I dunno about you, but I've used bandaids on minor cuts and abrasions in the past, and found them very helpful. That doesn't mean I didn't kick the ass of whatever was cutting me...
As someone who's not quite post-teen yet, and who looked at whatever the hell he felt like growing up, and who is perfectly capable of sustaining healthy relationships, thank you -- I just want to draw a distinction between online and the town. You wouldn't let your kids wander around a city without knowing where they were, because they could get raped, seduced, cracked out, mugged, diseased and bruised. You wouldn't let them wander around online because they might be exposed to information you find offensive. There's lots of information on the internet that is indeed offensive, but that level of danger simply does not justify the same limits on freedom that real-life danger does.
"even with peer review on open coude this sort of bug might still happen"
Witness NASA missing Mars cause of a conversion error. I love that story, cause if they can screw up, any coder can...
What is needed is open results -- a voting machine that stores its tallies in a form that can be independently verified. For example, paper. Have the machine print out a piece of paper in nice friendly letters that says "You voted for [foo]." Keep all the papers in a box. At randomly selected polling places, count up all the papers and see if the tally matches the machine. Or skip the machine's tally, and just use the papers. Or skip the machine, and just use a pen --
Sorry, that's crazy talk. But you see what I mean.
You're saying that this system will work as intended, allowing people to express their actual views more easily? If it works that way, then more power to them.
The cynical view is, this will allow people to give their PINs to the local strongman in exchange for fat loot.
You know, as skanky as I find this little debacle, it's kind of refreshing to have a company claiming infringement who actually wants you to remove the infringing documents. They're asking you to remove it, and instead of demanding money, they're simply providing clear and simple directions to regain 'compliance' with their 'copyrights'. None of this, "certain of your documents contain offending text, and if you don't pay us lots of money we'll take you to court and tell you which ones."
I guess I prefer an honest crook every time. I still hope these honest crooks get hammered, though.
... we won't have a spam problem. Think about it -- suppose every personal user implemented this, and never saw spam email. Then, when the spam is pumped out, only public business accounts would even receive it. How many of them are going to respond? Zero -- they delete it in batches like you.
The upshot is, spam becomes an ineffective tool and stops being used.
This is interesting. Firebird is my default browser. I use Yahoo LaunchCast occasionally, which is IE only, and when I open the launchcast app it pops up an IE window. This is exactly what I want it to do -- if it popped up a Moz window telling me Moz wasn't supported, I would just get pissed off.
If LaunchCast was owned by MS, would this behavior be illegal?
Disclaimers: he's not a spammer, he's just a bright 13-year-old, and it wasn't a clever system, it was just a randomly selected word that was always in the same font.
It was funny because once he got it working, they changed the system so that every letter was in a different wacky font, and he thought he was beat. Then he realized that they were still using only one font, it was just one of those ransom-note style ones where every letter is different. The upshot was, his system started working better than it had before, because there was more variation between letters.
Cernegie-Melon is obviously moving a little past the state of the art in random young geek websites.:-)
Given your sig, I'm assuming this is flamebait, but the answer is:
1) It's a farce to suggest that alienating the rest of the world is a good way to make your life better, or that their own fucking problems will never affect us.
2) If the measure of a society is how it treats its criminals, the measure of a country is how much it can forego selfishness. Of course the average country, on a level playing field, has to be selfish -- but we're America. The rules actually *don't* apply to us.
Case in point: you know why so many African nations didn't support the war in Iraq? Because France gives them more foreign aid every year than we do. We failed on point two, and it kicked our ass on point one.
Sure. What's driving them there is fame and exposure. I remember one artist, whose name I don't recall,:-) said that she made more money by starting her own label and selling 250,000 albums than she did by selling a million when she was with a major. The tradeoff is, only one quarter the people actually heard her music. Likewise, even if the average artist could make more by independent distribution, they would reach a fraction of the audience -- probably much smaller than my anonymous example since they hadn't sold a million in the first place.
