Clinton is a politician. He has to deal with a hostile and pretty dreadful congress. He has to pick his fights strategically, and guess what is his way of choosing. He won't pick up a fight that won't resonate with middle class voters and most middle class voters cannot understand what is wrong with the DMCA or with putting a few bearded muslims in jail for speaking while being Muslim.
He will fight congress wherever he can see political gain, and it's the job of civic organizations to deliver political gain to those politicians who protect liberty.
It seems that the area of larger than life leaders, for all our desire, is over for a while. (and Clinton has been pretty large--that is why so many people hate him). We get poll-driven politicians. And if liberty fails at the poll, don't build on politicians to save us from our own apathy.
First, I welcome repentence at any time. Would anybody prefer something else?
Now, about Clinton. Yes he signed into law some terrible laws like the Anti-terrorism act DMCA, etc. Did I wish he wouldn't? sure. Did I wish he'd show more leadership on this? You bet. But it is a bit exagerated to blame Clinton for a national disgrace that is everyone's.
What this shows, is that a) we got a congress that will screw you through the back door.
And b) when the media really cares about freedom the President ( this one at least) will cave in.
The next one will probably just smile and say, don't worry, I'm the leader, that is leadership, blah blah blah, let's not divide ourselves into this classissified documentation issue. blah blah, every one should be an account, sorry, accountable, blah the media shouldn't hold the first ammendment hostile to the security of the nation, blah blah.
I've installed the X 4.0 from source and the only problem so far was that I had to bring back some shared libs from X3.3 in order to succesfully compile KDE 2.
Apart from that, it rocks.
You know, this is really funny. You need a photo ID to buy alcohol, and that is fine with everybody, but voting? nosire. Now why is a photo id more intrusive/less private/whatever than pre-registration ???
My point about affiliation is not technical, and it isn't about privacy either, but about the way it makes it easier to use redistricting to preempt the election. Is Ohio special in that respect?
It's not a huge commitment of time or effort, anyone of age can do it, it's not like it's a real discrimination unless you say poor people are poor because they're lazy
the facts are, rich and old people are much more likely to vote than young and poor peaple. Do you believe it is because poor people are generally happy and carefree and humming 'summertimes' all day long and young folk just instinctively trust their elders to do the right thing?
If the young and the poor can't take 30 minutes out of some saturday to register to vote then they don't deserve to
Indeed, if they can't work, and get rich, and buy a dinnerplate at a fundraiser, they should all be in jail anyway, there they'll have 'time' aplenty. Suits them well, these parasites.
Of course, if you can afford to read this, time is not your problem;-)
Yes, that the traditional explanation and it is correct. But it is also the case that voter registration is one of the mechanisms that keep voters tournout low. First, you cannot just decide to vote in the last moment. So a lot of people, especially the poor, and the young, are discouraged from voting. Likewise recent immigrants are discouraged by the requirement to register, because they are often fearful of the government. People who don't own their own home (again the young and the poor) are more mobile and less likely to go through a registration that depends on residence.
In addition, registration requires you to state your political affiliation. This is extremely important because it allows the two parties to draw the boundaries between districts in a way that protects their incumbents, making most congressional elections pretty meaningless and further depressing voters turnout.
Low voters turnout benefits the two parties because it makes politics easier to manipulate and undermines challengers, and it particularly benefits Republicans because it deppresses voters that are less likely to vote for them.
All in all, it is a beautiful and ingenious system.
dubbed the Alberta SUPERNET, Minister of Science and Innovation Lorne Taylor said the system will "provide high speed"...
Lorne Taylor? I thought that was Al Gore's title.
These comis are never tired of putting forth this transparent propaganda machine about how the government did this.. the government did that..
Get real man. The internet was invented by General Motors and Standard Oil, and no high speed venture will succeed unless they appoint Chainsaw Al to run it.
