Yes, that's what I think each time I hear about ISP's misconduct.
But if I remember correctly, Comcast or some other big ISP was enforcing their throttling on smaller ISP's traffic because they were the ones ultimately carrying it; the smaller ISPs were just detailers for the big one.
Do we have the problem here? Also, is there an equivalent of TekSavvy in the US?
So if the marginal profit on a $400 digital camera is about (total guess) $150 bucks, and MSFT only demands the advertiser pay a cost per action, then that's $150 dollars of value that can be shared by a) Sony/Canon/whoever, b) Microsoft, and c) the USER!
The point here is that it doesn't even matter if Google offers better search now! Going forward, I'll probably product search/research on Google, but go over to Microsoft to make the all-important final decision (because it's plainly the rational decision - my product WILL be cheaper)!
This probably won't work; the camera would have to be advertised on micorsoft's search for this; and if it is, it will probably be more expensive than from the shop you found from google's search, which already refunds money from google, in the sense that the company didn't pay for that link. Google is effectively refunding 100% of it's margin on that link, since it is not advertisment!
You are confusing search results and advertisments near the search results; microsoft is saying it will offer better advertisments; but no one chooses where to shop, or what newspaper to read, for the advertisments! In that case you would just head to a discount hunting website.
No, you choose your search engine based on the better results, and then, you don't mind that the website profit from the 1% of attention you have to spare to look at an ad. Ads make money when you don't mind to shop without really comparing anything.
it isn't the same as BigWallet, which essentially just shared the already offered referral deals with you (half a percent of the sale, usually). Who said that this rebate to microsoft's users will be more than half a percent? Did the guys who got paid to surf the internet with extra ads make a lot of money?
I could be wrong, but all DNS does is resolve a domain (e.g. en.wikipedia.org) to an IP address (e.g. 208.80.152.2). So they could redirect you to a completely different website, but not just a different page. Also, because of the way DNS data is usually cached all over the place, they would only see one request per domain during all of your browsing, if that. But If ther send you to a bogus wikipedia IP, this one can in turn convert all your queries to wikipedia, except some that it meddle with (man in the middle attack). And you only need to highjack the name once (caching will cache the bogus IP).
Just a precision: the great firewall of China, or your ISP, has the same power (man in the middle possibility). But as in the p2p throttling case, once people detect it, they know that the culprit is the ISP.
Also, an ISP from an other country will not be able to affect you; but that root server effect is world-wide.
Of course (IIRC), the US always had their hand on a server with that kind of privilege. But again, meddling with it would have directly incriminated the US.
You guys are awefully optimistic; those who pulled that off had an enormous power for a short time. Quoting TFA:
In general, they could engage in all sorts of mischief, ranging from very targeted ("let's get this one individual or organization") to very wide-ranging ("let's blow away.com today"). all the while completly undetected. I don't understand all the details, but from what I got the whole name resolving is a trust based system; so advertising a false youtube domain would temporarly work, but then you'd be busted and left with no karma. Except that these "root servers" are free of those constraint.
The fact that those who did this had huge resources do not make it less scary, neither does the fact that nobody detected anything. Remeber how that guy operated a tor exit node to get a whole lot of interesting datas; the idea here is the same.
(A concrete example would be to send your wikipedia request to a bogus wikipedia website. It would forward all your queries to the real wikipedia, so you couldn't tell the difference (man in the middle), but on some pages it would serve you an altered page; it could also make you feel like you wrote an article, but the article would actually only show up on your copy of the bogus website, not the real one. Encryption twarts this, otherwise it's really the worst case scenario.)
And apparently, there is nothing to prevent it from happening again. Since people seem so little concerend, I must have missed some detail which makes everything fine; or at least I really hope so.
If I were living in China, I'd be wary (and probably afraid) of speaking out against gov't censorship and control of the Internet. An excellent point, as when you answer that kind of survey, the government knows your exact address.
I still think that most chinese do agree with the censorship; after all, they have been brain-washed into beleiving that the internet is dangerous.
