There are international legal precedents that already point towards a consensus that democracy is above the law[*]. The only thing that the city needs to do to apply this new tax is to organize (and win) a referendum.
I'd like to see a global organization pushing forward this view. I.e. legitimizing full democracy at a local, municipal, or smaller level. And at the same time to push for a Commons-based society, i.e. instead of "affordable housing", collective ownership of housing, utilities, energy, farms, etc. so that all the life's necessities are provided for free, and people voluntarily work in maintaining such services for the community. Also partner with people who prefer social relationships based on trade rather than based on giving, to advance with / for them an agenda of free social services plus unconditional basic income (UBI).
I'm working along this lines at "Living Commonly.org , please PM or contact me there if you are interested:)
[*] and we'll likely see a few more in the upcoming months: the illegal secessionist / independence referendums for the Iraqi Kurdistan (September), a part of Spanish Catalonia (October 1st), and Scotland (some time later)
question chipschap: did the touchpad and the screen brightness keys work out of the box on Linux Mint? or you had to fix it?
I quickly tested asus UX305CA on GNU/Linux, with Mint, Ubuntu and Kubuntu and had issues with this two components. None of them worked on Ubuntu, the brightness keys did work on one of them, Mint if I recall properly, and the trackpad didn't work in any of them. Otherwise it felt quite fast, and google thinks there are drivers available for the trackpad, so I just bought one for myself and I'm waiting for it to arrive.
The main reasons why I choose this laptop are: 1) fanless (I hate the noise and they are always the first thing to break, unless the mechanical HD breaks first, but this is not an issue anymore with SSDd), 2) long battery life 3) serviceable battery (not as good as replaceable, but at least is supposed to be easy to disassemble, unlike the mac books, where everything is glued and unreachable) 4) light
My SO has been using one on windows for more than two months and she consistently gets +10h battery life on windows with the "battery savings mode" enabled (otherwise, with the default settings, she was getting less than half of that). She uses it mostly for taking courses on gaming (unity, blender...) and is very happy with it. Yes, some programs take a bit more time to load than on a more capable desktop, but once loaded they perform fine. At least for doing simple things, she expects to have to switch to a desktop computer when in the future she wants to work on more complex projects, but the laptop is ideal for taking it to classes and meeting with friends to discuss projects.
Windows has stability issues with the intel graphics drivers, but don't bother enough to spend time looking for solutions (yet). Other than that it doesn't have other issues, besides all the issues that windows always have:)
They have also covered the war extensively on the past, so to the Democracy Now audience already knew many reasons why the USA is loosing the war. For example allegedly +10% of the military budget is spent bribing the insurgence for "security protection" paid by USA contractors. An the USA pays many time the prices of basic items (like fuel) that acquires through the same contractors. Yo don't need conspiracy theories or leaks: just follow the money and you'll see that is on the interest of capital that wars last as long as possible, the same way it's in the capital's interest to make medications that make your diseases chronic, rather than curing you.
Well, of course they do, but the real question is, is it really worth it to buy insurance and smash the phone? or is more profitable, easier faster and less risky to just sell the phone and buy a new one?
P.S. I recommend the book Freakonomics which talks about economic incentives of corruption, crime, cheating,.... Maybe in the next book they'll write about cheating to insurance companies and I'll know the answer to my question:)
I've been following the situation in Haiti via Democracy now and they have covered this topic extensively on their daily newscast. They even flew some reporters there for a few days. I highly recommend to subscribe to their tv/radio podcast (is free). I also recommend to read Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine" for a good background on disaster relief operations.
My conclusion is that the whole violence situation has been fabricated. For example, the prison escape that you mention, they had an interview with a local civil rights activist who said that about 80% of the prisoners where in prison without charges. Political prisoners of the coup regime are being held for years without trial. According to him the case could be made that the mass escape had actually been a good thing.
Everybody interviewed during the first days were saying that there was no insecurity problem. There was no need for massive deployment of soldiers. The guy in charge of the main hospital n Port-au-Prince was even complaining that the arrival of troops had interfered with the functioning of the hospital.
Tons of help has been shipped there but almost none has arrived to the people. Lots of volunteer nurses and doctors have arrived but they don't have access to any electricity or medical supplies. They are doing tabletotop amputations with tools acquired at the local hardware store and without anesthesia. Most of which unnecessary as they would have been avoided if they had had antibiotics on the first place.
