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The First E-President
Szentigrade writes "Popular Science is running a letter by Daniel Engber of the online Slate Magazine in which he offers the US Presidential nominees advice on using the full potential of the Internet upon their election into office. Some examples discussed in the letter include: a project already being developed that speeds up the patent approval process, a UK site that aims to improve government-citizen interactions, and perhaps most importantly, a call for government information to be 'presented in a standardized and widely used data format, like XML, so that anyone — in or out of government — could use and reconfigure it however they pleased.' Will 2009 be the first year of the E-President?"
He's just starting to learn to use "the Google". And YouTube? He thinks the internet is just a big truck you dump everything on!
Anybody want my mod points?
If the "E" stands for "ebony", then yeah, probably.
in previous elections, grassroots fundraising was small time. dean certainly created buzz in 2004, and $, on the internet, but by far, obama has shown that internet fundraising is a tsunami. it dwarfs the old-boy network and other sources of funding
i think a lot of us lament the influence of money in american democracy. but i think this is the first election you would ever have republicans siding with that sentiment
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The government has a problem giving information to the people, so it decides to use XML... now it has two problems.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
XML can be used for documents. just because it has broader uses doesn't mean it can't be used as a document format.
besides, OOXML, ODF, and XHTML are all based on XML--meaning they all validate as XML documents.
From personal experience of the UK gov petitions site - many times over - it has no effect whatsoever. It's a sham, a deflection for discontentment, a way of saying they are listening to your concerns without actually doing anything about them. All that happens - no matter how many thousands of signatures a petition gets - is that it ends and then a boilerplate response says how they understand your concerns but you're wrong. It has as much effect as all the millions of protesters in London had on us going to war in Iraq. It makes you realize how little say you have and it's very depressing. As has been said before about voting - taking part only legitimises a corrupt system.
The real "full potential of the internet" is that it allows the government to ignore people on a more massive scale than ever before.
I think it is time that we ask both major Presidential candidates to submit code samples. Bonus points will be awarded if they submit the code in Perl, Assembly, or FORTRAN.
Lets be fair to both candidates. Switch settings for a bombe should be acceptable.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Many government agencies have to release public information whenever asked, including the school I used to work for. However, you have to figure out who to ask, and make an appointment, then fill out forms, then sometimes pay a small copying fee, then they give you copies of their budgets. Why the hell aren't all government agencies (especially the small, local ones!) putting this info on the web? I brought this up to the dean of finance and she damn near had a stroke! I would love, as a taxpayer, to be able to delve into a file of stuff, and see for myself exactly where the money goes, rather than look at the shiny charts that break it down into a couple of very generic areas. I know there are privacy implications, but you could list how much you pay for salaries in different areas/departments. Perhaps clump all office supply purchases into one line item. It really can't be that hard, but nobody wants to, and no taxpayers are demanding it.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Maybe they'll even appoint a Secretary of the Internet!
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
I think it is time that we ask both major Presidential candidates to submit code samples. Bonus points will be awarded if they submit the code in Perl, Assembly, or FORTRAN.
I think blub would be most appropriate.
Developers: We can use your help.
perhaps one of the greatest benefits of IT is the possibility of establishing a direct democracy on a national scale through online referendums.
gone are the days when logistical obstacles prevented the public from directly participating in the legislative process. there's really no excuse to not involve the public in public policy decisions and create a participatory democracy at the federal level.
a government of the people, by the people, for the people, is not just a catchy phrase from the Gettysburg Address. if we want to continue to call ourselves a democracy, then we need to actually employ a democratic system of government that carries out the will of the people.
I imagine the issue is simply money. It would cost a lot of programming time to put something good together, especially spread across all of the local departments.
The only way to convince them to do it (without major public demand) would be to show it would somehow save them money in the long run. Maybe automating output in standard formats would allow other common systems to aggregate reports and generate graphs, saving manual labor, for example.
Developers: We can use your help.
"there's really no excuse to not involve the public in public policy decisions and create a participatory democracy at the federal level."
Are you insane?
