New materials, new compounds, new chemicals need to be PROVEN to be safe before they are let out of the lab
Unfortunately, you can't prove anything is safe. Primarily since you can't predict any of countless number of variables and reproduce them in a lab. Even if you test on 1000 human subjects, you might later find out that one human in a million has a fatal allergy to something.
At best, you could perform a battery of test on animal subjects and look for adverse reactions, like is done with new drugs. And even then, occasionally a dangerous one slips through.
I think I'll refrain from clicking the link you posted to the domain [chickenboner.com]. I have read/. for a while.
In retrospect, I should have pointed that out. It's a perfectly legitimate site. Here's a definition
Chickenboner:
From Jargon File (4.4.4, 14 Aug 2003)
chickenboner n.
[spamfighters] Derogatory term for a spammer. The image that goes
with it is of an overweight redneck with bad teeth living in a
trailer, hunched in semi-darkness over his computer and surrounded by
rotting chicken bones in half-eaten KFC buckets and empty beer cans.
See http://www.spamfaq.net/terminology.shtml#chickenbo ner for
discussion.
The law flat out says that he CAN SPAM. Say what you want about the guy, he's a big follower of truth in labeling...
Yeah, well show me the law that says I have to accept his email. I can block whatever I want, for whatever reason I want. I can block all email coming from an IP address with three 6's in it if I want. I can block all email sent on a Thursday if I want. And I can block email using Spamcop if I want.
No one is forced to use Spamcop. The people that use it chose to do so. They may do it themselves, or they may choose to do so by proxy, by choosing an ISP that uses Spamcop.
Richter's counter is that all these people really did opt in, they just don't remember when they did so. If they'd simply provide their e-mail address, Richter could likely tell them at what site and when they made their mistake of signaling that they were opting in,
Or at least manufacture evidence showing that.
No one on this planet can genuinely say that spammers don't exist. Therefore, someone out there is spamming, in violation of CAN-SPAM. It seems reasonable to me to conclude that of the *massive* number of accusations against Richter, they're not all made up.
Remember, Richter says that you opt-in to his spam just by viewing one of his websites. No email signup, no forms, just loading it in a web browser is enough.
OptIn is in the business of sending email advertisements to consumers who... indirectly subscribe by giving their express or implied consent through visitation to various websites.
Yup, you heard the man. Just visiting a website is enough to consent to receive spam. What these "various websites" are, or how a website determines a visitor's email address is left as an exercise for the reader.
By reading this post, you give your implied consent for me to hit you in the face with a cream pie.
One thing they don't mention is the cost of the software, i.e. the cost of the electronic textbooks. They say they'll load 2000 extra books onto the laptops, which I assume will just be a dump of Project Gutenberg or something.
My question is: are these textbooks purchased or licensed? Do they expire? The good thing about a textbook is that it can be used over and over. (There's some discussion here about used vs. new textbooks and the highlighting issue, but these are elementary students with basic textbooks, not law students. Hopefully there won't be too much highlighting.) Do these laptops follow the students through the school, or are they collected at the end of the year and redistributed next year? Do the electronic textbooks stop working after a set period of time, and need to be "repurchased" or relicensed?
I suspect the first major virus outbreak and the time/cost to fix all these machines will make them very much NOT cost-effective.
Last year, the dipshit that ran SPEWS decided he didn't want to play anymore and closed up shop. His method of announcing this was to blacklist the world!
While the Osirusoft DNSBL that many people used to get access to SPEWS data was taken offline, SPEWS is still up and going strong. (Thank God.)
And as for "blacklisting the world", it was the only practical way to get people to stop using the list. If he hadn't inattentive sysadmins would still be trying to do lookups years in the future.
How is that non toxic? Ethylene Glycol is the antifreeze you find in coolant and windshield wiper fluid and I assure you it is very toxic. Does the "poly" really change it all that much?
Absolutely.
Ethylene glycol is OH-CH2-CH2-OH and is fairly toxic. I would suspect it behaves similarly to ethanol (CH3-CH2-OH) in the bloodstream, but I don't really know. Contrast this with propylene glycol, CH2-CH2-(CHOH)-OH which is pretty much completely non-toxic.
Polyethylene glycol is (-CH2-CH2-O-)n, where n is some large number. It's a polymer. There are different kinds of PEG, but glancing at the web, there appear to be a number of different kinds available, and they appear to be reasonably non-toxic.
IANAL, but isn't bascially everything copyrighted unless it's done by the government or explicitly released into the public domain? Music, emails, fiction, poetry, etc. Heck, I bet even this post is copyrighted.