The USA controls the airport and are preventing some of the planes with aid to land. Tons of aid has arrived but is just staying at the airport, or being delivered to... the USA embassy. The little aid that is being delivered is being handed out by armed personnel who have been told the people out there are dangerous and they throw them food from a distance. People are getting really pissed of at being treated like dogs and/or very frustrated of not receiving any help.
It's the perfect recipe for violence and has been perfectly executed according to a plan. And it is starting to work: there are the first reports of insecurity at night, women being raped. Communities are just asking for proper lightening at night in their camps site to prevent this from happening. Nobody wants guns.
Local communities had all the experience required to get organized, and all the means except petrol. If they had just been handed some gas they would have used their own trucks to get water for the victims and relocate the people to less hit areas.
As usual when there is a natural disaster the disaster capitalists have stepped in to size the opportunity to steal as much as possible from the local people (they call it privatization). It is crucial that local communities are prevented from self organizing. There is also the issue of preventing any good PR from "hostile" regimes: cuba had already 400 doctors in the ground when the earthquake struck, and they sent more help immediately, Venezuela also sent aid, so did China while the USA was still "planning". In their military effort to prevent good PR for other governments they missed a golden opportunity to create good PR for the USA: the Guantanamo base is just around the corner and they could have sent emergency aid from there during the first hours. They didn't.
There is also the issue of racism. With Haiti being the first and only independent state created by a slave revolution, it is even more pressing to keep them poor, otherwise they would set a bad precedent. God forbid people from realizing that a bunch of negroes are capable of running a country. The USA has recently done two cups against a democratically elected government in Haiti (both times led by Jean-Bertrand Aristide) and it has had very good reasons to do so.
I don't know about the other four countries but last summer I was in Iran and USA brands were ubiquitous. For example all the restaurants had either Coca Cola or Pepsi which seem to be the locals' favorite drink. "Bottled in Iran with license from Coca Cola" read the cans, in plain English. And they were less than 50c!
I was clearly on the minority when drinking the local traditional soda, dugh, made with yogurt and mint.
Some locals take offense if asked about the embargo. It hurts their national feelings. "we've been under embargo for generations and we know how to get around it".
Friends who hadn't been to Iran for several years missed the old traditional Persian cola brands. Apparently Persicola and Zam Zam tasted much better than the USA brands. But locals didn't remember when the change had happened.
Similarly local olive and olive oil brands had been replaced with European counterparts. Last news I hear from Iran is that some clerics are getting around the import tariffs and illegally importing cheap Malaysian fruits which are driving local farmers to bankruptcy.
A few years ago the supreme leader abolished an article in the constitution which prevented the government from privatizing core state services. Now Ahmadinejad is eliminating the subsidies for bread, electricity, and gas.
Recently the Iranian government sounds more like the Bush neocon administration than a revolutionary socialist one.
I know that the embargo of Internet services are different to get around from the embargo of physical goods, but many people in Iran already use a VPN and browse with a foreign IP, to get pass the Iranian censorship.
Iran's democracy is clearly a farce, just political propaganda. The fact that the current president had more votes than the other candidates is irrelevant if you consider the fact that most candidates where actually disqualified before the actual elections.
What distinguishes Iran from the USA is that the former has a very crude system for disqualifying presidential candidates, whereas the latter has more subtle mechanisms. Yet the result is the same: the candidates have been chosen before the actual elections and the voters have are faced with the dilemma of choosing which candidate represents the lesser evil. People don't go to vote for the candidate they think will represent them better, but they vote for the one who they think will cause the less damage ( maybe because having a lesser evil plan or maybe for being more incompetent at implementing equally evil plans).
In the upcoming USA presidential elections there will only be two candidates who stand a chance. This alone proves that it's not a democracy. In Iran the filter is called Council of Guardians or Supreme Leader, in the USA is called Electoral Votes and Electoral Colleges.
In my opinion, for a government to be qualified as democratic it should, at the very least, not have any "a priory" filters for the candidates, and not any "winner takes all" kind of filter either. All the candidates that have managed to get some votes should be able to pull their votes together to form a democracy.
I can't believe this guys are so bad at marketing, how can they sell a $130 anything? It's marketing 101 guys: prices must end with 99!
