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Slashback: Suffrage, Product, Broadcasting
Good thing politicians are in such strong ethical trim. In case you were thinking of selling your vote (early and often) in the next national election, it seems that there are legal barriers. Sort of like at least certain other activities which are legal if you do them for fun, but illegal if you take cash, the lawmakers seem to like the prostitution on their side of the castle wall. Or do they always vote their consciences?
GMontag writes: "This Wired story tells how Voteauction.com has shut itself down after public pressure and threats from various bureaucrats.
A telling quote by Doug Kellner, a Manhattan representative on the New York City Board of Elections: 'The message to get out to the public is that posting (intent to sell votes) to a
website even in jest is a serious matter. It could subject you to prosecution, or in New
York you could forfeit your vote,' Kellner said, referring to a New York state law that
imposes a one-year forfeiture on vote buyers and sellers.
So, this is more political speech that is 'illegal'? So far, it has been nothing but a discussion of vote auctioning and a college paper. Amazing that the bureaucrats what to 'do something' about this, but rounding up car thieves keeps 'slipping through the cracks.'"
Note to non-U.S. citizens: since this law probably doesn't apply to you, feel free to sell your votes online.
Radio Radio it's a sad salvation. wodelltech writes "With regard to the recent VMSK article/comments, readers might find the announcement at http://ibiquitydigital.com interesting."
Basically, this is an announcement of the merger of Lucent Digital Radio (which, little did I know, is just a few miles from my present dwelling) and USA Digital Radio, which sounds like an interesting step toward better choices in local radio. (Can't someone please give me good talk, all day?) Here's a snippet:
Today, radio in the United States is broadcast using analog signals. iBiquity Digital will enable broadcasters to send a digital signal, capable of containing CD-quality audio with crystal clear reception and additional wireless data for a variety of consumer applications such as station and program content, stock and news information, local traffic and weather, and much more, over existing radio frequencies, without denigrating transmission of current analog programming.
But is there a downloadable palm module? A Klingon translation? Anomie-ous Cow-ard writes "The ever-popular Jargon File has been updated to version 4.2.2."
So if you want to correctly use terms like "smoot," "ANSI standard pizza," and "dirty genitals," make sure to arm yourself with ESR's help. And you can look at the file's change log here.
Buzzword compliance is certainly a mission-critical optimization *ahem, mumble* ... Captain_Carnage writes "The LinuxWorld website has an article about itstop five productstoday. Featured are a rollable rubber keyboard from Broumand (only an e-mail address given), a user resource allocation/accounting tool from Aurema, an IDE-based RAID card from 3ware, a Linux-based router/VPN box from Linux Wizardry, and a High-Availability clustering product from Mission Critical Linux."
These all seem like cool products, but slashdot readers have known about the rubber keyboard for months. As for the others, any other nominations for the coolest products recently released? If the field is open, I have to say the pneumatic chair at the Loki booth, even if it isn't yet available and will cost 5 or 10 grand, and Slackware folding frisbees.
Wow; you've taken Freshmeat crossposting to a new level!
:)
...but... isn't there a web site for that?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Wow! One whole entry! How does ESR find the time to do this and, well, whatever the hell else he does?
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
It's right here. It was added a couple years ago, IIRC. "Dirty genitals" on the other hand....
Back in the late 80's when I and some friends used to hang out and make trouble on multi-line 'Chat' BBSes, we would sometimes just start typing out messages like 'SRH' once in awhile. Generally it was to make fun of the people who would type 'AFK' in the open. Our point was almost always who gives a fsck if you're away from your &$@*$ keyboard, idiot!.
SRH, of course, stands for Staying Right Here. Proper usage is to alternate your SRHs with AKs. (At Keyboard).
Yes, we were annoying little pisses at times.
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
You silly fool. Most people don't vote because one vote doesn't make a difference. Well, this vote-aggregation scheme is a way to create a vote that *matters*. And the value of that vote is transferred to the voter, by virtue of its being auctioned off.
Instead, you would have people waste the value of their vote, by not voting.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
are you sure that article was intended to be humorous?
