As a more dramatic addition to the story of projectile weapons, the Pope outlawed crossbows.
My details here are sketchy, but my understanding was that because of the terrific power of the crossbow to puncture platemail. Which meant that a commoner could kill a knight. Couldn't tell you which pope though.
While I agree insofar as materialism is the result of questionable moral choices, I've never felt that capitolism is an ideal means to manage scarce resources. And medicine is an excellent field in which to discuss this.
Antibiotics and HMOs. People are dying for the profits of others (kidney patients are more likely to stay on dialasis until they turn yellow and die than get a tranplant under HMOs. 20% more than not.) under a fairly well controlled capitolism.
Antibiotics are prescribed to patients who won't complete the cycle, breeding hardier germs. Anyone remember the TB upswing? And now, to push their products, dishsoap, "fresh" scent sprays, ever children's toys are being made antibacterial, which has the same effect, only moreso.
Which is not to mention the (I feel) natural push towards monopoly and the results that has for everyone. If nothing else, capitolism leads naturally to mediocre software. Compare Windows to Linux. One was produced by market pressure and voting with dollars. From the theory, you'd guess it was Linux.
I don't propone Socialism; people may be dumb, but a single person tends to be evil. I'd rather have herds of blind self-service than centralized enlightened self-service. I stil wonder about whether an alternative economic system would be possible...
What happens when two adjacent but opposite-flow time zones hit the exact same moment, then? They have to at some point, after all; it's a case of meeting in the middle.
While this is not as obvious as stated, it is provable. However, I wonder why it should confuse? The regions as described are not co-spacial, and for a moment would be co-temporal. But you and I are co-temporal at the moment. So what?
More interesting, I think, are the implications of entering such a region of space. Not the actual being there, so much, as considering the interface of normal and reverse time. (Now here's a "seems obvious" assertion: One region's reverse time is indistinguishable from the others. Betcha that's not true, but I can't say why...)
What I mean though is, so much elementary physics presumes that time flows in one direction (if not neccesarily at uniform speed). While the interface is singularly thin, there's a width where time is flowing one way on one side and the other on the other. Quick way to be out a watch, if you see what I mean...
You need to sequence the gene first. This is the long and costly part if I remember well. This is silly. The sequencing is the computer intensive part. You need to take the chunks you've got and attempt to line up the overlaps to make larger chunks. So passing out a hundred or a thousand or however many sequence chunks to be compared and good matches returned would be an excellent way of doing things. And would have the side effect of publishing results; necessarily you'd be handing out copies of the longer sequences you've established, until everyone who wants it has the whole sequence. (Although, I think it's kind of large, bitwise.:)
I strongly disagree. AIUI, DB2 was designed for one purpose: beating the Grandmaster. So, IMO, it was a bigger kludge than a hack. A hack would have been a general purpose chess program that could win. Not what amounted to a patch on DB1 so that it would be fit for one purpose.
While not a crypto expert, I do have a passing knowledge of RSA and some conception of digital security.
However, it seems to me that as stated, your problem has two immediate solutions. First is buffering bits until you have enough to properly encrypt. While you couldn't use full PGP in this (since digesting won't work), doesn't RSA operate on single chunks of the plaintext, so you could buffer to the appropriate length and use RSA. This might make your crypto vulnerable to frequency attacks, if they're appropriate to the plaintext.
It occurs to me that some sort of random delay on the buffered packets, together with ordering information within the encryption, would destroy this attack potential, though.
The other solution approached the shortcoming of the first that it infringes on the real-time-ness of the stream. For mission critical streaming, it might be sufficient to use a pad at the beginning of the message, determined by a challenge-response or some such. (Honestly, I have an even vaguer feeling for challenge-response crypto and security, so this might not be as helpful.) Anyhow, if a garbage string of sufficient length could be added to the beginning of messages, you could accomplish bit by bit encryption without loss of security in early communication.
Of the two, I definitely favor the first, if for nothing other than error checking. It also seems to be the more secure of the two, and a trade off in security to simultaneity can be made in the length of packets, in extreme cases, or for extreme control methods (or on noisy lines) and in the maximum shuffling that can occur. This results in fairly predictable delays, since the length of packets times the maximum hold order (how many packets late it'll be) gives the minimum buffer length required, and thus the minimum delay.
Again, you might use the second in cases where the demand for synchronization is so high that it defeats the first system. However, I'm still uncertain how to arrange for the padding. Perhaps more conventional PGP or something could be used to establish the transmission?
