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Elect Steve Jobs President of the United States
Will Foster writes "There is a groundswell of support for electing Steve Jobs President of the United States." I'll vote for him if I can write in my vote -- with a Newton stylus!
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This is a stupid idea. Why not form some of your own political views and act on them?
I wouldn't vote for Steve Jobs for president, but I would definately vote for the "Woz". Something tells me that Jobs would actually make a better figurehead president than Woz though.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
Here's the text. Pretty interesting :)
San Francisco, CA
In a stunning move, Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer INC, announced his intention to run for presidency of the United States of America. The announcement was greeted with overwhelming support by the large macintosh community in the united states, and veiled reproach from Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft Corp.
"We here at Microsoft are more concerned with somebody addressing the fact that the editors of slashdot are pulling shit over on moderators they don't like" said Gates. We question whether Jobs will be up for the diffiucult task of getting the editors to stop Taco-snorting for long enough to run a decent news blog, like Rusty over at kuro5hin.org"
Slashdot 's editors are dickheads
What I mean is.. Suppose Bill Gates really did buy an election. Would he need to pay anyone back for the campaign expense? Or would he be free to act on his own will?
He could theoretically run on issues and voters could predict his behavior by what he says, rather than who is funding him.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
You know, he might not be a bad president...
a) he's someone who made something of himself, and wasn't just from a wealthy, powerful family
b) he's someone that has Vision and can seek it out (even if we might not agree with his Vision, he's definitely got it!)
c) he's arguably of above-average intelligence... try and say THAT of any of the other candidates!
If Nader wasn't running, I'd vote for Jobs just because I know that if Jobs won, he would make a decent go of it and maybe even get something real done.
-ZOD-
Apple is a monopolist? What do they have a monopoly on? Translucent plastic cases? Selling a system with a closed architecture is different than being a monopolist. A monopoly exists when you control all of (or almost all of) a particular market, not just a product.
Vote Linus!
The PowerPC platform is very open. Apple, however, doesn't let people use their "Apple" trademark to sell "Apple-compatible" computers. It's a harsh marketing tactic, and well within the intent of Trademark law. It's difficult to sell PowerPC computers when you can't claim that they're Apple-compatible.
The platform, however, is beautifully open. IBM makes a PowerPC proccessor call the Power4, and (today) has revealed a reference model PDA based on the PowerPC architecture.
Apple is extremely strict with their trademark rights, but they rarely overstep the intent, let alone the letter, of the law.
Jobs has my vote just for his insight that DRM will fail, and his strong resolution to never integrate it into MacOS.
I'm as mimsy as the next borogove but your mome raths are completely outgrabe.
Heck this has been going on longer than post-irony set in. I remember my amusement when I first heard ronald reagan was a presidential candidate. Well he'll never win I thought, what a joke. After he won I was in disbelief, and realized I was not the only one when I saw a bathroom grafitii "reagan...without a cause", an obvious riff on the james dean movie title.
Later after watching "back to the future" there is a scene where marty tries to prove he's fromt he future. The professor asks "okay future boy, whos president." MArty answeres "ronald reagan" thus assuring the professor he's a lunatic: "Oh and who's the treasury secratary 'jack benny?'.
Later in the same movie, the professor is amazed by the video camera "a portable movie production studio....Great scott! no wonder your politicians have to be actors!". A banal observation unless you think of in the context of it dawning on a person from the 1950's.
So will we all be thinkng "great scott, no wonder all your presidents have to be CEO's of consumer products" when a visitor from the future comes back and tells us about president Jobs?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
It turns out that the best leaders are those who do not want it. Steve Jobs probably doesn't fall into this category, being the grab-asstic wannabe he is, but Linus Torvalds, for example, would probably be the best president we've had for half a century. This goes for any number of do-good low-key individuals not only in the Open Source movement, but in human rights movements, etc.
I think that at this point, our government is so corrupt and broken, that appointing government officials by lottery would yield something better.
fifth sigma, inc.
...Instead, he got kindof serious, and said, "Well, no, he (Al Gore) didn't create the internet, and I think he's been quoted out of context, but he was absolutely responsible for creating the legislative environment that allowed that type of research to be done, and lead to the creation of the internet."
Yes, I would agree that Gore's supposed statement that he "Invented the Internet" was taken out of context. Despite being so seemingly uncomfortable in his own skin in public speaches, I would tend to credit the man with enough intelligence to *NOT* have made that claim.
What I supposed that Gore could have been referring to was his support of the Boucher Bill which was solely (AFAIK) responsible for opening up the internet to general use by the public. Up until the point of this bill being signed, the internet was supposed to be used solely for "official" government use. Of course, by this time many private citizens were already using it to buy and sell things to one another, proposition one another, display ASCII Art and whatnot. But this bill was the official nod that the internet wasn't just for breakfast anymore and was ripe for the picking to anyone interested. Of course, this was roughly contemperaneous with Tim Berners Lee's development of the WWW so both factors probably worked together towards making the 'net what it is in this day and age.
