This isn't as good as it sounds.
on
Lego Machine Gun
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· Score: 4
Great! Now I have to wait ten days before buying my lego A-Wing. Does this mean that legos have become too dangerous for anyone to have other than Approved Law Enforcement Authorities? I hope I'm not too subversive for silly putty-- I'm running out of toys which are not Bad Influences (TM).
As far as the whole privacy/Ford-is-big-brother theory, I doubt that is of any substance. While it is entirely possible that they could do that, just the thought of the nightmarish PR scandal that would arise if such a scheme was uncovered should shy away even the most Orwellian of corporate policy makers.
I agree. Most of these sneaky schemes backfire, and good managers know it. Companies which are busy being clever usually see their cleverness fail, while companies which concentrate on their core operations surpass them.
Of course, Ford isn't doing this to be very nice guys-- if for no other reason because it wouldn't be very nice for people whose pension funds are invested in Ford stock. This could just be like corporate scholarships or other endeavors, but here are my theories:
Ford once represented the culmination of the industrial revolution. It made its mark because it recognized the new realities of the economy, and built a business around the new model. It paid its employees more because that's how you get the best people. It built simple, bare-bones cars for a market noone ever really pushed for (much as Apple did with the PC).
So maybe they just realize that just as in the early twentieth century the agricultural economy was industrialized; the industrial economy will now become information-based. By that logic, it makes sense to get your workers computer-literate.
I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that Ford isn't going to monitor their employees. If even one of them is a cracker, the fact that they had tacit permission from Ford and were supposedly being supervised creates a big liability problem. Besides, then they wouldn't be used.
The problem is that we are in the midst of the information revolution, but most sectors of the economy have only superficially benefitted from it. Sure the superficial benefits are significant, but imagine if a car company-- from the ground up-- took advantage of what technology could give them. Factories even more automated than they are now, staffed by people who are highly skilled and who like working there! Ever notice that CS people work like dogs, and get paid almost 50% more than the American median income straight out of college? If you think high salaries are expensive, try mediocrity.
Most of the obstacles for these companies aren't technological, they are bureaucratic. So by shaking things up and cutting the cost required to train people later, they'll be up and running while their competitors struggle to catch up. Of course, that is assuming that Ford can endure the growing pains such a radical shift will cause. I think this is a great idea, and I hope that Ford can make it pay for them.
Glad you asked.;) (I am not one, but I am studying in the field...)
I looked over this survey, and it is basically a 'push poll'. That is where you ask questions which are designed to influence a person's opinion. You do this by asking questions about one point of view, especially agree/disagree questions which bring up points in a person's head. By manipulating the questions, and the order in which they are asked, and getting the wording right, you have maneuvered a person who previously didn't have an opinion into having the one you want. Especially if you imply that a person should have an opinion.
They ask all these questions which imply the importance of the trial, then ask how closely they are following the MS trial. The options were 'following closely', 'somewhat closely' and 'not following'. Surprise surprise, people pick the middle answer.
I wouldn't put too much stock in this. In fact, we should be happy that people have this instinctive fear of regulation and government intrusion into our field. If they learn the details of the MS suit, then we'll see if opinion shifts, but the last thing we want is a list of rules and procedures which would strangle the small startups before they got off the ground.
I'd say there is virtually nothing we want the government to do about MS's monopoly. Now that we have the finding of fact, there are grounds for lawsuits against MS. I can see an argument for taking the "MS embraced and extended" proprietary standards and releasing them to an industry coalition. But open sourcing Windows 2000 would accomplish nothing (except reveal to programmers what they already know about the Mother of All Kludges). Break up MS? It would be like those slime monsters in D&D which when you cut them in half, now there are two of them! We'd have three or four MS monopolies (OfficeCorp, WindozeCorp, etc).
Mainly, we can watch the companies MS buried in the past go after them now. Since the industry is moving away from the desktop anyway, MS might be contained by technology already.
The Open Source Movement could have just as easily been called the Stable Software Movement. Linux and other open source products are better not because of who's on board or the quality of its people (though that's been tremendously helpful). It is just a better way of making software.
We've got MS and others who tried an experiment with computers: sell software the way Ford sells cars. It did pretty well, but eventually, that business model has to give way to something more mature and appropriate for what a business needs. And the success of Linux companies isn't because some journalist on the sidelines is cheering for the team-- it is because selling software the way a doctor sells healthcare is more appropriate. So now programmers are making better products, and making more money. Chicken and egg-- the media like Linux because it is successful; not the other way around.
This is a young field. Software as a product is fairly new, since until the 80's software was considered part of the hardware platform. It took a decade to improve the model, but that isn't too bad. I'm sure there's some other way of making software that is even better, and in ten years we'll all be doing that.
Reading that article reminded me of punk rockers who can't stand it when their favorite band becomes popular. Sure, Open Source is filled with parasites, con artists and Big Corporations. But the motto "show me the code" applies here. The parasites don't have anything to contribute, and will go to the next Next Big Thing. The con artists will eventually get caught (they almost always do). And if the Big Corporations can show me the code, I say welcome aboard. I hope someday to lead one-- and I refuse to be jealous if they someday manage to make better stuff than the startups.
That's the great thing about markets. Journalists, pundits, Jon Katz, marketting experts, strategic analysts-- none of them really make a difference. They're just kibbitzers. As long as the sourcecode remains open and free, we'll do just fine.
It was sad to hear this-- I remember sitting up at night in middleschool and high school reading the old sci-fi classics.
We're losing all the old great masters of science fiction. I guess this is inevitable, but modern science fiction just isn't the same.
I think modern writers can learn something from the Great Old Ones.;) In the Campbell era, there were genuinely new ideas, examination of social issues without being preachy or satirical, great writing and (oddly absent from many modern writers) a great knowledge of science. You can find pieces of that puzzle everywhere now, but the specialization leaves us with few authors who try to be great in everything.
So while we're mourning, and catching up our anthology collections, let's think about where we want science fiction to be going.
Most of them are pretty ignorant about technology, and, for example, if you tell them, "The most popular video game currently available is called Blood & Gore and the plot of the game is to gun down innocent schoolchildren and nuns," they'll probably believe you (or figure that you are "close enough for government work.")
Politicians are often ignorant about technology because most technology people have exactly that attitude. "They're all corrupt anyway, and they are dumb, so why bother." It is rare to see such a community so stridently uninvolved. Many Congressmen have tried and failed to find technology people to advise them on issues because of just this attitude, which reminds me of the "Open Source is communism" stuff we used to hear.
I have always assumed congressional Email works like this. The congressman or Senator has a bunch of interns who don't necessarily have a lot to do all the time, they set one of the interns to read the incoming Email.
The ones I have met have full time people whose only job is answering mail. They get thousands per day!
If it is something important to the politician ("Bill gates wants to donate to your campaign") or something the intern cares about, they'll tell the politician.
Definitely not true. The official office that does the mail isn't even allowed to look at contributions. The congressguy has a person outside his official office who handles all that. By law, the office can't even touch it, except to forward it to that guy if it is accidentally sent to them. On the email/snailmail that takes most of their time, which deals with bills and issues, most do go through as much as they can, and demand careful reports on the rest. When you get thousands of snailmail/email a day, that's as much as you can do.