The shareholder is always right.
As for the downloadable Palm module, IIRC the Jargon File isn't much more than 5 MB total, so it's theoretically possible on a higher-end model. Is there any sort of text reader thingy that does on-the-fly compression/expansion, or is the Palm not powerful enough yet for such a program?
Harrumph. It most certainly is powerful enough; what you are referring to is the DOC format, which is a compressed text format for Palm use. There are tons of readers (CSpotRun is a good free one, and methinks it's open under the GNU GPL), and a few editors.
I don't know what the compression rate is for DOC, so I'm not sure whether you could get the File down to a friendly size (my IIIxe has 8 megs of RAM, but a great deal of that is taken up with a ditionary and various documents, so no room for a 5 meg Jargon File). There are other formats as well (iSilo comes to mind), which might be more appropriate to the File's format.
-J
Karma: T-rexcellent.
(_nobody_ else STR?)
I wish that Signal 11 would die, just so you people would shut your whiney little yaps. The biggest reason to get rid of Karma would be the cessation of your endless bitching.
Fuck Slashdot
Link
http://dtum.livejournal.com
Anyone know what it's running to do the routing beyond what's done by `route` and `ipchains` (stuff like BGP)???
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Oh shit! I forgot to click "Post Anonymously"...
We've had digital radio here in the UK for about 4 years now - the BBC transmits all of it's radio programs in digital as well as analogue, and several of the larger commercial stations do as well.
The big problem is that the receivers are still prohibitavely expensive (I think they're still around £600 or so), which is an awful lot to pay to get radio broadcasts with only slightly better quality than those you can gt on a £20 analogue receiver.
When it was first launched, there were only 150 receivers in existance, one of which resided in Buckingham Palace...
iSilo brings it down to 0.99MB, which fits handily on an 8M palm :-)
- Paul
I thought Democracy was all about everyone using their vote selfishly and the majority getting their way.
Well, it is not written in stone that people have a civic duty, but people acting purely selfishly tends to result in unstable government. Arguing from extremes, you can easily see that it would always be advantageous for 51% of the population to oppress the rest.
"In a society under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be said to reign as in a state of nature, where the weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger;" (Federalist LI, paragraph 10, Hamilton or Madison)
In the United States this is avoided by the various checks and balances in the system of the Federal Republic. The most important check to this purpose is the fragmenting of authority between the states and the federal government.
But if votes are for sale, it is too easy to set up a self-perpetuating system, in which officeholders enrich themselves and then pay off enough people to get their gang reelected. This is how the political bosses of the 20's and 30's operated.
It can be argued that the Republicans try a similar scheme when they promise tax breaks to their voters. But imagine if they could give tax breaks selectively, only to the people who helped them get re-elected! That would be pretty fucked up.
But imagine if they could give tax breaks selectively, only to the people who helped them get re-elected! That would be pretty fucked up.
Yeah, it's a good thing that politicians never enact tax breaks or subsidies that selectively benefit groups that donated to their campaigns!
Did gorski get a suggestion in? 'cause he's the *only* person I've heard use that term.
(other geeks from elsewhere chime in: where did you hear this one? I've always heard of it being a pizza decided upon by a group, compromised on by everyone and palatable by no-one...)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Would that make it okay, sweetie??
"Those who would give up essential liberty for temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" - Benjamin Franklin,
$400 is rather expensive for an IDE raid controller, but getting a few cheap IDE hard drives quickly makes up for the price of the controller. Comparing scsi hard drive prices with ide hard drive prices, an 18 gig 7200 rpm scsi hd costs ~$300 while a 20 gig 7200 rpm ide hd costs ~$150. with a 4 drive raid configuration, the IDE raid system costs (4x150)+400=$1000 while the SCSI raid system costs (4x300)+115=$1335.
so when it comes to prices, IDE is still cheaper than scsi. However, a dual channel UW scsi can have up to 30 devices on it and it uses less irqs compared to the ide raid controller which can only support 4 devices. OTOH, putting 15 hard drives on an UW scsi channel will saturate the 40 Mb/s bandwidth pretty quickly....