It is a unavoidable problem in democracy: if you are advocating for democracy, you can't justify ingerence if the people concerned don't want it; even if you think that they are brain-washed/wrong.
But in that case, we have a good hint at something that makes sense: only take into account the opinion of people who actually know what they are talking about. That someone who has never used the internet beleive it to be addictive, that someone who has never read western medias beleive them to be only lies, those are not very pertinent.
It's the same as all those journalists saying how violent a video game is, without having played it.
I said marketing, that is, the art of making things look better than they are. You can advertise your product without using marketing techniques, the same way that you can ask for some laws (and say why) without lobbying. (I didn't add that distinction in my post because it was long enough already.)
For example, paying millions to a specialised firm to realise a TV spot falls in the marketing category. If there was a will to reduce marketing, you could forbid claims that are not proven, intrusive ads, put a cap on marketing budget (*), etc.
I'm not saying that it would be easy to forbid marketing; only that you can't justify it in the ideology of capitalism. Actually, I don't mind marketing that much (I don't listen to it), I was just showing that even marketing, which is regarded as completly normal, goes against the interest of the buyers. An other way of saying it is that, from a global point of view, marketing is counter-productive. I think it makes it the perfect example to prove that sellers are opponents, and not your friends.
As for the fact that ads are a source of information, come on. If there were no ads, and if we still felt a need for information on some products, normal medias would fit the gap nicely. When you decide to shop for a computer, do you watch ads on TV or do you look up some specialised websites/newspapers?
Capitalism is a game in which buyers and sellers are oppenents.
Saying "the market decides" means that the power is all in the hands of the buyers: that's when you can say that "the market will make better products appear": better meaning better for the buyer. This is the ideology which justifies capitalism: the people are the buyers, and the law are (supposed to be) made for the people's sake.
But this is just one extreme in the balance of power between the two players; and just finding a good example for it is difficult. The best one is probably gas stations: you know exactly what you are buying, and you can easily check an other one, so the margins are (I guess) pretty low. But in many cases, the balance weights heavily toward the seller. We all know the reasons: using people's mistakes (lottery, complicated billing), forced buying (bundling, etc), monopoly (or any alliance of sellers against buyers), control of the information, control of the law (lobbying).
All thoses are limitted or forbidden by the law, because they all go against the people's interest. Even marketing, when you think about it, is pretty absurd since it openly tries to make a deal seem better than it really is for buyer. The only moral justification you can think of to allow marketing is that a company will only have the money to run ads if it is successful; this takes for granted that success is mostly the result of the company's real usefulness to the people. In short, marketing is only justified if it does not change the relative success of companies! (Note: you can't justify marketing just by freedom of speech, which is intended for cases when the law should stay neutral in the fight between two parties, as in a trial; there is no reason not to favor the people against the sellers. Except for international competitivity; it's often an easy excuse, but it's a valid point and a wider discussion).
Of course, the other cases (monopoly, bundling) are even harder to justify; but the worse is certainly lobbying. The simple idea that sellers could affect the law is utterly absurd, and lobbying is the best indicator of the power balance. In France -and I guess most countries- it's simply called corruption (which does not mean it doesn't happen).
And by the way: the internet has the potential to take a lot of power away from the sellers. Before Ebay, some companies made profit just by providing the organisation that buyers lacked. Things can really change; that is, if we don't let them rewrite the laws too much with the power they have left.
And thus your purchase will raise the number of "customers who preferred the professional quality of Windows(TM)".
To me, the whole point of the eee is that it finally lets linux and windows have an unbiased competition with the market for judge: people won't just keep windows because it's preinstalled ( except of course taking linux still means "switching" to something less familliar).
If I was australian and wanted to buy one, I'd throw in the extra cash to show that linux users exist as a demographic.
That reminds me, yesterday I was configuring my new ubuntu install for the net, and I just couln't connect: none of my queries (typed in the firefox address bar) worked, and pinging google also didn't work.
And then, after testing pretty much every other possible cause I could think of, I tried an other server. And, it was google that was down:)
I guess we always get surprised when that big a site goes dead, even for ten minutes.
