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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.
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
(_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
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...
$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.
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?
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
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 :-)
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* 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
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
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.
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.
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
It can be argued, but how effectively when you introduce the person who puts their own life in jeopardy to save another?
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As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
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
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.