So if politicians must be publicly funded, then what constitutes an illegal bribe?
That's an easy one, actually.
If a guy gets a good deal buying a used car, is that a bribe?
Was it a better deal than the dealer would have given someone else? If so, yes, if not, no.
If someone buys a hooker for a politician, is that a bribe?
Was it his bachelor party? If so, we might let it slide. If not, yes.
Are birthday presents from family a bribe? From friends?
Would those people have done the same thing for him/her were he/she not in that position? If so, then no. If not, yes.
From "friends"?
See above.
Are you going to make a list of what financial transactions politicians are allowed to make and who they are allowed to make them with?
Of course not. By getting rid of private campaign financing, you eliminate the vast majority of things that would be considered bribes in one fell swoop. Every other type of bribe tends to be club-me-on-the-head obvious at that point because it will stick out like a sore thumb instead of getting lost in the noise of campaign contributions.
1) It's impossible. Everyone has to buy something from someone sometime.
And you think those someones should be allowed to give preferential treatment to politicians? As far as I'm concerned, all business dealings with politicians must be arms-length, and all gifts must be publicly declared and scrutinized. It almost sounds like you actually want corruption.
2) It's against the idea of freedom of "oh so many things", like speech (expressing your political opinion with money), association (who are you allowed to buy from), equality of law (you can sell your car to your boss but not to your congressman), etc
Bullshit. First, you're making ludicrous assumptions about business dealings. We already have a legal definition for arms-length agreements, and any politician engaging in any other "deal" is almost by definition corrupt.
Second, regarding free speech, nowhere in the Constitution does it say that money == speech. We've twisted the Constitution to interpret it that way. When the founding fathers wrote it, Freedom of Speech meant shouting in the court square or writing letters. Freedom of the Press meant paying a printer a couple of days' pay, not paying a TV network a couple of centuries' pay. We've allowed lots of grey areas to creep into our definitions of these things that simply did not exist two hundred years ago. Arguably some of those grey areas are useful to protect, but that does not mean that we should be forced to blindly protect them without limitation and at all costs, up to and including the loss of democracy itself.
Third, equality of law has never existed for public officials. Period. I can't go up to my congressperson and legally say, "I'll give you a million bucks if you'll vote against SOPA" any more than a politician can give a police officer $500 for looking the other way after a drunk driving accident. Either one is bribery of an official, and is quite illegal. In the United States, to my knowledge, we have never had anything approaching perfect equality of law when it comes to public officials. Many anti-bribery laws exist in English Common Law, with some dating back as far as the 1500s. We can't possibly get away from such a core founding principle of our government and hope to have any shred of democracy left.
3) It doesn't address the real problem at all.
Pray tell, what would that real problem be, if it isn't the corrupting influence of hundreds of billions of dollars in politics?
You're joking, right? Do you honestly think that, if someone were injecting a flaw, they would inject a flaw that was readily discoverable? No. Of course not. They'd introduce some miniscule mistake in some random number generator that makes the result no longer be quite uniformly distributed in such a way that the error is only detectable by performing thousands of calls and doing heavy math on them, thus enabling a side channel attack on the randomly generated symmetric keys used for SSL or some such.
Maybe you didn't notice, but Biden was removed from office. Except in the rare event of a tie in the Senate, the VP doesn't get a vote on much of anything unless the President snuffs it.
No. I do not want to wake up and work part of every day to provide campaign cash to someone who says I'm evil for thinking that it's not government's role to make sure everyone gets the same stuff regardless of whether or how they work. I do not want to be forced to support a candidate that says I'm inherently wrong for being, say, male. Or that I'm evil for thinking that people who break the law by sneaking into the country and lying on federal paperwork should get free stuff that I spend other parts of my day working to pay for. You're welcome to give such people campaign cash, but don't force me to.
The problem is that there's really no other choice that preserves democracy. Either you spend taxpayer dollars to ensure that everyone who meets some reasonable set of criteria (e.g. getting n signatures) is funded equally from the public treasury or you have elections in which the politicians are inherently for sale.
This is one of the few issues that is absolutely black and white. Giving money to a politician is a bribe, and those who give the most money will inherently have more influence. There's just no good way to prevent that. Public funding prevents corruption precisely because you are forced to support not just your candidate, but also everyone else, thus ensuring that politicians have no incentive to try to raise more money than their competitor. Without that built-in leveling, you cannot have a truly free election.
You may want to run your state or your country like a PTA meeting, but the founders had a much better grip on the tyrrany and foolishness of the simple majority and capricious elections. You do sound like someone who would like California, though. That's working out really well, isn't it?