1) Not a community run website (no accountability). Apparently users cannot submit articles, and they can post comments to stories, but with no assurance that it will really show up. Check out boingboing's new crazy comment policy if you don't think this can be a problem. Excerpt (from boingboing):
Q. One of my comments has disappeared!
A. There are several possibilities. One is that we may be having technical problems. It never hurts to write and ask. Another possibility is that someone thought your comment would be better gone. Of course, as long as the website has no real importance, and as long as you completly trust the site's admins, there is no problem. But I think the last wikipedia scandals showed it's not a good attitude.
2) Only provides information for buying goods, so the actions of the website's reader are not automaticaly coordinated. If it was an association that you payed every month to have them buy stuff for you, but letting them chosing the brands, it would have far more impact.
Right now, a negative article on that site means that some of the site's members (those who read the article) might not buy that product (if they agree/remeber). And their is no way to know what those numbers actually are.
If everyone's action were determined by the global vote, then a negative vote would mean that all sales made by the association will cease (or all the stocks possessed by the site will be sold, if we take my idea). That's a lot more intimidating for the given company.
This seems so obvious; did no one had (the courage to have) that idea before?
That said, "special attorneys" with security clearence are not that good of a solution if they are a small group and no one has to right to check on what they did.
Plus, I would hate to see a whole "secret justice" aside from the normal one. What I mean is that cogress rejected the idea of "secret laws" a while ago, and I wouldn't want the governement to use "secret attorneys" as a way to push that idea again.
precision: what I mean with the EFF analogy is that, if you "can't be bothered" with getting informed and voting, you can just buy the 300$ of stocks, and not vote. That way you trust the other users of the webiste to do the voting and information gathering, the same way you trust the EFF.
Some times you care enough to spend 300$, but not enough to do the actual activism, or even to get informed well enough; for example, people who give to the EFF would not know what precise law to fight, but they know that the EFF does it well and serves their objectives.
Plus, those 300$ are an investment; you might get a little less money from it than from a standard stock set, but that's all. It's just that, in the current stock exchange, big stock-holders are the only one able to quickly affect the policy of a company. But if many small stock-holders unite, they should be able to do it too.
I'm not sure I'd want to invest in an oil company or someone else with a lousy record, even if I had a say in what they did. All it'd amount to was giving them my money.
Sure, that kind of fund would only invest in companies with good ethics; but even those will do some questionnable stuff, and that's when it's important to influence their actions with stock holder's votes.
Maybe we should instead find companies that are doing good, and then invest in / buy from them, rather than their competitors. We wouldn't need a website to co-ordinate this, either, as there are plenty of sites dedicated to "ethical consumerism" already. Well, i'm not aware of those sites (could you give me some links?), but it seems different from having a monolithic community, where all actions will always be co-ordinated. You get a lot more power that way.
The difference with a standard website is that you've already given a credit card number at this point. Credit cards are linked to names, and this identification is controlled by the banking system.
This is as solid as it get (so much that I actually hate it when any shop can have your full identity this way, with no way of spoofing it).
Of course rich people/companies could still pay someone to vote in their name, or send their employees, but then that's true of real elections too. Actually, I think this would be a bit more secure than standard elections! (what with the tracability, password and all.)
Just a precision: It can seem like that idea focuses only on western consumers (like influencing a software companie's choces or stuff like this), but when you look at the role of oil companies in affecting the stability of some african governments (including dictatorships), or the importance of economic embargo in diplomatic relations, you'll see it can be much more than that.
IMHO, one of the best way to use the democratic power of the internet would be to have internet communities buying stocks.
A bit like the so called "ethic funds" who buy stocks in companies with good ethics first, then try to influence the companie's decision according to that agenda (which many entities do, only they do so with an "ethic" agenda in mind")
As an optimistic person, I think that if the mass of internet users did that, they would be more powerful than the few rich people right now (that might need some math).