The record companies work hard to maintain this kind of clout, including some $200 million paid to radio stations every year to decide what gets played. (Do a search on salon.com for 'RIAA payola'.) As long as they can decide what gets heard, they could get whatever artists they want, even if the artists had to agree to actual, nonmetaphorical rape instead of the money kind.
Is paying the artists jack squat a requirement in order to support this business model? Of course it isn't. They could easily split off a fifth of that 6.6 million profit. *They don't have to.* It's cheaper to buy an audience, and get the band for free.
Re: popular misconception: I'm aware that the economy didn't really improve until WW2, but that was over ten years after the stock market crash in 1929. FDR came into office in 1932. That's a lot of years when he was impacting the economy and the war wasn't. I stand by my original thesis that his reforms prevented mass revolt -- long before WW2 was a factor.
Re: 30% of Americans: that's more or less correct. But it once again doesn't impact my original thesis, that the wealthy are working to increase the gap in wealth. The tax cut is promoted as relief for all Americans, but in fact it's targeted at the specific taxes that are predominantly paid by the wealthy. I understand that there are reasons for this; it's still true.
(As a side note, I'm real annoyed at the way they sold it by saying that the 'average' American would save $1000 a year, or whatever -- when in fact the median American would save, what, a quarter of that? Someone said that it's like saying me and Bill Gates have an average net worth of $40 billion dollars -- it doesn't exactly help me pay my rent. Now that's fuzzy math.)
And having now painted myself as a readily ignorable liberal, I'm off to a more techy article where we can argue about things that don't matter.:)
"Quite simply, the government was never intended to function as a means to redistribute the wealth of its citizens; to divert money from one group of individuals to another."
Perhaps not; don't forget the old saw about America starting out as the land of the free for white male land owners. That stuff's in the Constitution too.
Now here's where I introduce my pet economic theory: we don't play by those rules anymore, and the reason we don't is that if we stuck to pure capitalism, the worker's revolution would have popped up just like Marx predicted. I think this almost happened during the great depression, but then FDR came into office and saved the day by, what, mixing in the socialism. Social security, medicare, union protection, welfare, government work programs, all started out or given a big kick during his administration.
The result is, we have a system where the rich are given strong incentive to invest, and the working class is protected, and we dampen down the boom/bust cycle that Marx accurately observed to the point where the revolution never comes.
So now, indeed, I would argue that a purpose of our government is to cycle money back from the wealthy elite down to the working class, like an aerator in a fish tank, to keep the whole system functioning happily. Of course it will all rise to the top again -- that's how the system works.
***
Now, that's all I had to say that I'm willing to stand behind. But here's some raw speculation: over the past ten years, which were prosperous for everyone, the very wealthy became richer by something like 40%, while the rest became richer by something like 4%. Order of magnitude guesses, but based on credible sources I don't happen to recall.:)
Now that the wealthy are in power, they're working to consolidate this position, with a tax cut that gives back $0 to 30% of Americans, and $100,000 a year to people like Dick Cheney.
So what happens with this kind of lopsided distribution? There's plenty of money to invest, but no money among the consumers to buy. With no demand, there's no incentive to invest, and that money starts to sit idle. Money sitting idle = stagnation = depression.
The economy is not something I claim to understand, or that anyone who seems knowledgeable claims to be able to predict, but... it's a compelling case, isn't it? And if I'm right, we're just digging ourselves deeper and deeper...
Simply because Trent Lott and whatsisname, the sponsor of the bill, held a press conference featuring boxes and boxes and boxes of petitions, doesn't mean that those petitions had any influence. OK, good call. But they *say* that it had an influence, right, the good congressmen flat-out say it, and I can't help agreeing that all that support must have made it just a little bit easier to vote this way...
Maybe you're right, though. Maybe Clearchannel just forgot to send in a bribe. I bet they're real pissed off now, too. After all, the Senate just went and rolled back those new limits on radio consolidation. Now Clearchannel might have to go and buy *more* radio stations, and you know how much they hate doing that.
