I'm still talking out of my ass, and no one's reading anyway, but I'm pretty sure when you talk about remembering the cards you're thinking of blackjack. That's the one where the MIT students were able to work out a strategy that actually beat the house, at least for a while.
In every type of poker game I've heard of, during each hand you can see a maximum of, oh, ten cards or so, and between each hand the deck is reshuffled, and every type of game relies on your opponent having information you don't have until the very end of the hand. There's nothing at all displayed and hidden that requires memory, and calculating the odds isn't a feat reserved for grandmasters.
Remember a while back on Slashdot someone won the world poker championship who had never set foot in a real casino? The reason speculated was that in-person poker players rely on personal interaction, reading human signals which can be faked, while on the internet you have to rely on reading betting patterns, signals that are much harder to fake. Those were the skills that made grandmasters, not calculating odds. I'd be willing to believe that board state vs playing the opponent is 80% vs 20% of BG -- but in poker I bet it's at least 80/20 the other way. More comparable, perhaps, but still a totally different animal.
My title is wrong, but it's true that in my experience DVDs could benefit a lot from better error correction. I can't think of the last video tape I rented that had significant playback problems, but I can think of the last 5 DVDs that did. I would love to see a movie encoded on something like Blooray that has a full-on four way backup of the data, so it has to be scratched in exactly the wrong four places at once before it'll skip. I'm sure there are cleverer ways to make error checking more efficient, but you get the idea -- like the grandparent, I hope like hell they'll throw more data at this problem, because right now DVDs strike me as anything but permanent under normal use.
How about: "there are 10 pieces of furniture in my house. They satisfy my entire need for furniture for the next couple of years."
"There are 10 CDs in my house. They satisfy my entire need for music for the next couple of years."
See the difference? Unlike furniture, most CDs are valuable to me only for a short amount of time, then I want a new one. Typically I want access to about 100 at a time, so I can find the one I'm in the mood for. Which 100 that is changes semi-frequently.
The amount I'll pay to Rhapsody this year is about the cost of 8 CDs. The amount I'll pay over ten years is the cost of 80 CDs. Can I satisfy my entire music needs for the next 10 years with 80 CDs? Absolutely not. Either I'll have to put lots of time into stealing music, I'll listen to music that is less than satisfying, or I'll have to pay lots of money for it.
You know what? Once you factor in the cost of my time, every single alternative costs more than paying for Rhapsody for the next ten years, and then when they go out of business, buying the 80 CDs I actually want to own.
And here's the thing -- everyone I know likes listening to music the same way I do. I suspect that even you wouldn't be happy with 8 CDs this year, or 80 CDs over the next ten years.
So, do the math -- you might catch on to something pretty great. I'll catch you in a few years.:)
I for one am a total convert to the streaming jukebox approach to music. I don't even know how to write about it without coming across like spam -- having instant access to over 40,000 albums for about $25 every three months utterly changed the way I listen to music. (I use Rhapsody, but it looks like the MusicMatch service is roughly identical) Even CDs I own don't get played anymore because it's faster to stream them, and when I want to try a new artist I don't futz around accidentally downloading their most popular track five times -- I just click and their first CD is playing.
So, there are still problems. You're dependent on your network connection, and on their servers. You only have the songs they've managed to acquire, which for example means almost no Beatles. Rhapsody only runs in Windows -- and how much of your time do you really spend within listening distance of a Windows box connected to broadband?
Well, tragically, about 90% of it. And don't lie, if you're reading this you probably do too.
I don't think the jukebox concept is necessarily all there yet for people whose job isn't computers -- but as soon as it reaches the same price via cell phones, the idea of buying CDs is going to be antique. If you haven't tried these things, give them a shot -- for me, at least, this way kicks the ass of both CDs and P2P hands down.
Oh, and, uh, some spam for you. If you sign up for the FREE TRIAL VERSION for whatever service pleases you, please tell them I sent you. They only clean out my cage and restock the food pellets if I bring in enough referrals every week...
I wasn't even aware there were grandmasters of backgammon, so excuse the ignorance to follow. It seems to me backgammon and poker are utterly different problems, though, because backgammon lets you see the entire board state. To decide the next move you don't for the most part have to analyze your opponent -- you look at the board, and at what you rolled, and pick the best move.