As for the details (in bulk):
- A central website, looking something like slashdot or wikipedia (although with far higher standards for accountability, no special power to foundators, or even better, a system with no admins (every modification on the site is automatic and public, with a hash system to prevent tempering).
- Someone's vote is weighted by the amount of money he gave to the site, but with a low (300$?) cap; you can invest more (and get the proportional revenues), but your voting power is capped.
- People vote for the stocks to be bought, and for the common voice of the community in stock holder's vote. Since an account is linked to real money, you don't have most of the problems with votes on the internet (bots, etc).
That would give more power to "public opinion", which oterwise tends to be to often disregarded. Even if the community is small, it's power can already tip the balance in many cases; think about the EFF, for exemple. With that kind of money, even if you can be majoritary share holder, you can already buy ads in the New York Times or things like that, and break the barrier for entering the "rich people/big companies club".
Well that's a change. For once a counterfeited items seems a little bit dangerous.
That's a much better job as scaring us to support the anticounterfeit capains than the previous stuff.
I mean, I've seen those ads saying "counterfeited items can kill" with a teddy bear ready to burn a child alive because he's not fireproof, and I must say it felt a little bit too much.
The fact that the financial loss they claim is mostly due to fake Rolexes, Channel stuff and the like doesn't help. I mean, how many people who buy a fake Rolex could afford a real one?
Still, I don't see how those Cisco conterfeits could be that bad; I mean, if it's critical equipement, of course you'll have to know where it comes from (and I don't see how real Cisco servers made in China would be a lot less of a risk).
If you do not wish to submit to being scanned/searched/whatever, you can take a bus, a cab, or your own personal transportation. No one is restricting your ability to get from point A to point B, there are no traffic control points with Gestapo'd brownshirts saying "papers please." Please. How can you travel to anywhere in the US without taking a plane? and how about going to Europe? I remember the story about that guy who wanted to give a talk in the US, and got blocked at the airport for a no-fly-list reason. That way he couldn't give his talk (3 days delay). Gestapo you said?
So, in your eyes, asking someone to submit to a thorough search of their person and belongings in order to guard against the possession of bombs (see Pan Am Flight 103), boxcutters (see 9/11) or guns (more than I can easily cite), is...unreasonable. Yeah...right...Okaaay. I see you quoted two terrorist events. Could you give a number that will show how it is more likely than winning the lottery? Or remind us why security experts couln't obtain the guards near the plane itslef that they asked for, instead of the useless checkpoints? (Rethorical questions; don't lose too much time on this!) Yes, It's an unreasonable infringement of privacy, because it's useless and gives an unreasonable amount of power to airport "cops", with apparently no counterpower.
And explain to me how it is constitutional that "eastern looking" people systematicaly spend twice the time boarding their plane (when they can).
Perhaps one day you'll get your wish. Maybe it'll be the day Abdullah and Hassan decide to blow up the plane you're riding in. Well that answers my question about your fear of racial discrimination I guess. But you can feel safe: all people whose name are Hassan are on the no fly list! Why? because it could be an alias for Hussein! And by the way, the ghosts of the terrorist who killed themselves on 9/11 will not be able to board, either! And for those who happen to have the same name? It's just bad luck.
But when the researchers looked for this, shouldn't that looking have caused the metaphorical pot to be watched thus inducing the effect, or had no one tried to measure this simply because they knew the reaction didn't take long enough (or shouldn't, ignoring quantum mechanics)?
I didn't have any serious courses on quantum-anything, but I think you are taking this way to "philosophically". "Observation" here actually just means interaction with a nearby atom.
I think that the idea is that the atom is in an "undefined" state (or rather, multiple states at once), and that having an interaction (which should depend on the state) forces it to chose between states. Once this happens (in the bird's retina), I don't think any further interaction can affect anything, and certainly not something as indirect as a human looking at the bird. Confusion arise because of the words "observation", "retina" and looking" in the same topic.
