Duh, no. I think computers are like in the movies where a hacker uses a VR helmet and gloves in a 3D immersive graphical environment to break into systems using a cyberspace 3D polygon-based 4-color CGA battering ram (much better than a monochrome green-screen one), or maybe by moving holographic cubes around like in that movie Swordfish, or maybe by downloading his brain into a dolphin or some crap like that, not by typing cryptic commands that nobody knows about (such as ls) into a command line.
Ok geniuses, what the heck are you gonna do when you start putting the Username/Password databases together and a million identical names belonging to different people collide? I think they'll need to create a separate database for OpenID that doesn't touch the databases that already exist.
The law should be updated to allow for obvious patent trolls to have a chair thrown and broken over their head. The law will appoint Steve to do the honors of throwing the aforementioned chair.
Ok, now on a more serious point, I really don't understand how patents like this get past the "expert" patent examiners who work at the USPTO. A database is something that is used to keep lists of things. It doesn't matter if it's a list of telephone numbers, a list of customers and vendors, a list of email addresses for a mailing list you manage, a list of husbands you've pissed off by screwing their wives, or a wishlist. Even a monkey can see that this is not only obvious, but is the first method that comes to mind in anyone's mind to keep a list of information. Even if you write down a shopping list on a piece of paper, that piece of paper is essentially a "database." So on a more serious note of how the law should be updated: If you file an obvious troll patent like this and it gets overturned on the grounds of being obvious, you should be compelled to pay back anyone you've charged for the use of the patent, plus interest, and the patent examiners who let it get past their desk get fired and ALL patents they've been involved in are revoked automatically. This will help fight the PROBLEM of a runaway patent system.
A patent system, as with a copyright system, is a good thing, but the rights of the entire population must be in balance with the time-limited (for a SHORT time) rights given to the patent or copyright holder. The purpose of both systems is to enrich the entire society by giving people incentive to invent, create, and/or release new things.
This is not enough packaging. They should have shipped a truckload of sixteen wooden crates, built with inch-thick plywood, each crate containing a large wooden box built with thick finished mahogany with golden hinges and latch, each such box containing within it a large cardboard box buried in packing peanuts, each cardboard box containing a smaller one packed in foam, each smaller one containing an envelope, which contains the sheet of paper.
Instead of putting lime in the ocean, they should figure out a way to convert the ocean into Guinness. The only problem is that if you're stranded files from shore in a row boat, you won't be able to piss into the sea.
Oh, and about that global warming bullshit... has anyone figured out why Mars is heating up the same amount (proportionally to Earth) when there are neither SUVs nor Al Gore on Mars?
One of these days, those big evil media companies will figure out that embracing the Internet and technology will actually improve their business. This is one tiny step in that direction. Kudos to Amazon.
Hmmm, it sounds like this kind of worm really benefits the RIAA. It works like this: If all your mp3 files are encoded from your own CDs for legitimate purposes, then nothing will happen to you. But if you download a single song, or if you copy a single song from a friend, then BOOM! All of your music becomes totally jacked up. It seems a pretty sophisticated worm/virus concept and the transcoding of mp3s is kind of like an additional "fsck you" from the RIAA.
Newsgroups are useful for legitimate purposes. They should set up a mechanism whereby people can report newsgroup-based child abuse. Since you need to be registered with a newsgroup provider (either your ISP or one you pay to access), they can easily track down people who post or download that stuff. But don't cancel a valuable system that's useful for thousands of legitimate uses because of several illegitimate ones.
I don't think anyone with a/. UID thought that this Mac clone company would last very long. I'm surprised they lasted as long as they did. Think this is unfair? Hey, Mac OS X is Apple's product; it's a great piece of software despite its shortcomings; and, yes, to run it, you need a Mac, made by Apple. They do this to guarantee that it runs the way they tested it in the lab. On other hardware, OS X might rock equally well or it might be the suxx0rz, Apple has no way to know or to control that outcome, so they prevent it from running that way. You can take it or use the alternative, which is a computer made by anyone of your choice, running your choice of Linux, the *BSDs, Windows 2000, XP, Vista, or Server 2008 modified to function as a workstation per the instructions given in another/. story earlier today. Vote with your dollars!
Given that my Gmail email address is my real first and last name, separated by a period, I don't think it's a big deal that my real name will be revealed through the calendar. I don't care. There are a million of me out there anyway. I've Googled my own name before and found that I'm several professors, an artist, a few musicians, a business owner or two, and a bunch of other things. I didn't find myself in there even after wading through about 300 results. So this ain't an issue. But if your name is Rumpelstiltskin DiScrewdio, then you're screwed because there's only one of you out there.
Ok, so the Republicans are doing all kinds of web savvy stuff to make the other guy look worse than themselves, but how about using their skills to tell us what makes them a good choice in 2008? Because many people, myself included, are disenchanted with everything going on in Washington right now and with the choice of candidates in 2008, which means more disenchantment coming in the near future.
I don't care if it's Democratic, Republican, or Cartesian; what matters to me is that we get leaders who care about allowing you to keep as much of your own power (freedom) and your own money as possible, since that principle has proved successful in making America a great country for over 200 years. Unfortunately, in this election, I am suffering from electile dysfunction, failure to become aroused over either choice of candidate. Both McCain and Obama have flip-flopped numerous times, as evidenced by videos on YouTube showing both saying opposite things about the same topics within short time intervals (looking up the videos is left as an exercise for the reader, as I'm short on time, but those videos are there). I feel that neither candidate is the right person for the job, and that both candidates will cause significant damage to this country as president. Many people share these feelings. Web savviness is great, but come on people, tell us why you're good, not why the other dude is bad.
As I see it, the trouble with so-called web development begins with the fact that it encompasses so many diverse fields and ends with the fact that each field and its representation as web-based software is implemented using different standards and languages, each of which comes with its tools and its learning curve. Compare and contrast this with non-web programming endeavors, the vast majority of which rely largely on C and similar languages (C++, Objective-C, and languages with C-like syntax). It would be much less of a skill crisis if there were less tools and languages to learn.
There should, no, there MUST be an option to prevent it from falling back on an unencrypted connection. Failure to implement this means you may as well not have encryption at all, since you never know if it's encrypted or not. The EFF needs your donations so it can go all over the world and fight to repeal laws allowing government idiots to snoop on communications, and to create laws that make it illegal to snoop or to create laws that allow such snooping. Governments all over the world are out of control.
1. To display a static green arrow over the open TSA security lanes at Detroit Metro.
I kid you not, at the main security checkpoint to get into Detroit Metro there are monitors over each metal detector. The ONLY thing those monitors ever display is a big green arrow pointing down. Oh, occasionally they display a blue screen with a Windows error notice.
Why not use a toggle switch for each lane to turn on a bunch of green LEDs shaped like a down arrow? Oh, I know! Your tax dollars at work, paying for a Windows license for each down arrow!! I bet it's running Windows XP Professional, not Home. And I bet the box each of these runs on has 4 gigs of RAM. Proof once again that the TSA is so inept, it should be called the Totally Stupid Administration.
7. Manufacturing controls
Now we are getting to lala land. Imagine having your manufacturing plant rely on Windows. If you are the plant manager how do you explain to your CEO that your plant is down because of a virus? But I am here to tell you that Windows on machine controllers is becoming standard. Crazy, but the truth.
Yeah. Unfortunately, Windows is used in quite a few machine controls. Control systems generally have real-time requirements as well as safety requirements. We're talking moving parts, motor control, relays that turn on and off large systems that can be dangerous. Here an OS crash means that mechanical equipment physically crashes and people get hurt or even killed. I worked in a machine shop that bought a machine with a Windows-based control on it about ten years ago. While the machine was mechanically sound, the control was a piece of junk. After a month of struggling with it, we had them take it back. It makes no sense to use Windows in a system like this. More likely than not, it's used to provide GUI and networking. That's all. And that can be provided just fine with any of a zillion embedded OSes out there that don't crash, or a customized Linux distro that, uh, won't crash either.
As I keep repeating time and time again, businesses like Dell depend on your money to stay in business. Therefore, when a business does something you appreciate, you should think of that business when you're on the market for whatever product or service it sells and support that business. And when a business does something contrary to what you appreciate, you should likewise do the opposite. It helps to actually write to the folks in charge of sales and marketing and let them know, politely, of course, the reason that you have purchased from their competitor.
I really don't understand what the big advantage is in using package managers. It's dangerous because you never know what "updates" will come down the pike. Thanks to the good folks who contribute to GNU Autotools, it's very easy to type./configure followed by make and make install. Even end users can do this with a pretty high success rate. If there is a reason that you really need a package manager (for example, if you're a sysadmin responsible for many computers) then you can easily make your own packages and avoid trusting someone else's package decisions. Updates can be convenient, but they can screw things up really badly.
Yeah I've been getting a zillion of these, too. They must have figured that selling Viagra, cheap meds, male organ enhancement products, emails claiming to be from Zimbabwe's lottery agency or some long lost uncle that wants to park a billion bucks in your bank account, and emails claiming to be from hot girls who have a secret crush on you, isn't getting enough people to waste enough time clicking on bogus links to virus-laden scam websites, so now they're using the fact that many people don't know what's happening on their street, let alone in Iran, coupled with word on the street about the tests Iran has been running with all kinds of missiles, coupled with the rumors that Israel is going to blow up Iran that began when Israel flew some planes to Greece a few weeks ago (Greece is approximately the same distance from Israel as Iran), and other nonsense to get people clicking their links. How these spammers manage to avoid getting their face punched in is simply beyond me. It's gonna be like the boy who cried wolf. When something really does blow up, nobody will believe it's actually happening.
To make games free, game developers will have to figure out how to make money off free (as in both beer and speech) software, and it won't work like it does for servers and stuff. For software like, say, Apache or Linux or Samba or OpenVPN or whatever, you can give the software away for free and then charge for support. This works because some savvy businessman who wants to jump on the Open Source bandwagon but doesn't have the skill or time to learn this stuff (he needs to run his business, pay his employees and his bills, and make money, after all), so he hires some geeked out 1337 h4x0rz to deal with these issues, get his system working the way his business needs it, and contribute bug fixes and whatnot back to the community. But it won't work for games because nobody is going to pay for support to get the thing up and running or implement business rules or that sort of thing. So there will have to be something else that people have to pay for, and if it can't be content and it can't be service, then what can it be? Maybe hardware. Maybe the game companies will have to become fabless semiconductor companies that build anything from bitchen new graphics processors to entire video game consoles. These companies would then write FOSS drivers and games to demonstrate the hardware, to cause people to buy the hardware (to play the games at full speed and quality), etc. I don't know how sustainable such a business model would be, but I can tell you that gamers go out and spend beaucoup dollars/euros/pounds/yen/shekels on all kinds of fancy hardware to run the games they pirate, er, borrow... so maybe such a thing could work.
Okay, so let me get this straight. Windows XP is supposedly going to be cancelled ASAP, but Windows 10,000 BC Edition still being licensed until November?! I believe this makes approximately zero sense.
Why? Because for contemporary computers, Windows XP is, believe it or not, a decent operating system PROVIDED THAT you use nLite to customize your Windows XP installation CD-ROM to install the darn thing with all options changed to the opposite of the Microsoft-provided defaults, AND install CCleaner to run automatically on startup with all options selected, AND install Firefox and set it as the default browser, AND replace Notepad with your favorite text editor AND run it behind a Linux- or *BSD-based firewall... Provided you do all these things and probably a few more, all of which will take approximately an hour and a half to setup from first boot to completion if you use nLite, you'll get a pretty decent operating system. Windows 10,000 BC Edition won't really do much for you nowadays. Why is support for it lasting longer than for XP, which should supercede Vista?!
The keyword here is IF, which means the people constantly need to be on top of things and to actively fight things they don't like. But that doesn't usually happen and the government passes thousands of laws that the people know nothing about. Only very controversial stuff that the media decides to cover is fought for or against. By requiring ALL new laws to pass the filter of a public vote, which happens once per year, it means that unless the public ACTIVELY goes out and votes in favor of a law, the government can write new laws all day long but none of them will get passed. Only the ones that 50% or more of the population want passed into law. It's an additional safety measure against a runaway government.
Thank you! I didn't understand that either... especially since I was innovative enough to move the Profit! to step 1 and the ??? to step 3. But yes, I really think that requiring 50% support from the entire country to put laws into effect is a good idea, since, as you can see, government dudes and dudettes sit around all day dreaming up new laws, the result being that in the United States to use this country as an example, tens of thousands of new laws (at least) are put into effect every year if you count all levels of government from the local to the federal. The presence of a law usually means that you can't do one or more things, and laws don't get taken off the books very often, so sooner or later, you won't be able to take a piss without breaking a law somewhere. It's all fine and dandy that in an ideal world, a government of the people, by the people, and for the people means that the people are monitoring their government, but when it comes down to it, most people prefer to live their lives, leave the governing to the government, and then they wake up one day and find out that there are no more liberties because there are a billion laws forbidding everything, regulating everything, and taxing everything. A system like I mentioned means one of two things will happen: If people actively participate, it means that laws that have the public's support will get passed while others don't (never mind how smart or dumb the public is; you can't control that, but you at least know that something has their support), or if enough people don't actively participate, the government can sit around writing laws as thick as phone books and none of them will actually become law. I think that in the end, people will go to the polls for important issues, issues that most people believe affect them personally, while they'll avoid going for unimportant issues.
Slashdot Mirror
Duh, no. I think computers are like in the movies where a hacker uses a VR helmet and gloves in a 3D immersive graphical environment to break into systems using a cyberspace 3D polygon-based 4-color CGA battering ram (much better than a monochrome green-screen one), or maybe by moving holographic cubes around like in that movie Swordfish, or maybe by downloading his brain into a dolphin or some crap like that, not by typing cryptic commands that nobody knows about (such as ls) into a command line.
Does it run Linux? And if it takes a core dump, does it know that it should use the toilet? And will it fight for recognition as a sentient life form?
Ok geniuses, what the heck are you gonna do when you start putting the Username/Password databases together and a million identical names belonging to different people collide? I think they'll need to create a separate database for OpenID that doesn't touch the databases that already exist.
The law should be updated to allow for obvious patent trolls to have a chair thrown and broken over their head. The law will appoint Steve to do the honors of throwing the aforementioned chair.
Ok, now on a more serious point, I really don't understand how patents like this get past the "expert" patent examiners who work at the USPTO. A database is something that is used to keep lists of things. It doesn't matter if it's a list of telephone numbers, a list of customers and vendors, a list of email addresses for a mailing list you manage, a list of husbands you've pissed off by screwing their wives, or a wishlist. Even a monkey can see that this is not only obvious, but is the first method that comes to mind in anyone's mind to keep a list of information. Even if you write down a shopping list on a piece of paper, that piece of paper is essentially a "database." So on a more serious note of how the law should be updated: If you file an obvious troll patent like this and it gets overturned on the grounds of being obvious, you should be compelled to pay back anyone you've charged for the use of the patent, plus interest, and the patent examiners who let it get past their desk get fired and ALL patents they've been involved in are revoked automatically. This will help fight the PROBLEM of a runaway patent system.
A patent system, as with a copyright system, is a good thing, but the rights of the entire population must be in balance with the time-limited (for a SHORT time) rights given to the patent or copyright holder. The purpose of both systems is to enrich the entire society by giving people incentive to invent, create, and/or release new things.
This is not enough packaging. They should have shipped a truckload of sixteen wooden crates, built with inch-thick plywood, each crate containing a large wooden box built with thick finished mahogany with golden hinges and latch, each such box containing within it a large cardboard box buried in packing peanuts, each cardboard box containing a smaller one packed in foam, each smaller one containing an envelope, which contains the sheet of paper.
Sorry, that's supposed to be if you're stranded miles from shore, but in UNIX, everything is a file. :-)
Instead of putting lime in the ocean, they should figure out a way to convert the ocean into Guinness. The only problem is that if you're stranded files from shore in a row boat, you won't be able to piss into the sea.
Oh, and about that global warming bullshit... has anyone figured out why Mars is heating up the same amount (proportionally to Earth) when there are neither SUVs nor Al Gore on Mars?
One of these days, those big evil media companies will figure out that embracing the Internet and technology will actually improve their business. This is one tiny step in that direction. Kudos to Amazon.
Hmmm, it sounds like this kind of worm really benefits the RIAA. It works like this: If all your mp3 files are encoded from your own CDs for legitimate purposes, then nothing will happen to you. But if you download a single song, or if you copy a single song from a friend, then BOOM! All of your music becomes totally jacked up. It seems a pretty sophisticated worm/virus concept and the transcoding of mp3s is kind of like an additional "fsck you" from the RIAA.
Newsgroups are useful for legitimate purposes. They should set up a mechanism whereby people can report newsgroup-based child abuse. Since you need to be registered with a newsgroup provider (either your ISP or one you pay to access), they can easily track down people who post or download that stuff. But don't cancel a valuable system that's useful for thousands of legitimate uses because of several illegitimate ones.
I don't think anyone with a /. UID thought that this Mac clone company would last very long. I'm surprised they lasted as long as they did. Think this is unfair? Hey, Mac OS X is Apple's product; it's a great piece of software despite its shortcomings; and, yes, to run it, you need a Mac, made by Apple. They do this to guarantee that it runs the way they tested it in the lab. On other hardware, OS X might rock equally well or it might be the suxx0rz, Apple has no way to know or to control that outcome, so they prevent it from running that way. You can take it or use the alternative, which is a computer made by anyone of your choice, running your choice of Linux, the *BSDs, Windows 2000, XP, Vista, or Server 2008 modified to function as a workstation per the instructions given in another /. story earlier today. Vote with your dollars!
Put a bunch of monkeys in a cage with a hose attached to their you-know-what and collect it all day long. Why do they need human volunteers for this?
Given that my Gmail email address is my real first and last name, separated by a period, I don't think it's a big deal that my real name will be revealed through the calendar. I don't care. There are a million of me out there anyway. I've Googled my own name before and found that I'm several professors, an artist, a few musicians, a business owner or two, and a bunch of other things. I didn't find myself in there even after wading through about 300 results. So this ain't an issue. But if your name is Rumpelstiltskin DiScrewdio, then you're screwed because there's only one of you out there.
Ok, so the Republicans are doing all kinds of web savvy stuff to make the other guy look worse than themselves, but how about using their skills to tell us what makes them a good choice in 2008? Because many people, myself included, are disenchanted with everything going on in Washington right now and with the choice of candidates in 2008, which means more disenchantment coming in the near future.
I don't care if it's Democratic, Republican, or Cartesian; what matters to me is that we get leaders who care about allowing you to keep as much of your own power (freedom) and your own money as possible, since that principle has proved successful in making America a great country for over 200 years. Unfortunately, in this election, I am suffering from electile dysfunction, failure to become aroused over either choice of candidate. Both McCain and Obama have flip-flopped numerous times, as evidenced by videos on YouTube showing both saying opposite things about the same topics within short time intervals (looking up the videos is left as an exercise for the reader, as I'm short on time, but those videos are there). I feel that neither candidate is the right person for the job, and that both candidates will cause significant damage to this country as president. Many people share these feelings. Web savviness is great, but come on people, tell us why you're good, not why the other dude is bad.
As I see it, the trouble with so-called web development begins with the fact that it encompasses so many diverse fields and ends with the fact that each field and its representation as web-based software is implemented using different standards and languages, each of which comes with its tools and its learning curve. Compare and contrast this with non-web programming endeavors, the vast majority of which rely largely on C and similar languages (C++, Objective-C, and languages with C-like syntax). It would be much less of a skill crisis if there were less tools and languages to learn.
There should, no, there MUST be an option to prevent it from falling back on an unencrypted connection. Failure to implement this means you may as well not have encryption at all, since you never know if it's encrypted or not. The EFF needs your donations so it can go all over the world and fight to repeal laws allowing government idiots to snoop on communications, and to create laws that make it illegal to snoop or to create laws that allow such snooping. Governments all over the world are out of control.
How in the fscking world does a serious opinion like the parent get modded Troll? Only on /.
My two favorite...
Why not use a toggle switch for each lane to turn on a bunch of green LEDs shaped like a down arrow? Oh, I know! Your tax dollars at work, paying for a Windows license for each down arrow!! I bet it's running Windows XP Professional, not Home. And I bet the box each of these runs on has 4 gigs of RAM. Proof once again that the TSA is so inept, it should be called the Totally Stupid Administration.
Yeah. Unfortunately, Windows is used in quite a few machine controls. Control systems generally have real-time requirements as well as safety requirements. We're talking moving parts, motor control, relays that turn on and off large systems that can be dangerous. Here an OS crash means that mechanical equipment physically crashes and people get hurt or even killed. I worked in a machine shop that bought a machine with a Windows-based control on it about ten years ago. While the machine was mechanically sound, the control was a piece of junk. After a month of struggling with it, we had them take it back. It makes no sense to use Windows in a system like this. More likely than not, it's used to provide GUI and networking. That's all. And that can be provided just fine with any of a zillion embedded OSes out there that don't crash, or a customized Linux distro that, uh, won't crash either.
As I keep repeating time and time again, businesses like Dell depend on your money to stay in business. Therefore, when a business does something you appreciate, you should think of that business when you're on the market for whatever product or service it sells and support that business. And when a business does something contrary to what you appreciate, you should likewise do the opposite. It helps to actually write to the folks in charge of sales and marketing and let them know, politely, of course, the reason that you have purchased from their competitor.
I really don't understand what the big advantage is in using package managers. It's dangerous because you never know what "updates" will come down the pike. Thanks to the good folks who contribute to GNU Autotools, it's very easy to type ./configure followed by make and make install. Even end users can do this with a pretty high success rate. If there is a reason that you really need a package manager (for example, if you're a sysadmin responsible for many computers) then you can easily make your own packages and avoid trusting someone else's package decisions. Updates can be convenient, but they can screw things up really badly.
Yeah I've been getting a zillion of these, too. They must have figured that selling Viagra, cheap meds, male organ enhancement products, emails claiming to be from Zimbabwe's lottery agency or some long lost uncle that wants to park a billion bucks in your bank account, and emails claiming to be from hot girls who have a secret crush on you, isn't getting enough people to waste enough time clicking on bogus links to virus-laden scam websites, so now they're using the fact that many people don't know what's happening on their street, let alone in Iran, coupled with word on the street about the tests Iran has been running with all kinds of missiles, coupled with the rumors that Israel is going to blow up Iran that began when Israel flew some planes to Greece a few weeks ago (Greece is approximately the same distance from Israel as Iran), and other nonsense to get people clicking their links. How these spammers manage to avoid getting their face punched in is simply beyond me. It's gonna be like the boy who cried wolf. When something really does blow up, nobody will believe it's actually happening.
To make games free, game developers will have to figure out how to make money off free (as in both beer and speech) software, and it won't work like it does for servers and stuff. For software like, say, Apache or Linux or Samba or OpenVPN or whatever, you can give the software away for free and then charge for support. This works because some savvy businessman who wants to jump on the Open Source bandwagon but doesn't have the skill or time to learn this stuff (he needs to run his business, pay his employees and his bills, and make money, after all), so he hires some geeked out 1337 h4x0rz to deal with these issues, get his system working the way his business needs it, and contribute bug fixes and whatnot back to the community. But it won't work for games because nobody is going to pay for support to get the thing up and running or implement business rules or that sort of thing. So there will have to be something else that people have to pay for, and if it can't be content and it can't be service, then what can it be? Maybe hardware. Maybe the game companies will have to become fabless semiconductor companies that build anything from bitchen new graphics processors to entire video game consoles. These companies would then write FOSS drivers and games to demonstrate the hardware, to cause people to buy the hardware (to play the games at full speed and quality), etc. I don't know how sustainable such a business model would be, but I can tell you that gamers go out and spend beaucoup dollars/euros/pounds/yen/shekels on all kinds of fancy hardware to run the games they pirate, er, borrow... so maybe such a thing could work.
Okay, so let me get this straight. Windows XP is supposedly going to be cancelled ASAP, but Windows 10,000 BC Edition still being licensed until November?! I believe this makes approximately zero sense.
Why? Because for contemporary computers, Windows XP is, believe it or not, a decent operating system PROVIDED THAT you use nLite to customize your Windows XP installation CD-ROM to install the darn thing with all options changed to the opposite of the Microsoft-provided defaults, AND install CCleaner to run automatically on startup with all options selected, AND install Firefox and set it as the default browser, AND replace Notepad with your favorite text editor AND run it behind a Linux- or *BSD-based firewall... Provided you do all these things and probably a few more, all of which will take approximately an hour and a half to setup from first boot to completion if you use nLite, you'll get a pretty decent operating system. Windows 10,000 BC Edition won't really do much for you nowadays. Why is support for it lasting longer than for XP, which should supercede Vista?!
The keyword here is IF , which means the people constantly need to be on top of things and to actively fight things they don't like. But that doesn't usually happen and the government passes thousands of laws that the people know nothing about. Only very controversial stuff that the media decides to cover is fought for or against. By requiring ALL new laws to pass the filter of a public vote, which happens once per year, it means that unless the public ACTIVELY goes out and votes in favor of a law, the government can write new laws all day long but none of them will get passed. Only the ones that 50% or more of the population want passed into law. It's an additional safety measure against a runaway government.
Thank you! I didn't understand that either... especially since I was innovative enough to move the Profit! to step 1 and the ??? to step 3. But yes, I really think that requiring 50% support from the entire country to put laws into effect is a good idea, since, as you can see, government dudes and dudettes sit around all day dreaming up new laws, the result being that in the United States to use this country as an example, tens of thousands of new laws (at least) are put into effect every year if you count all levels of government from the local to the federal. The presence of a law usually means that you can't do one or more things, and laws don't get taken off the books very often, so sooner or later, you won't be able to take a piss without breaking a law somewhere. It's all fine and dandy that in an ideal world, a government of the people, by the people, and for the people means that the people are monitoring their government, but when it comes down to it, most people prefer to live their lives, leave the governing to the government, and then they wake up one day and find out that there are no more liberties because there are a billion laws forbidding everything, regulating everything, and taxing everything. A system like I mentioned means one of two things will happen: If people actively participate, it means that laws that have the public's support will get passed while others don't (never mind how smart or dumb the public is; you can't control that, but you at least know that something has their support), or if enough people don't actively participate, the government can sit around writing laws as thick as phone books and none of them will actually become law. I think that in the end, people will go to the polls for important issues, issues that most people believe affect them personally, while they'll avoid going for unimportant issues.