Hmmm... 19,120 cards thrown out for multiple Senate race votes, a Socialist candate who collected 96% of his votes from Volusia County, irregular cards in Palm Beach...
Let's say it all together, people... ...Fuzzy Math Sucks!
Let's ban the Electoral College!
Indeed, this is the epitome of Fuzzy Math! Bad ballots, rejected cards, and a Socialist candidate who got 96% of his 10,000 votes from a single county, presumably from computer error!
I think that we're watching intently, not because the actual candidates are in any way interesting, but because it's a morbid fascination to watch the electoral system on its death throwes. According to a poll today on the Election 2000 news site and also the Electoral College FAQ, more than Two Thirds of America want the Electoral College banned from the Constitution, and have so since at least the 1960's!
I hate to defend this process in any way, but fact is stranger than fiction: It was the Electoral College that led us to discover the level of irregluarity in just on state due to the focus of an entire nation on this outcome. If we went solely by popular vote, we may have heard just as little of these scandals as we have from the other 49 states combined! =-O
The end of copyright law would have several serious trade-offs, but not all of them bad. Just most of them!;-)
First and foremost, there'd be somewhat less incentive to invent and innovate, but more competition to compete over cost-effective quality. Copyright, afterall, is an incentive for the furtherance of the sciences and arts, despite the fact that it is currently exploited by distributors. Branding would change, as trademarks would be harder to enforce, and conterfeitting would be the rule rather than the exception.
Second, there would be a greater glut of self-published works without credit to "original authors." On one hand, the signal-to-noise ratio would become utterly absurd. But on the other hand, that self-publishing is the very thing that made the web so popular.
Finally, there would be backlash against this 'great idea,' and people would compensate against the lack of genuineness by developing means of authentication. It would probably end up looking like some antique road show, with "experts" doing everything from reviewing music videos to examining cell phones.
Now THERE's a What-if question leading to some serious sci-fi!
With most EULAs, we can read up on the peculiar notions of behavior they wish to impose on the users. The companies will then have a contractual advantage over their customers, and the customers can laugh at how self deluded the companies are for believing themselves... eventually the courts will decide.
But think about it: how many licenses actually grant license to the wild behavior of the manufacturer?
This could be the advent of a whole new battle, not so easily dismissed in court by those who have signed the EULA but regard the contract as absurd. What happens when Microsoft starts reserving the rights openly for the dirty tricks they used to have to do in secret?
Bush may have those qualities compared to Gore, but not compared to a third party candidate such as Browne. Which does Bush plan to reduce more: less governing of the citizen, or less of the corporate sponsers who funded his campaign? If the latter, it would likely mean that corporations will continue to become more intrusive upon the citizens.
If Clinton carried Ohio in the last two elections, it should also be pointed out that Clinton made it into office by a minority of the popular vote. As Clinton didn't need the popular vote, neither would Bush (neither of the 'big two' actually). Gore has already conceeded Ohio days ago, directing focus to 'more favorable markets.' To them, the winner-takes-all electoral is all that matters, and an 'Ohio' 'Bush-vote' is a redundancy of sorts. But to third parties, a popular vote is exactly the needed step to reforming the old duopoly.
I just wish these two parties could have done better than the two coattail-riders who are known more by their associations with previous presidents than by their own measure of merits. The Third Parties have quite a few good choices among them, if the system could grant them a mathematically fair chance.
As mentioned elsewhere, I used the Nader vote stratgically for Third Parties in general... Afterall, Browne has cool qualities, as does Hagelin, who I voted for in a previous election. But Nader is the one actually suing states to push our freedom more widely open.
Nader - on his positive side, he's addressing issues that the others have barely considered in hindsight: Cable-and-Internet Content Discrimination, Corporate Crime and Anti-Trust, present issues with poisoning neighborhoods in further discrimination... He'd have kicked serious butt in the debates! His running mate, Winona LaDuke, is even more cool to vote for... a Minnesota Chippewa woman whose strong record stands for minority equality and opportunities. If there's any downside to this platform, it's the implication that the Green Party which has such cool people (and there are two parties of Greens, one he runs with and one he doesn't) is sometimes called the watermellon party, green on the outside, red on the inside. Still, since it is near impossible to agree with a party 100%, I see them as less an evil.
Hagelin- A learned man who can stately present the issues. His positions seem similar to Nader on some topics, but they're stated will less angst and more educated finnesse. My only qualm with him is his overuse of Transcendal Meditation(tm) as the answer: Kosovo got you down? Let's send 4000 TMtm Instructors to pacify things. Naivate' aside, I like to see such a civil, refined highbrow in the choices.