That said, I had the impression that those kind of quantum weirdness (like the living-dead cat) were a good hint that those thing can never scale up to act uppon the "regular" world, were everything is a result of statistics (like air pressure which is the statistical sum of random movement). A good exemple is how intricated atoms could theorically convert information at faster than light speed, but if you actually want to use it then the observation equipement needed will keep you under light speed (and it's not something you can get around). So if this turns out to be true, I will be quite amased.
Bonus questions: The article said that had proved this by using a strong electric field to alter the way this reaction goes. Would it be possible to inject something into the birds that would prevent them from "watching" this reaction, so it would go at it's "normal" speed?
Good idea! Let's stick the large electromagnet in the bird's retina, then watch to see if it's flying paterns are different!;)
Oh sure, I feel much more at ease now that I know that the government, who will extract my full DNA information from my saliva, will then go in the back room and tell me he stripped all the information except some md5 hash of it.
It's not like they would bend the law to get more information on me if they could, right? And anyway, if I end up on a no-fly list or a no-medical-loan list, I will be dully notified of it, with the right to file an appeal, right?
If you trust your government that much, you don't need elections!
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, that's what I think each time I hear about ISP's misconduct.
But if I remember correctly, Comcast or some other big ISP was enforcing their throttling on smaller ISP's traffic because they were the ones ultimately carrying it; the smaller ISPs were just detailers for the big one.
Do we have the problem here? Also, is there an equivalent of TekSavvy in the US?
This probably won't work; the camera would have to be advertised on micorsoft's search for this; and if it is, it will probably be more expensive than from the shop you found from google's search, which already refunds money from google, in the sense that the company didn't pay for that link. Google is effectively refunding 100% of it's margin on that link, since it is not advertisment!The point here is that it doesn't even matter if Google offers better search now! Going forward, I'll probably product search/research on Google, but go over to Microsoft to make the all-important final decision (because it's plainly the rational decision - my product WILL be cheaper)!
You are confusing search results and advertisments near the search results; microsoft is saying it will offer better advertisments; but no one chooses where to shop, or what newspaper to read, for the advertisments! In that case you would just head to a discount hunting website.
No, you choose your search engine based on the better results, and then, you don't mind that the website profit from the 1% of attention you have to spare to look at an ad. Ads make money when you don't mind to shop without really comparing anything. it isn't the same as BigWallet, which essentially just shared the already offered referral deals with you (half a percent of the sale, usually). Who said that this rebate to microsoft's users will be more than half a percent? Did the guys who got paid to surf the internet with extra ads make a lot of money?
Just a precision: the great firewall of China, or your ISP, has the same power (man in the middle possibility). But as in the p2p throttling case, once people detect it, they know that the culprit is the ISP.
Also, an ISP from an other country will not be able to affect you; but that root server effect is world-wide.
Of course (IIRC), the US always had their hand on a server with that kind of privilege. But again, meddling with it would have directly incriminated the US.
The fact that those who did this had huge resources do not make it less scary, neither does the fact that nobody detected anything. Remeber how that guy operated a tor exit node to get a whole lot of interesting datas; the idea here is the same.
(A concrete example would be to send your wikipedia request to a bogus wikipedia website. It would forward all your queries to the real wikipedia, so you couldn't tell the difference (man in the middle), but on some pages it would serve you an altered page; it could also make you feel like you wrote an article, but the article would actually only show up on your copy of the bogus website, not the real one. Encryption twarts this, otherwise it's really the worst case scenario.)
And apparently, there is nothing to prevent it from happening again. Since people seem so little concerend, I must have missed some detail which makes everything fine; or at least I really hope so.
Any hint on the source, or at least why they consider it important?
Not to be harsh, but if I send some random code letter to some lab, I guess (hope) it won't make the news, even on slashdot.
I still think that most chinese do agree with the censorship; after all, they have been brain-washed into beleiving that the internet is dangerous.
It is a unavoidable problem in democracy: if you are advocating for democracy, you can't justify ingerence if the people concerned don't want it; even if you think that they are brain-washed/wrong.