Poor guys, where so unlucky, who would have thought back then that Bush would sunk the dollar with his toy wars? I'd recommend them to switch their pricing to a solid, stable currency which enables them to express their price in the usual x99 format. For example the Euro. According to Saint Google:
Since Iran does not enforce USA copyright, iranian publishers can reproduce USA books legaly without having to pay any fee. So they reprint USA textbooks at better quality than USA originals (harder covers, better paper,...) and sell them for less than $5.
I'm not aware of any company reimporting books from Iran though:( but it should be possible since DHL operates there ( FedEx and UPS don't )
Maybe google is experimenting with some kind of semantic restriction in the results in order to improve the quality of the search. This would explain why all the anomalies reported are made of uncorrelated words.
Also,
The text is vaguely reminiscent of actual gramatical English. Here's one sentence:
And With Unknown virtual gifts Already baby food coupons to Information Installed The 2000, with Himself, to other tips, tricks, and tweaks The Issue De Processes services.exe.
This could explain the reason why they have deployed the new sematic feature now, maybe a bit too early, due to the preassure of this new wave of spammers. (i had also noticed very successfully ranked spam pages recently)
Google could be using a "simple" pseudo-semantic algorithm to block this sort of random pseudo-english spam. Measuring the probability that words happen at distance X after/before other words in "real english" google could hope to discover that the probability of having the sequence "virtual gifts Already baby" is zero in human communication.
To summarize my conspiracy theory: google is computing the entropy of the results and discarding the too-much-entropy-to-be-human-language ones.
Maybe is just wishful thinking. But it also can explain why the order matters in the search. Imagine you search for two common words that have a specific meaning when put together in a specific order. Well, google seems to realize that. For example search for "cell white" returns a white house press release on stem cells but "white cell" returns relevant results on medicine.
Sorry I can't remember a good example of semanticaly relevant search. That would be two words that are very common but when put in the same sentence (but not next to each other to make it more challenging) would define a very specific topic. I've had this problem several times: google returning irrelevant results and not knowing how to narrow my search beacause all the words are so common. I wish i could remember one to check if google results have improved...
OTH if my entropy-based google filter theory is correct maybe i should consider going to the business of selling tools to spammers:)
Slashdot Mirror
There are international legal precedents that already point towards a consensus that democracy is above the law[*]. The only thing that the city needs to do to apply this new tax is to organize (and win) a referendum.
I'd like to see a global organization pushing forward this view. I.e. legitimizing full democracy at a local, municipal, or smaller level. And at the same time to push for a Commons-based society, i.e. instead of "affordable housing", collective ownership of housing, utilities, energy, farms, etc. so that all the life's necessities are provided for free, and people voluntarily work in maintaining such services for the community. Also partner with people who prefer social relationships based on trade rather than based on giving, to advance with / for them an agenda of free social services plus unconditional basic income (UBI).
I'm working along this lines at "Living Commonly .org , please PM or contact me there if you are interested :)
[*] and we'll likely see a few more in the upcoming months: the illegal secessionist / independence referendums for the Iraqi Kurdistan (September), a part of Spanish Catalonia (October 1st), and Scotland (some time later)
question chipschap: did the touchpad and the screen brightness keys work out of the box on Linux Mint? or you had to fix it?
I quickly tested asus UX305CA on GNU/Linux, with Mint, Ubuntu and Kubuntu and had issues with this two components. None of them worked on Ubuntu, the brightness keys did work on one of them, Mint if I recall properly, and the trackpad didn't work in any of them. Otherwise it felt quite fast, and google thinks there are drivers available for the trackpad, so I just bought one for myself and I'm waiting for it to arrive.
The main reasons why I choose this laptop are: 1) fanless (I hate the noise and they are always the first thing to break, unless the mechanical HD breaks first, but this is not an issue anymore with SSDd), 2) long battery life 3) serviceable battery (not as good as replaceable, but at least is supposed to be easy to disassemble, unlike the mac books, where everything is glued and unreachable) 4) light
My SO has been using one on windows for more than two months and she consistently gets +10h battery life on windows with the "battery savings mode" enabled (otherwise, with the default settings, she was getting less than half of that). She uses it mostly for taking courses on gaming (unity, blender...) and is very happy with it. Yes, some programs take a bit more time to load than on a more capable desktop, but once loaded they perform fine. At least for doing simple things, she expects to have to switch to a desktop computer when in the future she wants to work on more complex projects, but the laptop is ideal for taking it to classes and meeting with friends to discuss projects.