A big pile of paper mail, however, will have the politician come into his office and say, "Wow, look at all that mail!" The politician is bound to take notice if it is mostly against something he or she is doing, though it might not change his or her mind. (Stuff they don't really care about, which I believe includes a lot of tech related issues, is not something they are going to risk votes over.)
So which are you saying? That Representatives ignore their constituents because of their other beliefs? Or that they listen too much and blow with the wind and don't just do what is right? Answer: you are saying both-- when your views are the majority's you say the guy who disagrees is blind to democracy and majority rule. When most people disagree with you, you say the politician is blowing with the polls. This is cynicism masquerading as sophistication.
From the above, it doesn't sound like you have any direct knowledge of what a congressman/senator/president/cabinet member does from day to day, other than from what you see on TV. You should give some thought to how coders look, as seen on TV news. It isn't a pretty picture.
Of course, deCSS is copy protection broken by evil thieves, the Clipper chip stops child pornography (which is nearly everything on the internet), Al Gore invented the internet, and security through obscurity is best, so I guess TV does know best.
So, being involved in local politics gives you more of a voice on the national level.
This I totally agree with. I have been active in local politics in my area, and there is that same "show me the code" mentality there. If you put your time (forget money, it is people putting in real live hours of real live work that is really valued), the people you favor will more likely win. It isn't finding Big Players and trying to change their minds, it is finding a state legislator who might be a programmer and agree with you already, and helping them become a state senator, or a Congressman. If you are a libertarian, you pretty much tank your chances of winning (since third parties by definition are made of people who won't compromise enough to win a majority and actually do something). But that just makes your help more important, so get to work!
Robert Heinlein was a political leader in LA after he left the Navy, and wrote a book called Take Back Your Government. Read it. I read it in high school, and in college followed his algorithm. As I said, I am active in local politics, and can say that Heinlein was 100% right and following his advice, I have been ridiculously successful.
As has already been said, most offices have about 40 people working for them. Many of them are answering phones, doing clerical work, etc (just like any office). With that said, the offices I have had contact with do handle email they receive. They print it out and handle it like normal mail, for reasons given below.
Virtually all the offices respond via snail mail. There are couple of reasons for this. First, there is security-- it is easier to detect forgery on paper mail. Second, it is easier for the Congressman/Senator to look over and approve a paper letter than an email before it is sent. Finally, the software/hardware is very old, and tough to adapt anyway, for reasons below.
Congressional offices operate under ridiculous rules and regulations. You'd think, hey, these guys write the laws, why not just change them? But the reality is that offices lack the resources to do software support on their own, and the rules were originally designed to be tough to change to prevent abuse.
Finally, on the subject of responding to people outside your district, you have to think about it this way. You only represent your district (the better interest of the nation as a whole counts as part of this, but since every issue is painted as a critical 'take one for the team' issue, it wears thin quickly). They are the only people who vote for you. It is therefore a disservice to them to spend resources on others which would have helped them. If they are so concerned about something, they can tell their congressman. Put another way, as Robert A. Heinlein said before basically giving the same advice I just did, "the votes are in the precincts".
Hey, Congress staffers read Slashdot, don't they? Tell us what software you use! Maybe we can improve it. It would be a public service, so RMS would like it.;)
Zork and Hitchhikers (already mentioned, but they still rock.
The Ancient Art of War and the Ancient Art of War at Sea: Two great games without a modern equivalent.
Adventure Construction Set: OK, this wasn't all it could have been. But we mean to call Linux a true OS when it doesn't even have a roleplaying game developer's tools yet? We could call it gtk!! Wait, that's taken. How about RPGtk?
Omega: This was an Origin game that let you make an AI tank, then code it to find other tanks and kill them for the Apple ][e.
Doom: Well, ok we have Doom.
Starcraft and Diablo: Already said, but they bear repeating, since they rock and roll.
Ascendency: By the Logic Factory. Great game with wonderful atmosphere. It didn't get the marketting to really take off, but it was very polished and cool.
Sexplosion!: Originally for the mac, this game loses its luster in translation, since we don't have GPFs.
I think this was the best point the author made. For an experienced administrator, typing in a quick and dirty text command is the quickest way to do things. For someone who is keeping her life as non-computer oriented as possible, though, text interfaces, key combinations, and scripts/rc files are all hopelessly arcane and arbitrary.
That's why windowing metaphors are so powerful-- you are hijacking training that people already have in the Real World and using it to ease the adjustment. That's why complex procedures are laid out in wizards: to guide people through it without having to remember an algorithm.
If you are trying to let someone do something complex, you want to make them learn as little as possible in order to do it. That doesn't mean they are ignorant, it means that we are imposing on them to spare as little brainspace as possible. A doctor doesn't make us learn medicine-- we shouldn't force him to learn software engineering.
This is all pretty obvious, IMO. But it is easy to forget. As coders, we know way more than the average person about computers. We don't need metaphors-- we can handle the raw abstractions. So in the name of flexibility and consistency, we get straight into what often amounts to minor coding in its own right.
This is compounded by feature creep. People are paying for features they won't use on their Office apps, and then wonder why their desktop is so crowded, and why everything has to be filed away in menus.
Finally, since abstraction is our living, we are using it too much where we shouldn't-- the user's experience. Making something universal, making it systematic, often good things. But sometimes you have to hide the underlying elegance in favor of being usable by people who don't know code.
emacs is not what we want. Enlightenment isn't, either, though it is ridiculously great. Nor is Word, really. MS's interface advantage isn't that they're particularly good, they are just what people are used to now. What we have to start thinking about is what is making Linux suddenly so popular to the Rest of the World: What do users want? Linux addresses security, stability, standardization and upgrade issues that the business world probably assumed were inevitable.
What we have to do is what PARC did years ago. Say "What are these computers for?" "What can they let people do which they couldn't do before?" and "How can computers help people do what they're doing now more efficiently?".
Answer those-- and don't think that companies like Apple aren't asking those questions every day-- and people will wonder why MS and others can't make an operating system which doesn't need to be unravelled by a PhD in CS. Rather than saying that about us, which is what they're doing. In almost every other area, Open Source has proved to be better. I think that, if people really start focusing on it, we can take the lead on it.
According to the article in yesterday's post, a few companies have cut deals with them to record this information and pass it on. All it takes is one company trading it for them to get a lock on you.
I'm not so worried about opting out. Frankly, cookies are sometimes useful, and really, Doubleclick is counting on people either not hearing, not caring/bothering, or forgetting when they reinstall their browser/use a different one/ get a new computer.
Research is, obviously, a Very Good Thing. But let's remember Clinton promises everyone that they'll get special treatment in the budget next year. He doesn't actually push for everything, since if he did, we'd be back in debt. So he just blames Congress instead. We can only hope that science is one of those things he's willing to actually do more than talk about.
After Clipper Chip/CDA/etc, I'm not too optimistic.
Silicon Valley, Slashdot News Mysterious startup Transmeta unveiled its Crusoe processor today. The new, low power processor is designed to address the chronic battery life problems facing laptop users.