Zetetic
Seeking; proceeding by inquiry.
Elench
A specious but fallacious argument; a sophism.
...but... isn't there a web site for that? :)
Sir, I kindly ask you to direct me to this site that you speak of.
I used to know a great word for abusing a bad set of rules, umm, degenerate I think. A game with bad rules "degenerates", it doesn't corrupt. It simply becomes something pointless that no one (with morals) wants to play. Sound familiar?
3ware seems to have a good product, but has anyone been able to get the Promise IDE RAID controllers to work on linux? put 2 of those and a slew of IBM's 10K rpm drives and you'll have a kickass box...
/., but we built a 390 Gigabyte (usable space) RAID5 server for around $3000, using eight 60 Gig Maxtor IDE drives (5400 RPM), and Red Hat 6.2.
I beat you to it.
I don't want to give everything away, since I am thinking about submitting a web page featuring it to
This was using the onboard IDE with a Promise IDE, both UDMA66. The performance is no so great, but it's big and cheap and that was our goal. The performance bottleneck is because we used two devices per IDE channel. It took about a day to fill it up with files over NFS. I think we got something like 2-3 megs per second.
It took a kernel upgrade via RPM, and some other tweaking to get it to work right, but it wasn't too hard. I hear the 2.4 kernel has full support, but we got it running on 2.2, with the patch.
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I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
cheers,
ai731
--
"I use the words you taught me. If they don't mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent"
doh, I forgot to mention, we didn't use the Promise hardware RAID, we used the linux software RAID to get RAID5 and to use the onboard controller.
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I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Heehee... I was going to say "High-Availability Clustering solution" but opted for "product" instead, so as not to give anyone BINGO! (as in, buzzword bingo)
=8^)
-Captain Carnage
(and yeah, I work for Mission Critical Linux)
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Check out the OSS linux clustering technology called
Why else would they vote Republican?
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E_NOSIG
Also, the point is that it's the same people who do take bribes to do various things in the government for large corporations, which is corruption. In addition, I really think that politicians should have better things to do than crack down on people TALKing about selling votes in jest, such as, say, cracking down on massive crack peddling and murders. Or would you say that this is more important than that?
Chris Hagar
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
Hmm... you got a copy of that I could have? ;)
iSilo works with hypertext, right? Or am I delusional?
-J
Karma: T-rexcellent.
So what your saying is, in New York, I can buy a politician, but I can't sell my vote?
thanks for spotting it, or I might not have noticed ... forest for trees sort of thing.
:)
Here's what happened, if you're interested
When I build a Slashback, I usually start with one submisson -- in this case the New York voting thing -- and add others to it, rather than cut-n-paste *all* of them into a single other file. (Is that semi-clear?)
That voting one came in with a suggested topic of DOJ (appropriate) -- I meant to but obviously did not change the topic icon to the more general Slashback one, so that DOJ one "stuck."
Brain fart it was.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
first post?
How could Slashdot readers have known about the rubber keyboard for months when Slashdot has only posted *one* story about it? We need to be reminded of these things from time to time, you know... at least one story a week should do it :-)
--
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
Hello. I'm a 18 year old female. Who wants to fuck me?
Depends on your species.
--Shoeboy
what happens if i sell votes for federal elections in New York? what does the state have to do with that?
3ware seems to have a good product, but has anyone been able to get the Promise IDE RAID controllers to work on linux?
put 2 of those and a slew of IBM's 10K rpm drives and you'll have a kickass box...
...with the selling-your-vote-online metaphore is that you are implying that the candidates buy votes.
That is not how the system works. The candidates don't buy votes, the corporations buy candidates. Either Bush or Gore is going to win, but for the powerfull elite it doesn't matter. Most corps have donated to both the Democrats and the Republicans.
Don't throw your vote away on the Republicrats. Vote Nader.
http://overwhelmed.org
On a tangential note, End Women's Suffrage Now! tells a dihydrogen monoxide-like tale worked into a rant of "don't vote, it only encourages them."