Windows has stability issues with the intel graphics drivers, but don't bother enough to spend time looking for solutions (yet). Other than that it doesn't have other issues, besides all the issues that windows always have :)
I recommend this report
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/7/26/the_new_pentagon_papers_wikileaks_releases
They have also covered the war extensively on the past, so to the Democracy Now audience already knew many reasons why the USA is loosing the war. For example allegedly +10% of the military budget is spent bribing the insurgence for "security protection" paid by USA contractors. An the USA pays many time the prices of basic items (like fuel) that acquires through the same contractors. Yo don't need conspiracy theories or leaks: just follow the money and you'll see that is on the interest of capital that wars last as long as possible, the same way it's in the capital's interest to make medications that make your diseases chronic, rather than curing you.
Well, of course they do, but the real question is, is it really worth it to buy insurance and smash the phone? or is more profitable, easier faster and less risky to just sell the phone and buy a new one?
P.S. I recommend the book Freakonomics which talks about economic incentives of corruption, crime, cheating, .... Maybe in the next book they'll write about cheating to insurance companies and I'll know the answer to my question :)
I've been following the situation in Haiti via Democracy now and they have covered this topic extensively on their daily newscast. They even flew some reporters there for a few days. I highly recommend to subscribe to their tv/radio podcast (is free). I also recommend to read Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine" for a good background on disaster relief operations.
My conclusion is that the whole violence situation has been fabricated. For example, the prison escape that you mention, they had an interview with a local civil rights activist who said that about 80% of the prisoners where in prison without charges. Political prisoners of the coup regime are being held for years without trial. According to him the case could be made that the mass escape had actually been a good thing.
Everybody interviewed during the first days were saying that there was no insecurity problem. There was no need for massive deployment of soldiers. The guy in charge of the main hospital n Port-au-Prince was even complaining that the arrival of troops had interfered with the functioning of the hospital.
Tons of help has been shipped there but almost none has arrived to the people. Lots of volunteer nurses and doctors have arrived but they don't have access to any electricity or medical supplies. They are doing tabletotop amputations with tools acquired at the local hardware store and without anesthesia. Most of which unnecessary as they would have been avoided if they had had antibiotics on the first place.
The USA controls the airport and are preventing some of the planes with aid to land. Tons of aid has arrived but is just staying at the airport, or being delivered to ... the USA embassy. The little aid that is being delivered is being handed out by armed personnel who have been told the people out there are dangerous and they throw them food from a distance. People are getting really pissed of at being treated like dogs and/or very frustrated of not receiving any help.
It's the perfect recipe for violence and has been perfectly executed according to a plan. And it is starting to work: there are the first reports of insecurity at night, women being raped. Communities are just asking for proper lightening at night in their camps site to prevent this from happening. Nobody wants guns.
Local communities had all the experience required to get organized, and all the means except petrol. If they had just been handed some gas they would have used their own trucks to get water for the victims and relocate the people to less hit areas.
As usual when there is a natural disaster the disaster capitalists have stepped in to size the opportunity to steal as much as possible from the local people (they call it privatization). It is crucial that local communities are prevented from self organizing. There is also the issue of preventing any good PR from "hostile" regimes: cuba had already 400 doctors in the ground when the earthquake struck, and they sent more help immediately, Venezuela also sent aid, so did China while the USA was still "planning". In their military effort to prevent good PR for other governments they missed a golden opportunity to create good PR for the USA: the Guantanamo base is just around the corner and they could have sent emergency aid from there during the first hours. They didn't.
There is also the issue of racism. With Haiti being the first and only independent state created by a slave revolution, it is even more pressing to keep them poor, otherwise they would set a bad precedent. God forbid people from realizing that a bunch of negroes are capable of running a country. The USA has recently done two cups against a democratically elected government in Haiti (both times led by Jean-Bertrand Aristide) and it has had very good reasons to do so.
Here is a sample of democracy now reporting:
Security “Red Zones” in Ha
I'm not a lover or hater of MS, but I know when a article is biased.
Are you new here? Either you are with us or against us when it comes to MS terrorist business.
Please make up your mind quickly or we will preemptively send you to Gitmo.