Browne- true to the principals of liberty this counrty was founded on. The Libertarian Party in general can be taken more seriously than most third party options: There are more Libertarians in career political offices than the other third parties (Green, Natural Law P, etc.) combined!
...But in the long run I voted for Nader. Strategically, he's fighting the states for the freedoms we need if we're to see these 'Third' Choices given a fair shake. Why can't the "big two" parties come up with such plausible choices without the obvious coattail-riders?
My wife and I just voted. I voted for Nader, and while my wife told me last night she was voting Gore, which was fine by me, she instead voted Nader which I said was better still:
Ohio is so Traditionally Repubilican, that at no time in history has a Republican president won who hasn't first won Ohio. Democrats may win the Presidency while Ohio still goes Republican, but at no time could a Republican win if he is so unpopular that he doesn't even get Ohio's Repulican stamp-of-approval.
So, if Ohio is so sure to go to Bush, what's a voter to do? Vote Third Party. The popular vote will resound against the electoral vote, showing greater disparity. Specifically, a vote for the Green Party is a sound strategy: not only will a 5% popular vote get their foot in the door next election, but Ralph will sue the states that deny you that freedom!
Remember, there would be no Republican President if Abraham Linoln hadn't been the nation's first. If we want more than one choice greater than Russia, we need the popular vote to demand it!
Mobility's great... But not matter where you go, there you are paying Microsoft.
In Cincinnati, Main Street Ventures just opened their doors for business under great fanfare. Their goal is to be part of an inner city renovation where the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood is seeing many of its historically significant buildings reworked into trendy yuppie lofts.
At the opening, they had a ceremonial golden plug to be pulled apart when Main Street's new wireless service made the area officially "unplugged." This tented event for a few hundred spectators and camera crews took place in The Salvation Army's 12th street parking lot, with representative from Lucent and Microsoft, and Ohio's Governer Bob Taft.
I've often noticed similarities (of a good nature) between programmers and lawyers:
They have hair-splitting discernment for logic, whether seeking an implicit flowchart of programming or an unbroken chain of evidence.
They have the ability to focus greatly on attention-to-detail.
Their skills are (usually) in better demand/pay on the market than most jobs.
Thomas Jefferson was a Lawyer with a lot to say about freedom... but could he have been a programmer in our day and age? The 'Program' of the U.S. Constitution seem to say so... it shows enough discernment and fault-tollerence 'exception handling' to avoid overregulating the freedom it protects. I believe he once said 'Those who would trade a little freedom for a little order will lose both and deserve neither.'
RMS still often comes across as a totalitarian with a focus on hisown Emacs... but this latest news is encouraging. Harmony is all about finding ways the differing parties can cohabit the planet, and my confidence in his abilities has gone up a notch today.
Goldbach's Conjecture is a veritable forest of discovery. Once I write up my proof for it, I plan to move on to Reimann's Hype and P=NP.;-)
Ya see, GC has puzzled mathematicians for 258 years because it's easy to "see" relationships immediately, but each of them is difficult to prove. Once proof is offered, it will be easy to verify, much easier than Fermat's 150pg proof, just like P=NP solutions are quickly verified.
GC lends well to P=NP, because finding composite numbers (non-prime) is a classic example of one of those tasks that requires checking through every permutation. Minesweeper is a pattern-matching exercise that is not far from finding which prime patterns (twins, quartets) are workable and which are invalidated by congruencies (modulas) of other primes.
On my way to solving GC, I think I accidentally proved both the Hardy-Littlewood conjectures, and thus disproved the disproof against them!:-D
Since Dreamcast was based on WinCE, its performance and profitability (after licensing MS software) were probably erroded from the inside. Now with MS advancing their own X-Box, it's time to cut bait with Microsoft and find a more trustworthy partner, their rivals at Nintendo.
With Sony making the real advances and Microsoft shifting the spotlight to themselves, Sega's had to do something!
"Why are these Dreamcast and X-Boxes freezing up?" Shhh... They're Thinking!;-)
Maybe this is exactly what is needed for Microsoft to be seen for the house of cards they are:
If they push the point of absurd and unconstitutional EULAs that don't even permit speech cover in 'fair use' reviews, they may lose ground on hte only thing they've successfully innovated: license agreements.
Once they lose that, they lose the primary tool of holding their marketshare.