It was only yesterday -- the Senate voted to roll back the FCC media consolidation ruling, based to some extent on the MoveOn petition. Check out the picture of Trent Lott standing next to 360,000 pieces of paper. One of those is mine, and it looks like it carried some weight to me.
I went to school with Eli Pariser, btw -- he's one of the guys who runs MoveOn. Check out what else they've done to see how online activism can be effective.
OK, if a conspiracy is a bunch of people getting together and planning to take control of the government, then I have a conspiracy theory for you. It goes like this: there's a group of people in power now whose stated purpose is to use our military to shape the rest of the world to benefit America.
You're right that many Americans have heard this theory and rejected it. This is a bit surprising -- considering this 'conspiracy' has a website:
If there are Americans out there who still reject this theory, then I would say by definition that the story is underreported -- because no one responsible is trying to deny it. The linked page, which is undersigned by Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and, of all people, Quayle, is pretty upfront:
"We aim to make the case and rally support for American global leadership. [...] Does the United States have the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests?"
From another page:
"The successful disarming, rebuilding, and democratic reform of Iraq can contribute decisively to the democratization of the wider Middle East. This is an objective of overriding strategic importance to the United States, as it is to the rest of the international community - and its achievement will require an investment and commitment commensurate with that."
As long as we discuss motives for invading Iraq outside the context of this objective, I would say this angle is decisively underreported. Call me a thinktank theorist.
In principle, I agree with you. But as usual in the online/realworld metaphor game, the actual comparison is a little more complicated...:)
When you buy songs from Apple, you're also buying the *explicit* right to burn CDs with them. It's not just a hack, like making game ISOs or photocopying a book. It's built right into the service -- click here to make a physical representation of your goods.
So imagine that books and CDs came with a little button on the side that said "Push me to make a perfect, identical copy, as often as you like." It would either be a very large button, or very small writing. But it would also seriously change the way we think about reselling books and CDs -- just like iTunes requires some serious thinking about the way we resell digital files.
how about, the computer prints out a piece of paper, behind glass, so you can verify what it says, but you never get to touch it in any way? all the pieces of paper are collected in a secure location in each machine. verifying that the computer has no way to mess with the paper once it's printed shouldn't be very hard.
it looks like the chain voting thing works because the manipulator can verify to some extent that the voter picked the right candidate. if you don't give the voter any kind of paper to carry out, the system collapses (and of course even now a wily voter could keep the bribe and vote for whoever they wanted simply by soiling the prepared ballot and asking for another one).
I suppose that brings me to another thought -- whether buying votes should be wrong. i think that, morally speaking, taking someone's money and then voting for whoever you feel like is pretty nifty. taking someone's money and then voting for whoever they feel like is a very bad thing, however. think about the obvious influence corporations have now in the US -- all the issues we talk about here with the senator from Disney and so on. would you like to see what happens when a corporation's power to influence elections is multiplied ten-fold? when exxon mobile, walmart, and general motors are the three biggest forces in American politics?
heh. ok. so would I. but I think it would be the kind of movie featuring arnold schwarzeneger rather than robin williams, don't you?
I think you're right to some extent - my parents (hard-nosed moderate liberals both) have certainly given up on American politics.
Then I look at someone like Howard Dean, who has 300,000 people on his email list already, raises money from individual online contributions, and spoke to some 40,000 people on tour last week alone. Have those 300,000 people abandoned the belief that democracy can work? Not yet, I think...
"Should it go to court, the finding will most likely be that Tibco's product is a messaging system like iChat, and not a network discovery service like Apple's product."
But since this is a trademark, the point isn't the underlying technology, but brand confusion for consumers. If I go into iChat, I see a window labelled 'Rendezvous' that lets me talk to other users on my network. And now you tell me that Tibco's product, Rendezvous, is a messaging system that lets users on the network talk to each other? There's definitely some potential confusion there...