I don't know about the other four countries but last summer I was in Iran and USA brands were ubiquitous. For example all the restaurants had either Coca Cola or Pepsi which seem to be the locals' favorite drink. "Bottled in Iran with license from Coca Cola" read the cans, in plain English. And they were less than 50c!
I was clearly on the minority when drinking the local traditional soda, dugh, made with yogurt and mint.
Some locals take offense if asked about the embargo. It hurts their national feelings. "we've been under embargo for generations and we know how to get around it".
Friends who hadn't been to Iran for several years missed the old traditional Persian cola brands. Apparently Persicola and Zam Zam tasted much better than the USA brands. But locals didn't remember when the change had happened.
Similarly local olive and olive oil brands had been replaced with European counterparts. Last news I hear from Iran is that some clerics are getting around the import tariffs and illegally importing cheap Malaysian fruits which are driving local farmers to bankruptcy.
A few years ago the supreme leader abolished an article in the constitution which prevented the government from privatizing core state services. Now Ahmadinejad is eliminating the subsidies for bread, electricity, and gas.
Recently the Iranian government sounds more like the Bush neocon administration than a revolutionary socialist one.
I know that the embargo of Internet services are different to get around from the embargo of physical goods, but many people in Iran already use a VPN and browse with a foreign IP, to get pass the Iranian censorship.
Iran's democracy is clearly a farce, just political propaganda. The fact that the current president had more votes than the other candidates is irrelevant if you consider the fact that most candidates where actually disqualified before the actual elections.
What distinguishes Iran from the USA is that the former has a very crude system for disqualifying presidential candidates, whereas the latter has more subtle mechanisms. Yet the result is the same: the candidates have been chosen before the actual elections and the voters have are faced with the dilemma of choosing which candidate represents the lesser evil. People don't go to vote for the candidate they think will represent them better, but they vote for the one who they think will cause the less damage ( maybe because having a lesser evil plan or maybe for being more incompetent at implementing equally evil plans).
In the upcoming USA presidential elections there will only be two candidates who stand a chance. This alone proves that it's not a democracy. In Iran the filter is called Council of Guardians or Supreme Leader, in the USA is called Electoral Votes and Electoral Colleges.
In my opinion, for a government to be qualified as democratic it should, at the very least, not have any "a priory" filters for the candidates, and not any "winner takes all" kind of filter either. All the candidates that have managed to get some votes should be able to pull their votes together to form a democracy.
I can't believe this guys are so bad at marketing, how can they sell a $130 anything? It's marketing 101 guys: prices must end with 99!
Poor guys, where so unlucky, who would have thought back then that Bush would sunk the dollar with his toy wars? I'd recommend them to switch their pricing to a solid, stable currency which enables them to express their price in the usual x99 format. For example the Euro. According to Saint Google:
130 U.S. dollars = 99.3807813 Euros
Since Iran does not enforce USA copyright, iranian publishers can reproduce USA books legaly without having to pay any fee. So they reprint USA textbooks at better quality than USA originals (harder covers, better paper, ...) and sell them for less than $5.
:( but it should be possible since DHL operates there ( FedEx and UPS don't )
I'm not aware of any company reimporting books from Iran though
Also,
This could explain the reason why they have deployed the new sematic feature now, maybe a bit too early, due to the preassure of this new wave of spammers. (i had also noticed very successfully ranked spam pages recently)
Google could be using a "simple" pseudo-semantic algorithm to block this sort of random pseudo-english spam. Measuring the probability that words happen at distance X after/before other words in "real english" google could hope to discover that the probability of having the sequence "virtual gifts Already baby" is zero in human communication.
To summarize my conspiracy theory: google is computing the entropy of the results and discarding the too-much-entropy-to-be-human-language ones.
Maybe is just wishful thinking. But it also can explain why the order matters in the search. Imagine you search for two common words that have a specific meaning when put together in a specific order. Well, google seems to realize that. For example search for "cell white" returns a white house press release on stem cells but "white cell" returns relevant results on medicine.
Sorry I can't remember a good example of semanticaly relevant search. That would be two words that are very common but when put in the same sentence (but not next to each other to make it more challenging) would define a very specific topic. I've had this problem several times: google returning irrelevant results and not knowing how to narrow my search beacause all the words are so common. I wish i could remember one to check if google results have improved...
OTH if my entropy-based google filter theory is correct maybe i should consider going to the business of selling tools to spammers