But in that case, we have a good hint at something that makes sense: only take into account the opinion of people who actually know what they are talking about. That someone who has never used the internet beleive it to be addictive, that someone who has never read western medias beleive them to be only lies, those are not very pertinent.
It's the same as all those journalists saying how violent a video game is, without having played it.
I said marketing, that is, the art of making things look better than they are. You can advertise your product without using marketing techniques, the same way that you can ask for some laws (and say why) without lobbying. (I didn't add that distinction in my post because it was long enough already.)
For example, paying millions to a specialised firm to realise a TV spot falls in the marketing category. If there was a will to reduce marketing, you could forbid claims that are not proven, intrusive ads, put a cap on marketing budget (*), etc.
I'm not saying that it would be easy to forbid marketing; only that you can't justify it in the ideology of capitalism. Actually, I don't mind marketing that much (I don't listen to it), I was just showing that even marketing, which is regarded as completly normal, goes against the interest of the buyers. An other way of saying it is that, from a global point of view, marketing is counter-productive. I think it makes it the perfect example to prove that sellers are opponents, and not your friends.
As for the fact that ads are a source of information, come on. If there were no ads, and if we still felt a need for information on some products, normal medias would fit the gap nicely. When you decide to shop for a computer, do you watch ads on TV or do you look up some specialised websites/newspapers?
(*) We have that in France for elections.
That's a really idealized vision of the system.
Capitalism is a game in which buyers and sellers are oppenents.
Saying "the market decides" means that the power is all in the hands of the buyers: that's when you can say that "the market will make better products appear": better meaning better for the buyer. This is the ideology which justifies capitalism: the people are the buyers, and the law are (supposed to be) made for the people's sake.
But this is just one extreme in the balance of power between the two players; and just finding a good example for it is difficult. The best one is probably gas stations: you know exactly what you are buying, and you can easily check an other one, so the margins are (I guess) pretty low.
But in many cases, the balance weights heavily toward the seller. We all know the reasons: using people's mistakes (lottery, complicated billing), forced buying (bundling, etc), monopoly (or any alliance of sellers against buyers), control of the information, control of the law (lobbying).
All thoses are limitted or forbidden by the law, because they all go against the people's interest. Even marketing, when you think about it, is pretty absurd since it openly tries to make a deal seem better than it really is for buyer.
The only moral justification you can think of to allow marketing is that a company will only have the money to run ads if it is successful; this takes for granted that success is mostly the result of the company's real usefulness to the people.
In short, marketing is only justified if it does not change the relative success of companies!
(Note: you can't justify marketing just by freedom of speech, which is intended for cases when the law should stay neutral in the fight between two parties, as in a trial; there is no reason not to favor the people against the sellers. Except for international competitivity; it's often an easy excuse, but it's a valid point and a wider discussion).
Of course, the other cases (monopoly, bundling) are even harder to justify; but the worse is certainly lobbying. The simple idea that sellers could affect the law is utterly absurd, and lobbying is the best indicator of the power balance. In France -and I guess most countries- it's simply called corruption (which does not mean it doesn't happen).
And by the way: the internet has the potential to take a lot of power away from the sellers. Before Ebay, some companies made profit just by providing the organisation that buyers lacked.
Things can really change; that is, if we don't let them rewrite the laws too much with the power they have left.
1, 2, 3... Fight!
And thus your purchase will raise the number of "customers who preferred the professional quality of Windows(TM)".
To me, the whole point of the eee is that it finally lets linux and windows have an unbiased competition with the market for judge: people won't just keep windows because it's preinstalled ( except of course taking linux still means "switching" to something less familliar).
If I was australian and wanted to buy one, I'd throw in the extra cash to show that linux users exist as a demographic.
Because when your OS displays the empty space on your device, it uses powers of 2.
You don't have to be a "technical professional" if you OSãtranslates for you.
That reminds me, yesterday I was configuring my new ubuntu install for the net, and I just couln't connect: none of my queries (typed in the firefox address bar) worked, and pinging google also didn't work.
:)
And then, after testing pretty much every other possible cause I could think of, I tried an other server. And, it was google that was down
I guess we always get surprised when that big a site goes dead, even for ten minutes.