In poker, on the other hand, you have a very simple probability calculation to determine the meaning of the board state -- and then a wildly difficult calculation to interpret the betting pattern of your opponents and figure out what moves will influence them to your advantage and what moves will win the pot. Comparing backgammon to that, if it lacks the dimension of interpreting the opponent's behavior over time, doesn't seem accurate -- and from my naive view, poker sounds a hell of a lot harder.
If I'm forgetting something about the game, though, please enlighten me.
"Remember, President Bush has asked all the 527s to stop the mudslinging, including the SBVFT"
As far as I've seen, though, he has evaded requests (by John McCain, for example) to condemn their tactics. "Will you condemn those ads?" really breaks down into two questions:
1) "Do you believe 527s should be allowed to run political ads without limits on funding?"
and
2) "Do you believe that any group, whatever the legal definition, should be challenging John Kerry's military record?"
As far as I've seen, Bush has repeatedly been asked the second question, and responded with an answer to the first. If he won't answer the second part, any statements he makes about respecting Kerry's service don't really impress me much.
I'd start in with some vague ramblings about how apathetic people tend to vote for the incumbents just because they've heard the name, and maybe the people pushing for greater voter participation just want to keep things the way they are...
Quite the opposite, actually. No tinfoil necessary. You're right that GOTV campaigns are never really nonpartisan -- whichever way the demographic being targeted tends to vote, that's the side the organizers are supporting.
As for the audience for HotOrNot, let's see... they're young... probably single... possibly more educated, since they use computers? Not sure about that one. In any case, off the top of my head, I'm thinking they vote Democratic. I know for a fact that young and single skews that way.
If my guess about the demographic is right, and the organizers aren't Democrats, then they're fools.
Incidentally, I'd question the idea that people who don't vote aren't informed. I think it's just as likely that they have opinions about politics as useful as ours, but don't see any particular reward or impact from voting. Offering some additional reward in that case makes a lot of sense. I'm sure there are also some who are just uninformed, but I wouldn't be so quick to write off the mass of non-voters.
I'm afraid I can't be bothered to look up the relevant facts:) but I suspect the initial investment to cover the US nationwide is many times that to cover Finland. I know that the potential revenue would be larger by an equal amount, but I'm betting that problem of coming up with that much money to get started is enough to keep new competitors out of the field -- at least ones who are proposing such an untested business plan as opening up the phones for consumers to do as they want, and asking for enough money to somehow beat Verizon's coverage.
I apologize for not limiting my comments to my own country and area of experience, by the way.
I've been angry with cell companies for a while now, and this is exactly why -- since coverage is so much more important than any other metric, I can't go with someone other than Verizon no matter how much I dislike them. Voting with your wallet is a crappy choice for a consumer to have to take.
If these guys were, say, a bookstore, some upstart would have come along by now and destroyed them. Since no one else can come along and suddenly have a network better than Verizon's, they can keep on hobbling the phones to preserve ridiculous fees for things like text messaging and internet (and, it appears, pictures).
This is slightly off-topic, but can anyone hazard a guess as to how long it will be until media players are fast enough to run the codec in software? At that point, specifying a hardware player spec will be more like, "read a codec at this place on disc, which will conform to this API. Implement these calls to hardware-accelerate certain common tasks." Then we can arbitrarily update file formats as they are developed, and existing players will be able to read them. Sony can use a proprietary MS codec for their discs, and I can use xvid or theora for mine, and everyone's happy.
How much better does the hardware have to be before that's a reality?
I can't think of any reason a consumer computer needs more than 2 GB of RAM (grandma wants to edit high-rez photoshop files and cut a high-bitrate album at the same time instead of consecutively?), but you're right that Apple shoots themselves in the foot with this one as far as the default. They charge way too much on the website for expanding RAM, when they could use their buying power to charge less than average instead. The upshot is systems that hobble along at much less than full capacity, because the target audience for an iMac doesn't know what's going wrong. They do know that something is going wrong -- my folks have a 1ghz iMac sitting at home that can't rip and play a CD in iTunes at the same time. That's not good for Apple's image.
Apple tends to be smarter than people think when it comes to sales, but I really think they're dropping the ball on this one.
I though it just didn't *occur* to anyone in charge that a computer system without a paper trail wouldn't allow for any meaningful recount. You're telling me a judge actually went out and said, nah, that recount thing is old fashioned, we don't really need it?
For some reason Florida still manages to shock me...
What are the odds that they'll use strong encryption on the ad delivery? If not, I bet anyone on the same LAN can replace those fetched ads with their own (ala the recent goatse wifi story). That's going to be a lot of fun on college campuses and in net cafes...
Remember, one of the goals of 9/11 was not just to kill people but to hurt the US economy.
Sorry, totally off-topic, but according to the previously posted article about al-Qaeda's hard drive from the Atlantic Monthly, the major goal was to provoke the US into an overly extreme counter-attack and sway public opinion to their side.
Just something to think about...
(I can't find the full text anymore -- the link below is subscribers only. Anyone?)
The system we have is very stable -- it's not going to change from wishing. The reason, of course, is that any successful 3rd party candidate does damage to the major candidate they resemble most. Practically speaking, to support a 3rd party you have to resign yourself to damaging many of the causes that 3rd party candidate supports.
What we need is a system that allows you to express your true preference without damaging the causes they support. I understand that this has been proved mathematically impossible, but there are definitely systems that approximate it, instant runoff, condorcet and the like, and they're not very hard. If you like Nader, why not support Kerry, who honestly is closer to Nader's platform in many significant ways, and then contribute to a group that's working for voting reform? As far as I can tell that's the best middle path in a situation with no morally clear option.
Voting reform isn't an impossibility. We just have to work up to it -- start with local elections, until everyone's used to it, and then finally switch the national ballot when it's not a scary idea anymore.
Incidentally, I liked Nader in 2000, but he's lost much of my respect. Based on credible polls, he's doing more to help Bush than any other single person in the country. If he acknowledged and made peace with this fact I might respectfully disagree with his reasons, but instead he apparently refuses entirely to recognize it -- along with the real negative results of electing Bush over Kerry. For a reformer to deliberately blind himself to the truth in support of his campaign, and do great harm to the country in the process, is, well, ironic for a start.
Salon interview in which Nader doesn't see any difference between accepting donations from prominent Republicans and Kerry accepting donations from prominent corporations:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/07/14/nad er phonecall/index_np.html
I no longer believe in the option of voting my conscience. On the one hand, there are candidates I prefer to Kerry. On the other hand, voting for them increases the chances that my environment will be destroyed, my tax dollars used to pay back a massive debt to the Chinese thanks to wartime tax cuts, and my ass drafted and sent overseas. My conscience isn't exactly clear either way. Nader's campaign in 2000 was based on the reasonable idea that having Bush or Gore in the White House wouldn't have any significant impact on the events of the next four years. With respect, if you still believe this you aren't paying attention.
So, let's put it this way -- do you support voting reform more by voting for Nader, or by sending $10 to an organization working for voting reform? I say, vote the way the current system requires you to vote in order to win -- and work, in some equally tiny way, to change the system.
As to how to go about doing that, my inclination is to work for voting reform in, say, Vermont congressional elections first, something doable, and then move up from there once people see it works.
"Nothing is created or destroyed, only converted from one form to another."
The only problem with that truth is that a great many things are converted from a form I call 'created' to a form I call 'destroyed.' It works out the same as far as I'm concerned.
Seriously. The window doesn't stop them anyway, and I don't have anything worthwhile in there, so I'd just as soon the thieves don't damage anything in the process of finding that out.
Of course, it helps that my car is a piece of crap.
"scripts to fill bugus stuff? that's even worse for them, it puts waste in the database."
I thought that it would be, until I realized that the media sites have no incentive to care. Think about it -- if they could run a little script to automatically generate 20,000 fake DB entries, and claim 20,000 new registrations when selling advertising, that would be great for them. Obviously that would be too risky, but if 20,000 random strangers want to do it for them... no, I don't think it'll hurt them too much.
The problem is that bugmenot-type services work better the more people use them -- having one such service is ten times as good as having ten individual services. That means it's centralized, and that means it's vulnerable. Stopping such services in theory is difficult, but stopping any particular such service is easy:
What'll happen once sites catch on? They'll hire someone like me to spend half an hour writing a script that queries bugmenot for logins to their site, and disables those accounts. Making bugmenot useless won't be very hard.
Perhaps what we need is a more anonymous version of Passport -- a site that knows how to sign up automatically to a large number of free-reg-required sites, with information that you give it one time. Then when you want to read the New York Times, you go to RegItForMe.com and say "please create an account at [www.nytimes.com] with my (possibly fake) info," which doesn't take any longer than using bugmenot. This way the pan-internet super-cookie privacy concerns of Passport are neatly avoided -- as far as each reg site knows, you're using a local account with them. RegItForMe.com knows which sites you've requested a login for, but not when or how often you go.
The point of a phonecam is to be there, all the time. PDA, iPod, digicam might or might not come with me on any given trip, but the phone is something I'm guaranteed to have at all times. If something I want a picture of shows up while I'm out buying milk, those 4 megapixels won't do a damn thing for me.
So I've had this idea for a while that could improve traffic a lot with existing technology. The idea is that an OnStar-style navigation system in your car is much more valuable if it reports your average speed in some anonymous way back to a central server, because if enough other people have the same system, it will know the average speed on the road for each of the potential routes it could give you. You are then nicely routed around any areas of congestion, and incidentally all the people without the system benefit because you aren't along with them adding to the problem. The upshot, when enough people have the system, is that the existing roads become more efficient as traffic is evenly distributed over them, using entirely voluntary and largely human-powered technology rather than sophisticated future-AI.
Is this already being done? If not, anyone interested in starting a Palm/cellphone powered version?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm still talking out of my ass, and no one's reading anyway, but I'm pretty sure when you talk about remembering the cards you're thinking of blackjack. That's the one where the MIT students were able to work out a strategy that actually beat the house, at least for a while.
In every type of poker game I've heard of, during each hand you can see a maximum of, oh, ten cards or so, and between each hand the deck is reshuffled, and every type of game relies on your opponent having information you don't have until the very end of the hand. There's nothing at all displayed and hidden that requires memory, and calculating the odds isn't a feat reserved for grandmasters.
Remember a while back on Slashdot someone won the world poker championship who had never set foot in a real casino? The reason speculated was that in-person poker players rely on personal interaction, reading human signals which can be faked, while on the internet you have to rely on reading betting patterns, signals that are much harder to fake. Those were the skills that made grandmasters, not calculating odds. I'd be willing to believe that board state vs playing the opponent is 80% vs 20% of BG -- but in poker I bet it's at least 80/20 the other way. More comparable, perhaps, but still a totally different animal.
My title is wrong, but it's true that in my experience DVDs could benefit a lot from better error correction. I can't think of the last video tape I rented that had significant playback problems, but I can think of the last 5 DVDs that did. I would love to see a movie encoded on something like Blooray that has a full-on four way backup of the data, so it has to be scratched in exactly the wrong four places at once before it'll skip. I'm sure there are cleverer ways to make error checking more efficient, but you get the idea -- like the grandparent, I hope like hell they'll throw more data at this problem, because right now DVDs strike me as anything but permanent under normal use.
How about: "there are 10 pieces of furniture in my house. They satisfy my entire need for furniture for the next couple of years."
:)
"There are 10 CDs in my house. They satisfy my entire need for music for the next couple of years."
See the difference? Unlike furniture, most CDs are valuable to me only for a short amount of time, then I want a new one. Typically I want access to about 100 at a time, so I can find the one I'm in the mood for. Which 100 that is changes semi-frequently.
The amount I'll pay to Rhapsody this year is about the cost of 8 CDs. The amount I'll pay over ten years is the cost of 80 CDs. Can I satisfy my entire music needs for the next 10 years with 80 CDs? Absolutely not. Either I'll have to put lots of time into stealing music, I'll listen to music that is less than satisfying, or I'll have to pay lots of money for it.
You know what? Once you factor in the cost of my time, every single alternative costs more than paying for Rhapsody for the next ten years, and then when they go out of business, buying the 80 CDs I actually want to own.
And here's the thing -- everyone I know likes listening to music the same way I do. I suspect that even you wouldn't be happy with 8 CDs this year, or 80 CDs over the next ten years.
So, do the math -- you might catch on to something pretty great. I'll catch you in a few years.
I for one am a total convert to the streaming jukebox approach to music. I don't even know how to write about it without coming across like spam -- having instant access to over 40,000 albums for about $25 every three months utterly changed the way I listen to music. (I use Rhapsody, but it looks like the MusicMatch service is roughly identical) Even CDs I own don't get played anymore because it's faster to stream them, and when I want to try a new artist I don't futz around accidentally downloading their most popular track five times -- I just click and their first CD is playing.
...
So, there are still problems. You're dependent on your network connection, and on their servers. You only have the songs they've managed to acquire, which for example means almost no Beatles. Rhapsody only runs in Windows -- and how much of your time do you really spend within listening distance of a Windows box connected to broadband?
Well, tragically, about 90% of it. And don't lie, if you're reading this you probably do too.
I don't think the jukebox concept is necessarily all there yet for people whose job isn't computers -- but as soon as it reaches the same price via cell phones, the idea of buying CDs is going to be antique. If you haven't tried these things, give them a shot -- for me, at least, this way kicks the ass of both CDs and P2P hands down.
Oh, and, uh, some spam for you. If you sign up for the FREE TRIAL VERSION for whatever service pleases you, please tell them I sent you. They only clean out my cage and restock the food pellets if I bring in enough referrals every week
I wasn't even aware there were grandmasters of backgammon, so excuse the ignorance to follow. It seems to me backgammon and poker are utterly different problems, though, because backgammon lets you see the entire board state. To decide the next move you don't for the most part have to analyze your opponent -- you look at the board, and at what you rolled, and pick the best move.
In poker, on the other hand, you have a very simple probability calculation to determine the meaning of the board state -- and then a wildly difficult calculation to interpret the betting pattern of your opponents and figure out what moves will influence them to your advantage and what moves will win the pot. Comparing backgammon to that, if it lacks the dimension of interpreting the opponent's behavior over time, doesn't seem accurate -- and from my naive view, poker sounds a hell of a lot harder.
If I'm forgetting something about the game, though, please enlighten me.
"Remember, President Bush has asked all the 527s to stop the mudslinging, including the SBVFT"
As far as I've seen, though, he has evaded requests (by John McCain, for example) to condemn their tactics. "Will you condemn those ads?" really breaks down into two questions:
1) "Do you believe 527s should be allowed to run political ads without limits on funding?"
and
2) "Do you believe that any group, whatever the legal definition, should be challenging John Kerry's military record?"
As far as I've seen, Bush has repeatedly been asked the second question, and responded with an answer to the first. If he won't answer the second part, any statements he makes about respecting Kerry's service don't really impress me much.
I'd start in with some vague ramblings about how apathetic people tend to vote for the incumbents just because they've heard the name, and maybe the people pushing for greater voter participation just want to keep things the way they are...
... they're young ... probably single ... possibly more educated, since they use computers? Not sure about that one. In any case, off the top of my head, I'm thinking they vote Democratic. I know for a fact that young and single skews that way.
Quite the opposite, actually. No tinfoil necessary. You're right that GOTV campaigns are never really nonpartisan -- whichever way the demographic being targeted tends to vote, that's the side the organizers are supporting.
As for the audience for HotOrNot, let's see
If my guess about the demographic is right, and the organizers aren't Democrats, then they're fools.
Incidentally, I'd question the idea that people who don't vote aren't informed. I think it's just as likely that they have opinions about politics as useful as ours, but don't see any particular reward or impact from voting. Offering some additional reward in that case makes a lot of sense. I'm sure there are also some who are just uninformed, but I wouldn't be so quick to write off the mass of non-voters.
I'm afraid I can't be bothered to look up the relevant facts :) but I suspect the initial investment to cover the US nationwide is many times that to cover Finland. I know that the potential revenue would be larger by an equal amount, but I'm betting that problem of coming up with that much money to get started is enough to keep new competitors out of the field -- at least ones who are proposing such an untested business plan as opening up the phones for consumers to do as they want, and asking for enough money to somehow beat Verizon's coverage.
I apologize for not limiting my comments to my own country and area of experience, by the way.
I've been angry with cell companies for a while now, and this is exactly why -- since coverage is so much more important than any other metric, I can't go with someone other than Verizon no matter how much I dislike them. Voting with your wallet is a crappy choice for a consumer to have to take.
If these guys were, say, a bookstore, some upstart would have come along by now and destroyed them. Since no one else can come along and suddenly have a network better than Verizon's, they can keep on hobbling the phones to preserve ridiculous fees for things like text messaging and internet (and, it appears, pictures).
What's the solution?
This is slightly off-topic, but can anyone hazard a guess as to how long it will be until media players are fast enough to run the codec in software? At that point, specifying a hardware player spec will be more like, "read a codec at this place on disc, which will conform to this API. Implement these calls to hardware-accelerate certain common tasks." Then we can arbitrarily update file formats as they are developed, and existing players will be able to read them. Sony can use a proprietary MS codec for their discs, and I can use xvid or theora for mine, and everyone's happy.
How much better does the hardware have to be before that's a reality?
This is just like DVDs. I'm waiting until the aluminum edition comes out. :)
I can't think of any reason a consumer computer needs more than 2 GB of RAM (grandma wants to edit high-rez photoshop files and cut a high-bitrate album at the same time instead of consecutively?), but you're right that Apple shoots themselves in the foot with this one as far as the default. They charge way too much on the website for expanding RAM, when they could use their buying power to charge less than average instead. The upshot is systems that hobble along at much less than full capacity, because the target audience for an iMac doesn't know what's going wrong. They do know that something is going wrong -- my folks have a 1ghz iMac sitting at home that can't rip and play a CD in iTunes at the same time. That's not good for Apple's image.
Apple tends to be smarter than people think when it comes to sales, but I really think they're dropping the ball on this one.
I though it just didn't *occur* to anyone in charge that a computer system without a paper trail wouldn't allow for any meaningful recount. You're telling me a judge actually went out and said, nah, that recount thing is old fashioned, we don't really need it?
...
For some reason Florida still manages to shock me
What are the odds that they'll use strong encryption on the ad delivery? If not, I bet anyone on the same LAN can replace those fetched ads with their own (ala the recent goatse wifi story). That's going to be a lot of fun on college campuses and in net cafes ...
Remember, one of the goals of 9/11 was not just to kill people but to hurt the US economy.
Sorry, totally off-topic, but according to the previously posted article about al-Qaeda's hard drive from the Atlantic Monthly, the major goal was to provoke the US into an overly extreme counter-attack and sway public opinion to their side.
Just something to think about ...
(I can't find the full text anymore -- the link below is subscribers only. Anyone?)
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200409/cullis on
The system we have is very stable -- it's not going to change from wishing. The reason, of course, is that any successful 3rd party candidate does damage to the major candidate they resemble most. Practically speaking, to support a 3rd party you have to resign yourself to damaging many of the causes that 3rd party candidate supports.
d er phonecall/index_np.html
What we need is a system that allows you to express your true preference without damaging the causes they support. I understand that this has been proved mathematically impossible, but there are definitely systems that approximate it, instant runoff, condorcet and the like, and they're not very hard. If you like Nader, why not support Kerry, who honestly is closer to Nader's platform in many significant ways, and then contribute to a group that's working for voting reform? As far as I can tell that's the best middle path in a situation with no morally clear option.
Voting reform isn't an impossibility. We just have to work up to it -- start with local elections, until everyone's used to it, and then finally switch the national ballot when it's not a scary idea anymore.
Incidentally, I liked Nader in 2000, but he's lost much of my respect. Based on credible polls, he's doing more to help Bush than any other single person in the country. If he acknowledged and made peace with this fact I might respectfully disagree with his reasons, but instead he apparently refuses entirely to recognize it -- along with the real negative results of electing Bush over Kerry. For a reformer to deliberately blind himself to the truth in support of his campaign, and do great harm to the country in the process, is, well, ironic for a start.
Salon interview in which Nader doesn't see any difference between accepting donations from prominent Republicans and Kerry accepting donations from prominent corporations:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/07/14/na
I no longer believe in the option of voting my conscience. On the one hand, there are candidates I prefer to Kerry. On the other hand, voting for them increases the chances that my environment will be destroyed, my tax dollars used to pay back a massive debt to the Chinese thanks to wartime tax cuts, and my ass drafted and sent overseas. My conscience isn't exactly clear either way. Nader's campaign in 2000 was based on the reasonable idea that having Bush or Gore in the White House wouldn't have any significant impact on the events of the next four years. With respect, if you still believe this you aren't paying attention.
So, let's put it this way -- do you support voting reform more by voting for Nader, or by sending $10 to an organization working for voting reform? I say, vote the way the current system requires you to vote in order to win -- and work, in some equally tiny way, to change the system.
As to how to go about doing that, my inclination is to work for voting reform in, say, Vermont congressional elections first, something doable, and then move up from there once people see it works.
"Nothing is created or destroyed, only converted from one form to another."
The only problem with that truth is that a great many things are converted from a form I call 'created' to a form I call 'destroyed.' It works out the same as far as I'm concerned.
That's why I never lock my car.
Seriously. The window doesn't stop them anyway, and I don't have anything worthwhile in there, so I'd just as soon the thieves don't damage anything in the process of finding that out.
Of course, it helps that my car is a piece of crap.
Yeah, I'd love to see Bugmenot sue to prove that providing fake information in a form like that is illegal.
Heh. No, really, it would amuse me to no end.
"scripts to fill bugus stuff? that's even worse for them, it puts waste in the database."
... no, I don't think it'll hurt them too much.
I thought that it would be, until I realized that the media sites have no incentive to care. Think about it -- if they could run a little script to automatically generate 20,000 fake DB entries, and claim 20,000 new registrations when selling advertising, that would be great for them. Obviously that would be too risky, but if 20,000 random strangers want to do it for them
The problem is that bugmenot-type services work better the more people use them -- having one such service is ten times as good as having ten individual services. That means it's centralized, and that means it's vulnerable. Stopping such services in theory is difficult, but stopping any particular such service is easy:
What'll happen once sites catch on? They'll hire someone like me to spend half an hour writing a script that queries bugmenot for logins to their site, and disables those accounts. Making bugmenot useless won't be very hard.
Perhaps what we need is a more anonymous version of Passport -- a site that knows how to sign up automatically to a large number of free-reg-required sites, with information that you give it one time. Then when you want to read the New York Times, you go to RegItForMe.com and say "please create an account at [www.nytimes.com] with my (possibly fake) info," which doesn't take any longer than using bugmenot. This way the pan-internet super-cookie privacy concerns of Passport are neatly avoided -- as far as each reg site knows, you're using a local account with them. RegItForMe.com knows which sites you've requested a login for, but not when or how often you go.
Does that sound feasible?
The point of a phonecam is to be there, all the time. PDA, iPod, digicam might or might not come with me on any given trip, but the phone is something I'm guaranteed to have at all times. If something I want a picture of shows up while I'm out buying milk, those 4 megapixels won't do a damn thing for me.
So I've had this idea for a while that could improve traffic a lot with existing technology. The idea is that an OnStar-style navigation system in your car is much more valuable if it reports your average speed in some anonymous way back to a central server, because if enough other people have the same system, it will know the average speed on the road for each of the potential routes it could give you. You are then nicely routed around any areas of congestion, and incidentally all the people without the system benefit because you aren't along with them adding to the problem. The upshot, when enough people have the system, is that the existing roads become more efficient as traffic is evenly distributed over them, using entirely voluntary and largely human-powered technology rather than sophisticated future-AI.
Is this already being done? If not, anyone interested in starting a Palm/cellphone powered version?
"The only people that remember primaries are wonks. It's like watching the full regular season of baseball. Who's doing that? Only the hardcore fans."
The hardcore fans of politics -- like, for example, everyone who might ever conceivably consider hiring Trippi as a campaign manager?
I doubt it matters much to Trippi whether you or I remember the primary -- but you betcha the people who matter were paying attention.