I'm thinking all of that changes once you have money involved. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to me that, to be a profitable spammer, someone most likely in the US has to use a credit card to buy a product from a merchant who gives some of the cash to you. If any link in that chain is in the US, I would expect the FBI could step in and cut it off. They might not catch you, but they could put the middlemen out of business and take their cash, and they wouldn't have to do that often before the system fell apart.
I'm a little confused. Wouldn't using synthetic gasoline have the same downside as hydrogen (requires point-source pollution) without the upside (minimal spread-source pollution)? Does synthetic gasoline somehow manage to be cleaner than hydrogen, instead of having all the emissions problems of fossil fuel? And if not, wouldn't it make more sense to use that hypothetical clean energy you mention to generate some type of fuel that *doesn't* pollute?
(On a separate note, it has been alleged in this forum that hydrogen is not significantly more explosive than gas. Any sources for your point?)
Maybe slashdot just needs to watch a little more of Bill Nye the Science Guy. As he explained it to me long ago, it's much better to have one big source of pollution than millions of small sources. There are two reasons I can think of: 1) it's cheaper and easier to make a giant fuel-efficient hydrogen plant than it is to make millions of fuel-efficient cars, and 2), when a better source of power or other technique comes along, you only have to upgrade one location, instead of upgrading every car.
While it's true that hydrogen still relies on fossil fuel right now, that doesn't mean that having a million tiny gas-burning engines is just as good as having one giant gas-burning plant.
See, writing viruses is not only illegal on the level of spam, it's illegal on the level of breaking and entering and all sorts of good stuff. When a new virus comes out, doesn't the FBI do their best to work out who did it and throw the book at them? Any site that's linked to by a virus is going to be pretty thoroughly gone over, and if they paid money to anyone for the privilege then the whole gang will be royally screwed.
I know that there's ways to disguise web site owners and such, and plausible deniability and so on... but spammers are in it for the money. Combine seriously illegal with a money trail, and it's my bet the FBI has your ass within a week.
I for one welcome them to try it. It's about time we had some big guns going after spammers.
I'm not saying that it doesn't matter if Bush is elected. I am a firm believer in the Anyone But Bush campaign. I just don't think that the traditional Democratic Party strategy is going to work. We got Bush and Gore last year, instead of McCain and Bradley, because the Parties prefer candidates who are safe and predictable rather than risky but with the potential to excite voters. This attempt to reduce elections to a science is no doubt a response, as you say, to McGovern.
The problem is, I simply don't believe that this science can be used to unseat a popular incumbent. If we try to play the game, against a better-known candidate with a popular war and twice the campaign chest, we will lose. The strategy for avoiding another McGovern is to make the campaign as predictable as possible -- but it's not hard to predict how this one will turn out.
So here's the thing. I'll be campaigning for Anyone But Bush next year, one way or another. But I support Dean, and it's not because he may be more liberal than the rest (gun control?). It's because I respect him. If you look at my post, you'll notice I don't say anything about his platform. What I say is that, when he talks, my bullshit detector stays off. I feel like he's saying something he believes, and that he believes it because he's a smart guy who's done a lot of research, not because it's a matter of faith.
That means that his platform isn't a straight-up liberal platform. It's a unique construction based on what makes sense to him. In many ways, I think he could be positioned as moderate -- because he's all over the map.
So what would happen if a smart guy with a lot of research and policies appealing to a wide range of voters went up against Bush in a debate? I think he just might win. It's impossible to say, but I definitely think he's more likely to pull it off than any of the other candidates.
That's why I would support him. Not because I want a glorious failure, but because I think he's the only one with a shot at a glorious victory.
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno about you, but I've used bandaids on minor cuts and abrasions in the past, and found them very helpful. That doesn't mean I didn't kick the ass of whatever was cutting me ...