What I've never understood is the fascination the/. crowd has with Nader and the extreme left. Admittedly, my libertarian bias towards self-interest is showing - but would any Nader techies care to comment on how they think life will be better for them
First, one has to grow brainwashed in America to call Nader the extreme left, he isn't even pink. Nader's main issue is the protection of the public domain. This is a central tenet of liberal thought ( and yes, liberalism is the ideology of conservatives everywhere in the West except in America)
Second, each US resident on slashdot will be better off if he or she (or their parents) could walk away from a stinking job and still be able to receive decent medical treatment, as almost all non US slashdotters can. Most slashdotters could earn more if Congress did not allow US software companies to run saoftware sweatshops. Most slashdotters seem to prefer, for personal reasons also, a government that did not pass the DMCA. Most slashdotters would gain if, when they have children, they could get them a decent primary education for less than 40K a year (if you leave elsewhere, please have pity and don't laugh).
Besides, your 'self interest' is purely delusional. You should be concerned about self interest when you act as an economic agent on the market. In politics, you win by banding with others and you always lose when you stand alone. So it is your self interest, and mine, to have access to political power, and that requires a political system in which we can participate without paying 10K. There in nothding terribly left about that.
The republican tax cut may favor me today, in the same way that an increase of fodder favors my future prime rib. The republican party is committed to treating non billionaires as cattle. The Democratic party does the same though with slightly less commited. Today the going is good so we can ignore the fact that as citizens we are de facto disenfrenchised by the two one-party systems. But sooner or later, not having political power is going to hurt me and my private interest badly, And probably yours too.
you are misinformed about the American Legal System. Courts don't change the law, they make it as they go along. This process is called intpretation.
Justices are chosen by politicians and the politicians job is to choose justices that favor their political view. This IS what the constitution mandates. Both Gore and Bush are adamant that they will choose Justices in this way and this is as they should since it is their responsability to do that.
Now, Bush promised to appoint justices like Scalia. Scalia is the guy who said that he would have dissented in Brown vs. the board of education. Scalia is the judge who has never met an injustice the Bill of rights forbade. Scalia, together with the other conservative judges, Rehnquist and Thomas, believe it's ok for the police to use illegally obtained evidence.
They all believe that evidence of an patently unfair trial is not a sufficient reason to stay an execution. If this is your understanding of the constitution, by all means, vote for Bush.
No, I am against bloated government, and there is pretty much consensus about that between Gore and Bush. Just because Bush says Gore wants more gvernment than himself doesn't make him so. They have pretty similar ideas about the size of government.
The difference is in what government is for.
Bush:
dole out welfare for the arm and oil, insurance, biotechnology, (and probably software) industry,
help American companies take over the world (including the US),
destroy labor unions,
shove Christian love through everyone's throat,
put all African Americans whose name is not Colin Powel behind bars.
Gore:
dole out welfare for the software and entetainment industry,
protect teachers and lawyers
help American companies take over the world (but with some misgivings about the US),
try to keep earth in suspended animation for another forty years ( but only if it can be done without annoying G.M.).
keep labor unions under the tab,
put only half of African Americans behind bars ( but do include Colin Powel).
I don't see your free speech cooncerns to be as problematic.
anonymity: if you wan't to seak anonymously, you can talk on/.., you can write in any publication that will accept your submission. You can interview on TV with your face blurred.
Anonymity is something we value because we wan't people to say what's on their mind without fear of retribution. This is not the issue in broadcasted political speech. A campaign commercial is not an expressive idea per se. It is a mode of broadcasting of an idea, and one that can affect every life on this planet. Someone capable of spending such vast sums hardly needs protection from retribution. ( what, his/her boss will fire them?) Here is the difference in a nutshell: If you have a proof that Al Gore murdered his Grandmother you should be able to make it public anonymously. But if you want to pass this message directly to voters effectively, without having to convince journalists or anybody else, by buying ad time on ABC, I fail to see why you should be able to hide.
after you've spent your limit, you're not allowed to say anything else
Once you frame the question in the wrong terms, it becomes unsolvable. How about after you've spent your limit, you're not allowed to spend anything else? Of course you can interpret it as censuring speech, but why would you? You can equally interpret the two term limit on the presidency as a limitation on free speech.