The founding fathers could not possibly have envisioned a world in which the cost to run for President would be equal to an average person's salary over eleven thousand years (based on 2011 U.S. median income). They did their best to make sure that we would not end up in a plutocracy, but we managed to end up there anyway. So clearly, those founding fathers you so are so enamored with didn't know everything....
Doesn't matter. Just pick a non-politician to run as an independent. If you could get that 20% to vote for such a candidate as a block, you'd shake up the establishment pretty seriously.
Besides, the only reason running for office is so expensive is that TV advertising plays such a big role. TV viewership is on the decline, though, so in ten to twenty years, it's going to be a whole new ballgame.
20% of Egypt was up in arms about it's leadership, too. That's not a small enough percentage of the population to safely marginalize.
You'd be amazed what 20% of the population can do, voting in a block. With only 60% voter turnout in a typical Presidential election, unless almost every other voter chooses another candidate (and by that, I mean the same other candidate), that's enough to solidly tip the balance to a different politician or party.
Think about it this way: if Google and Facebook don't act and SOPA/PIPA passes, they'll be in a situation where the government requires them to do something that's basically impossible. They'll have no choice but to break the law (and risk fines) or shut down parts of their operation entirely. The desire to survive generally outweighs any consideration of contracts or money in most sane and rational people.
You haven't been paying attention. The TSA has no need to justify anything, citizen. They repeatedly commit dubiously legal searches and seizures, illegal detentions, random groping, and unlicensed irradiation of the flying public under the threat of invalidating your expensive plane ticket purchase (extortion) if you do not comply. They can't justify most of what they do. That never stopped them from doing anything before. Why start caring now?
I thought this was what the Arduino series computers were good at.
Only if your project requires no CPU. Consider an autonomous bot learning a path through a maze. With an Arduino, you might be able to do a passable job using a series of stepper motors with counters, but with this, you could connect a webcam and do computer vision analysis.
Also, with an Arduino, you're limited in your ability to interact with it. Although it might be possible to cram a TCP/IP stack into the thing, it would be pretty tight. With this thing, you could ssh into it over a Wi-Fi connection (with an external adapter), update the software remotely, and keep on going.
And you're memory-constrained with an Arduino. I realize that back in the day of assembly language über-hackers, it wasn't a big deal to cram amazing programs into tiny little chunks of RAM, but it's not a programming skill that's particularly useful in this day and age, and it makes more sense to teach people programming skills that more accurately map onto what they will see in the real world. This means having more than just a few kilobytes of RAM. Why would anyone want to squeeze their code down enough to work in such a resource-constrained environment if they don't have to?
Wine is frequently buggy precisely because it is not an emulator. It is an attempt to create a set of compatibility libraries that shim between Windows APIs and a completely different OS. It's a miracle it works at all, given what a Herculean task that is.
If Microsoft wanted to emulate x86 on ARM, they'd probably do exactly what Apple did when they emulated PowerPC on x86 (which, incidentally, worked remarkably well for most apps): include a complete copy of the actual x86 Windows libraries, run it all in a dynamically recompiling emulator, and translate the few dozen system calls where the apps and libraries actually call down into the kernel. And boom. You're done.
General purpose I/O pins normally only show up on expensive prototyping boards, not on "real" computers. I think the idea is that this will allow folks who couldn't otherwise afford such prototyping hardware to experiment with such things. I could easily see this being used for school science projects like BattleBots, those computer maze projects, and so on.
Similarly, real computers aren't small enough to trivially embed them into random crap around your house. I can think of lots of really fun pranks to pull with one of these and a small speaker....:-D But then again, that's hobbyist stuff.
The problem with planting trees as a solution to arid climates is that although they can get by with little rainfall once they are established, they need a fair amount of water to get started. By the time their roots are deep enough to live in a grassland area, someone has been watering them for decades. Thus, planting the trees is necessary, but not sufficient.
As for trees releasing CO2 back into the atmosphere when they die, that's technically true, but somewhat disingenuous. You have a fountain with multiple basins. The water level is too high. You take a bowl and place it so that one basin drains into the bowl before it drains into another basin. For a period of time, water is going into the bowl and not into the next basin. Water will eventually come out of that basin, so at some point, the water level ceases to drop, but it is still lower than it was before you added the bowl.
Trees are the same way. You are not sequestering anything permanently, but so long as the trees remain alive, they are sequestering carbon, and when they die, they will be replaced by other trees that sequester carbon, so on the average, there is carbon being sequestered unless somebody clear-cuts the forest.
Tidal power has to be right on the coast. Water extraction does not. Run a few fifty-foot-wide pipes out five miles into the ocean. Problem solved. Next problem?