The problem is that, from the article, it's not at all clear what this software does. Does it just seek out some data somewhere that's an MP3 and delete it? And how does it differentiate between improperly transmitted MP3s and perfectly legitimate ones?
Google may not sell your email transcripts, but how do you know some unethical Google employee may not be reading your email on the sly?
How do you know some unethical employee of your ISP isn't reading your email on the sly? How do you know some unethical employee of any free web email provider isn't reading everyone's email on the sly?
The simple answer is that you don't. It all comes down to a matter of trust. To date, Google has shown themselves to understand their audience and provide them a useful service in a responsible fashion. I may or may not use Gmail when it becomes available, but I feel they have earned a modicum of trust at this point.
A company I worked with briefly was considering something like this. Email from sources not on the "whitelist" would get a kind of bounce message that directs you to a page on the company web site.
Great, and since virtually all From and Reply-to lines in spam are faked, for every 100 spams you receive, you send 90 or so emails to innocent bystanders that don't want your bounce message.
Spammers sometimes use systems like this one to retaliate against people/groups that have annoyed them.
First, there is no spam magic bullet. There never will be.
This is very similar to what SpamPal along with the URLBody plugin does. (Client-side, Windows-only, also not a magic bullet.) The only difference being that this checks URLs against existing DNSBLs, and this is a new DNSBL specifically for this purpose.
A digital signing and certificate system could still be used to preserve anonymity. A designated editor with some level of trust and prestige fields prospective articles, distributes them to reviewers, and adds up points and presents articles making a Score:4 or above.
But this is exactly what the current peer review system does. The publisher distributes a paper to reviewers for comments; they send corrections, suggestions, and questions; the authors make changes and respond to the reviewers; repeat as necessary until everyone is happy. Finally the publisher does the publication.
There really is no reason for the digital signing, other than the fact that it's cool and geeky. Once the peer-review cycle has been completed, there is no longer a need to be able to determine the identity of the reviewers.
For people new to a field, it really helps if the articles they see published have undergone scrutiny by experts before being released.
In any decent journal, ALL articles have been reviewed by experts in the field, the experts have commented and suggested changes, and the authors changed their papers accordingly. This is the peer-review system, and it's basically the whole reason scientific journals exist. The actual paper (or online, these days) publication is probably about only half the work.
Then, as an author accumulates a good reputation because of his published work, other authors will seek to have him review and put his stamp of approval onto their papers. [This is a lot like getting well known scientists to become editors of a dead-tree journal].
I'd have to disagree. In my experience, the peers that review your paper do so in secret. Since everything goes through the publisher as a middleman, you never know who is reviewing your paper. As part of the submission process, you supply a list of suggest reviewers, and may request that a particular author not review your paper. But you never know who they are. This keeps the whole process objective. Take that away, and you'll constantly have people asking for a presigious reviewer's signature, or people trading theirs around, and so forth.
The last thing the scientific process needs is karma whoring.
If the research is funded in whole or in part by the taxpayers, then ALL research results must be published and made freely available to ALL taxpayers. I can see no room for argument there.
I just recently came across an example of a paper written by a government agency, but can't find it at the moment. At the bottom of the title page, it had a disclaimer that read, "Work done by the US government. Work is in the public domain," or something to that effect.
I agree that work done BY THE GOVERNMENT should be in the public domain. By non-government researchers working entirely or partly on a government grant, I disagree. What do you do if the work is done using funds partly from the National Science Foundation (govt.), and partly the American Chemical Society (private org.), as mine is done? Just copyright half the paper?
Also note that, while the copyright is usually transferred to the journal for the purposes of publication, the author reserves the right to distribute copies of his paper for research and scholarly work. The same usually goes for posting the papers on the web, if you include a little copyright message.
I don't know what field you're in, but in my area of research, almost all journals have significant page charges.
I'm in materials science, and most of the journals I've published in, that page charges are optional. They request it, and many scientific grants have a line item for it, but whether or not you pay does not affect publication. The notable exception to this, however, is for color figures in the paper version, where the charges appear to be mandatory.
And this is as it should be. Science should be about the objective and rational search for truth. Cold-hearted, even. When you start bringing money into that equation, you're just going to mess it up.
Which is why I don't think open-source journals are ever going to work. If they can keep the page charges optional, and still make enough money to keep afloat, then it might.