Consider why we care about free speech in the first place. What does the first ammendment protect? Does it really protect your ability to speek in pure isolation from everyone else? Not really, because that kind of speech does not need legal protection. Even in communist Russia you could travel to Siberia, stand on top of an iceberg and shout obscenities. You could do that here too, and the constitution won't either help or hinder you. What the First Amendment protects is the ability to make yourself heard by fellow citizens. This was immediately understood by the early judicial statements that interpreted the First Ammendment as a protection of the marketplace of ideas. THe first ammendment is there to create a public space in which ideas can compete on their own merit and cannot be bullied away by power. The ability to shout louder than everybody else does not therefore deserve a the highest constitutional protection, because that would undermine the very purpose of the First Ammendment. It destroys the marketplace of ideas by preventing most of the speakers from being heard.
the only real problem is practical. This is the famous 'slippery slope' argument. How do we protect 'the market place of ideas' without letting regulation itself kill it. This is a problem similar to anti-trust in essence. And in both cases, since the problem is practical I find the idea that we should stick with abstract principle no matter what counter-productive. Providing practical solutions involves evaluating risks as trade-offs. The fear of excessive regulation should be put against the fear of self-destruction, and we should ask ourselves first what the reality is now. Do we have a marketplace of ideas in good order, or are we in fact living in in a system in which only bullies have effective access to their fellow citizens ears? We may still differ on our answers to this question. But I believe this is the question that must frame any free-speech vs. money debate.
Yours is the typical pavlovian libertarian's reaction. On hearing about a new threat to privacy that comes from THE CORPORATE world, you immediately bitch about the government. What's the matter with you guys?
While, your argument seems intuitively right, statistical data suggests most time on line is spent by people who are earning around $30000. It seems that some interesting path crossing between cyberspace and social class is yet to come.
Re:Mantra = Perl does what ever I want.
on
Perl 6 Showcase
·
· Score: 1
Very true, but the market place of computer languages is structured by economics as mach if not more than by computer science.
The more computers are ubiquitous the more programmers you need. And the more programmers you need the more you must do with not very bright programmers, and the more you restrict yourself to the brightest programers the more your production costs soar.
and so, there is no escape from the conclusion that the killer language of the future will be judged by one feature above all else: how much it allows mediocre coders to write reasonable code reasonably fast.
BTW, I think perl already wins on this criteria for write-once code.
I liked the part about the hackers stealing source code, it reminded me of the O Henry story about kidnapping the chief ( dunno the exact name). Or maybe it is a smart attempt to convince the media that someone wants their source code.
Yes, and I did the same, but this is exactly my point. The 'issue' is realy a soundbite that must be decoded as part of a particular political identity, rather than a starting point for intelligent discussion. We are not disagreeing about the 'issues', rather we use issues to signal our emotional investment in the same way the Serbians use nationality.
<p>
As many point out. The congressional behavior is going to convince a lot of people to be less cooperative with future surveys. That is exactly what the GOP wants, since
the census bureau insistence on counting everybody means better counting of populations that don't vote GOP ( blacks, recent immigrants etc),
smaller census means reduced money for public services ( leaving more for Pork, and just going well with the general GOP mean-spiritedness)
Under the Bush plan, the portion of the money going into investment accounts IS STILL PART OF THE SS PROGRAM.
Either I decide what to do with my money or it is used to pay for other obligations. If I invest it, and I earn 1M because I'm a brilliant investor, than I expect to be payed that 1M extra when I retire, and hence you cannot use this 1M to pay for other obligations. this is not high Math. Or has the new economy changed that too?
isn't such a clear separation since some of the invested portion will end up paying for retirees in future decades.
Prey explain how my investment will pay for other peoples retirement without stopping to be mine.
The plan calls for restrictions on the investments to prevent people from gambling with their money in high risk or agressive growth investments.
Now let me understand, Bush is turning the social security system into an investment banking seminary. You get your money, and you get managers that evaluate what is risky and what is not, and they decide say, you can invest in these 10 stocks, and you can have X volatlity and Y concentration, and then I pick my favorites. And I innocently thought Bush was the party of reducing the government. Is he in favor of privatization or of creating a national MBA?