"Look, I'm tellin' ya, Captain, we need more power or the laddies will get on the plane without their data. The processors canna take anymore, captain!" said David R. Ditzel, CEO of Transmeta.
"Well, I dunno, it sounds great," remarked Billy Carlyse, a 7-11 employee in Skokie, IL."but it'll probably be obsolete before anyone sees it. The industry trend is for rapid obsolescence-- and Transmeta has been working on this for five years!"
As if on cue, Motorola announced a new fuel cell battery, promising unlimited power for laptops. In response, Transmeta has announced a halt to Crusoe production. They will now be doing Linux distributions and portals like everyone else.
I hate to admit it, but voting is different from financial transactions. The incentive for fraud is greater, and the system is less fault-tolerant because so few people vote. I am more knowledgeable about elections than I am a security guru, so take this w/ a grain of salt, but:
Software systems are much easier to crack than physical systems. At the risk of sounding like the french with their 'visual telegraph' alternative to telephones, there is a comfort in the fact that:
1. Tampering can be limited to people with physical access to the machine which is monitored by ordinary people. Political parties employ 'poll watchers', who are ordinary people who often aren't even politically active, to keep an eye on the machines during the elections process to watch for tampering.
2. If tampering DOES occur, the machine can be examined to determine who did it, and reveal physical evidence. It is much harder to determine that from a compromised system.
3. Financial transactions are time-dependent, whereas election info is useful for years. So I can sniff the encrypted packets today, and decrypt it with tomorrow's techniques.
Besides, I keep hearing from experts that our current systems for financial transaction are insecure and require major overhaul.
People are very passionate about politics-- just read the other posts! There are plenty of people who, given the means, would actively try to disable or disrupt an on-line election. Or try to distort the results. Or use tricky web page scripts to socially engineer a person into voting for other candidates. The point is, this is one of the most vulnerable things to tampering in the real world-- let alone online. We have to be very cautious before we implement it.
I'd say that the first thing to be wary of are vesting rules. It is a sensible and ubiquitous precaution for a company to keep you there; you are the value of the company, more than its so-called assets.
But it is therefore easy to get stuck at a bad company. You don't know how much the company will be worth when/if it is successful. You need to know what proportion of total shares is represented by your share (I know one company which basically offered n shares, but said, "You'll just have to hope we don't issue too many shares and dilute you out of the game. Trust us."
You'll want to get a good idea of the management team, talk to other coders there, etc. You should do this anyway, but if salaray was all you got, you could just jump to somewhere better. Vesting rules means that much of your pay depends on you staying 2-4 years-- that could be half your working life due to age discrimination. That means saving 10% of your income for your retirement, too.
It is, philosophically, great that you don't care too much about money. But for Pete's sake don't tell them that. Otherwise they will lure you with 'intangibles' which will vanish by week two. I know people who are hideously underpaid for their skills, but get seduced by sweet talk from managers who are taking 10x the salary. Take 80k instead of 50k and donate it to charity-- you'll be doing a good deed and management will regard you as an $80k asset. This isn't about being a 'nice guy', it is about not being a naive businessman. To them, your worth is what they are paying for you.
Remember age discrimination. There'll be some great young 22 year old who can work 16 hour days and is up on everything new, and doesn't have a family to support in ten years. So count on a short working life before you have to settle somewhere where your bargaining position isn't so good.
Look at who is investing. Joe McClueless might be big in the machine tools field, but to him your venture is just a way to put a little risk in his portfolio. If Larry Ellison is dropping $10M, though, you know that your company has been judged as a good investment by experts. Don't look at who they're 'talking to'. Anyone can talk to anyone else. The measure of a company is ink on paper, and numbers not happy words.
Finally, and this actually should have come first, make sure this is something you believe in as a field. Don't do databases because they are hot. If your passion is UNIX, do that. If it is COBOL, do that (!). If it is graphics and usability, do that. You'll be happier and much more successful doing work you love and believe in. Just remember: you are also a businessman. Act naive, and management will fleece you. If you don't believe in money, take it anyway, then give it to charity.
Well, from what I gather, we aren't suffering from people who know security. We are suffering from managers and leaders who won't do anything to fix known holes in security.
This wouldn't be a bad idea, but coming from President Clipper Chip, it is a little ominous. If he's so intent on improving education, why doesn't he do something where we really need it-- at elementary and high schools. Hard to major in CS when you can't read or do simple math. He keeps caving in to the teachers unions instead of doing something productive.
Effectively, businesses have been told "if you put all your employees together, in a dangerous area, we'll bust you from here to the ends of the Earth, but if you just give them some plutonium tablets and let them run home like pretty little sheep, we don't give a damn if you run them like a distributed sweat shop until they die of work-related injuries."
This is a little alarmist. For one thing, most of the telecommuters I know work for small start-ups which can barely afford to put safety rails on the water cooler as is.
One of the points of working where you live is that you get to make your own environment. OSHA making that decision basically forces companies to either invade your home to shield them from litigation or not allow telecommuting.
If I put live wires hanging inches from my face, that's my choice. If my top bunk isn't wheelchair accessible, ditto. If I am not hanging "labor friendly" posters over my bed, who cares? The idea of working at home is that you aren't in a cubicle, you have control over how you live and work.
There are times when it makes sense for your company to provide you with desk, computer, lamp electricity, air, etc. But I don't see why we need OSHA setting this in stone when it should be part of the normal salary/working conditions negotiations.
Compared to your salary and (especially!) benefits, the cost of furniture is pretty minimal. And if my company gives me an extra thousand a year and says "buy your own" then what is OSHA's beef? That we aren't doing it Their Way (TM)?
I have to admit, while his writing is often mechanically workmanlike, I have yet to see anything:
...insightful from a social science perspective. (Read any modern neo-socialist, such as Marcuse, if you want something with this general slant, backed up by facts and intelligent analysis. Or better yet, look at all the countries run by neo-socialists as they desperately try to catch up with us.)
...that demonstrates more than a passing familiarity with technology. All he seems to know is that he sure don't like corporatism.
...that shows a good journalist's skill at bringing up new ideas or at least better organizing old ones.
...that doesn't amount to wannabe-ism and self-promotion.
None of this really matters, except that Slashdot is paying him instead of someone better, and a slight waste of bandwidth. Really, I'm only worried that real writers might try to use Katz as a source. What if he became our spokesman?
BTW, I read a Niven article asserting (convincingly, too!) that Dante's Inferno was science fiction, using the only science of the time, theology. I think there has been science fiction as long as there has been science.
What really stands out to me from this interview is something I have felt for a long time-- that an uninformed citizenry is the biggest threat to our liberty.
The best thing we can do is to remain engaged and active in educating people about what the internet and other computational advances mean for people. One thing I see is that although we may bicker about alot, it is interesting that whether you are a self described libertarian or socialist (or anything in between), most hackers have a great deal in common.
I think that this is because knowledge of the new realities of the world and their implications itself points to good solutions for people. Small, agile corporations and governments. Privacy for individuals, publicly available information on group activities (such as governments or corporations.
So grim saying of nay, which is all I've been hearing recently, is premature. Once people know what is going on, the answers will present themselves to them. And with the web, we don't have to tell them anymore, or give them philes we've downloaded at 1200 baud from someone's C64-- we can show them in full color.