A large portion of the reason why is that the people that actually *use* these journals (researchers, students, etc.), at least in the academic world, are insulated from their cost. A journal might be free, or it might cost a bundle and I would never know. I'll use the best journals I have access to for my research, and I'll publish in the best one's I can, cost of the journal be dammned.
Buy your definition of SPAM. Ready the CAN-SPAM and as per that document (which is law) it's not SPAM.
No, that is the industry-standard definion of spam and has been for over a decade now. This business about "it's not spam if you can opt out" or "it's not spam without faked headers" or "it's not spam unless it's fraudulent" is incorrect.
I'm not saying CAN-SPAM-compliant spams are illegal, just that they *are* spam. Yes they have a (presumably) valid opt-out mechanism. How am I supposed to tell the difference between the CAN-SPAM compliant mom-and-pop-drustore-selling-cheap-viagra.com and the chinese-hucksters-selling-powdered-rhino-horn.com? They'll both look the same in an email, but unsubscribing to one will get me off a list, and unsubscribing to the other will added to dozens more.
The idea that there are many different definitions of spam, as I heard one claim on CSPAN when CAN-SPAM was being considered, is FUD put out by the DMA.
If all that's gone then SPAM would not be a problem and then Spamhaus should not need to treat everyone as guilty until proven innocent (or pays the appropriate fee)
No. If all the "illegitimate" spam went away overnight, the problem would get worse. Spam would no longer be considered to be a haven of scammers and frausters, and it would be seen as a legitimate marketing tool.
There were 22.9 millions businesses, in the US alone, in 2002. If 1% of those businesses sent you one email just once per year, you'd be getting over 600 per day.
And thanks to CAN-SPAM, you'd have to opt-out of each one, individually.
A gentle reminder. SPAM is Hormel's trademark for their potted meat food product. Spam is unsolicited bulk email.
I'm just not getting how this proposal would do much. I read through the
text of the proposal, which is written in fairly obtuse language I just couldn't quite plod through right now.
OK, so we'll have this.mail TLD. Since any domain name just resolves to an IP address, this proposal would just boil down to keeping a list of trusted IP addresses. In other words, a list of trusted mailservers, which can easily be done with what exists now.
What happens when spam originates from a.mail address? Because it will, if only from a virus-compromised machine. It seems the only recourse would be the revocation of the.mail domain.
And if so, what is to stop a spammer from signing up, sending off a one-shot spam run, and losing the domain? It will just raise the cost of each spam run by the cost of registering the.mail domain. That certainly might *help* reduce spam, but it depends on the amount of spam they could send through before losing the domain.
I assume each ISP will have a.mail domain of the sort isp.com.mail, and their customer's email will be routed through it. So what happens when a customer of an ISP decides to spam? Will this committee be tasked with determining whether the ISP terminates their spamming customer within an "acceptable" timeframe?
It is already known that there are a number of less-than-entirely-responsible ISPs and even some that are explicitly spam-friendly. For a sufficiently large organization, they could afford to go through.mail domains at a fairly high rate.
The cost also seems to be a problem. It seems that this proposal can ONLY work if the cost of the.mail domain is fairly high. It seems that the cost will probably be somewhere between $200 and $2000. This seems prohibitive for individuals, non-profits, and third-world orgs.
The companies I work for are interperting the CAN-SPAM requirements as:
Postal Address(no P.O. Box)
Clearly worded opt-out in the same font as the rest of your email
Clear subject line(That indicates that this is in fact an advertisement of some type)
And if they're interpreting these when they send unsolicited commercial bulk email, then they're spamming.
That's not quite correct. The SpamHaus rules wouldn't ban anyone who obeyed the CAN-SPAM act
I belive you are mistaken. As I understand CAN-SPAM, you can spam all you want, so long as you have a postal address in the mail, a working opt-out mechanism, and dont forge anything. Note: complying with CAN-SPAM just means your email is legal, not that it isn't spam.
"Double opt-in" means that you asked to be on the list, and the list sent mail to you asking if you're *sure* you want to be on the list, and you ask *again* to be put on the list.
No, that's confirmed opt-in. "Double opt-in" is a term made up by spammers to make the confirmation step sound difficult and unnecessary.
The purpose of the email isn't to double-check that you still want to be on a mailing list, but to verify that the person that submitted your email address was, indeed, you.
I am pretty sure that silicon becomes more like a metal at higher tempretures (conductivity increases) and becomes more like an insulator at lower tempretures.