In many ways, it's You Tube that's killed the Republican coalition between fiscal conservatives (libertarians), social conservatives, and the "National Greatness" conservatives (the neo-cons, more or less.)
Obama's campaign helped the Republicans self-destruct by aggressively running a 50-state campaign, not a 50% +1 campaign. This meant that the RNC had to run ads to shore up its base in formerly secure red states. The problem is, the message that rallies the base - using "liberal" as a smear word, attacking patriotism, etc - alienates the middle. An ad attacking the Democrats in North Carolina will be seen by voters in New Hampshire and Minnesota, and they will find it repellent. Meanwhile, Obama does not have to appeal to the far left to mobilize his base, and his base is already extremely well mobilized. He is more or less in a situation where he never has to apologize or be sheepish about any ad with "I'm Barack Obama, and I approve this message" on it, while a lot of the John McCain ads are frankly embarrassing.
The result is Republican meltdown. Fiscal conservatives already suspect that it may be easier, as in the Clinton era, to get fiscally conservative policy out of a Dem administration than out of the Republicans. It's definitely easier to push fiscal conservatism in the Democratic party than it is to push social liberalism in the Republican one. Now, the tensions between the generally secular neo-cons and the religious social conservatives (many of whom, like Huckabee, are actually comfortable with a government that provides a lot of services) is being reflected in the cracks between McCain's camp and Palin's camp.
I think what YouTube has done is put an asterisk next to Tip O'Neill's old axiom that "all politics are local." That asterisk is "but all communications are global."
a government of the people, by the people, for the people, is not just a catchy phrase from the Gettysburg Address. if we want to continue to call ourselves a democracy, then we need to actually employ a democratic system of government that carries out the will of the people.
"Direct democracy," no matter how well intentioned, is a recipe for dystopia. Every democracy worth living in has mechanisms set up to protect individuals from "the will of the people."
We don't "need" to make radical changes, at all. Sorry to get all conservative on you, but given such a high level of complexity, a established system, incorporating countless bug-fixes, is preferable to a complete re-write. A similar principle applies to software developement.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
The last thing that the neo-cons want is for more government-citizen interaction and less secrecy in their more 'sensitive' actions. The less that the citizens know, the better! All this government-citizen interaction just gets in the way of what they believe a government is supposed to do: give away hundreds of billions of dollars to sleazy corrupt hedge-fund managers and mercenary corporations, and to then just disappear when it's completely broke (along with everyone's pensions and 401-K plans).
Would anyone want to be entrusted to have to try and explain anything technical to Sarah Palin? The first DAZ-MO president (dumb-as-shit mommy)! God, I've got hundreds of them trying to drive their space shuttles (huge SUVs) around town, occasionally flipping them over and crashing into poles because they haven't quite mastered the art of feeding the kids, dialing the phone, changing the DVD, and driving a huge truck-sized vehicle in dense highway traffic.
And a Palin presidency? Just tell her that "this is what America wants and needs", make a huge payoff to the people who are really deciding the policies, and walk off with the billion-dollar no-bid contracts. Two months of a Palin presidency and even the staunchest liberals will be begging the military to take over the country. Just don't shoot us, please. Shoot them, instead. You know who we mean.
Jeez.
my comment would bring out the partisan hacks
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Right answer, wrong explanation. if they made it obvious and easily accesible to figure out where all of the money went, it would make it that much harder for any of it to stick to their hands. You really think people are willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars just to get a 6-figure salary, a comped mansion and an impressive title for a couple of years? You think that such people could actually manage to win?
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess you're voting for Obama, not McCain?
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Bonus points will be awarded if they submit the code in Perl, Assembly, or FORTRAN.
Bonus points if the same source works in 3 or more languages, see http://www0.us.ioccc.org/1986/applin.c
a UK site that aims to improve government-citizen interactions,
Hahahaha. Have you ever read any of the replies to the petitions on the no.10 e-petitions site? I don't know of a single one that actually worked. Usually it's either "we're already doing this, honest" or "you don't understand the benefits of what you're signing against!"
It really serves no other purpose other than to make people think they're doing something when really they're not.