Free Republic

Crowdsourcing has become increasingly popular the last several years. What’s not to like? It allows someone working out of their garage or basement to obtain enough funds to actually bring their dream to the market without the need for bank loans or loan sharks. While we’re not going to proclaim that crowdsourcing is the end-all-be-all (there are numerous horror stories of products never making it to the market) there’s a problem for people like us.Most crowdsourcing platforms ban anything and everything even peripherally related to guns. Here are some examples from the big guys: Here’s one of the prohibitions from...

Ohio Congressman Warren Davidson thinks crowdfunding may provide a solution to the controversial proposal of building a wall on the Mexican border. And, perhaps more notably, he suggested using a cryptocurrency to do so. During an interview with NPR’s Steve Inskeep, the U.S. lawmaker explained that he has already proposed letting the American public pay for the wall, which is opposed by Democrats but mades up a key aspect of President Donald Trump’s list of 2016 campaign promises. In particular, Davidson told Inskeep, he has suggested a private funding program wherein “the American people, or whomever should choose to donate,”...

Publicly fretting about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, last month, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin assured an audience at the Economic Club of Washington that "one of the things we will be working very closely with the G-20 on is making sure that this doesn't become the Swiss numbered bank accounts." He specifically cited the difficulty cryptocurrencies pose to tracking transactions as a major concern. Soon afterward, India's finance minister, Arun Jaitley, sounded an even stronger note, saying, "The government does not consider crypto-currencies legal tender or coin and will take all measures to eliminate use of these crypto-assets in financing illegitimate...

When bitcoin was first introduced, one of the concerns was that it was being used as a form of payment for questionable and/ or illegal transactions, such as those on the now-defunct marketplace Silk Road. The reason it was so popular for such transactions was because it provided an untraceable way to pay for items, but that seems to be changing. Researchers recently discovered that they were able to unmask some dark web users by linking them to bitcoin wallets that were used for transactions on the dark web. As a result, the anonymity once offered by bitcoin seems to...

You did not have to be a technophobe to worry that the virtual-currency boom of the past year papered over plenty of problems. The scale of those problems is starting to become clear as digital tokens have slid more than 50 percent in value from their peaks in early January, with steep drops on Monday pushing the value of Bitcoin specifically below $7,000.

Article IV, Section 3 of our Constitution provides that "The Congress shall have the power to dispose of and make all needful rules and regulations respecting the territory or other property belonging to the United States." A Republican-run state might buy up a few square miles of unoccupied land and sell it and the state sovereignty over it to the federal government. The federal government might then sell it off to a state-authorized private party who promises to create a new republic on it with: 1. limits on taxation/governmental fees/fines/licensing, and 2. no foreign military force, and 3. no governmental...

The Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, or COMPAS, program is a complex piece of software that is intended to predict which people in the criminal justice system are likely to be repeat offenders. The algorithm it uses to generate mathematical predictions are based on a set of 137 aspects of the person’s personal history, their record, and their likely conditions in the future. But the sophisticated computer prognostication system is no more accurate than crowdsourcing non-experts based on just two factors, claims a new study by Dartmouth University computer scientists. “People from a popular online crowdsourcing marketplace—who, it...

NEW THINKING NEW THINKING   Want to help Puerto Rico recover? Amateur analysts of satellite imagery around the world are pointing relief workers to where they are needed most. Anyone can do it! PARIS—As President Trump paid his visit to hurricane-wracked Puerto Rico on Tuesday a small army of individuals, sitting at their desks far from the spotlight and scattered around the globe, were doing their anonymous bit to put the ravaged island back together again. They are a new breed of “digital humanitarians.” Crowdsourcing the raw data of hurricane Maria’s trail of destruction, they are helping artificial intelligence experts...

The Wall Street Journal reported on a trove of Civil War era telegrams — many of them to and from Abraham Lincoln — that have never been decoded. The telegrams are owned by the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino. They have started a project, "Decoding the Civil War," to transcribe and decipher their collection of nearly 16,000 Civil War telegrams between Lincoln, his Cabinet and Union Army officers. About a third of the telegrams were written in code. The library is crowdsourcing the project through the largest online platform for collaborative volunteer research, Zooniverse. They...

