Seems like the topic here is how technology might contribute to a purer expression of truth, in the form of detail background information. That's generally good, and some of it will happen due to the sensible and repeated suggestion that it should, that some candidates might even benefit, as McCain did to some extent, through being more open sources.
But there's also a way to turn this upside down. The prevalent notion is that people are psychologically ready for better government, if we were just better informed - as if our individual operating systems are in place and stable, and all we need is an improved suite of office apps.
What if it turned out we're most of us running the equivalent of MS Windows, and are thus pretty well locked into ending up with Dem-Rep Office as the only option that runs reasonably well on our platform?
Consider the characteristics of our present personal OS: (1) Doesn't multitask well: this is evident in every sort of 'aholism,' including the workaholism that's the foundation of current tech industry practice. (2) Has networking deficiencies: witness the common failure to even form simple duads well or lastingly, let alone the declines of unions and communitarian experiments. (3) Is so poor at parsing complex input that the average Website, tv show, or Starbucks counts as saturation of input channels.
So how would we design a better personal OS, and shift our common sense so as to favor the improved political applications that, despite years of scattering the seeds, fail to produce much more than a few tattered sprouts in our political soil... which is, after all, our mass psychology.
Hmm, another symptom of that psychology is that Windows is a good fit to it. Grant that Redmond knows their audience. What do we get if we move to a society where large numbers of people are comfortable going below the gooey and really self-configuring, even at the intermediate, sys admin level, let alone designing a kernel to replace our current ego code? Can we move the platform out from under current political practices?
With the 4.7 Netscape on Linux, going to Nasdaq.com and trying to get Info Quotes on a few stocks by entering the symbols and hitting the button sometimes makes the browser disappear. On today's build of Mozilla it always crashes the browser (as in, disappears from screen) - this on two different systems (one Red Hat, one Mandrake, both KDE). Trying to submit a Bugzilla report on this to the Mozilla team also makes Mozilla disappear.
Okay, only tried the last thing once. The first was totally reproducable though. Probably bad JavaScript on Nasdaq. But it's bad form for a browser to just give up like that. And on Bugzilla, too?
Other than that, it looks like it's taking a number of welcome leaps forward.
What people do well socially is create connections on many different levels and modes - it's very nonlineal. What the Net does poorly is anything by way of a social situation that's not based on a room, or a thread, or an outline. And traversing the Web doesn't, for the most part, make it smarter - whereas traversing a realworld landscape does, it wears paths into it. So how could an AI facilitate a multi-dimensional social space (which is not what an agent does - a human agent may as well be a robot, so designing an AI to be an agent isn't any sort of social intelligence).
This isn't to imply that such social spaces should be public - having a gradation of public-private and well-known, unknown spaces is more multidimensional, more what we really do socially. And it's probably not a MUD - playing social roles with rules isn't for everyone or every activity. And it's not a dating service. And not just a toy, and probably not based on avatars - minimal gimicks, maximal versatility. An advance that allows us to 'just connect' better, like the perfect bartender, maybe without the hangover.
Jumpdomain.com is retailing OpenSRS.org's registrar services. Some of the legal language - but I'm not sure about that phrase - is dictated by OpenSRS.org (which, despite the 'org,' is an apparently for-profit wing of Tucows). That said, I recently did a transfer to jumpdomain, and it went well - including thorough e-mail responses to various questions. The guy running it impresses me.
If you're handling more than 50 domains a year though, you might rather buy them wholesale from OpenSRS, if you can stand their language - they also insist on the right to spam domain holders registered through them with any news remotely related to Internet domains - although a recent add by them in Linux Journal claims they never will, and I understand they haven't so far.
I've also had decent experiences with dotster - which like jumpdomain is $15 a year for registrations now, but which unlike jumpdomain charges an extra $10 for a transfer (but it's a real registrar, not a reseller of someone else's services).
Basically, though, as soon as any of the newer registrars steal a domain, it will be all over/. and other news sources, and their business will be finished. The contract terms often suck - but only a Network Solutions could get away with exercising them.
The judge said some days back that there was no way that what mp3.com was doing was 'storage' (of copies of music the customer already owns). He said no normal use of the word 'storage' applies, since the customer can't come and say, "Okay, now I want the thing I stored back."