Finally, I'm honestly curious as to what other/.rs believe would be better: error checked(&corrected?) encrpytion, or encrpyted error checking. Again, maybe it doesn't matter if you aren't doing mission critical data, or data that can take errors okay, like voice or images, but in any other case, it should be required.
This may get Moderated as flamebait, but I'm really not trolling here. I personally am sick to death of reading and hearing about Nikola Tesla the misunderstood genius. From what I've seen as far as application, and from primary sources (published lectures) Tesla has always struck me as being enthralled by high voltage.
That's it. High voltage is cool. Some neat applications, and it doesn't work like the rest of electronics, since Kirkov's Laws cease to apply ( as they do at high magnetic flux and high frequency (an interesting point to recall as you continue to overclock ) ). And Tesla was a genius at producing high voltage current. But...
I find that too many people are too credulous when it comes to Tesla's claims of what he could make electricity do. I mean, the man claimed he could cure cancer with current.
He was enthusiastic, commendably so but a poor scientist. His presentation I was fortunate enough to read essentially ran "Lookit the cool spark!" He gushed about how high voltage was the solution to everything. And it really isn't. Tesla magnifiers terrifically clever, and make high voltage a reality in the garage. And there are defintely cool applications for them.
A lot of what he was talking about was blowing smoke. He had a lot of unscientific, unuseful theories. Like the Earth's "natural vibrations."
Pretty much he hit on some cool stuff and never accepted that it wasn't magic.
On the other hand, try looking into Micheal Faraday, who was to electronics what Gauss was to math. Before Ohms, he was experimenting with electric dissociation of chemical compounds, and relating it to current. And where Tesla was slinging EM fields without really knowing much about them, Faraday developed means to shield them out, and quantified what it took to shield from differing fields. (Faraday Cages.) Liken them to a kid making gas bombs and a geek developing internal combustion.
Are the various reprimands that might be leveled on Microsoft orthagonal or exclusionary? Is it possible that MS might be broken up into however many Baby Bills, and their trade secrets be revealed to their competitors? Or is each possibility contigient on the excision of the others?
How likely does it seem that Microsoft executives were unaware that what they were doing was illegal, or wrong? From interviews etc, I could easily believe as much of Mr Bill. Would that have any affect on a potential ruling?
Question 11 is (I think) a web spin on a short story by John Brunner called "Who Steals My Purse." I'd ruin it if I went much further, but I think the situation is so close to the story it would be hard to believe that the author of the exam hadn't read it.
Besides, Brunner is one of those authors, like Stephenson, who appeals greatly to the hacker in me. Brunner was predicting the internet in the mid Sixties. And a nomadic American populace, moving from job to job amazingly frequently. (The Shockwave Rider). Brunner was, in my opinion, more visionary than any other science fiction author, especially in the wisdom of his predictions.
In response to sliders etc, I do a little digital video work, and there are mixing boards for that, for crossfades etc (technically an A/B roll) and a special controller for doing the edit. A similar thing wouldn't be too difficult, especially with legacy hardware. YOu might need some EE experience, either your own or a friends. Essencially, the mixer slider is a really nice potentiometer. Use an A/D converter after contraining the amperage from the slider. Then all you need is a counter to get the freqeuncy output right. A PC parrellel port needs to supply a single signal ground and a clock pulse from your driver. The rest can be pulse based signals from your sliders. Kind of like servo control but not really. Hm. Then the driver is probably the hard part. Oh, you almost certainly will want a seperate AC power supply, but be sure a> to smooth the hell out of it with a serious peak detector and b> to isolate that from your signal source, or you'l fry that nice delicate circuitry, and/or your machine.
And this would have been monstrously successful, as evinced by the crushing success of X10 devices.:)
Embedding is a big deal now. Eleven years ago no one saw the point. Hell, today no one really sees the point. But the scene in the late '80s was very technophobic, encouraged by films like and Electric Dreams, all of which demonstrate how overempowered computers destroy people's lives. Hell, Electric Dreams was practically about computer controlled embedded systems going awry.
That might just be reasonable iff there was a huge market share held by a> any one player or b> any one disc press house. Then MAYBE they could pull that kind of nonsense and say "We have DVD2K!" and make it backwards compatible with the other side of the market's product. I suspect that a monopolistic player company would have an easier time of it.
Then they could redo the security of it, and expect results. Some extra features wouldn't hurt, but overall, all they'd really need to do is make the play. In the most ideal situation a partnership of two huge companies would be required: one to produce DVD2k players with backwards compatibility, and the other to make DVD2K discs out of all the new content they could lay hands on.