As someone who's not quite post-teen yet, and who looked at whatever the hell he felt like growing up, and who is perfectly capable of sustaining healthy relationships, thank you -- I just want to draw a distinction between online and the town. You wouldn't let your kids wander around a city without knowing where they were, because they could get raped, seduced, cracked out, mugged, diseased and bruised. You wouldn't let them wander around online because they might be exposed to information you find offensive. There's lots of information on the internet that is indeed offensive, but that level of danger simply does not justify the same limits on freedom that real-life danger does.
"even with peer review on open coude this sort of bug might still happen"
...
Witness NASA missing Mars cause of a conversion error. I love that story, cause if they can screw up, any coder can
What is needed is open results -- a voting machine that stores its tallies in a form that can be independently verified. For example, paper. Have the machine print out a piece of paper in nice friendly letters that says "You voted for [foo]." Keep all the papers in a box. At randomly selected polling places, count up all the papers and see if the tally matches the machine. Or skip the machine's tally, and just use the papers. Or skip the machine, and just use a pen --
Sorry, that's crazy talk. But you see what I mean.
You're saying that this system will work as intended, allowing people to express their actual views more easily? If it works that way, then more power to them.
The cynical view is, this will allow people to give their PINs to the local strongman in exchange for fat loot.
You know, as skanky as I find this little debacle, it's kind of refreshing to have a company claiming infringement who actually wants you to remove the infringing documents. They're asking you to remove it, and instead of demanding money, they're simply providing clear and simple directions to regain 'compliance' with their 'copyrights'. None of this, "certain of your documents contain offending text, and if you don't pay us lots of money we'll take you to court and tell you which ones."
I guess I prefer an honest crook every time. I still hope these honest crooks get hammered, though.
... we won't have a spam problem. Think about it -- suppose every personal user implemented this, and never saw spam email. Then, when the spam is pumped out, only public business accounts would even receive it. How many of them are going to respond? Zero -- they delete it in batches like you.
The upshot is, spam becomes an ineffective tool and stops being used.
This is interesting. Firebird is my default browser. I use Yahoo LaunchCast occasionally, which is IE only, and when I open the launchcast app it pops up an IE window. This is exactly what I want it to do -- if it popped up a Moz window telling me Moz wasn't supported, I would just get pissed off.
If LaunchCast was owned by MS, would this behavior be illegal?
Disclaimers: he's not a spammer, he's just a bright 13-year-old, and it wasn't a clever system, it was just a randomly selected word that was always in the same font.
:-)
It was funny because once he got it working, they changed the system so that every letter was in a different wacky font, and he thought he was beat. Then he realized that they were still using only one font, it was just one of those ransom-note style ones where every letter is different. The upshot was, his system started working better than it had before, because there was more variation between letters.
Cernegie-Melon is obviously moving a little past the state of the art in random young geek websites.
Given your sig, I'm assuming this is flamebait, but the answer is:
1) It's a farce to suggest that alienating the rest of the world is a good way to make your life better, or that their own fucking problems will never affect us.
2) If the measure of a society is how it treats its criminals, the measure of a country is how much it can forego selfishness. Of course the average country, on a level playing field, has to be selfish -- but we're America. The rules actually *don't* apply to us.
Case in point: you know why so many African nations didn't support the war in Iraq? Because France gives them more foreign aid every year than we do. We failed on point two, and it kicked our ass on point one.
Sure. What's driving them there is fame and exposure. I remember one artist, whose name I don't recall, :-) said that she made more money by starting her own label and selling 250,000 albums than she did by selling a million when she was with a major. The tradeoff is, only one quarter the people actually heard her music. Likewise, even if the average artist could make more by independent distribution, they would reach a fraction of the audience -- probably much smaller than my anonymous example since they hadn't sold a million in the first place.
The record companies work hard to maintain this kind of clout, including some $200 million paid to radio stations every year to decide what gets played. (Do a search on salon.com for 'RIAA payola'.) As long as they can decide what gets heard, they could get whatever artists they want, even if the artists had to agree to actual, nonmetaphorical rape instead of the money kind.