So, while Gore of course was not "responsible for the invention of the internet", he can with a straight face lay claim to being a key supporter of the bill that brought it to the masses.
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
You are missing the whole point. Nobody thinks that Gore is delusional enough to actually believe that he invented the Internet, but his comments were so self-serving and clumsy that he deserves every bit of ridicule that he gets.
"The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom" - George W Bush
Frankly, I'd rather see him take the position of president.
Speaking as a respectibly left wing Democrat, I'd vote for Jobs over Nader in a heartbeat. Nader has simply shown zero ability for that kind of a job. When he says there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans, he's either lying, or an idiot. Who is president MATTERS, no matter what he says.
Leadership requires the right mix of idealism and pragmatism, and Nader badly fails that test. If he actually WON the presidency, he'd be disasterous at it. And since even he knows that he isn't going to win, running mainly makes him just the Perot-of-the-left, working as a spoiler to get Bush reelected.
My video compression blog
They make really good computers, cant we just stop there? Isn't that good enough? Do we need to build a tranluscent plastic alter?
So what you are saying is that Gore supported a bill on the back end that gave the nod to what was completely obvious.
I'm voting for the Woz!
So what you are saying is that Gore supported a bill on the back end that gave the nod to what was completely obvious.
Yes, it was completely obvious as you have so perspicaciously pointed out. However, it is useful to note how small the technology community was in the early 90's vs. the size it is today. Did you read Slashdot back in '93? Why, of course not! It didn't bloody well exist yet, genius!
Add to that how technologically clueless most politicians are even in this day and age, let alone way back then, I believe that Gore does indeed deserve credit for his vote on this issue.By the way, how have your elected officials voted on the DMCA?
To reiterate, it was completely obvious at that point, but only to a select few. It was a day when the internet (nee, arpanet!) was in use only by UNIX die-hards and nary a Windows user (unless she was already a Unix user).
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
OK, just for the sake of rebuttal:
Re 1: Actually, this shows an ability to say "I was wrong" and closing the chapter. And the Lisa wasn't entirely landfilled, as it came back as the deluxe "big brother" to the Macintosh (Macintosh XL, IIRC).
Re 2: You make is sound as if the Lisa was the reason Jobs left Apple, instead of the failed coup against John Sculley. That incident has left him with a lot of experience. As for NeXT, it let him develop the technologies that would let him "reconquor" Apple. His more recent history shows that he does learn from mistakes, despite what people say.
Re 3: This is different from the current administration how? Fleischer, Rove, Ashcroft and Rumsfeld are all great lovers of secret dealings. I think a President Jobs would deliver his State of the Union address in a black mock turtleneck with "Just one more thing"...
Re 4: No matter what you call it, it's effective marketing, and no different than what goes on in Washington almost every day. That, and your example is easily rebutted: how fast was the connection? How many bottlenects did you experience? Did you test loading loacal files to check the rendering engine speeds? You get my drift.
Still, I don't think Jobs is right for the job--at least not yet. I don't subscribe to the PHB philosophy that a good manager can manage everything. Managing a public office is a lot different from managing a company. If Steve really were interested, he'd run for a governor's post first.
. . . is to give the voting system a much-needed tweak. I think most people would agree that if Nader hadn't run, Gore would be president. There was a similar problematic election in France recently. The problem arises from the system of plurality voting, which can easily lead to the paradoxical result of a lesser desired candidate winning. While there are no perfect voting systems, there are much less imperfect ones, such as the Borda count, that would allow a candidate like Jobs to run without voters having to fear that their votes for him would have no chance of counting, or would only skew the election results insofar as they had any effect. Voting can be much more democratic than it currently is.
Here's a quote from an article I came across not too long ago on voting theory:
In some elections, any candidate can win, depending on which voting system is used, says Donald Saari of the University of California, Irvine. Consider 15 people deciding what beverage to serve at a party. Six prefer milk first, wine second, and beer third; five prefer beer first, wine second, and milk third; and four prefer wine first, beer second, and milk third. In a plurality vote, milk is the clear winner. But if the group decides instead to hold a runoff election between the two top contenders--milk and beer--then beer wins, since nine people prefer it over milk. And if the group awards two points to a drink each time a voter ranks it first and one point each time a voter ranks it second, suddenly wine is the winner. Although this is a concocted example, it's not an anomaly, Saari insists.
You can get the whole article, which gives a fair overview of various voting systems, at Science News, or if you prefer: http://www.sciencenews.org/20021102/bob8.asp
Vote as an individual; lemmings end up falling off cliffs. Camaraderie is no substitute for common sense, and being your own man will make you sleep better.
--Pierre S. du Pont
A few questions I have:
Does anyone outside of the US actually respect Dubya?
Has any other president of any other country had an email circulated soon after coming to power comparing him to a monkey?
What other leader has had a word coined after him/her for stupid things they have said? (And not just one or two stupid things but a whole books published of them.)
Has any other countries leader come to power in an undemocratic way and then gone on to proclaim he/she is defending democracy?