If there is something of human interest out on the planet, there are a dozen sites providing it a fan following. The web has done wonders for giving SIGs and hobbyists a forum where everyone is their own publisher. Web Fandom has toppled obstacles of censorship and electoral distribution so that every niche has its spotlight.
But Republicrats have a self-perpetuating method of limiting choice. When ISP's can veto websites based on commercial favoritism... and when Cable companies can unfairly exclude local television channels at their monopolistic whim... we need more freedom of choice!
In the words of Jesse "the Gov'ner" Ventura, "What good is it to have just one more choice than Russia?"
Vote Third Party. Vote Ralph Nader and Winona LaDuke.
Think about it... English has more rules than exceptions! In Europe, most languages are pronouncable at first glance... once you know the rules. In English, the only teacher is experience, because every word has potential to be the exception!
Now in fairness, the Roman alphabet is the best accessible subset of type... and pronunciation isn't the biggest issue. Conjugation of verbal tenses, discernment of homonyms... these kinds of things make English look downright batty.
Those who know me realize my memory is already Swiss Cheeze.;-) But I think that this latest breakthrough takes Exception Handling to new levels of fault tolerance...
Linux forced its way into our IT Department when it could restore a trashed system into something useful. Here at The Salvation Army, we endevor to be good stewards of what we are given. We have an IBM PC Server 350 (now named "Methusela") that crashed one day for no apparent reason. It refused to run Windows anymore... not even Win98 or Win95!
But it ran Linux flawlessly. Well, actually it did point out one flaw on its own: The internal Ethernet controller was getting an unusually high number of bad packets. It would receive DHCP assignments, even do some web work in Linux... but it was enough to shut Windows down completely. Even after installing a working NIC, Windows could not run due to the faulty internal NIC, but Linux ran fine!
Likewise, we found an instant way to crash every WinNT system in the building. Someone was re-arranging the hubs and switches, and accidentally created a packet loop by plugging a switch back to itself... in three seconds every WinNT system on the network went straight to the Blue Screen of Death.
It one thing to handle the rules well, but quite another to deal with the exceptions!
A further note: Eric's website is the prime point of advertisement for this disputed publication. If they think paid ads in the dead tree journals get them nearly as many sales as the free adversitement on Eric's site... they've got another thing coming! Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face!
It is indeed a bitter injustice that we're losing out on such a magnificent contribution... but I sincerely hope that the publisher should only get 'bit in the butt' if their hungry push for dollars goes much further...
This very summer a began writing my proof for one of those $million math problems. (Which one, I am not yet willing to disclose, but you'll likely hear soon!) It took only two weeks to "see" the solution, but four months to type it up in a format that is useful to math journals. (That four months included teaching myself the LaTeX layout language from scratch.) Already written into this proof is a grateful acknowledgement to Weisstein and his contributors for the resource provided at mathworld.wolfram.com.
I almost bought the CD edition before this news broke... but now those guys are costing themselves another customer! Eric Weisstein will get his acknowledgement whether or not this is resolved. It is for authors, not distributors, that the incentives of copyright were created. If the publishers' hunger for money only costs themselves sales, it will be poetic justice.
Thomas Jefferson, a Lawyer during the founding of the United States, said 'Ignorance of the Law is no excuse.' Yet, that was back in the day when the Law was just a few sheets of paper. If he could see the superhuman monstrosity that is now the Litigation Industry, he'd roll in his grave.
Agreement tends to mean that two or more parties are 'of like mind' in a certain issue. (i.e. Term of Use) How many humans do you know that can be of 'like mind' with a person who writes the typical click-through agreement or EULA?
Microsoft real advancement to the industry has nothing to do with software innovation... but rather License innovation. In a recent article, some microsoft programmers were drawing strong analogies between conditional branchesw of program code and conditional terms of Microsoft's software licenses, with the sense that licenses should be programmed in the future. Remember, when Microsoft got started in the 70's, people actually owned the software they bought... Microsoft helped 'pioneer' the idea that its use is merely licensed through obfuscated conditions of agreement.
Should we be thankful for this? I sure am not. Most lawyers have far more job security than I find comfortable. Why else would RMS be so nostalgic for the free software of old?
In the past two elections, I voted for Hagelin and Perot respectively. (Ironic, since it was the reversal of their years for popularity.) Perot had his weirdness with Aliens, etc, and Hagelin his Transcendental Meditation(tm) (which I refer to as the TMtm issue), but they at least each reflected that the institutional choices were not the peoples' choices.