My list includes a bastard sword, chain mail, soft leather boots, a number of belt pouches, my trusty travelling spellbook, and fifty feet of rope. As long as I don't bump into El Ravager or Teflon Billy, I should be just fine!
While you puny mortals use your thrice-cursed 'technology', I will be racking up easy experience points taking out dead-eyed suburbanites as I become the Elvish fighter-mage I was always destined to be.
Tell Bill that in the coming Age of Sorcery that there can be only one!
Vote Smart is a great resource-- you'd be surprised how many candidates who talk 'open source/computers/whatever' and say their "down with it" don't do a thing for us (Gore: Clipper Chip, that committee that is trying, right now to tax the internet, etc.) and vice versa.
But sure, if more people voted third party, they would win more often-- but why do that when you can much more easily work to change one of the two parties? There are more libertarian Republicans than there are libertarian Libertarians! And more green Democrats than green Greens. (typographical note: lowercase indicates philosophy, uppercase indicates party).
You'd be surprised who matches up with your views. That's because the media is paid to be truthful, but paid much more (and more reliably) to be dramatic. So we can learn about candidates from the media alone (and don't deny it-- we are all influenced to some extent, we're immersed in it) or we can learn about candidates we like from impartial sources (Vote Smart), groups we like (EFF) and from the candidates themselves (web sites).
For pete's sake, if all I knew about Linux came from poly sci classes and Media Personalities, I would know less than nothing about it.
I'm surprised to see so many slashdotters support the greens, though. That socialist 'Cathedral' philosophy, IMHO, isn't really viable. I'd prefer a libertarian 'Bazaar' approach, myself.
Third-party candidates have no chance of winning the Presidency; therefore very few people will "waste" their votes on a third-party candidate; therefore... You get the idea. With fusion, a third party can nominate one of the major-party candidates that most closely represents their views. Then when at the polls, one can vote for a third-party ticket without "wasting" one's vote, because the candidate is also a major-party candidate and could win.
I don't see what the point of helping third parties is. More views/opinions promoted? But third parties like the Libertarians and Greens are doing that already. One of the two parties, seeing a good/popular idea, adopts it, or doesn't and watches third party popularity increase (many elections are tipped one way or another by third party candidates 'taking' votes from the candidate closes to them ideologically.
What else does a third party do? Bring in more factions/marginalized groups? Those people tend to pick a major party, then become influential in the primaries (the original Mayor Daly of Chicago was one of many democrats supported by the then-persecuted irish americans at the turn of the century, for instance. Or the way persecuted blacks who got past the Jim Crow laws voted Republican, at a time when no white southerner would.)
The way I see it, the only rationale for tilting the rules to help third parties is so that people don't have to compromise their positions. A democracy without compromise is a tyranny of the 50%+1. And realistically, without compromise, you won't make it past 5% in an election. Other systems let people vote as a reflex, then leave governing to backroom deals between parties. Our system (for the few who still actually participate in it in its entirety), supports people who make decisions about what they believe, and what they can live with.
Since virtually no two people agree on every issue, democracy reduces to a compromise problem. Parliaments place compromise in the hands of a few. Our system lets people make their own compromises. Sucks if you are a fanatic, academic, or potential dictator-- but for people who have deadlines to meet and real-world risks in their jobs, this shouldn't be anything new. The trick is that the more effort you put into the process, the more you get out of it.
1. Even in states with so-called non-partisan primaries, you may only vote in one party.
2. Parties serve to synthesize conflicting and competing beliefs and interests (we all believe in law enforcement and in privacy- but where does crypto regulation fall?) as well as competing factions (labor democrats want more trade restrictions, 'new' democrats don't). Of course, by voting in a primary you are compromising your beliefs-- but so is the radical next door. It allows minorities to be heard, and even sometimes win, even though majorities in the end rule. If you feel you are above this process of compromise and persuasion, our system rewards you by making you irrelevant to the process.
3. Parties are exactly like open source development projects. We say "show me the code" or "send in a patch". Politicians say "run for office" or "contribute to a candidate you like". Note that most successful politicians know to value your time and hard work more than money-- especially for programmers, whose time is so valuable! So find a state legislator you can agree with, and help him/her out! If they are as good as you think they are, you'll eventually see things happen.
4. Read "Take Back Your Government" by Robert A. Heinlein. He was a democrat ward boss in LA during his post-navy, pre-science fiction days. Ignore Jerry Pournelle's liner notes-- Heinlein's advice is true to this day.
5. Decide what you really believe. Rank those beliefs. Then look at what candidates have done in the past. That is the only real measure of their worth. Odds are, you'll be surprised who you like most. If you rebel from your result, then rewrite or rerank what issues you care about, but be clear on why you believe what you believe. Joining a party isn't compromising your principles, it is enacting those principles. What you want to avoid is joining a party, and then deciding what you believe. Or deciding that it is your way or the highway-- that's an excuse for laziness.
Did I mention to read Heinlein? Everyone seems to think that politics is about money and media-- but those are only marginally effective.
Normally, Katz's comments are eloquent, though I think another poster hit the nail right on the head when he said that Katz just tries too hard. Open Source isn't lots of people doing your work for you. Two short movie reviews doesn't a feature make. This was really weak-- the kind of thing you submit when you have a deadline and are busy partying for the holidays.
Anyway, I am going to mention it. This has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Slashdot. I read Slashdot to get past the punditry and fluff pieces-- and I am starting to see way too many of them.
We all know that this is the holidays and there isn't a whole lot of news. So there is nothing wrong with having only one or two good articles or even zero, rather than trying to post for posting's sake. Less, in editing as in virtually everything else, is more.
This article was right on the money. Somehow, we've turned into a combative culture where the power of the judiciary is being used as a weapon-- against democracy and free markets.
Nowadays, rather than saying "this should be legal" and then getting together with people you agree with and supporting a law to legalize something, it is easier to hire a lawyer and declare that someone's rights somewhere are being violated. Then a court rules in your favor, and no debate or legislation can overturn you. It is because a right trumps everything in this country-- including democracy itself. I'm not saying this is bad-- quite the contrary, it is a wonderful system when it is used in good faith. But right now, it is being shockingly abused.
For one thing, people are suing each other over things they would never have bothered with before. There is a reflex now that you might as well try-- and the jackpots (monetary or ideological) that await people or corporations who do are irrestible. In this country, sometimes not suing is considered tacit permission when your rights are violated, encouraging still more knee-jerk lawsuits.
Another factor is that the judiciary has begun to blur what a right is. There is a difference between "this is a right" and "people should be free to do this, but it isn't a right because it isn't in the constitution yet". But this distinction is disappearing-- now a judge basically gets to make our liberties up as he goes along. Because the specification for what a right is isn't being adhered to, spurious lawsuits can make up rights and hope for a judge that agrees with them.
It's dangerous because when the backlash comes (and we are still a democracy-- when enough people's real rights are violated a la Amazon or etoy, there will be a backlash), I am afraid that our real rights and the great judical system we have will get thrown out with the bathwater. The judiciary can't be completely arbitrary for long before people lose all faith in it.
