Wikipedia and privacy

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Contributers here do a lot. Lets be honest, without the volunteers the Wikimedia Foundation would cease to exist. Now, skirting the subject of Jimbo Wales drawing a very healthy salary from the private donations to the foundation, and the somewhat dubious use of funds, the foundation does very little for its contributors. They rarely provide legal assistance (although this would be prohibitively difficult) and their privacy protection is absolutely terrible.

Not having a secure login screen means that hackers on their lunch breaks take contributor's passwords and apparently the foundation gives out Users' IP addresses to whoever wants it if asked nicely: this. That is pretty disturbing, really. What's more, comcast (know for deplorable costumer service) did more to protect the contributor than the foundation.

It is beyond me why companies do this type of thing. Qwest did it earlier with the US government, giving thousands of customers' phone records to the government voluntarily. These are customer (and contributor) supported companies and they betray them with little more than a news blurb in the local paper. Video professor doesn't write wikipedia articles and they probably don't donate to the foundation and yet, despite this, some manager made the decision to give confidential information about a contributor to a third party without a fight!

Total Dow Jones Return During Bush Presidency

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I was thinking about it and realized it might be interesting to see how the market did over the tenure of a 'pro-business' president.
The first business day of Bush's presidency, January 22, 2001; the Dow opened at 10,581.90.
The final business day of Bush's presidency, January 20, 2009; the Dow opened at 8,279.63.
For a grand total return of NEGATIVE 21.76 %
Not bad for 8 years.