Nader, on the other hand, is not only the braver rebel, but also has taken up the causes of greatest import: The call to make companies accountable to humans. What a concept! Maybe if he gets too good, I'll eventually have to switch voting to a REAL loser, but it is his reforms and lawsuits of the established system that will provide us the freedom to do so!;-)
Apple feined originality, but in a convincing way. Microsoft, on the other hand, neither pretended to be original, nor even better quality... just more convenient.
If Microsoft were to buy PARC, it'd likely be the end of a great thing. Remember, decades before Bill Gates had his house wired for infrared badges to customize the displays from room to room, PARC had already been doing it.
One particular news program interview attacked the fact that Nader does not personally own a computer.
To some, this is bound to mean something, on a personal level. To me, I know he's clearly aware of the systems (as can be witnessed in his debate with Gore's advisor Hundt). If only the corporate sycophants of the CPD weren't so fearful of Nader, we could have heard some interesting confrontations on the topic.
The most interesting part of the Hundt/Nader debate are the issues Nader raises about unfair/discriminatory business practices. In particular, the cable industry has monopolies who exclude major channels unfairly. (An example local to Cincinnati I can add is that there is no UPN coverage, hasn't been for years, despite the existance of WBQC in town) You'll never see the Repubmocrats raise this kind of issue, since that would cost their big corporate sponserships. It's issues like this that tell me Nader is the most fearless candidate I've seen in all my adult life.
Some like Gore because of his techno-savvy connections. I think Hundt did a great job braving a debate with Nader. If I'm worried about being understood, I might just vote for Gore...
... but I'm voting for Nader, because I'm more concerned about corporations who view their customers as adversaries, including Microsoft. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for capitalism, and the freedom for companies to distinguish themselves with their 'God-given' natural advantages of talent and opportunity... but I'm hard set against the unfair advantages taken against competition and consumers. A company should live in harmony, first with the humans they serve and secondly with the rest of the global economy.
Unlike Gore, sharp as he may be, Nader would actually do something about that.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's say it all together, people...
...Fuzzy Math Sucks!
Let's ban the Electoral College!
I think that we're watching intently, not because the actual candidates are in any way interesting, but because it's a morbid fascination to watch the electoral system on its death throwes. According to a poll today on the Election 2000 news site and also the Electoral College FAQ, more than Two Thirds of America want the Electoral College banned from the Constitution, and have so since at least the 1960's!
I hate to defend this process in any way, but fact is stranger than fiction: It was the Electoral College that led us to discover the level of irregluarity in just on state due to the focus of an entire nation on this outcome. If we went solely by popular vote, we may have heard just as little of these scandals as we have from the other 49 states combined! =-O
First and foremost, there'd be somewhat less incentive to invent and innovate, but more competition to compete over cost-effective quality. Copyright, afterall, is an incentive for the furtherance of the sciences and arts, despite the fact that it is currently exploited by distributors. Branding would change, as trademarks would be harder to enforce, and conterfeitting would be the rule rather than the exception.
Second, there would be a greater glut of self-published works without credit to "original authors." On one hand, the signal-to-noise ratio would become utterly absurd. But on the other hand, that self-publishing is the very thing that made the web so popular.
Finally, there would be backlash against this 'great idea,' and people would compensate against the lack of genuineness by developing means of authentication. It would probably end up looking like some antique road show, with "experts" doing everything from reviewing music videos to examining cell phones.
Now THERE's a What-if question leading to some serious sci-fi!
But think about it: how many licenses actually grant license to the wild behavior of the manufacturer?
This could be the advent of a whole new battle, not so easily dismissed in court by those who have signed the EULA but regard the contract as absurd. What happens when Microsoft starts reserving the rights openly for the dirty tricks they used to have to do in secret?
If Clinton carried Ohio in the last two elections, it should also be pointed out that Clinton made it into office by a minority of the popular vote. As Clinton didn't need the popular vote, neither would Bush (neither of the 'big two' actually). Gore has already conceeded Ohio days ago, directing focus to 'more favorable markets.' To them, the winner-takes-all electoral is all that matters, and an 'Ohio' 'Bush-vote' is a redundancy of sorts. But to third parties, a popular vote is exactly the needed step to reforming the old duopoly.
I just wish these two parties could have done better than the two coattail-riders who are known more by their associations with previous presidents than by their own measure of merits. The Third Parties have quite a few good choices among them, if the system could grant them a mathematically fair chance.