It's even more complicated than that. Intrinsically pure silicon is basically an insulator. When you add small amounts of impurities, the impurity electrons disturb the electronic structure of the remaining silicon. Extra impurity electrons (n-type Si) are fairly easy to pop off their host atom, and the thermal energy of 300 K is usually enough to do that.
You don't get much more conductivity if you heat doped Si, because most of the impurities are already ionized. But if you cool it too far, you won't have enough energy to ionize those impurities, and your Si becomes insulating again.
What I wonder about this system (currently slashdotted, so I can't read the article), is that you can't really cool anything. You just pump heat around. So, yeah, you can generate a local cold zone for your chip, but you have to find some place to move all that extra heat *to*.
Not being a Dish Network subscriber, this would have zero effect on me, but it might be interesting to see the costs for each subsection of the package itemized on the monthly Bill.
Something like:
Package A: 30.00
Network channels: 5.00
Viacom channels: 10.00
Company B's channels: 5.00
Company C's channels: 5.00
Company D's channels: 5.00
Once consumers know how much they're spending for what, they might be able to make their preferences known better and spend accordingly.
The cynic in me, however, says that this won't happen *because* once consumers know how much they're spending for what, they might be able to make their preferences known better and spend accordingly.
For example, I know my name, phone number, and address are public (in the phone book). I know that my web surfing habits are private.
Do you really know your web surfing habits are private? Can you point to any particular law that ensures this? Remember this is a private organization doing this, not the government, so any "right to privacy" in the Constitution doesn't apply.
I really wouldn't be surprised to find out major ISPs were quietly conglomorating this information and passing it along to those who are willing to pay for it. It wouldn't be a particularly wise move business-wise, and it would be a PR disaster if it got out, but that doesn't necessarily mean it isn't going on.
My condolences on Illinois having practically no direct input into the selection of the Democratic candidate. It's a lousy deal, really. But moving to an all-at-once primary system won't make your deal any better.
I don't actually think that they should all be done on the same day. On the other hand, doing it over a period of six months is ridiculous. It's not like the candidates are traveling from state to state in a horse-drawn carriage. I would suggest doing the primaries in three groups, separated about a week apart, or something similar.
I admit, the downside of this method is that the campaigns would need to be active in a lot of different market simultaneously, which would involve significant changes to spending techniques. Something tells me Kerry won't be spending as much time or money campaigning in Montana in six months as he did in Iowa.
The problem isn't with Super Tuesday. It's with the fact that the decision has been made already, and more than a third of the states haven't had an opportunity to weigh in.
You say that holding all the primaries on the same day would bias the election towards metropolitan areas. But doesn't holding the elections all on the same day do just the same thing?
Do you see what'd happen? The candidates would campaign only in high-population areas and would talk only about metropolitan issues. Because really, if everything all gets settled at once, it doesn't make any sense for Kerry to sit down at Gwen's Diner in Lisbon, Iowa (great food if you're ever in the neighborhood) and talk to the usual crowd of farmers, hunters and retired schoolteachers who hang out there.
Kerry has won the Democratic nomination. No one else can reasonably be considered a viable candidate at this point.
I live in Illinois. My primary election isn't for two more weeks. Hell, New Jersey and Montana's aren't until June 8th. Forty percent of all the primaries have yet to be held.
There's no point in me even bothering to vote. My vote is irrelevant. I'm not even going to bother.
If you make everyone vote all at the same time, what you're going to do is tell everyone who doesn't live in a major metropolitan area... that their opinions don't count
Slashdot Mirror
At best, you could perform a battery of test on animal subjects and look for adverse reactions, like is done with new drugs. And even then, occasionally a dangerous one slips through.
In retrospect, I should have pointed that out. It's a perfectly legitimate site. Here's a definition
Yeah, well show me the law that says I have to accept his email. I can block whatever I want, for whatever reason I want. I can block all email coming from an IP address with three 6's in it if I want. I can block all email sent on a Thursday if I want. And I can block email using Spamcop if I want.
No one is forced to use Spamcop. The people that use it chose to do so. They may do it themselves, or they may choose to do so by proxy, by choosing an ISP that uses Spamcop.
Or at least manufacture evidence showing that.
No one on this planet can genuinely say that spammers don't exist. Therefore, someone out there is spamming, in violation of CAN-SPAM. It seems reasonable to me to conclude that of the *massive* number of accusations against Richter, they're not all made up.
Remember, Richter says that you opt-in to his spam just by viewing one of his websites. No email signup, no forms, just loading it in a web browser is enough.
I love this part:
Yup, you heard the man. Just visiting a website is enough to consent to receive spam. What these "various websites" are, or how a website determines a visitor's email address is left as an exercise for the reader.
