Bazaars in the Government Cathedral

guanxi writes: "This article by James Fallows in The Atlantic is one of the most interesting I've read all year. It describes how innovators in government are applying the concept of the Bazaar: The many eyes of 'Open-Source Intelligence' movement that provides better intelligence than classified sources, and a b2b-like marketplace created by World Bank employees that distributes aid more efficiently than the bureaucratic process."

Comments

want to see something really bizarre?

[Mdog]

00

Those are teh size of my actual balls.

Wow.

Oh and fp BITCHES.

Idi Amin, former dictator, dead at 77

[Anonymous Coward]

I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Genocidal and cannibalistic former dictator Idi Amin was found dead in his Saudi Arabian home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to tyranny and despotism. Truly a Ugandan icon.

I hate you people!

[ekrout]

I hate you people!

This is the second time today that a new story has been Slashdotted almost simultaneously as it was posted to the main page.

You people need to venture out into the real world once in awhile.

;-)

Re:world bank

[oregon]

Not really off-topic, IMO.
Some comments

Place your bets HERE

[Haxx]

See if the 'Open-Source Intelligence' people can get the score of the Superbowl before it is over. We could make a killing on this.

-http://www.packetshield.com

Nobody likes me.

[rice_burners_suck]

Oderint dum metuant. (Heh heh... Hablo un poco el espanol.)

Mix up the lines: "You have a problem with authority, Mr. Anderson. You believe that you are special, that somehow the rules do not apply to you. Obviously you are mistaken. This company is one of the top software companies in the world, and that is because every employee understands that they are part of a whole. Thus, if an employee has a problem, the company has a problem. The time has come to make a choice, Mr. Anderson. Either you choose to be at your desk on time from this day forth, or you choose to find yourself another job. Do I make myself clear?" "Hmmm... That sounds like a really good deal, but I think I got a better one. How 'bout I give you the finger, and you give me my phonecall."

De duobus malis, minus est semper eligendum.

Watch... I'll write the most awesome comment, and nobody will respond to it, let alone moderate it up. That's because nobody likes me. There's something inherently unpopular about me, even on the anonymous Internet. Speaking of which, Internet SUCKS! TCP/IP SUCKS! It's all about transferring information around using floppy disks... those big 8 inch ones! I think the Internet should be a service where you go to someone's homepage by writing them a handwritten letter requesting a their TCP/IP packets on floppy disk. When the disk arrives 6 to 8 weeks later, you can look at the page. (By the way, if the packets take up more than one disk, you'll have to install that disk, then send it back to the manufacturer and wait another 6 to 8 weeks for the next set of packets, and so on and so forth.) There won't be any links, but just a P.O. box address listing to order pages that would come up if links did exist, and it would take 6 to 8 weeks for those to arrive. "Downloads" would take F-O-R-E-V-E-R. I think this would be beneficial to society because. (And the previous IS a complete sentence, as is "Please wait while Microsoft.") Of course, you probably think the author of this comment is a flipping idiot, but sie hat sich einen Affen gekauft. Oh well.

So just watch... nobody will even respond to this, I betcha. "We are but poor lost circus performers. Is there a village nearby?" "There is nothing nearby, not for miles." "Then there will be no-one to hear you scream."

Oh well.

Which leads me to the next paragraph, which discusses the fact that probably nobody is even gonna be reading this far down in this retarded comment, because like I said above in the first paragraph (I think) of this post or comment or whatever you would like to call this thing that I am in the complicated process of writing right now, what the hell was I saying? Oh yeah, that there's something inherently unpopular about me. Oh well.

"Doc. I'm from the future. I came here in a time machine that you invented. Now I need your help to get back to the year nineteen eighty five." "Do you know what this means? It means that this damn thing doesn't work at all!"

Est unusquisque faber ipsae suae fortunae...... oooooooh well.

Re:Nobody likes me.

[rice_burners_suck]

SEE?!?! I told you that nobody likes me! So far, my comment has been moderated -1: Offtopic a whopping THREE times! I just can't figure out what it is! People just don't fucking like me!

Oh well... SLASHDOT SUCKS!

speaking of which...