Lactose intolerance is generally believed to be caused by insufficient levels of lactase, which breaks down lactose. L. acidophilus produces lactase. Now admittedly, the lactose intolerance is not caused by the lack of bacteria, but rather by the particular human not producing enough lactase. However, introducing additional lactase-producing bacteria does help some people.
They make supplements that are supposed to overcome this and not open up until they get to your intestines, but they are not the norm.
What you're missing is that it is not a requirement that all the bacteria survive, only that some of the bacteria survive. It's like trying to injure somebody by throwing a baseball at him or her. If you throw one baseball, that person will probably catch it. If you throw a million baseballs in the course of a half a second... you get the picture.
No need to remove houses. We have plenty of land to grow trees. What we don't have is enough fresh water. Enter desalinization plants. Add a bunch of them near the U.S. coast, and pump metric craptons of fresh water into the grasslands and deserts in the middle of the U.S. Take advantage of the now-arable land to grow forests.
So the only problems remaining are electrical power, money, and time.
Perhaps in the future, you might be able to get treatments of beneficial stomach bacteria, maybe even in pill form, to help treat diabetes. I doubt this particular strain found in mice will work though, you would probably have to find a human analog or genetically engineer a bacterium more at home in the human digestive tract.
The natural medicine practitioners that so many folks on Slashdot seem to bash and ignore have been aware of the connection between L. acidophilus and a number of medical conditions for several years. It has just taken this long for the medical community to be sufficiently convinced that they were right through the use of double-blind studies.
Acidophilus pills are available at pretty much every pharmacy and health food store (at least in the U.S.), from CVS and Walgreens to that weird place on the corner that smells kind of like incense, but not quite. I think if I had diabetes, I'd certainly be tempted to give it a shot. In the worst case, it doesn't help your particular form of diabetes, and you wasted a few dollars for a bottle.
Consuming L. acidophilus is also known to reduce serum cholesterol, reduce lactose intolerance in many people (because it produces some of the enzymes that break down lactose), and reduce the incidence of diarrhea in many situations by crowding out the bad bacteria that cause it. Frankly, it's about as close as you can get to a miracle drug, at least when it comes to digestive health, and it's available over the counter for just a few bucks per bottle. And because each pill contains living bacteria that multiply on their own, you don't necessarily need to keep taking it, unlike drugs.
There are over-the-counter Lactobacillus acidophilus tablets that contain cultured bacteria already. Why in the world would anyone do it the way you describe? I suppose there are other helpful bacteria in your gut, but that seems to be the most significant variety in terms of its effect on everything from serum cholesterol levels to lactose intolerance....
For most of us on Slashdot, statistically speaking, sending pictures of our private parts to a woman 20 years our junior is a felony, whether she consented or not.
Slashdot Mirror
That's an easy one, actually.
Was it a better deal than the dealer would have given someone else? If so, yes, if not, no.
Was it his bachelor party? If so, we might let it slide. If not, yes.
Would those people have done the same thing for him/her were he/she not in that position? If so, then no. If not, yes.
See above.
Of course not. By getting rid of private campaign financing, you eliminate the vast majority of things that would be considered bribes in one fell swoop. Every other type of bribe tends to be club-me-on-the-head obvious at that point because it will stick out like a sore thumb instead of getting lost in the noise of campaign contributions.
And you think those someones should be allowed to give preferential treatment to politicians? As far as I'm concerned, all business dealings with politicians must be arms-length, and all gifts must be publicly declared and scrutinized. It almost sounds like you actually want corruption.
Bullshit. First, you're making ludicrous assumptions about business dealings. We already have a legal definition for arms-length agreements, and any politician engaging in any other "deal" is almost by definition corrupt.
Second, regarding free speech, nowhere in the Constitution does it say that money == speech. We've twisted the Constitution to interpret it that way. When the founding fathers wrote it, Freedom of Speech meant shouting in the court square or writing letters. Freedom of the Press meant paying a printer a couple of days' pay, not paying a TV network a couple of centuries' pay. We've allowed lots of grey areas to creep into our definitions of these things that simply did not exist two hundred years ago. Arguably some of those grey areas are useful to protect, but that does not mean that we should be forced to blindly protect them without limitation and at all costs, up to and including the loss of democracy itself.
Third, equality of law has never existed for public officials. Period. I can't go up to my congressperson and legally say, "I'll give you a million bucks if you'll vote against SOPA" any more than a politician can give a police officer $500 for looking the other way after a drunk driving accident. Either one is bribery of an official, and is quite illegal. In the United States, to my knowledge, we have never had anything approaching perfect equality of law when it comes to public officials. Many anti-bribery laws exist in English Common Law, with some dating back as far as the 1500s. We can't possibly get away from such a core founding principle of our government and hope to have any shred of democracy left.