By reading this post, you give your implied consent for me to hit you in the face with a cream pie.
My question is: are these textbooks purchased or licensed? Do they expire? The good thing about a textbook is that it can be used over and over. (There's some discussion here about used vs. new textbooks and the highlighting issue, but these are elementary students with basic textbooks, not law students. Hopefully there won't be too much highlighting.) Do these laptops follow the students through the school, or are they collected at the end of the year and redistributed next year? Do the electronic textbooks stop working after a set period of time, and need to be "repurchased" or relicensed?
I suspect the first major virus outbreak and the time/cost to fix all these machines will make them very much NOT cost-effective.
Wrong. SPEWS is alive and well.
While the Osirusoft DNSBL that many people used to get access to SPEWS data was taken offline, SPEWS is still up and going strong. (Thank God.)
And as for "blacklisting the world", it was the only practical way to get people to stop using the list. If he hadn't inattentive sysadmins would still be trying to do lookups years in the future.
Absolutely.
Ethylene glycol is OH-CH2-CH2-OH and is fairly toxic. I would suspect it behaves similarly to ethanol (CH3-CH2-OH) in the bloodstream, but I don't really know. Contrast this with propylene glycol, CH2-CH2-(CHOH)-OH which is pretty much completely non-toxic.
Polyethylene glycol is (-CH2-CH2-O-)n, where n is some large number. It's a polymer. There are different kinds of PEG, but glancing at the web, there appear to be a number of different kinds available, and they appear to be reasonably non-toxic.
IANAL, but isn't bascially everything copyrighted unless it's done by the government or explicitly released into the public domain? Music, emails, fiction, poetry, etc. Heck, I bet even this post is copyrighted.
The problem is that, from the article, it's not at all clear what this software does. Does it just seek out some data somewhere that's an MP3 and delete it? And how does it differentiate between improperly transmitted MP3s and perfectly legitimate ones?
How do you know some unethical employee of your ISP isn't reading your email on the sly? How do you know some unethical employee of any free web email provider isn't reading everyone's email on the sly?
The simple answer is that you don't. It all comes down to a matter of trust. To date, Google has shown themselves to understand their audience and provide them a useful service in a responsible fashion. I may or may not use Gmail when it becomes available, but I feel they have earned a modicum of trust at this point.
Spammers sometimes use systems like this one to retaliate against people/groups that have annoyed them.
First, there is no spam magic bullet. There never will be.
This is very similar to what SpamPal along with the URLBody plugin does. (Client-side, Windows-only, also not a magic bullet.) The only difference being that this checks URLs against existing DNSBLs, and this is a new DNSBL specifically for this purpose.
There really is no reason for the digital signing, other than the fact that it's cool and geeky. Once the peer-review cycle has been completed, there is no longer a need to be able to determine the identity of the reviewers.
The last thing the scientific process needs is karma whoring.
I just recently came across an example of a paper written by a government agency, but can't find it at the moment. At the bottom of the title page, it had a disclaimer that read, "Work done by the US government. Work is in the public domain," or something to that effect.
I agree that work done BY THE GOVERNMENT should be in the public domain. By non-government researchers working entirely or partly on a government grant, I disagree. What do you do if the work is done using funds partly from the National Science Foundation (govt.), and partly the American Chemical Society (private org.), as mine is done? Just copyright half the paper?
Also note that, while the copyright is usually transferred to the journal for the purposes of publication, the author reserves the right to distribute copies of his paper for research and scholarly work. The same usually goes for posting the papers on the web, if you include a little copyright message.
I'm in materials science, and most of the journals I've published in, that page charges are optional. They request it, and many scientific grants have a line item for it, but whether or not you pay does not affect publication. The notable exception to this, however, is for color figures in the paper version, where the charges appear to be mandatory.
And this is as it should be. Science should be about the objective and rational search for truth. Cold-hearted, even. When you start bringing money into that equation, you're just going to mess it up.
Which is why I don't think open-source journals are ever going to work. If they can keep the page charges optional, and still make enough money to keep afloat, then it might.
A large portion of the reason why is that the people that actually *use* these journals (researchers, students, etc.), at least in the academic world, are insulated from their cost. A journal might be free, or it might cost a bundle and I would never know. I'll use the best journals I have access to for my research, and I'll publish in the best one's I can, cost of the journal be dammned.
No, that is the industry-standard definion of spam and has been for over a decade now. This business about "it's not spam if you can opt out" or "it's not spam without faked headers" or "it's not spam unless it's fraudulent" is incorrect.