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Great! Now I have to wait ten days before buying my lego A-Wing. Does this mean that legos have become too dangerous for anyone to have other than Approved Law Enforcement Authorities? I hope I'm not too subversive for silly putty-- I'm running out of toys which are not Bad Influences (TM).
As far as the whole privacy/Ford-is-big-brother theory, I doubt that is of any substance. While it is entirely possible that they could do that, just the thought of the nightmarish PR scandal that would arise if such a scheme was uncovered should shy away even the most Orwellian of corporate policy makers.
I agree. Most of these sneaky schemes backfire, and good managers know it. Companies which are busy being clever usually see their cleverness fail, while companies which concentrate on their core operations surpass them.
Of course, Ford isn't doing this to be very nice guys-- if for no other reason because it wouldn't be very nice for people whose pension funds are invested in Ford stock. This could just be like corporate scholarships or other endeavors, but here are my theories:
Ford once represented the culmination of the industrial revolution. It made its mark because it recognized the new realities of the economy, and built a business around the new model. It paid its employees more because that's how you get the best people. It built simple, bare-bones cars for a market noone ever really pushed for (much as Apple did with the PC).
So maybe they just realize that just as in the early twentieth century the agricultural economy was industrialized; the industrial economy will now become information-based. By that logic, it makes sense to get your workers computer-literate.
I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that Ford isn't going to monitor their employees. If even one of them is a cracker, the fact that they had tacit permission from Ford and were supposedly being supervised creates a big liability problem. Besides, then they wouldn't be used.
The problem is that we are in the midst of the information revolution, but most sectors of the economy have only superficially benefitted from it. Sure the superficial benefits are significant, but imagine if a car company-- from the ground up-- took advantage of what technology could give them. Factories even more automated than they are now, staffed by people who are highly skilled and who like working there! Ever notice that CS people work like dogs, and get paid almost 50% more than the American median income straight out of college? If you think high salaries are expensive, try mediocrity.
Most of the obstacles for these companies aren't technological, they are bureaucratic. So by shaking things up and cutting the cost required to train people later, they'll be up and running while their competitors struggle to catch up. Of course, that is assuming that Ford can endure the growing pains such a radical shift will cause. I think this is a great idea, and I hope that Ford can make it pay for them.
Ask a socialogist and statician.
Glad you asked. ;) (I am not one, but I am studying in the field...)
I looked over this survey, and it is basically a 'push poll'. That is where you ask questions which are designed to influence a person's opinion. You do this by asking questions about one point of view, especially agree/disagree questions which bring up points in a person's head. By manipulating the questions, and the order in which they are asked, and getting the wording right, you have maneuvered a person who previously didn't have an opinion into having the one you want. Especially if you imply that a person should have an opinion.
They ask all these questions which imply the importance of the trial, then ask how closely they are following the MS trial. The options were 'following closely', 'somewhat closely' and 'not following'. Surprise surprise, people pick the middle answer.
I wouldn't put too much stock in this. In fact, we should be happy that people have this instinctive fear of regulation and government intrusion into our field. If they learn the details of the MS suit, then we'll see if opinion shifts, but the last thing we want is a list of rules and procedures which would strangle the small startups before they got off the ground.
I'd say there is virtually nothing we want the government to do about MS's monopoly. Now that we have the finding of fact, there are grounds for lawsuits against MS. I can see an argument for taking the "MS embraced and extended" proprietary standards and releasing them to an industry coalition. But open sourcing Windows 2000 would accomplish nothing (except reveal to programmers what they already know about the Mother of All Kludges). Break up MS? It would be like those slime monsters in D&D which when you cut them in half, now there are two of them! We'd have three or four MS monopolies (OfficeCorp, WindozeCorp, etc).
Mainly, we can watch the companies MS buried in the past go after them now. Since the industry is moving away from the desktop anyway, MS might be contained by technology already.
This is one hundred percent on target.
The Open Source Movement could have just as easily been called the Stable Software Movement. Linux and other open source products are better not because of who's on board or the quality of its people (though that's been tremendously helpful). It is just a better way of making software.
We've got MS and others who tried an experiment with computers: sell software the way Ford sells cars. It did pretty well, but eventually, that business model has to give way to something more mature and appropriate for what a business needs. And the success of Linux companies isn't because some journalist on the sidelines is cheering for the team-- it is because selling software the way a doctor sells healthcare is more appropriate. So now programmers are making better products, and making more money. Chicken and egg-- the media like Linux because it is successful; not the other way around.
This is a young field. Software as a product is fairly new, since until the 80's software was considered part of the hardware platform. It took a decade to improve the model, but that isn't too bad. I'm sure there's some other way of making software that is even better, and in ten years we'll all be doing that.
Reading that article reminded me of punk rockers who can't stand it when their favorite band becomes popular. Sure, Open Source is filled with parasites, con artists and Big Corporations. But the motto "show me the code" applies here. The parasites don't have anything to contribute, and will go to the next Next Big Thing. The con artists will eventually get caught (they almost always do). And if the Big Corporations can show me the code, I say welcome aboard. I hope someday to lead one-- and I refuse to be jealous if they someday manage to make better stuff than the startups.
That's the great thing about markets. Journalists, pundits, Jon Katz, marketting experts, strategic analysts-- none of them really make a difference. They're just kibbitzers. As long as the sourcecode remains open and free, we'll do just fine.
It was sad to hear this-- I remember sitting up at night in middleschool and high school reading the old sci-fi classics.
We're losing all the old great masters of science fiction. I guess this is inevitable, but modern science fiction just isn't the same.
I think modern writers can learn something from the Great Old Ones. ;) In the Campbell era, there were genuinely new ideas, examination of social issues without being preachy or satirical, great writing and (oddly absent from many modern writers) a great knowledge of science. You can find pieces of that puzzle everywhere now, but the specialization leaves us with few authors who try to be great in everything.
So while we're mourning, and catching up our anthology collections, let's think about where we want science fiction to be going.
Most of them are pretty ignorant about technology, and, for example, if you tell them, "The most popular video game currently available is called Blood & Gore and the plot of the game is to gun down innocent schoolchildren and nuns," they'll probably believe you (or figure that you are "close enough for government work.")
Politicians are often ignorant about technology because most technology people have exactly that attitude. "They're all corrupt anyway, and they are dumb, so why bother." It is rare to see such a community so stridently uninvolved. Many Congressmen have tried and failed to find technology people to advise them on issues because of just this attitude, which reminds me of the "Open Source is communism" stuff we used to hear.
I have always assumed congressional Email works like this. The congressman or Senator has a bunch of interns who don't necessarily have a lot to do all the time, they set one of the interns to read the incoming Email.
The ones I have met have full time people whose only job is answering mail. They get thousands per day!
If it is something important to the politician ("Bill gates wants to donate to your campaign") or something the intern cares about, they'll tell the politician.
Definitely not true. The official office that does the mail isn't even allowed to look at contributions. The congressguy has a person outside his official office who handles all that. By law, the office can't even touch it, except to forward it to that guy if it is accidentally sent to them. On the email/snailmail that takes most of their time, which deals with bills and issues, most do go through as much as they can, and demand careful reports on the rest. When you get thousands of snailmail/email a day, that's as much as you can do.
