen square massacre in Chinese. It isn't exactly easy, but it can be done and in spite of insane levels of government interference in trying to deal with the issue it seems to only get harder to stop that from happening.
Such levels of regulation also haven't hit a people who is used to freedom of expression and the willingness to tell off the government in large numbers. This is one genie that is going to be very hard to stuff back into a bottle now that it is out, which is exactly what some of these governments are trying to do.
The drop off happened rather suddenly, with a specific month and year that can be noted. I think it is about October 2007 as the point where Wikipedia stopped growing. Wikipedia has been able to maintain itself since but it hasn't been collecting more editors and contributors than it has been losing.
Until that point, the growth of Wikipedia was geometric with a definite upward slope in terms of new contributors. Oh, there have also been seasonal fluctuations, but those seasonal fluctuations have always stayed at about the same levels since too. If you look at various sorts of statistical graphing of Wikipedia activity, it all seems to hit that wall about the same time.
I've tried to identify what might have been the deciding factor as a magical event for that time period. Some of it might have been that it is now harder to find new subjects for Wikipedia, but for it it hit a certain month as a dropoff point doesn't seem to explain that... you would think it would be more asymptopical to a certain maximum and possibly a general decline in the number of new articles created and accepted. Instead, what you find is more of a steady rate of growth with roughly the same number of new articles being created and the number of edits staying roughly stable, but not increasing or decreasing.
Basically I don't think it is for a lack of things to write about, the issue is that editors aren't showing up to edit Wikipedia anymore in large numbers.
A good argument that has been made is that about that time Wikipedia participation leveled off (October 2007) is about when Facebook went live as well as Twitter and a number of other "social media" websites that are sucking the life out of places like Wikipedia that were once upon a time the hot spot for on-line socializing. Wikipedia also instituted a number of interesting policy changes at the same time too, and it was about that same time that the Wikimedia foundation got much more formal... and IMHO much more distant from the ordinary contributors too.
I'm sure all of those factors have played a role and perhaps some other things I haven't considered. I do on occasion find topics that haven't been described on Wikipedia, and certainly several that I think are poorly described, but then again I am a regular contributor to Wikipedia as well and have written a few articles myself over the years. It is still something to think about. I do think that some changes could happen to Wikipedia that could encourage some additional growth that isn't happening right now.
It does seem to be that the more money that the Wikimedia Foundation seems to get, the more places they seem to find to put it. They now get donations on the order of several million per year, and it certainly exceeds the basic needs for running the basic infrastructure such as the server farms (yes, plural) and dealing with network hosting costs. In theory they certainly could be building up such a trust funding account, even if it is just a few thousand dollars per year at the moment they would be receiving. The point would be to grow that trust fund in such a way that it could be perpetual and diminish the need for additional fund raising in the future, at least for basic services.
A few organizations have been able to pull off something like that, but it is rare.
If you want to see what an advertiser-based Wikipedia would look like, go to the Klingon-language edition of Wikipedia, now hosted on Wikia since it got kicked out of the Wikimedia project circle. It isn't completely tasteless, although Wikia has gone the rounds with some really lousy advertisers and some significant defections of some of the contributors over the years in part due to the advertising. A slightly better representative would be to look at how advertising is currently being used on the World of Warcraft Wiki, which does include some targeted advertising based upon certain content pages too.
There are some problems with advertisements, and Wikia certainly has had its problems with them too. Considering that Wikia was also set up by Jimmy Wales, the differences between these sites and Wikipedia is all that more interesting too, even more considering there is certainly a whole bunch of cross-pollination between Wikipedia and many of these Wikia websites including many common volunteers.
Yes, that is a problem. The main thing however is that with donors the amount represented by a single donor can be minimized by simply having lots of smaller donations from a great many people and perhaps even putting caps on the size of donations which will be accepted precisely to stop that sort of practice. If the founder of Ebay offers a million dollars with the proviso that his assistant gets full editorial control over the article about Ebay, it would be tempting... but if you simply say "sorry, but donation over $1k are not accepted" also makes it easy to turn down such requests too.