However, I don't think we are anywhere near that kind of situation. The cost-of-duplication argument aside (because it's silly; I heard that one when CD-R was just starting), to circumvent the clusterfuck they've invented would destroy the DVD market as it exists now. And it isn't firmly enough embedded for a changover.
If you report it, and it gets fixed, then kudos all round.
That'd be great, but the publicity of the thing is that you report it and They ignore you. This is Microsoft's second favorite game, after inflating mediocre products. IIRC, Back Orifice was created in response to a brushoff from MS.
Granted, the flip side is that when the glitch gets fixed, no one hears about it, since the company in question is desperate to keep that sort of information quiet.
Finally though, what would the fix have been in this case? Not to continue the license to XingDVD or RealNetworks? Their key would still be plaintext and useful for guessing new keys.
Furthermore, what could the fix be now? Scrap this DVD standard and replace it with a new one? A resurgance of DIVX(fie!)? You're dealing with an existing hardware market that is just beginning to take off that you would be completely destroying if you scrap the existing security. Any new security system would have to be a superset of the old one, which mean it would be no more secure.
Strictest definition of organic: including carbon. Until now, any serious carbon based chemicals are typically related to life. The only exception I can think of is elemental carbon crystals: graphite, diamond.
But the cool thing about organic circuitry is that there's no heat requirement. The energy required to impose order can be chemical. And one of the upshots of THAT is that the substrate doesn't need to resist high temperatures. So your LCD could go on mylar or some other plastic. Thus, unbreakable laptop displays. Or freaky lightshows as the inherent grid of the LCD is distorted.
Additionally, it would be theoretically possible to make circuits that could almost be painted on. For instance, what if UPC symbols were also radio transponders, so you really could just push your groceries through the checkout thingy. You Will...
As much as I'd prefer to have one device for all my comm needs (including a tidy little telnet etc), I wonder how well this will end up being implimented. Motorola has a fine history of decent chips, but the actual implimentation thereof will make or break the design.
I mean, while the idea of having a Vader sized portal-to-the-world is cool and all, I wonder how useful a monolithic design actually will end up being.
I certainly don't use my web browser for email or news. And not just because of the rampant security issues. IE and NS are okay for browsing, but their utility for other services sucks rocks. Why should I expect better from a R/O functionality set?
For how long has ZDNet been the mouthpiece of Microsoft? I remember when there were some useful and informative articles in their publications. Now several of their magazines look like they've succumbed to the increasingly blatant "MS Grassroots (a full owned and controlled subsidiary of Microsoft, Inc.)" campaign. It's kind of insulting to look into MacUser and be told I'd be better off on a Wintel box.
Heh. Reminds me of Microsoft Bob. Wasn't that a fascinating glimpse into the Microsoft User Experience Philosophy?
These are the same people who FROST their trees. They aren't thinking about eating them, or even thinking of them as alive, really.
Which actually makes these trees the perfect start for more intensive genetic manipulation. A sorry state where in order to gain acceptance, a branch of research has to stoop to frivolous applications. But if Americans (and, unfortunately, therefore the world) are going to accept recombindant DNA technologies, it will be in safe niches that they do. Meaning plants they don't eat. Animals are too 'alive'- a glow in the dark dog would be "wrong" in too many eyes, I think. And genetically engineered food has been too big an issue for too long. I'm all for glowing plants though. Or color patterns. Company logos. Whatever. Anything to get it into the public eye in an unthreatening way.
It seems to me I recall seeing an article in print about an herbicide that reversed photosynthesis, so that weeds literally glowed to death. Seems to me there were the typical herbicide problems of selectivity, but what if you used it as a tree additive? Seems to me you could get a nice soft glow much more cheaply than $330.
On the other hand, the tree might die too quickly. Why does the Xmas tree tradition suddenly seem cruel?
Additionally, is it just me, or do all 'Xian' injections into more profane media have to look like dirt? Screenshots of this game are repellent. The interface is 80's shareware-esque embossed blocks with Monoco status numbers. Blegh.
Also compare this to Dragon-Raid, (interested parties: ftp) the Christian role-playing game. Which, as a game system is more than a lot stupid. (Amongst other flaws, you are more likely to communicate with a badger than a blacksmith. All that time in the forge, I guess...)
There's an added similarity in that both include a moral trap/lesson. Choose Dark, and burn. I realize that it might be counter-productive to make the demon's role ultimately productive, but I've always hated long build ups to failure when I play a game. Just a personal issue.