A big pile of paper mail, however, will have the politician come into his office and say, "Wow, look at all that mail!" The politician is bound to take notice if it is mostly against something he or she is doing, though it might not change his or her mind. (Stuff they don't really care about, which I believe includes a lot of tech related issues, is not something they are going to risk votes over.)
So which are you saying? That Representatives ignore their constituents because of their other beliefs? Or that they listen too much and blow with the wind and don't just do what is right? Answer: you are saying both-- when your views are the majority's you say the guy who disagrees is blind to democracy and majority rule. When most people disagree with you, you say the politician is blowing with the polls. This is cynicism masquerading as sophistication.
From the above, it doesn't sound like you have any direct knowledge of what a congressman/senator/president/cabinet member does from day to day, other than from what you see on TV. You should give some thought to how coders look, as seen on TV news. It isn't a pretty picture.
Of course, deCSS is copy protection broken by evil thieves, the Clipper chip stops child pornography (which is nearly everything on the internet), Al Gore invented the internet, and security through obscurity is best, so I guess TV does know best.
So, being involved in local politics gives you more of a voice on the national level.
This I totally agree with. I have been active in local politics in my area, and there is that same "show me the code" mentality there. If you put your time (forget money, it is people putting in real live hours of real live work that is really valued), the people you favor will more likely win. It isn't finding Big Players and trying to change their minds, it is finding a state legislator who might be a programmer and agree with you already, and helping them become a state senator, or a Congressman. If you are a libertarian, you pretty much tank your chances of winning (since third parties by definition are made of people who won't compromise enough to win a majority and actually do something). But that just makes your help more important, so get to work!
Robert Heinlein was a political leader in LA after he left the Navy, and wrote a book called Take Back Your Government. Read it. I read it in high school, and in college followed his algorithm. As I said, I am active in local politics, and can say that Heinlein was 100% right and following his advice, I have been ridiculously successful.
A couple of points:
As has already been said, most offices have about 40 people working for them. Many of them are answering phones, doing clerical work, etc (just like any office). With that said, the offices I have had contact with do handle email they receive. They print it out and handle it like normal mail, for reasons given below.
Virtually all the offices respond via snail mail. There are couple of reasons for this. First, there is security-- it is easier to detect forgery on paper mail. Second, it is easier for the Congressman/Senator to look over and approve a paper letter than an email before it is sent. Finally, the software/hardware is very old, and tough to adapt anyway, for reasons below.
Congressional offices operate under ridiculous rules and regulations. You'd think, hey, these guys write the laws, why not just change them? But the reality is that offices lack the resources to do software support on their own, and the rules were originally designed to be tough to change to prevent abuse.
Finally, on the subject of responding to people outside your district, you have to think about it this way. You only represent your district (the better interest of the nation as a whole counts as part of this, but since every issue is painted as a critical 'take one for the team' issue, it wears thin quickly). They are the only people who vote for you. It is therefore a disservice to them to spend resources on others which would have helped them. If they are so concerned about something, they can tell their congressman. Put another way, as Robert A. Heinlein said before basically giving the same advice I just did, "the votes are in the precincts".
Hey, Congress staffers read Slashdot, don't they? Tell us what software you use! Maybe we can improve it. It would be a public service, so RMS would like it. ;)
Here are my ideas:
Zork and Hitchhikers (already mentioned, but they still rock.
The Ancient Art of War and the Ancient Art of War at Sea: Two great games without a modern equivalent.
Adventure Construction Set: OK, this wasn't all it could have been. But we mean to call Linux a true OS when it doesn't even have a roleplaying game developer's tools yet? We could call it gtk!! Wait, that's taken. How about RPGtk?
Omega: This was an Origin game that let you make an AI tank, then code it to find other tanks and kill them for the Apple ][e.
Doom: Well, ok we have Doom.
Starcraft and Diablo: Already said, but they bear repeating, since they rock and roll.
Ascendency: By the Logic Factory. Great game with wonderful atmosphere. It didn't get the marketting to really take off, but it was very polished and cool.
Sexplosion!: Originally for the mac, this game loses its luster in translation, since we don't have GPFs.
I think this was the best point the author made. For an experienced administrator, typing in a quick and dirty text command is the quickest way to do things. For someone who is keeping her life as non-computer oriented as possible, though, text interfaces, key combinations, and scripts/rc files are all hopelessly arcane and arbitrary.
That's why windowing metaphors are so powerful-- you are hijacking training that people already have in the Real World and using it to ease the adjustment. That's why complex procedures are laid out in wizards: to guide people through it without having to remember an algorithm.
If you are trying to let someone do something complex, you want to make them learn as little as possible in order to do it. That doesn't mean they are ignorant, it means that we are imposing on them to spare as little brainspace as possible. A doctor doesn't make us learn medicine-- we shouldn't force him to learn software engineering.
This is all pretty obvious, IMO. But it is easy to forget. As coders, we know way more than the average person about computers. We don't need metaphors-- we can handle the raw abstractions. So in the name of flexibility and consistency, we get straight into what often amounts to minor coding in its own right.
This is compounded by feature creep. People are paying for features they won't use on their Office apps, and then wonder why their desktop is so crowded, and why everything has to be filed away in menus.
Finally, since abstraction is our living, we are using it too much where we shouldn't-- the user's experience. Making something universal, making it systematic, often good things. But sometimes you have to hide the underlying elegance in favor of being usable by people who don't know code.
emacs is not what we want. Enlightenment isn't, either, though it is ridiculously great. Nor is Word, really. MS's interface advantage isn't that they're particularly good, they are just what people are used to now. What we have to start thinking about is what is making Linux suddenly so popular to the Rest of the World: What do users want? Linux addresses security, stability, standardization and upgrade issues that the business world probably assumed were inevitable.
What we have to do is what PARC did years ago. Say "What are these computers for?" "What can they let people do which they couldn't do before?" and "How can computers help people do what they're doing now more efficiently?".
Answer those-- and don't think that companies like Apple aren't asking those questions every day-- and people will wonder why MS and others can't make an operating system which doesn't need to be unravelled by a PhD in CS. Rather than saying that about us, which is what they're doing. In almost every other area, Open Source has proved to be better. I think that, if people really start focusing on it, we can take the lead on it.
According to the article in yesterday's post, a few companies have cut deals with them to record this information and pass it on. All it takes is one company trading it for them to get a lock on you.
I'm not so worried about opting out. Frankly, cookies are sometimes useful, and really, Doubleclick is counting on people either not hearing, not caring/bothering, or forgetting when they reinstall their browser/use a different one/ get a new computer.
Research is, obviously, a Very Good Thing. But let's remember Clinton promises everyone that they'll get special treatment in the budget next year. He doesn't actually push for everything, since if he did, we'd be back in debt. So he just blames Congress instead. We can only hope that science is one of those things he's willing to actually do more than talk about.
After Clipper Chip/CDA/etc, I'm not too optimistic.
Silicon Valley, Slashdot News Mysterious startup Transmeta unveiled its Crusoe processor today. The new, low power processor is designed to address the chronic battery life problems facing laptop users.
"Look, I'm tellin' ya, Captain, we need more power or the laddies will get on the plane without their data. The processors canna take anymore, captain!" said David R. Ditzel, CEO of Transmeta.