Fuck Slashdot
You may not sell your vote, but your congressman may sell his vote. Just Rosie O'Donnell won't let you own your guns, but her son's bodyguard gets to own his guns.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
I'm still not clear on the concept - you can't sell your vote, but you can buy your congressman?
Don't seem right to me.
The state has *everything* to do with every aspect of your life. Don't you know that yet? They know whats good fer ya, so just 'lay back and enjoy it'
"Those who would give up essential liberty for temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" - Benjamin Franklin,
I was under the impression that the point of the "vote auction" site was to point out that if corruption on the "vote auction" level isn't acceptable then why is it accepted at the legistlative level? And why isn't anyone concerned about it given that it is a much more dangerous problem at that level?
They look like a real neat idea from the outset.
Then you learn the nitty gritty. Like price. And capabilities.
The basic model has two channels. These cards only let you put one drive on each channel. So you've paid $200 for two drives. A two drive raid. whoop-de-effin-do.
The prices ramp up very quickly from there. Close to $400 for a four-drive controller. You're not saving a red cent vs. comparible scsi. You'd be better off with a couple Promise controllers and software raid.
UW scsi is comparable to UDMA66 in terms of throughput, even with multiple drives on the channel. UW scsi is considered old-crappy-junk by the RAID array set. Thus, UW scsi based raid controllers are selling quite cheap. I have personally purchased (for my employer) several AMI Megaraid 2 channel UW scsi raid controllers for $115 each. It's quite common to find them for less than $200.
Don't bother with this IDE raid malarky. It's pointless and silly. If you insist on RAIDing IDE drives, just use software raid, linux is quite good at it.
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
While the rest of the world rushes to embrace the Eureka 147 digital audio broadcast (DAB) standard, America has floundered for years to develop its own digital system. Why this departure? Greed.
The Eureka system uses a single transmitter facility that is used by all broadcasters in a geographical area. Each of the participants in the system also share a common coverage area. Everyone competes on the basis of the quality of the programming they offer and not the signal available to listeners.
By contrast, powerful, entrenched American broadcasters detest the idea of fair competition. The huge corporate multi-station operators (MSO's) that own hundreds of local radio stations each, have oligopoly power and intend to keep it. They own the big, powerful stations in each market, and dominate the airwaves.
Small stations, which don't have the broadcast reach of their MSO competitors, are left marginalized by the current scheme. Thus, the choices available to the listening public are limited by technical constraints. It matters not whether the smaller broadcaster offers superior programming.
The iBiquity system is designed to perpetuate this order. All it does is piggyback a digital audio signal on the existing analog one. The result is the degradation of the analog signal. This is done so that a digital signal that is vastly technically inferior to Eukeka can be delivered in a coverage pattern that duplicates the existing one.
Add to this the deregulation of US media ownership and the result is a concentration of media power that only worsens by the day.
`
Warning: It is a federal offense to impersonate The President.
but if you are an anarchist or somebody who at best believes this so called democracy is a crock of shit but dont agree with the third party candidates, what better way to use your vote than to try and fuck up the system?
It's nice to say that means something in the jargon file, but along with a number of other entries in the file, it doesnt mean anything. There was a time when I looked at the file and if there was a term in there that I hadnt seen before, that I was probably out of touch with the geek community. Now I see it's the other way around. C|N>K? Conway's Law? Of course in the context that I have heard these terms they meant different things and were only used by a very small number of people. I certainly dont think these terms are 'canon'.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
what if it was all a big conspiracy and they were just tricking us into thinking our votes counted? better yet, what if they tricked us into believing that they are for anything other than supporting the rich individuals and corporations who support them and pay the money to get them elected? would a million people die for that vote?
It would be trivial to put the Jargon file on a Palm.
I have the entire New International Version Bible on my Handspring, and it takes less than half the memory. That's using a custom reader program which is doing compression/decompression on the fly.
If the Jargon file is available, I would like to get it. I have one of the older printed versions - published as The Hacker's Dictionary - and it's one of my favorite computer books.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
This is really what makes democracy democracy.