Is paying the artists jack squat a requirement in order to support this business model? Of course it isn't. They could easily split off a fifth of that 6.6 million profit. *They don't have to.* It's cheaper to buy an audience, and get the band for free.
Re: popular misconception: I'm aware that the economy didn't really improve until WW2, but that was over ten years after the stock market crash in 1929. FDR came into office in 1932. That's a lot of years when he was impacting the economy and the war wasn't. I stand by my original thesis that his reforms prevented mass revolt -- long before WW2 was a factor.
:)
Re: 30% of Americans: that's more or less correct. But it once again doesn't impact my original thesis, that the wealthy are working to increase the gap in wealth. The tax cut is promoted as relief for all Americans, but in fact it's targeted at the specific taxes that are predominantly paid by the wealthy. I understand that there are reasons for this; it's still true.
(As a side note, I'm real annoyed at the way they sold it by saying that the 'average' American would save $1000 a year, or whatever -- when in fact the median American would save, what, a quarter of that? Someone said that it's like saying me and Bill Gates have an average net worth of $40 billion dollars -- it doesn't exactly help me pay my rent. Now that's fuzzy math.)
And having now painted myself as a readily ignorable liberal, I'm off to a more techy article where we can argue about things that don't matter.
"Quite simply, the government was never intended to function as a means to redistribute the wealth of its citizens; to divert money from one group of individuals to another."
:)
... it's a compelling case, isn't it? And if I'm right, we're just digging ourselves deeper and deeper ...
Perhaps not; don't forget the old saw about America starting out as the land of the free for white male land owners. That stuff's in the Constitution too.
Now here's where I introduce my pet economic theory: we don't play by those rules anymore, and the reason we don't is that if we stuck to pure capitalism, the worker's revolution would have popped up just like Marx predicted. I think this almost happened during the great depression, but then FDR came into office and saved the day by, what, mixing in the socialism. Social security, medicare, union protection, welfare, government work programs, all started out or given a big kick during his administration.
The result is, we have a system where the rich are given strong incentive to invest, and the working class is protected, and we dampen down the boom/bust cycle that Marx accurately observed to the point where the revolution never comes.
So now, indeed, I would argue that a purpose of our government is to cycle money back from the wealthy elite down to the working class, like an aerator in a fish tank, to keep the whole system functioning happily. Of course it will all rise to the top again -- that's how the system works.
***
Now, that's all I had to say that I'm willing to stand behind. But here's some raw speculation: over the past ten years, which were prosperous for everyone, the very wealthy became richer by something like 40%, while the rest became richer by something like 4%. Order of magnitude guesses, but based on credible sources I don't happen to recall.
Now that the wealthy are in power, they're working to consolidate this position, with a tax cut that gives back $0 to 30% of Americans, and $100,000 a year to people like Dick Cheney.
So what happens with this kind of lopsided distribution? There's plenty of money to invest, but no money among the consumers to buy. With no demand, there's no incentive to invest, and that money starts to sit idle. Money sitting idle = stagnation = depression.
The economy is not something I claim to understand, or that anyone who seems knowledgeable claims to be able to predict, but
Simply because Trent Lott and whatsisname, the sponsor of the bill, held a press conference featuring boxes and boxes and boxes of petitions, doesn't mean that those petitions had any influence. OK, good call. But they *say* that it had an influence, right, the good congressmen flat-out say it, and I can't help agreeing that all that support must have made it just a little bit easier to vote this way ...
Maybe you're right, though. Maybe Clearchannel just forgot to send in a bribe. I bet they're real pissed off now, too. After all, the Senate just went and rolled back those new limits on radio consolidation. Now Clearchannel might have to go and buy *more* radio stations, and you know how much they hate doing that.
Thanks for making my day a little brighter.