1) Not a community run website (no accountability). Apparently users cannot submit articles, and they can post comments to stories, but with no assurance that it will really show up. Check out boingboing's new crazy comment policy if you don't think this can be a problem. Excerpt (from boingboing): Q. One of my comments has disappeared!
A. There are several possibilities. One is that we may be having technical problems. It never hurts to write and ask. Another possibility is that someone thought your comment would be better gone. Of course, as long as the website has no real importance, and as long as you completly trust the site's admins, there is no problem. But I think the last wikipedia scandals showed it's not a good attitude.
2) Only provides information for buying goods, so the actions of the website's reader are not automaticaly coordinated. If it was an association that you payed every month to have them buy stuff for you, but letting them chosing the brands, it would have far more impact.
Right now, a negative article on that site means that some of the site's members (those who read the article) might not buy that product (if they agree/remeber). And their is no way to know what those numbers actually are.
If everyone's action were determined by the global vote, then a negative vote would mean that all sales made by the association will cease (or all the stocks possessed by the site will be sold, if we take my idea). That's a lot more intimidating for the given company.
This seems so obvious; did no one had (the courage to have) that idea before?
That said, "special attorneys" with security clearence are not that good of a solution if they are a small group and no one has to right to check on what they did.
Plus, I would hate to see a whole "secret justice" aside from the normal one. What I mean is that cogress rejected the idea of "secret laws" a while ago, and I wouldn't want the governement to use "secret attorneys" as a way to push that idea again.
precision: what I mean with the EFF analogy is that, if you "can't be bothered" with getting informed and voting, you can just buy the 300$ of stocks, and not vote. That way you trust the other users of the webiste to do the voting and information gathering, the same way you trust the EFF.
Some times you care enough to spend 300$, but not enough to do the actual activism, or even to get informed well enough; for example, people who give to the EFF would not know what precise law to fight, but they know that the EFF does it well and serves their objectives.
Plus, those 300$ are an investment; you might get a little less money from it than from a standard stock set, but that's all. It's just that, in the current stock exchange, big stock-holders are the only one able to quickly affect the policy of a company. But if many small stock-holders unite, they should be able to do it too.
Sure, that kind of fund would only invest in companies with good ethics; but even those will do some questionnable stuff, and that's when it's important to influence their actions with stock holder's votes. Maybe we should instead find companies that are doing good, and then invest in / buy from them, rather than their competitors. We wouldn't need a website to co-ordinate this, either, as there are plenty of sites dedicated to "ethical consumerism" already. Well, i'm not aware of those sites (could you give me some links?), but it seems different from having a monolithic community, where all actions will always be co-ordinated. You get a lot more power that way.
The difference with a standard website is that you've already given a credit card number at this point. Credit cards are linked to names, and this identification is controlled by the banking system.
This is as solid as it get (so much that I actually hate it when any shop can have your full identity this way, with no way of spoofing it).
Of course rich people/companies could still pay someone to vote in their name, or send their employees, but then that's true of real elections too. Actually, I think this would be a bit more secure than standard elections! (what with the tracability, password and all.)
Just a precision:
It can seem like that idea focuses only on western consumers (like influencing a software companie's choces or stuff like this), but when you look at the role of oil companies in affecting the stability of some african governments (including dictatorships), or the importance of economic embargo in diplomatic relations, you'll see it can be much more than that.
IMHO, one of the best way to use the democratic power of the internet would be to have internet communities buying stocks.
A bit like the so called "ethic funds" who buy stocks in companies with good ethics first, then try to influence the companie's decision according to that agenda (which many entities do, only they do so with an "ethic" agenda in mind")
As an optimistic person, I think that if the mass of internet users did that, they would be more powerful than the few rich people right now (that might need some math).
As for the details (in bulk):
- A central website, looking something like slashdot or wikipedia (although with far higher standards for accountability, no special power to foundators, or even better, a system with no admins (every modification on the site is automatic and public, with a hash system to prevent tempering).