Every time someone says a word that reminds me of a phrase from the movie, I have to start reciting the movie from that point on until its end, and I don't stop no matter how many times people tell me that I'm fucking annoying. For example, if someone uses the word "perhaps" I'll say:

"Perhaps we're asking the wrong questions." "Leave me with him... NOW!" ... and so on and so forth, until the part where Neo says, "I'm going to show these people what you don't want them to see..." It's a good 30 minutes of talking, and NOBODY can get me to shut up!

Or, if someone asks if there is something "nearby", I always say, "There is nothing nearby, not for miles." "Then there will be no one to hear you scream." And then I continue reciting a good hour or so of that movie until it's over.

Or, if someone says, "Oh my God", I'll say, "Oh my God, they've found me, I don't know how but they've found me. RUN FOR IT MARTY!" "WHO, WHO?!" "WHO DO YOU THINK? THE LIBYANS!" "HOLY SHIT!" etc.

blah blah blah blah blah

--

"Somebody's coming."

[the door opens and someone grabs him by the collar of his shirt and pulls him out of the car]

"You caused three hundred bucks damage to my car, you son of a bitch, and I'm gonna take it out of your ass. Hold him."

"Leave him alone Biff, you're drunk."

"Well lookie what we have here." etc. etc. etc.

--

Oh well... So, after describing all that shit, do you have ANY idea why people don't like me? Because I don't have a fucking clue.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOH WELL.

What, did you think I was done?!?! Hell no!!! I've got so much more crap to write, man! The time is now 4:35. Let's see how much time I spend on this...

Let me tell you something. The other day, there was a comment about using Ping to measure the speed of light, and after thinking about nothing except for that for several days, I think I have a technical theory behind this subject... See, this is what I think: You cannot measure the speed of light using Ping. What do you think Ping is, quantum physics hard at work? That's the most idiotic thing I've ever heard in my whole entire life. Because you know what? If you want to know the speed of light, just open a damn book. It's all there, black and white, clear as crystal. You stole phizzy lifting drink and floated up to the top of the tower which must now be washed and sterilized. And you need to remember the Boromir Principle, or whatever it's called, which says that the closer you try to measure some quantum physics stuff, the more messed up your measurements will be... or wait a minute... that's not what it says. It says that you can measure X or Y closely, but not both at the same time, and the accuracy of your measurement of X is inversely proportional to the accuracy of your measurement of Y. I just don't remember what the X and the Y were... What's that called, the Heisenberg thing? I don't know... it's been FOREVER since I've put a few good hours into reading all about physics, quantum mechanics, chemestry, superstring theory (or whatever they call it today), Calabi Chow spaces or whatever they're called, and who knows what else. :-) ...

Of course, if you can get the network to work exactly at the theoretical rate, you may actually be able to extrapolate the speed of light.However, that requires that I stop being an idiot and start writing some meaningful stuff in here. You see, what I've been doing in this stupid long and boring comment is just writing a bunch of crap to make it look at first glance as if I wrote a bunch of meaningful stuff, but really, it's just what I said it was a moment or two ago, no I think it was three moments ago, or was it four? You know what? I cannot tell because by the time I write a bunch more stuff, however many moments ago it was increased by a moment or two. Because you cannot stop the time, and that's really my point.

You see, time and the speed of light are really very closely intertwined! It works like this. Suppose that time is a dimension, kind of like our three dimensions of east/west, north/south, and up/down. So there's another dimension and it's past/future, and the present is almost nonexistant. The present is like the size of a tiny piece of an atom, if you could even measure it at all. What happens is this. Why is it that if you move an object at the speed of light, it like travels into the future or some bullshit like that? Actually, if you think about it for a while, speed is a measure of distance over time, or some garbage like that. What that really means is that, and by the way, the speed of light is the so-called alleged "cosmic speed limit" because THE SPEED OF LIGHT IS ACTUALLY THE SPEED OF TIME. Now if you go and read some books on the subject, there are really good explanations that I cannot reproduce here, for various reasons, and I will, for your convenient convenience, enumerate those items herein:

• Copyright violations. If I would include, say, a whole "commercial" book on physics and time and shit, that would probably be considered a violation of copyright law, and next thing you know, the copyright POLICE would show up at my door, and drag me kicking and screaming to the electric chair, where they would fry my happy ass.
• Because it would take too long for me to sit here like an idiot and transcribe (what a fancy word for "punch in the shit that I'm reading", eh?) the entire flipping book into this stupid freaking window, eh?
• Because Guiness sucks. That's right. That stuff tastes totally wrong. It's really weird shit. I prefer Negra Modelo. It's a Mexican beer, which means it's a correct beer. Actually, Negra Modelo is an ale. That's kind of like the difference between Madeira and Port, if you know what I mean. Guiness isn't a beer, and Guiness isn't an ale. It just isn't. It's incorrect. But Negra Modelo is correct. Some other Mexican beers aren't so good. Some are much better. But I like Negra Modelo because it is really the most awesome beer/ale/whatever the hell you want to call it in existance. Good with lime and salt, or without. Do it whatever way you want. By the way, I'm not into everything Mexican... For exampple, I hate tequila. It's gross, just like Guiness. Which brings me back to what I started saying a moment or two or three or... well, you get the point because I think I went over this whole moment and time and light thing in the previous paragraph, which is what brought me here, and if I start that whole damn thing again, this will become a recursive endless forever loop like for(;;) or some garbage like that. Actually, I like to write while (1) but many compilers are really stupid and they don't optimize out the "if" that goes in there somewhere, and they check against a gosh fucking constant, for crying out loud, and you know what? I think that sucks. But what the hell was I talking about? Oh yeah, the superb taste of Negra Modelo, and the deficiencies of Guiness, which sucks. (And I'm sure this pisses off a lot of people, like Linus, who probably wants to put a contract out on my happy ass, and RMS, who is probably committing suicide right now because if Guiness ever gets outlawed, that would probably mean the end of the GPL, or on the other hand, maybe RMS is quite happy right now, because he probably figures that beer should be open source, in other words, the brewery should release their recipes and all their trade secrets under the GPL, so that anybody could piss in the beer, or some garbage like that. Oh well.
• And the third reason... Or is it the fourth? I don't know, I've lost count. A couple of Negra Modelo's (because Guiness sucks) will do that to you. Oh well. I could write my own thing, and not plagiarize or whatever that stupid word is (and I can't even remember how to spell the damn thing) but that would take thought, time, and shit. And I don't have the patience for that kind of thing. So oh well.

So I will conclude that my conclusion is that I have discovered that there is no way in the entire universe that it would somehow be possible to use PING to measure the speed of LIGHT.

Einstein didn't use ping.

NEGRA MODELO. BECAUSE GUINESS SUCKS.

And then I had a revelation. A picture in my head. A picture of this! This is what makes time travel possible. The fluxcapacitor. As you can see, we've had our eye on you for some time now Mr. Anderson. It seems that you've been living two lives. In one, you're Thomas A. Anderson, program writer for a respectable software company. You have a social security number, you pay your taxes, and you help your landlady carry out her garbage. The other life is lived in computers, where you go by the hacker alias Neo and are guilty of virtually every computer crime we have a law for. One of these lives has a future, and one of them does not. Now I'm going to be as forthcoming with you as I can, Mr. Anderson. You're here because we need your help. We know that you've been contacted by a certain individual, a man who calls himself Morpheus. Whatever you think you know about this gentleman is irrelevant, he is considered by some authorities to be the most dangerous man alive. My partners think I'm wasting my time with you, but I believe you wish to do the right thing. We're willing to wipre the slate clean, give you a fresh start, and all we're asking is your cooperation in bringing a known terrorist to justice. That sounds like a really good deal, but I think I got a better one. How 'bout I give you the finger, and you give me my phone call. Hmmm... Mr. Anderson. You disappoint me. You can't scare me with this gestapo shit. I know my rights. I want my phone call. Tell me, Mr. Anderson. What good is a phone call, if you're unable to speak? The Matrix is a system Neo. That system is our enemy. Or some bullshit like that. Oh well.
--
Blend one part each: Bailey's, Kahlua, vanilla ice cream. Drink responsibly.

Ok, now it's 5:22... I've spent almost an hour on this comment, not including the stuff above where I said it's 4:35, which probably took a good 15 minutes to write, since I put stuff in and took stuff out and basically editted it to look exactly the way I wanted. Oh well.

By the way... one more thing. Don't even think of telling me to get a life, because if you read this whole stupid comment, YOU need to get a life as well.