I'm not saying CAN-SPAM-compliant spams are illegal, just that they *are* spam. Yes they have a (presumably) valid opt-out mechanism. How am I supposed to tell the difference between the CAN-SPAM compliant mom-and-pop-drustore-selling-cheap-viagra.com and the chinese-hucksters-selling-powdered-rhino-horn.com? They'll both look the same in an email, but unsubscribing to one will get me off a list, and unsubscribing to the other will added to dozens more.
The idea that there are many different definitions of spam, as I heard one claim on CSPAN when CAN-SPAM was being considered, is FUD put out by the DMA.
No. If all the "illegitimate" spam went away overnight, the problem would get worse. Spam would no longer be considered to be a haven of scammers and frausters, and it would be seen as a legitimate marketing tool.
There were 22.9 millions businesses, in the US alone, in 2002. If 1% of those businesses sent you one email just once per year, you'd be getting over 600 per day.
And thanks to CAN-SPAM, you'd have to opt-out of each one, individually.
A gentle reminder. SPAM is Hormel's trademark for their potted meat food product. Spam is unsolicited bulk email.
I'm just not getting how this proposal would do much. I read through the text of the proposal, which is written in fairly obtuse language I just couldn't quite plod through right now.
And if they're interpreting these when they send unsolicited commercial bulk email, then they're spamming.
I belive you are mistaken. As I understand CAN-SPAM, you can spam all you want, so long as you have a postal address in the mail, a working opt-out mechanism, and dont forge anything. Note: complying with CAN-SPAM just means your email is legal, not that it isn't spam.
No, that's confirmed opt-in. "Double opt-in" is a term made up by spammers to make the confirmation step sound difficult and unnecessary.
The purpose of the email isn't to double-check that you still want to be on a mailing list, but to verify that the person that submitted your email address was, indeed, you.
username/password isn't a "double login"
It's even more complicated than that. Intrinsically pure silicon is basically an insulator. When you add small amounts of impurities, the impurity electrons disturb the electronic structure of the remaining silicon. Extra impurity electrons (n-type Si) are fairly easy to pop off their host atom, and the thermal energy of 300 K is usually enough to do that.
You don't get much more conductivity if you heat doped Si, because most of the impurities are already ionized. But if you cool it too far, you won't have enough energy to ionize those impurities, and your Si becomes insulating again.
What I wonder about this system (currently slashdotted, so I can't read the article), is that you can't really cool anything. You just pump heat around. So, yeah, you can generate a local cold zone for your chip, but you have to find some place to move all that extra heat *to*.
Something like:
- Package A: 30.00
- Network channels: 5.00
- Viacom channels: 10.00
- Company B's channels: 5.00
- Company C's channels: 5.00
- Company D's channels: 5.00
Once consumers know how much they're spending for what, they might be able to make their preferences known better and spend accordingly.The cynic in me, however, says that this won't happen *because* once consumers know how much they're spending for what, they might be able to make their preferences known better and spend accordingly.
Do you really know your web surfing habits are private? Can you point to any particular law that ensures this? Remember this is a private organization doing this, not the government, so any "right to privacy" in the Constitution doesn't apply.
I really wouldn't be surprised to find out major ISPs were quietly conglomorating this information and passing it along to those who are willing to pay for it. It wouldn't be a particularly wise move business-wise, and it would be a PR disaster if it got out, but that doesn't necessarily mean it isn't going on.
I don't actually think that they should all be done on the same day. On the other hand, doing it over a period of six months is ridiculous. It's not like the candidates are traveling from state to state in a horse-drawn carriage. I would suggest doing the primaries in three groups, separated about a week apart, or something similar.
I admit, the downside of this method is that the campaigns would need to be active in a lot of different market simultaneously, which would involve significant changes to spending techniques. Something tells me Kerry won't be spending as much time or money campaigning in Montana in six months as he did in Iowa.
The problem isn't with Super Tuesday. It's with the fact that the decision has been made already, and more than a third of the states haven't had an opportunity to weigh in.
You say that holding all the primaries on the same day would bias the election towards metropolitan areas. But doesn't holding the elections all on the same day do just the same thing?
I live in Illinois. My primary election isn't for two more weeks. Hell, New Jersey and Montana's aren't until June 8th. Forty percent of all the primaries have yet to be held.
There's no point in me even bothering to vote. My vote is irrelevant. I'm not even going to bother.
And yet, that's exactly what they've told me.