OK, how about this one:
3 25 0
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/16/192
It was only yesterday -- the Senate voted to roll back the FCC media consolidation ruling, based to some extent on the MoveOn petition. Check out the picture of Trent Lott standing next to 360,000 pieces of paper. One of those is mine, and it looks like it carried some weight to me.
I went to school with Eli Pariser, btw -- he's one of the guys who runs MoveOn. Check out what else they've done to see how online activism can be effective.
This was on slashdot in the day, but it's still pretty nifty ... a perl script shaped like a camel, that prints four little camels:
a il /stuff/docs/perl-camel-source.shtml
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/coder/321a/det
Well, where did you think little camels came from?
OK, if a conspiracy is a bunch of people getting together and planning to take control of the government, then I have a conspiracy theory for you. It goes like this: there's a group of people in power now whose stated purpose is to use our military to shape the rest of the world to benefit America.
i nc iples.htm
You're right that many Americans have heard this theory and rejected it. This is a bit surprising -- considering this 'conspiracy' has a website:
http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofpr
If there are Americans out there who still reject this theory, then I would say by definition that the story is underreported -- because no one responsible is trying to deny it. The linked page, which is undersigned by Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and, of all people, Quayle, is pretty upfront:
"We aim to make the case and rally support for American global leadership. [...] Does the United States have the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests?"
From another page:
"The successful disarming, rebuilding, and democratic reform of Iraq can contribute decisively to the democratization of the wider Middle East. This is an objective of overriding strategic importance to the United States, as it is to the rest of the international community - and its achievement will require an investment and commitment commensurate with that."
As long as we discuss motives for invading Iraq outside the context of this objective, I would say this angle is decisively underreported. Call me a thinktank theorist.
In principle, I agree with you. But as usual in the online/realworld metaphor game, the actual comparison is a little more complicated ... :)
When you buy songs from Apple, you're also buying the *explicit* right to burn CDs with them. It's not just a hack, like making game ISOs or photocopying a book. It's built right into the service -- click here to make a physical representation of your goods.
So imagine that books and CDs came with a little button on the side that said "Push me to make a perfect, identical copy, as often as you like." It would either be a very large button, or very small writing. But it would also seriously change the way we think about reselling books and CDs -- just like iTunes requires some serious thinking about the way we resell digital files.
how about, the computer prints out a piece of paper, behind glass, so you can verify what it says, but you never get to touch it in any way? all the pieces of paper are collected in a secure location in each machine. verifying that the computer has no way to mess with the paper once it's printed shouldn't be very hard.
it looks like the chain voting thing works because the manipulator can verify to some extent that the voter picked the right candidate. if you don't give the voter any kind of paper to carry out, the system collapses (and of course even now a wily voter could keep the bribe and vote for whoever they wanted simply by soiling the prepared ballot and asking for another one).
I suppose that brings me to another thought -- whether buying votes should be wrong. i think that, morally speaking, taking someone's money and then voting for whoever you feel like is pretty nifty. taking someone's money and then voting for whoever they feel like is a very bad thing, however. think about the obvious influence corporations have now in the US -- all the issues we talk about here with the senator from Disney and so on. would you like to see what happens when a corporation's power to influence elections is multiplied ten-fold? when exxon mobile, walmart, and general motors are the three biggest forces in American politics?
heh. ok. so would I. but I think it would be the kind of movie featuring arnold schwarzeneger rather than robin williams, don't you?
I think you're right to some extent - my parents (hard-nosed moderate liberals both) have certainly given up on American politics.
...
Then I look at someone like Howard Dean, who has 300,000 people on his email list already, raises money from individual online contributions, and spoke to some 40,000 people on tour last week alone. Have those 300,000 people abandoned the belief that democracy can work? Not yet, I think
"Should it go to court, the finding will most likely be that Tibco's product is a messaging system like iChat, and not a network discovery service like Apple's product."
...