"Well, I dunno, it sounds great," remarked Billy Carlyse, a 7-11 employee in Skokie, IL."but it'll probably be obsolete before anyone sees it. The industry trend is for rapid obsolescence-- and Transmeta has been working on this for five years!"
As if on cue, Motorola announced a new fuel cell battery, promising unlimited power for laptops. In response, Transmeta has announced a halt to Crusoe production. They will now be doing Linux distributions and portals like everyone else.
I hate to admit it, but voting is different from financial transactions. The incentive for fraud is greater, and the system is less fault-tolerant because so few people vote. I am more knowledgeable about elections than I am a security guru, so take this w/ a grain of salt, but:
Software systems are much easier to crack than physical systems. At the risk of sounding like the french with their 'visual telegraph' alternative to telephones, there is a comfort in the fact that:
1. Tampering can be limited to people with physical access to the machine which is monitored by ordinary people. Political parties employ 'poll watchers', who are ordinary people who often aren't even politically active, to keep an eye on the machines during the elections process to watch for tampering.
2. If tampering DOES occur, the machine can be examined to determine who did it, and reveal physical evidence. It is much harder to determine that from a compromised system.
3. Financial transactions are time-dependent, whereas election info is useful for years. So I can sniff the encrypted packets today, and decrypt it with tomorrow's techniques.
Besides, I keep hearing from experts that our current systems for financial transaction are insecure and require major overhaul.
People are very passionate about politics-- just read the other posts! There are plenty of people who, given the means, would actively try to disable or disrupt an on-line election. Or try to distort the results. Or use tricky web page scripts to socially engineer a person into voting for other candidates. The point is, this is one of the most vulnerable things to tampering in the real world-- let alone online. We have to be very cautious before we implement it.
I'd say that the first thing to be wary of are vesting rules. It is a sensible and ubiquitous precaution for a company to keep you there; you are the value of the company, more than its so-called assets.
But it is therefore easy to get stuck at a bad company. You don't know how much the company will be worth when/if it is successful. You need to know what proportion of total shares is represented by your share (I know one company which basically offered n shares, but said, "You'll just have to hope we don't issue too many shares and dilute you out of the game. Trust us."
You'll want to get a good idea of the management team, talk to other coders there, etc. You should do this anyway, but if salaray was all you got, you could just jump to somewhere better. Vesting rules means that much of your pay depends on you staying 2-4 years-- that could be half your working life due to age discrimination. That means saving 10% of your income for your retirement, too.
It is, philosophically, great that you don't care too much about money. But for Pete's sake don't tell them that. Otherwise they will lure you with 'intangibles' which will vanish by week two. I know people who are hideously underpaid for their skills, but get seduced by sweet talk from managers who are taking 10x the salary. Take 80k instead of 50k and donate it to charity-- you'll be doing a good deed and management will regard you as an $80k asset. This isn't about being a 'nice guy', it is about not being a naive businessman. To them, your worth is what they are paying for you.
Remember age discrimination. There'll be some great young 22 year old who can work 16 hour days and is up on everything new, and doesn't have a family to support in ten years. So count on a short working life before you have to settle somewhere where your bargaining position isn't so good.
Look at who is investing. Joe McClueless might be big in the machine tools field, but to him your venture is just a way to put a little risk in his portfolio. If Larry Ellison is dropping $10M, though, you know that your company has been judged as a good investment by experts. Don't look at who they're 'talking to'. Anyone can talk to anyone else. The measure of a company is ink on paper, and numbers not happy words.
Finally, and this actually should have come first, make sure this is something you believe in as a field. Don't do databases because they are hot. If your passion is UNIX, do that. If it is COBOL, do that (!). If it is graphics and usability, do that. You'll be happier and much more successful doing work you love and believe in. Just remember: you are also a businessman. Act naive, and management will fleece you. If you don't believe in money, take it anyway, then give it to charity.
Well, from what I gather, we aren't suffering from people who know security. We are suffering from managers and leaders who won't do anything to fix known holes in security.
This wouldn't be a bad idea, but coming from President Clipper Chip, it is a little ominous. If he's so intent on improving education, why doesn't he do something where we really need it-- at elementary and high schools. Hard to major in CS when you can't read or do simple math. He keeps caving in to the teachers unions instead of doing something productive.
Effectively, businesses have been told "if you put all your employees together, in a dangerous area, we'll bust you from here to the ends of the Earth, but if you just give them some plutonium tablets and let them run home like pretty little sheep, we don't give a damn if you run them like a distributed sweat shop until they die of work-related injuries."
This is a little alarmist. For one thing, most of the telecommuters I know work for small start-ups which can barely afford to put safety rails on the water cooler as is.
One of the points of working where you live is that you get to make your own environment. OSHA making that decision basically forces companies to either invade your home to shield them from litigation or not allow telecommuting.
If I put live wires hanging inches from my face, that's my choice. If my top bunk isn't wheelchair accessible, ditto. If I am not hanging "labor friendly" posters over my bed, who cares? The idea of working at home is that you aren't in a cubicle, you have control over how you live and work.
I agree.
There are times when it makes sense for your company to provide you with desk, computer, lamp electricity, air, etc. But I don't see why we need OSHA setting this in stone when it should be part of the normal salary/working conditions negotiations.
Compared to your salary and (especially!) benefits, the cost of furniture is pretty minimal. And if my company gives me an extra thousand a year and says "buy your own" then what is OSHA's beef? That we aren't doing it Their Way (TM)?
I have to admit, while his writing is often mechanically workmanlike, I have yet to see anything:
...insightful from a social science perspective. (Read any modern neo-socialist, such as Marcuse, if you want something with this general slant, backed up by facts and intelligent analysis. Or better yet, look at all the countries run by neo-socialists as they desperately try to catch up with us.)
...that demonstrates more than a passing familiarity with technology. All he seems to know is that he sure don't like corporatism.
...that shows a good journalist's skill at bringing up new ideas or at least better organizing old ones.
...that doesn't amount to wannabe-ism and self-promotion.
None of this really matters, except that Slashdot is paying him instead of someone better, and a slight waste of bandwidth. Really, I'm only worried that real writers might try to use Katz as a source. What if he became our spokesman?
BTW, I read a Niven article asserting (convincingly, too!) that Dante's Inferno was science fiction, using the only science of the time, theology. I think there has been science fiction as long as there has been science.
What really stands out to me from this interview is something I have felt for a long time-- that an uninformed citizenry is the biggest threat to our liberty.
The best thing we can do is to remain engaged and active in educating people about what the internet and other computational advances mean for people. One thing I see is that although we may bicker about alot, it is interesting that whether you are a self described libertarian or socialist (or anything in between), most hackers have a great deal in common.
I think that this is because knowledge of the new realities of the world and their implications itself points to good solutions for people. Small, agile corporations and governments. Privacy for individuals, publicly available information on group activities (such as governments or corporations.
So grim saying of nay, which is all I've been hearing recently, is premature. Once people know what is going on, the answers will present themselves to them. And with the web, we don't have to tell them anymore, or give them philes we've downloaded at 1200 baud from someone's C64-- we can show them in full color.