It seems to me that the common sensical notion that money spent on a political campaign does equal to volume of speech is pretty accurate. We can rant on/. for days and reach nowhere near as many people as Rupert Murdoch could and Ted Turner can. Or MS, or Phillip Morris. What that means is that when there are candidates and issues that fall on economic lines, the Voice that gets heard is the voice with money. The flip side is that publicly financing political campaigns (if you include all statements endorsing or detracting a candidate) means ultimately either limiting how many people can say what they want (effectively putting a price, or a limit on 'free' speech) or financing the world. That's a tight little dillema, quite appart from "it cost my parents thousands to raise me, so are my political conjectures made by a PAC?" type absurdities. The absurdity is an artifact of the paradox. The real problem is that the ACLU and the FEC are both taking (fair typically) bloody-minded stances. Neither is taking a complex or realistic stand involving resolving this dillema. Rather the one wants to pave over the foundation the other wants to build on. And the fact is that the whole thing is built in the unexplored swamps.
There's a Mac only shareware company - Ambrosia Software that specialized in remaking old games. They put their own spin on them, modernize a bit, but basically the game is the same. Their most famous is Maelstrom, which is Asteroids. But they've also done a Centipede remake, and even a wierd Windows game called Jezeball (also known as Maxwell) got redone as Barrack. It's a decent example: the addition of some higher-power features and some attitude makes the games so Ambrosia that they never even mention the originals; and nobody really cares.
Slashdot Mirror
My details here are sketchy, but my understanding was that because of the terrific power of the crossbow to puncture platemail. Which meant that a commoner could kill a knight. Couldn't tell you which pope though.
Antibiotics and HMOs. People are dying for the profits of others (kidney patients are more likely to stay on dialasis until they turn yellow and die than get a tranplant under HMOs. 20% more than not.) under a fairly well controlled capitolism.
Antibiotics are prescribed to patients who won't complete the cycle, breeding hardier germs. Anyone remember the TB upswing? And now, to push their products, dishsoap, "fresh" scent sprays, ever children's toys are being made antibacterial, which has the same effect, only moreso.
Which is not to mention the (I feel) natural push towards monopoly and the results that has for everyone. If nothing else, capitolism leads naturally to mediocre software. Compare Windows to Linux. One was produced by market pressure and voting with dollars. From the theory, you'd guess it was Linux.
I don't propone Socialism; people may be dumb, but a single person tends to be evil. I'd rather have herds of blind self-service than centralized enlightened self-service. I stil wonder about whether an alternative economic system would be possible...
While this is not as obvious as stated, it is provable. However, I wonder why it should confuse? The regions as described are not co-spacial, and for a moment would be co-temporal. But you and I are co-temporal at the moment. So what?
More interesting, I think, are the implications of entering such a region of space. Not the actual being there, so much, as considering the interface of normal and reverse time. (Now here's a "seems obvious" assertion: One region's reverse time is indistinguishable from the others. Betcha that's not true, but I can't say why...)
What I mean though is, so much elementary physics presumes that time flows in one direction (if not neccesarily at uniform speed). While the interface is singularly thin, there's a width where time is flowing one way on one side and the other on the other. Quick way to be out a watch, if you see what I mean...
You need to sequence the gene first. This is the long and costly part if I remember well. This is silly. The sequencing is the computer intensive part. You need to take the chunks you've got and attempt to line up the overlaps to make larger chunks. So passing out a hundred or a thousand or however many sequence chunks to be compared and good matches returned would be an excellent way of doing things. And would have the side effect of publishing results; necessarily you'd be handing out copies of the longer sequences you've established, until everyone who wants it has the whole sequence. (Although, I think it's kind of large, bitwise.:)
I strongly disagree. AIUI, DB2 was designed for one purpose: beating the Grandmaster. So, IMO, it was a bigger kludge than a hack. A hack would have been a general purpose chess program that could win. Not what amounted to a patch on DB1 so that it would be fit for one purpose.
However, it seems to me that as stated, your problem has two immediate solutions. First is buffering bits until you have enough to properly encrypt. While you couldn't use full PGP in this (since digesting won't work), doesn't RSA operate on single chunks of the plaintext, so you could buffer to the appropriate length and use RSA. This might make your crypto vulnerable to frequency attacks, if they're appropriate to the plaintext.
It occurs to me that some sort of random delay on the buffered packets, together with ordering information within the encryption, would destroy this attack potential, though.