On Saturday, Newsbusters' Tom Blumer wrote about the work strain that young Mike Elk, a Politico reporter who wants to unionize his workplace, imagines himself to be enduring. Well, a quick check at Politico reveals that the Boy Wobbly wrote a grand total of five stories since October 16. On average only about one story every three weeks. Such a strain! The best (and most laughable) part of the story is this money quote from Elk destined to live on for all eternity unto the end of time: “I can’t work the kind of hours I did when I was...

Location of the tomb was, after all, an archaeological enigma lacking historical descriptions of its visual appearance.The authors said that not a single burial of the Mongolian imperial family has been identified. What is more, there are largely undocumented cultural heritage sites across a sparsely populated and undeveloped landscape. So while looking for the tomb was a motivation, the effort was also to leverage the power of human perception in a search for the unexpected. This was a challenge. The authors said that without a pre-existing reference for validation they turned towards consensus, defined by kernel density estimation, to pool...

As the mystery of what happened to missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 deepens, people from all around the world are eager to help. Crowdsourcing website Tomnod.com, run by DigitalGlobe Inc., is asking its users to comb through thousands of miles of satellite imagery in search of clues that could be of use to search and rescue teams. Shay Har-Noy, director of product development at DigitalGlobe, said they have millions of people using their website to look for anything out of place. More than two million people have donated their time thus far, flagging 645,000 features on images that look unusual....

Full title: ‘Crowdsource’ This: Emails Expose #OccupyWallStreet Conspiracy to ‘Destabalize’ Global Markets, Governments In keeping with the new media notion of crowdsourcing–enthusiastically embraced by the mainstream media when trawling through Sarah Palin’s emails–Big Government will be providing readers later today with links to a document drop consisting of thousands of emails. The email archive, created by a private cyber security researcher, appears to contain messages shared by the left’s anarcho-socialist activists during the strategic and daily tactical planning of the “Occupy Wall Street” and broader “Occupy” campaign this fall. Big Government received a tip about the existence of the archive,...

Early Thursday afternoon, Derek Willis posted on the paper’s "Caucus" blog a request surely enticing to the paper’s online liberal readership: "Help Us Investigate the Sarah Palin E-Mail Records." Ken Shepherd at NewsBusters says enlisting newspaper readers to pore through the email trove "indirectly amounts to free oppo research for the 2012 Obama campaign." On Friday, the State of Alaska will release more than 24,000 of Sarah Palin’s e-mails covering much of her tenure as governor of Alaska. Times reporters will be in Juneau, the state capital, to begin the process of reviewing the e-mails, which we will be posting...

An unusual example of media efficiency. There’s a huge new supply available of her e-mails as governor and an eternally huge demand among Palin-hating liberals for new dirt on her. If you’re a cash-strapped editor, why not match one to the other and let the market do your work for you? Palin derangement is like the wind, or the sun: All the media has to do is harness it to provide a limitless supply of productivity.Just think, if she runs for president, they might be able to outsource whole stories to their liberal readership instead of just document analysis. Then...

SharpieMarker writes"In what could be the most extreme and influential crowdsourcing project ever, Democrats are beginning to organize to purposely vote for Palin in the 2012 Republican primaries. Their theory is by having Palin as an opponent, Obama will have the best odds at winning reelection. Recent polls have shown that Obama comfortably leads Palin by 10-20 points, but Obama is statistically tied with Romney and barely ahead of Huckabee. They even have a state-by-state primary voting guide to help Democrats navigate various states' rules for voting Palin in Republican primaries."

The premiere of “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” on cable television this week felt more like a formality than a new career direction. In any meaningful sense, Ms. Palin has starred in her own reality show since she left the governor’s office last year, functioning more as a cultural symbol than as a politician and earning a Hollywood-size fortune in the process. What made all this possible, when you think back to Ms. Palin’s debut as a national figure in 2008, wasn’t actually her recognizable identity as a scourge of liberal government and values, but rather her lack of a political identity...

Will V.P. Biden, the overseer for the implementation of the stimulus package, answer Oversight Chairman Towns (D-NY) concern for establishing a standard for tracking the stimulus money? Recovery.gov is not a usable database, Recovery.org , a private sector website is usable. One way to insure transparency on such a large project is the use of “crowdsourcing”. (Click links).