But since this is a trademark, the point isn't the underlying technology, but brand confusion for consumers. If I go into iChat, I see a window labelled 'Rendezvous' that lets me talk to other users on my network. And now you tell me that Tibco's product, Rendezvous, is a messaging system that lets users on the network talk to each other? There's definitely some potential confusion there
I'm thinking all of that changes once you have money involved. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to me that, to be a profitable spammer, someone most likely in the US has to use a credit card to buy a product from a merchant who gives some of the cash to you. If any link in that chain is in the US, I would expect the FBI could step in and cut it off. They might not catch you, but they could put the middlemen out of business and take their cash, and they wouldn't have to do that often before the system fell apart.
I'm a little confused. Wouldn't using synthetic gasoline have the same downside as hydrogen (requires point-source pollution) without the upside (minimal spread-source pollution)? Does synthetic gasoline somehow manage to be cleaner than hydrogen, instead of having all the emissions problems of fossil fuel? And if not, wouldn't it make more sense to use that hypothetical clean energy you mention to generate some type of fuel that *doesn't* pollute?
(On a separate note, it has been alleged in this forum that hydrogen is not significantly more explosive than gas. Any sources for your point?)
Maybe slashdot just needs to watch a little more of Bill Nye the Science Guy. As he explained it to me long ago, it's much better to have one big source of pollution than millions of small sources. There are two reasons I can think of: 1) it's cheaper and easier to make a giant fuel-efficient hydrogen plant than it is to make millions of fuel-efficient cars, and 2), when a better source of power or other technique comes along, you only have to upgrade one location, instead of upgrading every car.
While it's true that hydrogen still relies on fossil fuel right now, that doesn't mean that having a million tiny gas-burning engines is just as good as having one giant gas-burning plant.
See, writing viruses is not only illegal on the level of spam, it's illegal on the level of breaking and entering and all sorts of good stuff. When a new virus comes out, doesn't the FBI do their best to work out who did it and throw the book at them? Any site that's linked to by a virus is going to be pretty thoroughly gone over, and if they paid money to anyone for the privilege then the whole gang will be royally screwed.
... but spammers are in it for the money. Combine seriously illegal with a money trail, and it's my bet the FBI has your ass within a week.
I know that there's ways to disguise web site owners and such, and plausible deniability and so on
I for one welcome them to try it. It's about time we had some big guns going after spammers.
I'm not saying that it doesn't matter if Bush is elected. I am a firm believer in the Anyone But Bush campaign. I just don't think that the traditional Democratic Party strategy is going to work. We got Bush and Gore last year, instead of McCain and Bradley, because the Parties prefer candidates who are safe and predictable rather than risky but with the potential to excite voters. This attempt to reduce elections to a science is no doubt a response, as you say, to McGovern.
The problem is, I simply don't believe that this science can be used to unseat a popular incumbent. If we try to play the game, against a better-known candidate with a popular war and twice the campaign chest, we will lose. The strategy for avoiding another McGovern is to make the campaign as predictable as possible -- but it's not hard to predict how this one will turn out.
So here's the thing. I'll be campaigning for Anyone But Bush next year, one way or another. But I support Dean, and it's not because he may be more liberal than the rest (gun control?). It's because I respect him. If you look at my post, you'll notice I don't say anything about his platform. What I say is that, when he talks, my bullshit detector stays off. I feel like he's saying something he believes, and that he believes it because he's a smart guy who's done a lot of research, not because it's a matter of faith.
That means that his platform isn't a straight-up liberal platform. It's a unique construction based on what makes sense to him. In many ways, I think he could be positioned as moderate -- because he's all over the map.
So what would happen if a smart guy with a lot of research and policies appealing to a wide range of voters went up against Bush in a debate? I think he just might win. It's impossible to say, but I definitely think he's more likely to pull it off than any of the other candidates.
That's why I would support him. Not because I want a glorious failure, but because I think he's the only one with a shot at a glorious victory.