The other solution approached the shortcoming of the first that it infringes on the real-time-ness of the stream. For mission critical streaming, it might be sufficient to use a pad at the beginning of the message, determined by a challenge-response or some such. (Honestly, I have an even vaguer feeling for challenge-response crypto and security, so this might not be as helpful.) Anyhow, if a garbage string of sufficient length could be added to the beginning of messages, you could accomplish bit by bit encryption without loss of security in early communication.
Of the two, I definitely favor the first, if for nothing other than error checking. It also seems to be the more secure of the two, and a trade off in security to simultaneity can be made in the length of packets, in extreme cases, or for extreme control methods (or on noisy lines) and in the maximum shuffling that can occur. This results in fairly predictable delays, since the length of packets times the maximum hold order (how many packets late it'll be) gives the minimum buffer length required, and thus the minimum delay.
Again, you might use the second in cases where the demand for synchronization is so high that it defeats the first system. However, I'm still uncertain how to arrange for the padding. Perhaps more conventional PGP or something could be used to establish the transmission?
Finally, I'm honestly curious as to what other /.rs believe would be better: error checked(&corrected?) encrpytion, or encrpyted error checking. Again, maybe it doesn't matter if you aren't doing mission critical data, or data that can take errors okay, like voice or images, but in any other case, it should be required.
That's it. High voltage is cool. Some neat applications, and it doesn't work like the rest of electronics, since Kirkov's Laws cease to apply ( as they do at high magnetic flux and high frequency (an interesting point to recall as you continue to overclock ) ). And Tesla was a genius at producing high voltage current. But...
I find that too many people are too credulous when it comes to Tesla's claims of what he could make electricity do. I mean, the man claimed he could cure cancer with current.
He was enthusiastic, commendably so but a poor scientist. His presentation I was fortunate enough to read essentially ran "Lookit the cool spark!" He gushed about how high voltage was the solution to everything. And it really isn't. Tesla magnifiers terrifically clever, and make high voltage a reality in the garage. And there are defintely cool applications for them.
A lot of what he was talking about was blowing smoke. He had a lot of unscientific, unuseful theories. Like the Earth's "natural vibrations."
Pretty much he hit on some cool stuff and never accepted that it wasn't magic.
On the other hand, try looking into Micheal Faraday, who was to electronics what Gauss was to math. Before Ohms, he was experimenting with electric dissociation of chemical compounds, and relating it to current. And where Tesla was slinging EM fields without really knowing much about them, Faraday developed means to shield them out, and quantified what it took to shield from differing fields. (Faraday Cages.) Liken them to a kid making gas bombs and a geek developing internal combustion.
But that's plenty ranting today.
Besides, Brunner is one of those authors, like Stephenson, who appeals greatly to the hacker in me. Brunner was predicting the internet in the mid Sixties. And a nomadic American populace, moving from job to job amazingly frequently. (The Shockwave Rider). Brunner was, in my opinion, more visionary than any other science fiction author, especially in the wisdom of his predictions.
In response to sliders etc, I do a little digital video work, and there are mixing boards for that, for crossfades etc (technically an A/B roll) and a special controller for doing the edit. A similar thing wouldn't be too difficult, especially with legacy hardware. YOu might need some EE experience, either your own or a friends. Essencially, the mixer slider is a really nice potentiometer. Use an A/D converter after contraining the amperage from the slider. Then all you need is a counter to get the freqeuncy output right. A PC parrellel port needs to supply a single signal ground and a clock pulse from your driver. The rest can be pulse based signals from your sliders. Kind of like servo control but not really. Hm. Then the driver is probably the hard part. Oh, you almost certainly will want a seperate AC power supply, but be sure a> to smooth the hell out of it with a serious peak detector and b> to isolate that from your signal source, or you'l fry that nice delicate circuitry, and/or your machine.
Embedding is a big deal now. Eleven years ago no one saw the point. Hell, today no one really sees the point. But the scene in the late '80s was very technophobic, encouraged by films like and Electric Dreams, all of which demonstrate how overempowered computers destroy people's lives. Hell, Electric Dreams was practically about computer controlled embedded systems going awry.
Then they could redo the security of it, and expect results. Some extra features wouldn't hurt, but overall, all they'd really need to do is make the play. In the most ideal situation a partnership of two huge companies would be required: one to produce DVD2k players with backwards compatibility, and the other to make DVD2K discs out of all the new content they could lay hands on.