Nader - on his positive side, he's addressing issues that the others have barely considered in hindsight: Cable-and-Internet Content Discrimination, Corporate Crime and Anti-Trust, present issues with poisoning neighborhoods in further discrimination... He'd have kicked serious butt in the debates! His running mate, Winona LaDuke, is even more cool to vote for... a Minnesota Chippewa woman whose strong record stands for minority equality and opportunities. If there's any downside to this platform, it's the implication that the Green Party which has such cool people (and there are two parties of Greens, one he runs with and one he doesn't) is sometimes called the watermellon party, green on the outside, red on the inside. Still, since it is near impossible to agree with a party 100%, I see them as less an evil.
Hagelin- A learned man who can stately present the issues. His positions seem similar to Nader on some topics, but they're stated will less angst and more educated finnesse. My only qualm with him is his overuse of Transcendal Meditation(tm) as the answer: Kosovo got you down? Let's send 4000 TMtm Instructors to pacify things. Naivate' aside, I like to see such a civil, refined highbrow in the choices.
Browne- true to the principals of liberty this counrty was founded on. The Libertarian Party in general can be taken more seriously than most third party options: There are more Libertarians in career political offices than the other third parties (Green, Natural Law P, etc.) combined!
Ohio is so Traditionally Repubilican, that at no time in history has a Republican president won who hasn't first won Ohio. Democrats may win the Presidency while Ohio still goes Republican, but at no time could a Republican win if he is so unpopular that he doesn't even get Ohio's Repulican stamp-of-approval.
So, if Ohio is so sure to go to Bush, what's a voter to do? Vote Third Party. The popular vote will resound against the electoral vote, showing greater disparity. Specifically, a vote for the Green Party is a sound strategy: not only will a 5% popular vote get their foot in the door next election, but Ralph will sue the states that deny you that freedom!
Remember, there would be no Republican President if Abraham Linoln hadn't been the nation's first. If we want more than one choice greater than Russia, we need the popular vote to demand it!
In Cincinnati, Main Street Ventures just opened their doors for business under great fanfare. Their goal is to be part of an inner city renovation where the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood is seeing many of its historically significant buildings reworked into trendy yuppie lofts.
At the opening, they had a ceremonial golden plug to be pulled apart when Main Street's new wireless service made the area officially "unplugged." This tented event for a few hundred spectators and camera crews took place in The Salvation Army's 12th street parking lot, with representative from Lucent and Microsoft, and Ohio's Governer Bob Taft.
They sure know how to inspire my distrust. ;-)
- They have hair-splitting discernment for logic, whether seeking an implicit flowchart of programming or an unbroken chain of evidence.
- They have the ability to focus greatly on attention-to-detail.
- Their skills are (usually) in better demand/pay on the market than most jobs.
Thomas Jefferson was a Lawyer with a lot to say about freedom... but could he have been a programmer in our day and age? The 'Program' of the U.S. Constitution seem to say so... it shows enough discernment and fault-tollerence 'exception handling' to avoid overregulating the freedom it protects. I believe he once said 'Those who would trade a little freedom for a little order will lose both and deserve neither.'RMS still often comes across as a totalitarian with a focus on hisown Emacs... but this latest news is encouraging. Harmony is all about finding ways the differing parties can cohabit the planet, and my confidence in his abilities has gone up a notch today.
Ya see, GC has puzzled mathematicians for 258 years because it's easy to "see" relationships immediately, but each of them is difficult to prove. Once proof is offered, it will be easy to verify, much easier than Fermat's 150pg proof, just like P=NP solutions are quickly verified.
GC lends well to P=NP, because finding composite numbers (non-prime) is a classic example of one of those tasks that requires checking through every permutation. Minesweeper is a pattern-matching exercise that is not far from finding which prime patterns (twins, quartets) are workable and which are invalidated by congruencies (modulas) of other primes.
On my way to solving GC, I think I accidentally proved both the Hardy-Littlewood conjectures, and thus disproved the disproof against them! :-D
With Sony making the real advances and Microsoft shifting the spotlight to themselves, Sega's had to do something!
"Why are these Dreamcast and X-Boxes freezing up?" Shhh... They're Thinking! ;-)
I can confirm this sighting... The transparencies and themes seem consistant with Enlightenment.
If they push the point of absurd and unconstitutional EULAs that don't even permit speech cover in 'fair use' reviews, they may lose ground on hte only thing they've successfully innovated: license agreements.
Once they lose that, they lose the primary tool of holding their marketshare.