- Someone's vote is weighted by the amount of money he gave to the site, but with a low (300$?) cap; you can invest more (and get the proportional revenues), but your voting power is capped.
- People vote for the stocks to be bought, and for the common voice of the community in stock holder's vote. Since an account is linked to real money, you don't have most of the problems with votes on the internet (bots, etc).
That would give more power to "public opinion", which oterwise tends to be to often disregarded. Even if the community is small, it's power can already tip the balance in many cases; think about the EFF, for exemple. With that kind of money, even if you can be majoritary share holder, you can already buy ads in the New York Times or things like that, and break the barrier for entering the "rich people/big companies club".
Well that's a change. For once a counterfeited items seems a little bit dangerous.
That's a much better job as scaring us to support the anticounterfeit capains than the previous stuff.
I mean, I've seen those ads saying "counterfeited items can kill" with a teddy bear ready to burn a child alive because he's not fireproof, and I must say it felt a little bit too much.
The fact that the financial loss they claim is mostly due to fake Rolexes, Channel stuff and the like doesn't help. I mean, how many people who buy a fake Rolex could afford a real one?
Still, I don't see how those Cisco conterfeits could be that bad; I mean, if it's critical equipement, of course you'll have to know where it comes from (and I don't see how real Cisco servers made in China would be a lot less of a risk).
Yes, It's an unreasonable infringement of privacy, because it's useless and gives an unreasonable amount of power to airport "cops", with apparently no counterpower.
And explain to me how it is constitutional that "eastern looking" people systematicaly spend twice the time boarding their plane (when they can). Perhaps one day you'll get your wish. Maybe it'll be the day Abdullah and Hassan decide to blow up the plane you're riding in. Well that answers my question about your fear of racial discrimination I guess. But you can feel safe: all people whose name are Hassan are on the no fly list! Why? because it could be an alias for Hussein! And by the way, the ghosts of the terrorist who killed themselves on 9/11 will not be able to board, either! And for those who happen to have the same name? It's just bad luck.
But when the researchers looked for this, shouldn't that looking have caused the metaphorical pot to be watched thus inducing the effect, or had no one tried to measure this simply because they knew the reaction didn't take long enough (or shouldn't, ignoring quantum mechanics)?
I didn't have any serious courses on quantum-anything, but I think you are taking this way to"philosophically". "Observation" here actually just means interaction with a nearby atom.
I think that the idea is that the atom is in an "undefined" state (or rather, multiple states at once), and that having an interaction (which should depend on the state) forces it to chose between states. Once this happens (in the bird's retina), I don't think any further interaction can affect anything, and certainly not something as indirect as a human looking at the bird.
Confusion arise because of the words "observation", "retina" and looking" in the same topic.
That said, I had the impression that those kind of quantum weirdness (like the living-dead cat) were a good hint that those thing can never scale up to act uppon the "regular" world, were everything is a result of statistics (like air pressure which is the statistical sum of random movement). A good exemple is how intricated atoms could theorically convert information at faster than light speed, but if you actually want to use it then the observation equipement needed will keep you under light speed (and it's not something you can get around). So if this turns out to be true, I will be quite amased.
Bonus questions: The article said that had proved this by using a strong electric field to alter the way this reaction goes. Would it be possible to inject something into the birds that would prevent them from "watching" this reaction, so it would go at it's "normal" speed?
Good idea! Let's stick the large electromagnet in the bird's retina, then watch to see if it's flying paterns are different!Oh sure, I feel much more at ease now that I know that the government, who will extract my full DNA information from my saliva, will then go in the back room and tell me he stripped all the information except some md5 hash of it.
It's not like they would bend the law to get more information on me if they could, right? And anyway, if I end up on a no-fly list or a no-medical-loan list, I will be dully notified of it, with the right to file an appeal, right?
If you trust your government that much, you don't need elections!
I don't get it; how could I be modded overrated, troll and then insightful ? (in that order!)
Can no one see a funny (or trying to be funny) post anymore??