The Bush plan is carefully designed
This sentence captures everything that pissed me off to start with. You must have spent too much time on Mars lately.
Bush had not spent a single thought on the Social Security System throughout his life until the day after the Democratic Convention. Then, realizing that his plan to run on Monica Lewinski wasn't working, his advisers sat down and pieced together in a night's work a 'program' to 'save' social security that saves nothing and would get a D+ if it were offered as a term paper at a two year college. But they sprinkled it with the right buzzwords, 'private', 'return on investment', etc, knowing that this 'resonates' with a certain part of the electorate. And lo and behold, you respond precisely as expected.
I don't support Gore's plan, because he has none really. I am just amazed by how easily you put the label of 'good', 'preferable' and,'carefully designed' to a last moment stunt, in a issue that is so complex and so far reaching. And then you want politicians to respect you.
Slashdot Mirror
Clinton is a politician. He has to deal with a hostile and pretty dreadful congress. He has to pick his fights strategically, and guess what is his way of choosing. He won't pick up a fight that won't resonate with middle class voters and most middle class voters cannot understand what is wrong with the DMCA or with putting a few bearded muslims in jail for speaking while being Muslim.
He will fight congress wherever he can see political gain, and it's the job of civic organizations to deliver political gain to those politicians who protect liberty.
It seems that the area of larger than life leaders, for all our desire, is over for a while. (and Clinton has been pretty large--that is why so many people hate him). We get poll-driven politicians. And if liberty fails at the poll, don't build on politicians to save us from our own apathy.
Now, about Clinton. Yes he signed into law some terrible laws like the Anti-terrorism act DMCA, etc. Did I wish he wouldn't? sure. Did I wish he'd show more leadership on this? You bet. But it is a bit exagerated to blame Clinton for a national disgrace that is everyone's.
What this shows, is that a) we got a congress that will screw you through the back door.
And b) when the media really cares about freedom the President ( this one at least) will cave in.
The next one will probably just smile and say, don't worry, I'm the leader, that is leadership, blah blah blah, let's not divide ourselves into this classissified documentation issue. blah blah, every one should be an account, sorry, accountable, blah the media shouldn't hold the first ammendment hostile to the security of the nation, blah blah.
I've installed the X 4.0 from source and the only problem so far was that I had to bring back some shared libs from X3.3 in order to succesfully compile KDE 2.
Apart from that, it rocks.
You know, this is really funny. You need a photo ID to buy alcohol, and that is fine with everybody, but voting? nosire. Now why is a photo id more intrusive/less private/whatever than pre-registration ???
My point about affiliation is not technical, and it isn't about privacy either, but about the way it makes it easier to use redistricting to preempt the election. Is Ohio special in that respect?
It's not a huge commitment of time or effort, anyone of age can do it, it's not like it's a real discrimination unless you say poor people are poor because they're lazy
the facts are, rich and old people are much more likely to vote than young and poor peaple. Do you believe it is because poor people are generally happy and carefree and humming 'summertimes' all day long and young folk just instinctively trust their elders to do the right thing?
If the young and the poor can't take 30 minutes out of some saturday to register to vote then they don't deserve to
Indeed, if they can't work, and get rich, and buy a dinnerplate at a fundraiser, they should all be in jail anyway, there they'll have 'time' aplenty. Suits them well, these parasites.
Of course, if you can afford to read this, time is not your problem;-)
LOL
In addition, registration requires you to state your political affiliation. This is extremely important because it allows the two parties to draw the boundaries between districts in a way that protects their incumbents, making most congressional elections pretty meaningless and further depressing voters turnout.
Low voters turnout benefits the two parties because it makes politics easier to manipulate and undermines challengers, and it particularly benefits Republicans because it deppresses voters that are less likely to vote for them.
All in all, it is a beautiful and ingenious system.
Lorne Taylor? I thought that was Al Gore's title.
These comis are never tired of putting forth this transparent propaganda machine about how the government did this.. the government did that..