I know what the collapse of civilization means.
My list includes a bastard sword, chain mail, soft leather boots, a number of belt pouches, my trusty travelling spellbook, and fifty feet of rope. As long as I don't bump into El Ravager or Teflon Billy, I should be just fine!
While you puny mortals use your thrice-cursed 'technology', I will be racking up easy experience points taking out dead-eyed suburbanites as I become the Elvish fighter-mage I was always destined to be.
Tell Bill that in the coming Age of Sorcery that there can be only one!
Vote Smart is a great resource-- you'd be surprised how many candidates who talk 'open source/computers/whatever' and say their "down with it" don't do a thing for us (Gore: Clipper Chip, that committee that is trying, right now to tax the internet, etc.) and vice versa.
But sure, if more people voted third party, they would win more often-- but why do that when you can much more easily work to change one of the two parties? There are more libertarian Republicans than there are libertarian Libertarians! And more green Democrats than green Greens. (typographical note: lowercase indicates philosophy, uppercase indicates party).
You'd be surprised who matches up with your views. That's because the media is paid to be truthful, but paid much more (and more reliably) to be dramatic. So we can learn about candidates from the media alone (and don't deny it-- we are all influenced to some extent, we're immersed in it) or we can learn about candidates we like from impartial sources (Vote Smart), groups we like (EFF) and from the candidates themselves (web sites).
For pete's sake, if all I knew about Linux came from poly sci classes and Media Personalities, I would know less than nothing about it.
I'm surprised to see so many slashdotters support the greens, though. That socialist 'Cathedral' philosophy, IMHO, isn't really viable. I'd prefer a libertarian 'Bazaar' approach, myself.
Third-party candidates have no chance of winning the Presidency; therefore very few people will "waste" their votes on a third-party candidate; therefore... You get the idea. With fusion, a third party can nominate one of the major-party candidates that most closely represents their views. Then when at the polls, one can vote for a third-party ticket without "wasting" one's vote, because the candidate is also a major-party candidate and could win.
I don't see what the point of helping third parties is. More views/opinions promoted? But third parties like the Libertarians and Greens are doing that already. One of the two parties, seeing a good/popular idea, adopts it, or doesn't and watches third party popularity increase (many elections are tipped one way or another by third party candidates 'taking' votes from the candidate closes to them ideologically.
What else does a third party do? Bring in more factions/marginalized groups? Those people tend to pick a major party, then become influential in the primaries (the original Mayor Daly of Chicago was one of many democrats supported by the then-persecuted irish americans at the turn of the century, for instance. Or the way persecuted blacks who got past the Jim Crow laws voted Republican, at a time when no white southerner would.)
The way I see it, the only rationale for tilting the rules to help third parties is so that people don't have to compromise their positions. A democracy without compromise is a tyranny of the 50%+1. And realistically, without compromise, you won't make it past 5% in an election. Other systems let people vote as a reflex, then leave governing to backroom deals between parties. Our system (for the few who still actually participate in it in its entirety), supports people who make decisions about what they believe, and what they can live with.
Since virtually no two people agree on every issue, democracy reduces to a compromise problem. Parliaments place compromise in the hands of a few. Our system lets people make their own compromises. Sucks if you are a fanatic, academic, or potential dictator-- but for people who have deadlines to meet and real-world risks in their jobs, this shouldn't be anything new. The trick is that the more effort you put into the process, the more you get out of it.
A couple of (mostly) factual points:
1. Even in states with so-called non-partisan primaries, you may only vote in one party.
2. Parties serve to synthesize conflicting and competing beliefs and interests (we all believe in law enforcement and in privacy- but where does crypto regulation fall?) as well as competing factions (labor democrats want more trade restrictions, 'new' democrats don't). Of course, by voting in a primary you are compromising your beliefs-- but so is the radical next door. It allows minorities to be heard, and even sometimes win, even though majorities in the end rule. If you feel you are above this process of compromise and persuasion, our system rewards you by making you irrelevant to the process.
3. Parties are exactly like open source development projects. We say "show me the code" or "send in a patch". Politicians say "run for office" or "contribute to a candidate you like". Note that most successful politicians know to value your time and hard work more than money-- especially for programmers, whose time is so valuable! So find a state legislator you can agree with, and help him/her out! If they are as good as you think they are, you'll eventually see things happen.
4. Read "Take Back Your Government" by Robert A. Heinlein. He was a democrat ward boss in LA during his post-navy, pre-science fiction days. Ignore Jerry Pournelle's liner notes-- Heinlein's advice is true to this day.
5. Decide what you really believe. Rank those beliefs. Then look at what candidates have done in the past. That is the only real measure of their worth. Odds are, you'll be surprised who you like most. If you rebel from your result, then rewrite or rerank what issues you care about, but be clear on why you believe what you believe. Joining a party isn't compromising your principles, it is enacting those principles. What you want to avoid is joining a party, and then deciding what you believe. Or deciding that it is your way or the highway-- that's an excuse for laziness.
Did I mention to read Heinlein? Everyone seems to think that politics is about money and media-- but those are only marginally effective.
Normally, Katz's comments are eloquent, though I think another poster hit the nail right on the head when he said that Katz just tries too hard. Open Source isn't lots of people doing your work for you. Two short movie reviews doesn't a feature make. This was really weak-- the kind of thing you submit when you have a deadline and are busy partying for the holidays.
Anyway, I am going to mention it. This has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Slashdot. I read Slashdot to get past the punditry and fluff pieces-- and I am starting to see way too many of them.
We all know that this is the holidays and there isn't a whole lot of news. So there is nothing wrong with having only one or two good articles or even zero, rather than trying to post for posting's sake. Less, in editing as in virtually everything else, is more.
This article was right on the money. Somehow, we've turned into a combative culture where the power of the judiciary is being used as a weapon-- against democracy and free markets.
Nowadays, rather than saying "this should be legal" and then getting together with people you agree with and supporting a law to legalize something, it is easier to hire a lawyer and declare that someone's rights somewhere are being violated. Then a court rules in your favor, and no debate or legislation can overturn you. It is because a right trumps everything in this country-- including democracy itself. I'm not saying this is bad-- quite the contrary, it is a wonderful system when it is used in good faith. But right now, it is being shockingly abused.
For one thing, people are suing each other over things they would never have bothered with before. There is a reflex now that you might as well try-- and the jackpots (monetary or ideological) that await people or corporations who do are irrestible. In this country, sometimes not suing is considered tacit permission when your rights are violated, encouraging still more knee-jerk lawsuits.
Another factor is that the judiciary has begun to blur what a right is. There is a difference between "this is a right" and "people should be free to do this, but it isn't a right because it isn't in the constitution yet". But this distinction is disappearing-- now a judge basically gets to make our liberties up as he goes along. Because the specification for what a right is isn't being adhered to, spurious lawsuits can make up rights and hope for a judge that agrees with them.
It's dangerous because when the backlash comes (and we are still a democracy-- when enough people's real rights are violated a la Amazon or etoy, there will be a backlash), I am afraid that our real rights and the great judical system we have will get thrown out with the bathwater. The judiciary can't be completely arbitrary for long before people lose all faith in it.