So far the WMF hasn't seemed to turn down such donations, so as a matter of practice I'd agree that at the moment the difference really is more of semantics than anything substantive.
Notability is always a slippery slope. It isn't really even the size of the organization, but being able to prove that whatever it is that you may write about on Wikipedia is something worth keeping on Wikipedia.
There are some fanatics who really push the issue and get angry when you claim notability but they don't believe it.
Are you talking Florence Devouard, aka Anthere?
While she succeeded Jimmy Wales as "chair" of the Wikimedia Foundation, she didn't really replace him as founder... a sort of ambiguous sort of position that still gives him a seat on the governing board and more significantly gives him free reign to do whatever he wants to do on the projects including appointing himself as admin or bureaucrat on any project at any time without even a vote. This is something he has chosen to do several times in the past, effectively giving himself complete control over content and user rights privileges on any project.
Jimbo claims that he won't do that any more and will respect community wishes, but I'll believe it when I see it. He still retains essentially the final word on the English language edition of Wikipedia. As a general rule of thumb he seldom exercises that authority and generally stays away from the general politics of the site, but those user rights are still there.
Some of this made sense when he was personally footing the site hosting bill for Wikipedia when he was legally responsible for the operations and content on Wikipedia. As a board member, he still has a fiduciary responsibility for the content of Wikipedia, so it is still somewhat of a concern... but there are other ways to deal with those few issues that come up from time to time and he really doesn't need such direct control any more.
Riiiiight..... and the book publishing business is falling apart now that we have computers, where there is no need at all for something written down and put on dead trees with a cover of some kind.
There will always be a demand for quality books, which is exactly what is being proposed here. If anything, the advent of computer technology has been a blessing to the book publishing industry by both making it cheaper to print books and to print them in smaller quantities (print-on-demand publishers) as well as to increase the number of titles and the number of authors who are available to publish.
I don't know how something like the Kindle is going to change the book publishing industry, but even that requires something a little bit better prepared than some of the tripe that sometimes gets put into Wikipedia articles. That requires some real effort. Besides, e-books have typically failed to pan out with their promise, where e-books were predicted to completely replace paper books several decades ago yet seldom seem to ever happen.
Instead, Wikipedia is outsourcing the book selling. I don't know what financial arrangements are currently being made between PediaPress and the Wikimedia Foundation, but there has been some arrangement which has been made and it is at the moment an exclusive arrangement so far as publishing a "book" containing Wikipedia content in a book form (and they are also doing this with the other Wikimedia sister projects as well).
I do think that some kind of more formalized book preparing volunteer group could be organized to separate out the spam from the quality materials on Wikipedia and to prepare what I think would be a high quality book of Wikimedia material... where the results would be to have something of a "product" that people would be willing to buy. Publishing content is much more than simply throwing some random text on a web page and throwing on a picture or two. You may even need a professional coordinator or two for the effort, but the main end-task would be to set up something that would be of comparable quality to something like say the CRC handbook or some other non-fiction reference guide.
My largest problem with trying to get an effort like this going has been trying to find a proper forum to present my ideas. I've tried to propose this idea on the Wikimedia Meta website and the Wikimedia Foundation mailing list, but those who happen to be regular readers of those forums are not really interested in being involved at that level. The Wikipedia Village Pump has also similarly fallen flat with any sort of response to setting something like this up. I know that efforts like Distributed Proofreaders exist that are somewhat similar and seem to bring in people with talent and abilities to do the "post-editing" document preparation that would be needed to turn quality Wikipedia articles or featured Wikibooks into a finished book, but I haven't been able to figure out how to do that either.
Another issue is that there seems to be a group that wants to automate the process of creating books entirely. While I applaud that effort so far as something is better than nothing at all, I think something is missing when the whole process is automated. The books I see are certainly of inferior quality to books which are hand-made with a little extra TLC which has been put forward into its preparation... and I've seen some amazing quality books based upon Wikimedia project content which has been put together. The question is how to set that up, and for those parts that could use some assistance through automation perhaps could be used but also there should be the ability to "step in" and tweak that automation as well to refine the process and make it better.
On the whole, I do think this is a missed opportunity for the Wikimedia Foundation.