But Republicrats have a self-perpetuating method of limiting choice. When ISP's can veto websites based on commercial favoritism... and when Cable companies can unfairly exclude local television channels at their monopolistic whim... we need more freedom of choice!
In the words of Jesse "the Gov'ner" Ventura, "What good is it to have just one more choice than Russia?"
Vote Third Party. Vote Ralph Nader and Winona LaDuke.
Think about it... English has more rules than exceptions! In Europe, most languages are pronouncable at first glance... once you know the rules. In English, the only teacher is experience, because every word has potential to be the exception!
Now in fairness, the Roman alphabet is the best accessible subset of type... and pronunciation isn't the biggest issue. Conjugation of verbal tenses, discernment of homonyms... these kinds of things make English look downright batty.
Linux forced its way into our IT Department when it could restore a trashed system into something useful. Here at The Salvation Army, we endevor to be good stewards of what we are given. We have an IBM PC Server 350 (now named "Methusela") that crashed one day for no apparent reason. It refused to run Windows anymore... not even Win98 or Win95!
But it ran Linux flawlessly. Well, actually it did point out one flaw on its own: The internal Ethernet controller was getting an unusually high number of bad packets. It would receive DHCP assignments, even do some web work in Linux... but it was enough to shut Windows down completely. Even after installing a working NIC, Windows could not run due to the faulty internal NIC, but Linux ran fine!
Likewise, we found an instant way to crash every WinNT system in the building. Someone was re-arranging the hubs and switches, and accidentally created a packet loop by plugging a switch back to itself... in three seconds every WinNT system on the network went straight to the Blue Screen of Death.
It one thing to handle the rules well, but quite another to deal with the exceptions!
A further note: Eric's website is the prime point of advertisement for this disputed publication. If they think paid ads in the dead tree journals get them nearly as many sales as the free adversitement on Eric's site... they've got another thing coming! Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face!
Why be a copyright thSlave when you can be its Mathster?!?
Color me THERE!
This very summer a began writing my proof for one of those $million math problems. (Which one, I am not yet willing to disclose, but you'll likely hear soon!) It took only two weeks to "see" the solution, but four months to type it up in a format that is useful to math journals. (That four months included teaching myself the LaTeX layout language from scratch.) Already written into this proof is a grateful acknowledgement to Weisstein and his contributors for the resource provided at mathworld.wolfram.com .
I almost bought the CD edition before this news broke... but now those guys are costing themselves another customer! Eric Weisstein will get his acknowledgement whether or not this is resolved. It is for authors, not distributors, that the incentives of copyright were created. If the publishers' hunger for money only costs themselves sales, it will be poetic justice.
Agreement tends to mean that two or more parties are 'of like mind' in a certain issue. (i.e. Term of Use) How many humans do you know that can be of 'like mind' with a person who writes the typical click-through agreement or EULA?
Microsoft real advancement to the industry has nothing to do with software innovation... but rather License innovation. In a recent article, some microsoft programmers were drawing strong analogies between conditional branchesw of program code and conditional terms of Microsoft's software licenses, with the sense that licenses should be programmed in the future. Remember, when Microsoft got started in the 70's, people actually owned the software they bought... Microsoft helped 'pioneer' the idea that its use is merely licensed through obfuscated conditions of agreement.
Should we be thankful for this? I sure am not. Most lawyers have far more job security than I find comfortable. Why else would RMS be so nostalgic for the free software of old?
Nader, on the other hand, is not only the braver rebel, but also has taken up the causes of greatest import: The call to make companies accountable to humans. What a concept! Maybe if he gets too good, I'll eventually have to switch voting to a REAL loser, but it is his reforms and lawsuits of the established system that will provide us the freedom to do so! ;-)
Why would Gore invent both the Internet and Pants if one precludes the need for the other?
;-D
If Microsoft were to buy PARC, it'd likely be the end of a great thing. Remember, decades before Bill Gates had his house wired for infrared badges to customize the displays from room to room, PARC had already been doing it.
If the oil well of "cool companies to steal from" dries up, it could be like another '76 energy crisis! ;-)
To some, this is bound to mean something, on a personal level. To me, I know he's clearly aware of the systems (as can be witnessed in his debate with Gore's advisor Hundt). If only the corporate sycophants of the CPD weren't so fearful of Nader, we could have heard some interesting confrontations on the topic.
Some like Gore because of his techno-savvy connections. I think Hundt did a great job braving a debate with Nader. If I'm worried about being understood, I might just vote for Gore...
Unlike Gore, sharp as he may be, Nader would actually do something about that.