But this is exactly what storage is to a remote location over a computer network. Your store it, you retrieve it, and yet it's still where you stored it (unless you specifically delete it, and I assume mp3.com gives users a way to delete from their accounts). If this logic stands, then we need a new term for what we now call 'storage' on remote computer systems - hell, this even applies to local disk 'storage.' This may be a threat to any ASP, in ways we can't hardly see yet.
In short, judge doesn't know English, judge doesn't know computers, and believe it or not most people in that profession are not quite that stupid. The job description says "must be comfortable with strange vocabularly and fussy applications of logic, also can pay well" - back before IT, it drew from our own kind.
Of course, unlike IT, there have always been more lawyers than job slots for 'em, which is partially why some become judges, despite the pay not being so good unless they're bought off under the table. I would not begin to suggest that applies in this case, despite the hearing having been held in notoriously corrupt New York City.
Slashdot Mirror
But there's also a way to turn this upside down. The prevalent notion is that people are psychologically ready for better government, if we were just better informed - as if our individual operating systems are in place and stable, and all we need is an improved suite of office apps.
What if it turned out we're most of us running the equivalent of MS Windows, and are thus pretty well locked into ending up with Dem-Rep Office as the only option that runs reasonably well on our platform?
Consider the characteristics of our present personal OS: (1) Doesn't multitask well: this is evident in every sort of 'aholism,' including the workaholism that's the foundation of current tech industry practice. (2) Has networking deficiencies: witness the common failure to even form simple duads well or lastingly, let alone the declines of unions and communitarian experiments. (3) Is so poor at parsing complex input that the average Website, tv show, or Starbucks counts as saturation of input channels.
So how would we design a better personal OS, and shift our common sense so as to favor the improved political applications that, despite years of scattering the seeds, fail to produce much more than a few tattered sprouts in our political soil ... which is, after all, our mass psychology.
Hmm, another symptom of that psychology is that Windows is a good fit to it. Grant that Redmond knows their audience. What do we get if we move to a society where large numbers of people are comfortable going below the gooey and really self-configuring, even at the intermediate, sys admin level, let alone designing a kernel to replace our current ego code? Can we move the platform out from under current political practices?
Okay, only tried the last thing once. The first was totally reproducable though. Probably bad JavaScript on Nasdaq. But it's bad form for a browser to just give up like that. And on Bugzilla, too?
Other than that, it looks like it's taking a number of welcome leaps forward.
This isn't to imply that such social spaces should be public - having a gradation of public-private and well-known, unknown spaces is more multidimensional, more what we really do socially. And it's probably not a MUD - playing social roles with rules isn't for everyone or every activity. And it's not a dating service. And not just a toy, and probably not based on avatars - minimal gimicks, maximal versatility. An advance that allows us to 'just connect' better, like the perfect bartender, maybe without the hangover.
If you're handling more than 50 domains a year though, you might rather buy them wholesale from OpenSRS, if you can stand their language - they also insist on the right to spam domain holders registered through them with any news remotely related to Internet domains - although a recent add by them in Linux Journal claims they never will, and I understand they haven't so far.
I've also had decent experiences with dotster - which like jumpdomain is $15 a year for registrations now, but which unlike jumpdomain charges an extra $10 for a transfer (but it's a real registrar, not a reseller of someone else's services).
Basically, though, as soon as any of the newer registrars steal a domain, it will be all over /. and other news sources, and their business will be finished. The contract terms often suck - but only a Network Solutions could get away with exercising them.
But this is exactly what storage is to a remote location over a computer network. Your store it, you retrieve it, and yet it's still where you stored it (unless you specifically delete it, and I assume mp3.com gives users a way to delete from their accounts). If this logic stands, then we need a new term for what we now call 'storage' on remote computer systems - hell, this even applies to local disk 'storage.' This may be a threat to any ASP, in ways we can't hardly see yet.
In short, judge doesn't know English, judge doesn't know computers, and believe it or not most people in that profession are not quite that stupid. The job description says "must be comfortable with strange vocabularly and fussy applications of logic, also can pay well" - back before IT, it drew from our own kind.
Of course, unlike IT, there have always been more lawyers than job slots for 'em, which is partially why some become judges, despite the pay not being so good unless they're bought off under the table. I would not begin to suggest that applies in this case, despite the hearing having been held in notoriously corrupt New York City.