When selling your vote you are basically saying that voting rights should be based upon your income or property, that is: one dollar==one vote. This is certainly NOT called democracy because it's not the majority of people who rules society but rather the majority of capital who rules it, similar to how corporations are run.
So if you fancy to change your country into a corporate state, then by God's means sell your vote to the highest bidder.
It can be argued, but how effectively when you introduce the person who puts their own life in jeopardy to save another?
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
Your tone is really annoying. Who do you think you are? He can express his opinion.
..... All of these have something directly to do with law enforcement.
Besides do you really believe that our representative in government have nothing to do with the enforcement of law? If so, you need to read a little. Local government (i.e. county or city) has a lot to do with local law enforcement. Counties the Sheriff is often an elected official. In most cities the Mayor hires the chief of police.
What about prosecutors? Govners? President?
Congress men have a less direct impact. They approve federal judges and create the laws that are to be inforced.
To suggest that elected officials do not have much to do with law enforcement, show a serious lack of understanding.
And that's what they want you to think! Voter apathy is rising! Typical election results: Winner 65% of the ballots; First loser 20%; 15% to people you never heard of. Voter turn out: 30%. 30%!! If those 70% of the people had turned out to vote for the person who got the least votes - that would have been our imaginary winner!
On the grand scale, yes, your vote means diddly. But it means much more with 70% of the population too lazy to stop watching the tube to get out and vote!
And in the last 100 years or so, 30-40 million people did die so you could vote. (assuming you live in a democratic country :-} )
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
I'm surprised that floating a vote-buying scheme isn't considered protected political commentary under the first amendment.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Since when is talking about committing a crime, a crime? Sounds like the "police state" has finally arrived. Of course...there may be a flip side to this...let's see...i could talk about sex...oh yeah, it's actually happenin', let's talk some more!!!!!
an enigma wrapped around a paradox driven by a paradigm shift
Signal 11, I want my vote back...
The Un-coolest thing at Linux World Expo was what last year was called the dot org pavilion this year was called the docking station... which reminded me of some kind of cattle pen for the non-profits and the advocacy foundations...
Did it seem wierd that the winners of the big award for best work, the Debian project, had a little pen in order to promote itself while corporations like Corel, who basically are reinventing themselves by piggybacking their desktop on top of Debian and KDE's good work?
Is VA Linux, who I heard sponsored some of these groups to be at LinuxWorld, too poor to allocate a little more space or at least more promotion for these very important organizations?
Coolest thing at the EXPO? The dot org's
What the heck?.....BIOTECH!
Hey! You forgot to use the word: Solutions Where the heck do you think you are, Canada?
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Yes and in response to the discussion, the gentleman made it clear that what was being discussed was blatently illegal and would be prosecutted. Very useful fact to insert into the discussion, don'tcha think?
And did your widdle car get stolen or are you just picking something that a legislater has nothing directly to do with and pulling an imature bait and switch.
Vote selling is a serious form of fraud. I personally have worked to apply this principle to elected officials as well as those electing them, but corruption at one level is a damn childish excuse for condoning it at another.
-Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
but I'm sure it's being considered.
As for the downloadable Palm module, IIRC the Jargon File isn't much more than 5 MB total, so it's theoretically possible on a higher-end model. Is there any sort of text reader thingy that does on-the-fly compression/expansion, or is the Palm not powerful enough yet for such a program?
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
What is the DOJ icon doing on a /back article? Timothy had a brain fart?
Mark Duell
Your not trying to buy my vote, are you?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
They know they can get away with stuffing little amendments about privacy into school taxation bills with a little added pay raise for themselves! Because no one will notice!
To quote Babylon 5 (or misquote...) "No one takes power, it is given to them by the people..."
It needs to be able to be taken away by the people too!
And to sell your right to vote. The same right that millions of people in the world would die for, the right to vote in a free and democratic election. To give away what so many young men and women DIED for, just for beer money.
That is a much sadder state of affairs.
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain