Why do so many people hate the idea of having an easy name for the concept of web pages that interact with the user? I don't see anyone else coming up with a better name. Yeah, let's stop calling it "Web 2.0" and move on to the oh-so-efficient "Interactive web pages built on AJAX, JSON, and other technological advancements." Give me a break, people. Unless you have coined a better term, stop whining.
How about "database backed websites"? Or how about just "website", since more often than not they're database-backed?
There's nothing in principle about transparency of political funding that requires it to be based on AJAX, dude. Great, so they're going to do something or other with google maps: who cares? What you need is a pretty simple app: "What's your zip code?"/"Okay, here's who bought the scum running to 'represent' you."
(One thing that could turn out to be the Right Thing to do is have a left-wing government buy out one of the voting machine companies... the people who would never worry about Republican fraud will then go apeshit about the possibility of subversion by foreign communists.)
Nice idea. Trouble is could it ever happen? Maybe the French government would be interested:)
the same as the "get out the vote" initiatives that come out every election cycle. When you come right down to it, if someone's only going to vote because MTV told them to, it's probably someone that shouldn't be voting
But on the other hand, if Some Guy on Slashdot tells them to vote,
they're just the kind of folks we need to take back the government from those
Republican Diebold-lovers, so Don't forget to vote in the US election tomorrow kids!
Well, presuming you're a US citizen. And presuming you're of age. And presuming you remembered to register -- and if you didn't now would be a good time to get it out of the way for the 2008 election, eh?
If you're feeling clueless about the process, you can check the Can I vote? site.
Take a look at the current state of the polls:
Electoral Vote.
The control of the Senate is balanced on a knife-edge right now.
(And if you live in California: Don't forget to vote for Debra Bowen for Secretary of State -- unlike the Republican appointee she's running against, she understands something about electoral integrity. And in my opinion, the world could use some better action movies far more than it needs a Hummer-driving environmentalist in the government office, so send him back to Hollywood, all right? And read up on Prop 90 before you walk into the booth.)
Calling politicians on their sources of funding is always positive, and holding politicians accountable for the things they say and the promises they make is fantastic.
But consider: is any of this stuff really the issue this election season?
I mean, I don't want to come off as a "Democrats and Republicans are all the same" kind of guy -- I suspect you'd find at least subtle shades of D vs. R differences between the funding behind your candidates for House -- but none of this is really
the issue right now, is it?
This particular US election looks to me like a referendum on the iraq war, so we're essentially choosing between the guys who we suspect are more enthusiastic for it and the guys we suspect are less enthusiastic, even though in both cases most of them voted for it; and the side that we're treating as nominally "anti-war" is typically too timid to even make a public statement in that direction.
How is better information on the net going to get us away from having to do this kind of political mind-reading?
And further: pretty much all of us knows that campaign fund-raising has mutated into legalized bribery. None of us like it -- and no politician is going to tell you that they like the situation either. You know what they say? "Yeah, it really sucks that the moment I get elected I've got to hit the ground running to raise money for the next election, but I'm stuck doing this, if I don't I'm going to get beaten by the other guys next year who do a better job of raising funds." In other words, you're back to mind-reading again, trying to distinguish the truely corrupt from the principled fellow who feels compelled to act like he's corrupt.
If you want improve this, you need to radically change the situation.
So, you got any candidates with a scheme for that? How about "public funding of campaigns"? How about "free TV ads for political parties"? Anything at all?
(And yeah, this is yet another "Web 2.0" app that's not remotely different from "Web 1.0". Wired is a fucking hive of buzzwords.)
Frankly pestering your local politicscritters until they stop approving cretinous suburbia developments that are designed to make trees impossible is a much better idea. Just look at most recent suburbia in UK (Cambouorne, MK, etc) and US. The utility supply lines are run deliberately in a manner which prevents anyone from planting anything larger then a small cherry or apple. And this is intended that way, allowed and approved by the bastards sitting on city council planning committees.
And you European guys are supposed to know better. You're going to feel pretty silly several decades hence when you ask yourselves why you did this, and all you can say is "Well, it was an American idea".
Because the current Iraqi government, installed via what may have been a democratic vote, is less sovereign than the previous Iraqi government, installed via the "Might makes Right" principle.
Since there's now a sovereign Iraqi goverment, why is the United States still blundering around in Iraq?
If there were a referrendum held in Iraq, wouldn't they would vote for the US to withdraw their forces?
And I suggest you review the conduct of the previous judge. His actions were, to say the least, a little bit strange. And that's just from reading translations of the public court documents.
Pick an article at random - hit the history button - see how many people have worked on it? For plagiariasm to stand, it requires that none of the subsequent editors noticed it.
More to the point, for a plagarized sentence to stand, it would have to avoid getting re-written to insert a bit of Simpsons trivia in the middle of it.
Vinge's premise is not that AI is fundamentally impossible -- transhuman intelligence is certainly possible in the Transcend. He just thought it would be a cute idea if AI never pans out on Earth, because the laws of physics here prohibit it. It's science fiction, you know. He doesn't actually believe that the Earth is located in the middle of a Slow Zone in the galaxy, nor does he believe that strong AI is impossible in real life. This is the guy who wrote that essay on the technological singularity, remember?
If anyone cares, this sounds an awful lot like a variation on a theme by Poul Anderson, from
an early novel of his called "Brainwave". Premise: the earth has been inside a region that
physically supresses clarity of thought throughout all of human evolution. The region shifts,
and suddenly everyone become orders of magnitude smarter than they have been.
Mandated laws for seatbelts - airbags in every car - licensing for every driver - improved roads, signs - speed limits - Where isn't the war on cars?
Just to pick an obvious "oversight", consider the light truck emissions loophole that the SUV (not to mention the Hummer) has been driven through for around a decade. Everyone who buys these things claims that they're doing it because they're "safer" (for the driver), but anyone who knows anything about the subject knows that this just isn't true... however they are far more dangerous to people who are outside of the vehicle.
Another point: if you judge by rents, housing prices, and tourist dollars, the most popular cities in the country are ones that were built before the post-WWII car mania kicked-in. So we should build more places like this, yes? But it is actually illegal to do so: zoning regulations across the United States are tailored to the notion that traveling around in cars is the natural order of things. Hacking some sort of public transportation system into places that have built like this is nearly hopeless: things are too difuse, spread-out, etc. This is the infamous "sprawl" that people complain about often, but never do anything about.
Just on a personal level, consider the factoid: "Driving is the most dangerous thing that most people do."
Everyone knows that, right? So the next logical step would be to look for ways to do less driving,
e.g. live closer to work, try to live somewhere that has real public transit, look into using a bicycle, demand that your local government make it possible to use a bicycle, and so on. Is this a big concern in your life?
If not, then why are you bothering to worry about outliers like "terrorist attack"?
Around 45,000 transportation-related deaths take place in the US every year.
That's 15 times the number of premature deaths that occurred on 9-11. Every year.
Thanks -- I wasn't remembering the 9/11 figures correctly (some of the early death-toll figures you heard were much larger), which perhaps not concidentally, is something Bruce Schneier was saying: "The final death toll from 9/11 was less than half of the initial estimates, but that didn't make people feel less at risk."
I've often wondered about the fact that the number of lives lost in the 9/11 attack are
lost every year in to traffic "accidents" in the US. So where's the war on cars?
Whats really funny is, I can't even tell what conservative means anymore, except that its what republicans like to call themselves.
Well you see conservatives are the people who believe in shrugging off environmental concerns and
running massive deficit spending to finance pointless military adventures, while undermining
the Constitution (not to mention the Magna Carta).
And liberals believe that John Kerry should've apologised more nicely for stumbling over his tounge, and they're very sorry he embarrassed George Bush by winning the vote in the 2004 election.
So, other than just repeating that meme, what's your actual evidence that what you're saying is actually true?. The fact that someone could screw with what a piece of technology can do doesn't mean that's happening.
The patterns in the exit-poll discrepancies that correlate with the use of electronic voting machines, the presence of Republican governors, and battle-ground states.
None of the various alternative hyphotheses that have been floated to explain this seem to hold water: e.g. were Bush fans reluctant to talk to pollsters? Answer no: it looks like there may have been some slight avoidance of pollsters on the part of Democrats.
Anyone who thinks that 5 days before an election is the worst time (because it might give people ideas and not enough time to stop it happening) are wrong
I think it might be argued that talking about election fraud can make people
feel discouraged about going to vote "what good can it do?"
Actually, my hope would be that it'll get people so pissed off at the
scum that have pushed these machines through they'll try to vote them
out of office (Note to Californians: Vote Debra Bowen for Secretary of State.
She has a clue).
And of course, if they're playing the vote-fraud card again, a strong turn-out
could be just the thing to win it inspite of the fraud.
Maybe the correct response is to hack the electonic voting machines & overwhelm them with so many bogus votes people HAVE to take notice.
It's a cute thought, but I think you'll find that the bad guys have no problem at all jumping up and down on your case about doing something that they've been doing all along.
Their first move would be something like to try to blame all the irregularities on you -- the appearence of Republican fraud was faked, in order to make the Democrats look good!
Don't get too clever... play it straight, and let the other guys step on their dick.
(One thing that could turn out to be the Right Thing to do is have a left-wing government buy out one of the voting machine companies...
the people who would never worry about Republican fraud will then go apeshit about the possibility of subversion by foreign communists.)
The only way you're going to get real elections back in this country is the tried and true path:
Give me Liberty or Give me Death.
My considered opinion is that while the problems are bad, you should not exaggerate how bad they are.
A damaged electoral system we may have, it is not certain that it's completely broken: the first thing
is to try is to vote the bums out.
Further, I'm of the opinion that everyone here should familarize themselves with the term
Agent Provacateur.
for people in Florida, hell they cant poke a hole in a piece of paper with a tool that is designed to poke that hole. what makes you think they can put their finger on the right spot on a touch screen.
The problem wasn't the voter. Don A. Dillman, who has researched the design of paper questionnaires, made the following observations the day after the election:
I've never seen one set up like this. It's very confusing the way they have put things on the right side together with things on the left side... If you passed over the first candidate to go for the second candidate, it's logical that you'd punch the second hole.
The butterfly ballot cost Al Gore more than 15,000 net votes. It cost him more than 2,000 votes attributed to Buchanan, whose punch hole was located
between that of Bush and Gore, and to socialist candidate David McReynolds, whose punch hole was located to the right of and below Lieberman's name.
Er, if you look at the last two presidential elections the amount of fraud is incredible and, indeed, provable (Wikipedia has some nice articles with links to the raw data otherwise try blackboxvoting.org). The scary thing to me (as an outsider) is not the fact that fraud occurs. It's just the fact that the American public seem so utterly apathetic to the fact that democracy has been extinguished.
You're right that the widespread silence on the subject has been seemed pretty weird... Mark Crispin Miller likes the "they're in denial" theory, which
I suppose is as good as anything. The American public has always been a little slow on the uptake, with the current state of the big media, they're
even slower, but I would guess they'll figure out eventually that this is an issue of more than passing importance.
But what I really wanted to say is that you don't want to be carried away by your rhetoric: "democracy has been extinguished"?
Well admittedly maybe it has, but on the other hand maybe it hasn't -- the fact that there are some holes in the system doesn't
prove it's completely busted: the problems we've got may, in fact, turn out to be fixable by the traditional process of "throw the bums out",
followed by "vote for a better system".
If they need to -- or even if they don't -- I expect that the Republicans will steal control of the Senate this election; but I have hopes
that they'll let the control of the House go. It would be a lot of work to steal it, and even if they could manage it, it would be awfully
goddamn obvious. That may not seem like much of a hope, but it'd be a start.
The right response to reports of election fraud is not to stay home: we need an even bigger turnout to overwhelm the bogus votes.
Voting fraud is OK, because it was done in the past?
Because the "other side" did it?
Yeah, and isn't that a scream? I think it's great that the forces of darkness and/or the republican party
keep coming back to that line -- it's so transparently lame.
Slashdot Mirror
How about "database backed websites"? Or how about just "website", since more often than not they're database-backed?
There's nothing in principle about transparency of political funding that requires it to be based on AJAX, dude. Great, so they're going to do something or other with google maps: who cares? What you need is a pretty simple app: "What's your zip code?"/"Okay, here's who bought the scum running to 'represent' you."
By the way, in case you didn't get it, I meant Venezuela and Sequoia.
But on the other hand, if Some Guy on Slashdot tells them to vote, they're just the kind of folks we need to take back the government from those Republican Diebold-lovers, so Don't forget to vote in the US election tomorrow kids!
Well, presuming you're a US citizen. And presuming you're of age. And presuming you remembered to register -- and if you didn't now would be a good time to get it out of the way for the 2008 election, eh?
If you're feeling clueless about the process, you can check the Can I vote? site.
Take a look at the current state of the polls: Electoral Vote. The control of the Senate is balanced on a knife-edge right now.
(And if you live in California: Don't forget to vote for Debra Bowen for Secretary of State -- unlike the Republican appointee she's running against, she understands something about electoral integrity. And in my opinion, the world could use some better action movies far more than it needs a Hummer-driving environmentalist in the government office, so send him back to Hollywood, all right? And read up on Prop 90 before you walk into the booth.)
But consider: is any of this stuff really the issue this election season? I mean, I don't want to come off as a "Democrats and Republicans are all the same" kind of guy -- I suspect you'd find at least subtle shades of D vs. R differences between the funding behind your candidates for House -- but none of this is really the issue right now, is it?
This particular US election looks to me like a referendum on the iraq war, so we're essentially choosing between the guys who we suspect are more enthusiastic for it and the guys we suspect are less enthusiastic, even though in both cases most of them voted for it; and the side that we're treating as nominally "anti-war" is typically too timid to even make a public statement in that direction.
How is better information on the net going to get us away from having to do this kind of political mind-reading?
And further: pretty much all of us knows that campaign fund-raising has mutated into legalized bribery. None of us like it -- and no politician is going to tell you that they like the situation either. You know what they say? "Yeah, it really sucks that the moment I get elected I've got to hit the ground running to raise money for the next election, but I'm stuck doing this, if I don't I'm going to get beaten by the other guys next year who do a better job of raising funds." In other words, you're back to mind-reading again, trying to distinguish the truely corrupt from the principled fellow who feels compelled to act like he's corrupt.
If you want improve this, you need to radically change the situation. So, you got any candidates with a scheme for that? How about "public funding of campaigns"? How about "free TV ads for political parties"? Anything at all?
(And yeah, this is yet another "Web 2.0" app that's not remotely different from "Web 1.0". Wired is a fucking hive of buzzwords.)
And tell that to the guys who work on the suicide girls site.
And you European guys are supposed to know better. You're going to feel pretty silly several decades hence when you ask yourselves why you did this, and all you can say is "Well, it was an American idea".
Ditto for nuclear energy, but then we'd all be going to hell.
Since there's now a sovereign Iraqi goverment, why is the United States still blundering around in Iraq?
If there were a referrendum held in Iraq, wouldn't they would vote for the US to withdraw their forces?
And I suggest you review the conduct of the previous judge. His actions were, to say the least, a little bit strange. And that's just from reading translations of the public court documents.
More to the point, for a plagarized sentence to stand, it would have to avoid getting re-written to insert a bit of Simpsons trivia in the middle of it.
The odds of that happening are very low.
If anyone cares, this sounds an awful lot like a variation on a theme by Poul Anderson, from an early novel of his called "Brainwave". Premise: the earth has been inside a region that physically supresses clarity of thought throughout all of human evolution. The region shifts, and suddenly everyone become orders of magnitude smarter than they have been.
Or perhaps the Simple Object Access Protocol?
Or maybe we should give it a REST.
Just to pick an obvious "oversight", consider the light truck emissions loophole that the SUV (not to mention the Hummer) has been driven through for around a decade. Everyone who buys these things claims that they're doing it because they're "safer" (for the driver), but anyone who knows anything about the subject knows that this just isn't true... however they are far more dangerous to people who are outside of the vehicle.
Another point: if you judge by rents, housing prices, and tourist dollars, the most popular cities in the country are ones that were built before the post-WWII car mania kicked-in. So we should build more places like this, yes? But it is actually illegal to do so: zoning regulations across the United States are tailored to the notion that traveling around in cars is the natural order of things. Hacking some sort of public transportation system into places that have built like this is nearly hopeless: things are too difuse, spread-out, etc. This is the infamous "sprawl" that people complain about often, but never do anything about.
Just on a personal level, consider the factoid: "Driving is the most dangerous thing that most people do." Everyone knows that, right? So the next logical step would be to look for ways to do less driving, e.g. live closer to work, try to live somewhere that has real public transit, look into using a bicycle, demand that your local government make it possible to use a bicycle, and so on. Is this a big concern in your life? If not, then why are you bothering to worry about outliers like "terrorist attack"?
Thanks -- I wasn't remembering the 9/11 figures correctly (some of the early death-toll figures you heard were much larger), which perhaps not concidentally, is something Bruce Schneier was saying: "The final death toll from 9/11 was less than half of the initial estimates, but that didn't make people feel less at risk."
Well you see conservatives are the people who believe in shrugging off environmental concerns and running massive deficit spending to finance pointless military adventures, while undermining the Constitution (not to mention the Magna Carta).
And liberals believe that John Kerry should've apologised more nicely for stumbling over his tounge, and they're very sorry he embarrassed George Bush by winning the vote in the 2004 election.
The patterns in the exit-poll discrepancies that correlate with the use of electronic voting machines, the presence of Republican governors, and battle-ground states.
None of the various alternative hyphotheses that have been floated to explain this seem to hold water: e.g. were Bush fans reluctant to talk to pollsters? Answer no: it looks like there may have been some slight avoidance of pollsters on the part of Democrats.
I think it might be argued that talking about election fraud can make people feel discouraged about going to vote "what good can it do?"
Actually, my hope would be that it'll get people so pissed off at the scum that have pushed these machines through they'll try to vote them out of office (Note to Californians: Vote Debra Bowen for Secretary of State. She has a clue).
And of course, if they're playing the vote-fraud card again, a strong turn-out could be just the thing to win it inspite of the fraud.
Excellent. I was just predicting that someone would start working that line over in another thread.
It's a cute thought, but I think you'll find that the bad guys have no problem at all jumping up and down on your case about doing something that they've been doing all along. Their first move would be something like to try to blame all the irregularities on you -- the appearence of Republican fraud was faked, in order to make the Democrats look good!
Don't get too clever... play it straight, and let the other guys step on their dick.
(One thing that could turn out to be the Right Thing to do is have a left-wing government buy out one of the voting machine companies... the people who would never worry about Republican fraud will then go apeshit about the possibility of subversion by foreign communists.)
My considered opinion is that while the problems are bad, you should not exaggerate how bad they are. A damaged electoral system we may have, it is not certain that it's completely broken: the first thing is to try is to vote the bums out.
Further, I'm of the opinion that everyone here should familarize themselves with the term Agent Provacateur.
Oh, sorry, I mean: Agent Provacateur.
You really need to read something besides Ann Coulter once in awhile... This is from the Freeman and Bliefuss book, Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?:
It helps to screen out some percentage of poor folks who've been getting by without one. The Republicans need all the help they can get.
You're right that the widespread silence on the subject has been seemed pretty weird... Mark Crispin Miller likes the "they're in denial" theory, which I suppose is as good as anything. The American public has always been a little slow on the uptake, with the current state of the big media, they're even slower, but I would guess they'll figure out eventually that this is an issue of more than passing importance.
But what I really wanted to say is that you don't want to be carried away by your rhetoric: "democracy has been extinguished"? Well admittedly maybe it has, but on the other hand maybe it hasn't -- the fact that there are some holes in the system doesn't prove it's completely busted: the problems we've got may, in fact, turn out to be fixable by the traditional process of "throw the bums out", followed by "vote for a better system".
If they need to -- or even if they don't -- I expect that the Republicans will steal control of the Senate this election; but I have hopes that they'll let the control of the House go. It would be a lot of work to steal it, and even if they could manage it, it would be awfully goddamn obvious. That may not seem like much of a hope, but it'd be a start.
The right response to reports of election fraud is not to stay home: we need an even bigger turnout to overwhelm the bogus votes.
Yeah, and isn't that a scream? I think it's great that the forces of darkness and/or the republican party keep coming back to that line -- it's so transparently lame.