However, I don't think we are anywhere near that kind of situation. The cost-of-duplication argument aside (because it's silly; I heard that one when CD-R was just starting), to circumvent the clusterfuck they've invented would destroy the DVD market as it exists now. And it isn't firmly enough embedded for a changover.
That'd be great, but the publicity of the thing is that you report it and They ignore you. This is Microsoft's second favorite game, after inflating mediocre products. IIRC, Back Orifice was created in response to a brushoff from MS.
Granted, the flip side is that when the glitch gets fixed, no one hears about it, since the company in question is desperate to keep that sort of information quiet.
Finally though, what would the fix have been in this case? Not to continue the license to XingDVD or RealNetworks? Their key would still be plaintext and useful for guessing new keys.
Furthermore, what could the fix be now? Scrap this DVD standard and replace it with a new one? A resurgance of DIVX(fie!)? You're dealing with an existing hardware market that is just beginning to take off that you would be completely destroying if you scrap the existing security. Any new security system would have to be a superset of the old one, which mean it would be no more secure.
But the cool thing about organic circuitry is that there's no heat requirement. The energy required to impose order can be chemical. And one of the upshots of THAT is that the substrate doesn't need to resist high temperatures. So your LCD could go on mylar or some other plastic. Thus, unbreakable laptop displays. Or freaky lightshows as the inherent grid of the LCD is distorted.
Additionally, it would be theoretically possible to make circuits that could almost be painted on. For instance, what if UPC symbols were also radio transponders, so you really could just push your groceries through the checkout thingy. You Will...
I mean, while the idea of having a Vader sized portal-to-the-world is cool and all, I wonder how useful a monolithic design actually will end up being.
I certainly don't use my web browser for email or news. And not just because of the rampant security issues. IE and NS are okay for browsing, but their utility for other services sucks rocks. Why should I expect better from a R/O functionality set?
Heh. Reminds me of Microsoft Bob. Wasn't that a fascinating glimpse into the Microsoft User Experience Philosophy?
Which actually makes these trees the perfect start for more intensive genetic manipulation. A sorry state where in order to gain acceptance, a branch of research has to stoop to frivolous applications. But if Americans (and, unfortunately, therefore the world) are going to accept recombindant DNA technologies, it will be in safe niches that they do. Meaning plants they don't eat. Animals are too 'alive'- a glow in the dark dog would be "wrong" in too many eyes, I think. And genetically engineered food has been too big an issue for too long. I'm all for glowing plants though. Or color patterns. Company logos. Whatever. Anything to get it into the public eye in an unthreatening way.
On the other hand, the tree might die too quickly. Why does the Xmas tree tradition suddenly seem cruel?
Also compare this to Dragon-Raid, (interested parties: ftp) the Christian role-playing game. Which, as a game system is more than a lot stupid. (Amongst other flaws, you are more likely to communicate with a badger than a blacksmith. All that time in the forge, I guess...)
There's an added similarity in that both include a moral trap/lesson. Choose Dark, and burn. I realize that it might be counter-productive to make the demon's role ultimately productive, but I've always hated long build ups to failure when I play a game. Just a personal issue.
It seems to me that the common sensical notion that money spent on a political campaign does equal to volume of speech is pretty accurate. We can rant on /. for days and reach nowhere near as many people as Rupert Murdoch could and Ted Turner can. Or MS, or Phillip Morris. What that means is that when there are candidates and issues that fall on economic lines, the Voice that gets heard is the voice with money. The flip side is that publicly financing political campaigns (if you include all statements endorsing or detracting a candidate) means ultimately either limiting how many people can say what they want (effectively putting a price, or a limit on 'free' speech) or financing the world. That's a tight little dillema, quite appart from "it cost my parents thousands to raise me, so are my political conjectures made by a PAC?" type absurdities. The absurdity is an artifact of the paradox. The real problem is that the ACLU and the FEC are both taking (fair typically) bloody-minded stances. Neither is taking a complex or realistic stand involving resolving this dillema. Rather the one wants to pave over the foundation the other wants to build on. And the fact is that the whole thing is built in the unexplored swamps.
There's a Mac only shareware company - Ambrosia Software that specialized in remaking old games. They put their own spin on them, modernize a bit, but basically the game is the same. Their most famous is Maelstrom, which is Asteroids. But they've also done a Centipede remake, and even a wierd Windows game called Jezeball (also known as Maxwell) got redone as Barrack. It's a decent example: the addition of some higher-power features and some attitude makes the games so Ambrosia that they never even mention the originals; and nobody really cares.