Pray tell, what would that real problem be, if it isn't the corrupting influence of hundreds of billions of dollars in politics?
You're joking, right? Do you honestly think that, if someone were injecting a flaw, they would inject a flaw that was readily discoverable? No. Of course not. They'd introduce some miniscule mistake in some random number generator that makes the result no longer be quite uniformly distributed in such a way that the error is only detectable by performing thousands of calls and doing heavy math on them, thus enabling a side channel attack on the randomly generated symmetric keys used for SSL or some such.
Maybe you didn't notice, but Biden was removed from office. Except in the rare event of a tie in the Senate, the VP doesn't get a vote on much of anything unless the President snuffs it.
The problem is that there's really no other choice that preserves democracy. Either you spend taxpayer dollars to ensure that everyone who meets some reasonable set of criteria (e.g. getting n signatures) is funded equally from the public treasury or you have elections in which the politicians are inherently for sale.
This is one of the few issues that is absolutely black and white. Giving money to a politician is a bribe, and those who give the most money will inherently have more influence. There's just no good way to prevent that. Public funding prevents corruption precisely because you are forced to support not just your candidate, but also everyone else, thus ensuring that politicians have no incentive to try to raise more money than their competitor. Without that built-in leveling, you cannot have a truly free election.
The founding fathers could not possibly have envisioned a world in which the cost to run for President would be equal to an average person's salary over eleven thousand years (based on 2011 U.S. median income). They did their best to make sure that we would not end up in a plutocracy, but we managed to end up there anyway. So clearly, those founding fathers you so are so enamored with didn't know everything....
Doesn't matter. Just pick a non-politician to run as an independent. If you could get that 20% to vote for such a candidate as a block, you'd shake up the establishment pretty seriously.
Besides, the only reason running for office is so expensive is that TV advertising plays such a big role. TV viewership is on the decline, though, so in ten to twenty years, it's going to be a whole new ballgame.
20% of Egypt was up in arms about it's leadership, too. That's not a small enough percentage of the population to safely marginalize.
You'd be amazed what 20% of the population can do, voting in a block. With only 60% voter turnout in a typical Presidential election, unless almost every other voter chooses another candidate (and by that, I mean the same other candidate), that's enough to solidly tip the balance to a different politician or party.
Wait, one of them is the father of the pregnant girl? Shouldn't it be that one of them is the father of the pregnant girl's child?
Oh, and can one of the passengers go PC Load Letter on the naked porn scanner?
Think about it this way: if Google and Facebook don't act and SOPA/PIPA passes, they'll be in a situation where the government requires them to do something that's basically impossible. They'll have no choice but to break the law (and risk fines) or shut down parts of their operation entirely. The desire to survive generally outweighs any consideration of contracts or money in most sane and rational people.
Feel the city breakin' and everybody shakin'...
Oh, wait, I thought you said 1024 Bee Gees. My bad.
You haven't been paying attention. The TSA has no need to justify anything, citizen. They repeatedly commit dubiously legal searches and seizures, illegal detentions, random groping, and unlicensed irradiation of the flying public under the threat of invalidating your expensive plane ticket purchase (extortion) if you do not comply. They can't justify most of what they do. That never stopped them from doing anything before. Why start caring now?
Only if your project requires no CPU. Consider an autonomous bot learning a path through a maze. With an Arduino, you might be able to do a passable job using a series of stepper motors with counters, but with this, you could connect a webcam and do computer vision analysis.
Also, with an Arduino, you're limited in your ability to interact with it. Although it might be possible to cram a TCP/IP stack into the thing, it would be pretty tight. With this thing, you could ssh into it over a Wi-Fi connection (with an external adapter), update the software remotely, and keep on going.
And you're memory-constrained with an Arduino. I realize that back in the day of assembly language über-hackers, it wasn't a big deal to cram amazing programs into tiny little chunks of RAM, but it's not a programming skill that's particularly useful in this day and age, and it makes more sense to teach people programming skills that more accurately map onto what they will see in the real world. This means having more than just a few kilobytes of RAM. Why would anyone want to squeeze their code down enough to work in such a resource-constrained environment if they don't have to?
Wine is frequently buggy precisely because it is not an emulator. It is an attempt to create a set of compatibility libraries that shim between Windows APIs and a completely different OS. It's a miracle it works at all, given what a Herculean task that is.
If Microsoft wanted to emulate x86 on ARM, they'd probably do exactly what Apple did when they emulated PowerPC on x86 (which, incidentally, worked remarkably well for most apps): include a complete copy of the actual x86 Windows libraries, run it all in a dynamically recompiling emulator, and translate the few dozen system calls where the apps and libraries actually call down into the kernel. And boom. You're done.
General purpose I/O pins normally only show up on expensive prototyping boards, not on "real" computers. I think the idea is that this will allow folks who couldn't otherwise afford such prototyping hardware to experiment with such things. I could easily see this being used for school science projects like BattleBots, those computer maze projects, and so on.
Similarly, real computers aren't small enough to trivially embed them into random crap around your house. I can think of lots of really fun pranks to pull with one of these and a small speaker.... :-D But then again, that's hobbyist stuff.
The problem with planting trees as a solution to arid climates is that although they can get by with little rainfall once they are established, they need a fair amount of water to get started. By the time their roots are deep enough to live in a grassland area, someone has been watering them for decades. Thus, planting the trees is necessary, but not sufficient.
As for trees releasing CO2 back into the atmosphere when they die, that's technically true, but somewhat disingenuous. You have a fountain with multiple basins. The water level is too high. You take a bowl and place it so that one basin drains into the bowl before it drains into another basin. For a period of time, water is going into the bowl and not into the next basin. Water will eventually come out of that basin, so at some point, the water level ceases to drop, but it is still lower than it was before you added the bowl.
Trees are the same way. You are not sequestering anything permanently, but so long as the trees remain alive, they are sequestering carbon, and when they die, they will be replaced by other trees that sequester carbon, so on the average, there is carbon being sequestered unless somebody clear-cuts the forest.
Tidal power has to be right on the coast. Water extraction does not. Run a few fifty-foot-wide pipes out five miles into the ocean. Problem solved. Next problem?
Lactose intolerance is generally believed to be caused by insufficient levels of lactase, which breaks down lactose. L. acidophilus produces lactase. Now admittedly, the lactose intolerance is not caused by the lack of bacteria, but rather by the particular human not producing enough lactase. However, introducing additional lactase-producing bacteria does help some people.
What you're missing is that it is not a requirement that all the bacteria survive, only that some of the bacteria survive. It's like trying to injure somebody by throwing a baseball at him or her. If you throw one baseball, that person will probably catch it. If you throw a million baseballs in the course of a half a second... you get the picture.
A blocked appendix is typically caused by inflammation due to infection.
No need to remove houses. We have plenty of land to grow trees. What we don't have is enough fresh water. Enter desalinization plants. Add a bunch of them near the U.S. coast, and pump metric craptons of fresh water into the grasslands and deserts in the middle of the U.S. Take advantage of the now-arable land to grow forests.
So the only problems remaining are electrical power, money, and time.
That's easy. Mars. All they have to do is keep doing what they're doing, but on a different planet, and eventually it will be warm enough. :-)
Heck, for that matter, if we could just come up with a way to efficiently sequester the CO2....
Have you looked into GCD?
Unfortunately, doctors are quick to remove your appendix upon infection instead of trying antibiotics first.
You already can. http://www.wholehealth.com/health-articles/probiotics-may-have-role-in-and-diabetes-management.
The natural medicine practitioners that so many folks on Slashdot seem to bash and ignore have been aware of the connection between L. acidophilus and a number of medical conditions for several years. It has just taken this long for the medical community to be sufficiently convinced that they were right through the use of double-blind studies.
Acidophilus pills are available at pretty much every pharmacy and health food store (at least in the U.S.), from CVS and Walgreens to that weird place on the corner that smells kind of like incense, but not quite. I think if I had diabetes, I'd certainly be tempted to give it a shot. In the worst case, it doesn't help your particular form of diabetes, and you wasted a few dollars for a bottle.
Consuming L. acidophilus is also known to reduce serum cholesterol, reduce lactose intolerance in many people (because it produces some of the enzymes that break down lactose), and reduce the incidence of diarrhea in many situations by crowding out the bad bacteria that cause it. Frankly, it's about as close as you can get to a miracle drug, at least when it comes to digestive health, and it's available over the counter for just a few bucks per bottle. And because each pill contains living bacteria that multiply on their own, you don't necessarily need to keep taking it, unlike drugs.
There are over-the-counter Lactobacillus acidophilus tablets that contain cultured bacteria already. Why in the world would anyone do it the way you describe? I suppose there are other helpful bacteria in your gut, but that seems to be the most significant variety in terms of its effect on everything from serum cholesterol levels to lactose intolerance....
For most of us on Slashdot, statistically speaking, sending pictures of our private parts to a woman 20 years our junior is a felony, whether she consented or not.