Get real man. The internet was invented by General Motors and Standard Oil, and no high speed venture will succeed unless they appoint Chainsaw Al to run it.
I am dutifully summoned to order, Whip!
Besides, my knee really hurts this time.
First, one has to grow brainwashed in America to call Nader the extreme left, he isn't even pink. Nader's main issue is the protection of the public domain. This is a central tenet of liberal thought ( and yes, liberalism is the ideology of conservatives everywhere in the West except in America)
Second, each US resident on slashdot will be better off if he or she (or their parents) could walk away from a stinking job and still be able to receive decent medical treatment, as almost all non US slashdotters can. Most slashdotters could earn more if Congress did not allow US software companies to run saoftware sweatshops. Most slashdotters seem to prefer, for personal reasons also, a government that did not pass the DMCA. Most slashdotters would gain if, when they have children, they could get them a decent primary education for less than 40K a year (if you leave elsewhere, please have pity and don't laugh).
Besides, your 'self interest' is purely delusional. You should be concerned about self interest when you act as an economic agent on the market. In politics, you win by banding with others and you always lose when you stand alone. So it is your self interest, and mine, to have access to political power, and that requires a political system in which we can participate without paying 10K. There in nothding terribly left about that.
The republican tax cut may favor me today, in the same way that an increase of fodder favors my future prime rib. The republican party is committed to treating non billionaires as cattle. The Democratic party does the same though with slightly less commited. Today the going is good so we can ignore the fact that as citizens we are de facto disenfrenchised by the two one-party systems. But sooner or later, not having political power is going to hurt me and my private interest badly, And probably yours too.
you are misinformed about the American Legal System. Courts don't change the law, they make it as they go along. This process is called intpretation.
Justices are chosen by politicians and the politicians job is to choose justices that favor their political view. This IS what the constitution mandates. Both Gore and Bush are adamant that they will choose Justices in this way and this is as they should since it is their responsability to do that.
Now, Bush promised to appoint justices like Scalia. Scalia is the guy who said that he would have dissented in Brown vs. the board of education. Scalia is the judge who has never met an injustice the Bill of rights forbade. Scalia, together with the other conservative judges, Rehnquist and Thomas, believe it's ok for the police to use illegally obtained evidence. They all believe that evidence of an patently unfair trial is not a sufficient reason to stay an execution. If this is your understanding of the constitution, by all means, vote for Bush.
The difference is in what government is for.
Bush:
- dole out welfare for the arm and oil, insurance, biotechnology, (and probably software) industry,
- help American companies take over the world (including the US),
- destroy labor unions,
- shove Christian love through everyone's throat,
- put all African Americans whose name is not Colin Powel behind bars.
Gore:dunno, I think his speech can be defined as a series of (ir)regular expression:
s/ba/te/g
s/age/ile/g
s/ile/ileble/g
s/(.+)s/\1ians/g
etc..
I don't see your free speech cooncerns to be as problematic.
anonymity: if you wan't to seak anonymously, you can talk on /.., you can write in any publication that will accept your submission. You can interview on TV with your face blurred.
Anonymity is something we value because we wan't people to say what's on their mind without fear of retribution. This is not the issue in broadcasted political speech. A campaign commercial is not an expressive idea per se. It is a mode of broadcasting of an idea, and one that can affect every life on this planet. Someone capable of spending such vast sums hardly needs protection from retribution. ( what, his/her boss will fire them?) Here is the difference in a nutshell: If you have a proof that Al Gore murdered his Grandmother you should be able to make it public anonymously. But if you want to pass this message directly to voters effectively, without having to convince journalists or anybody else, by buying ad time on ABC, I fail to see why you should be able to hide.
after you've spent your limit, you're not allowed to say anything else
Once you frame the question in the wrong terms, it becomes unsolvable. How about after you've spent your limit, you're not allowed to spend anything else? Of course you can interpret it as censuring speech, but why would you? You can equally interpret the two term limit on the presidency as a limitation on free speech.
Consider why we care about free speech in the first place. What does the first ammendment protect? Does it really protect your ability to speek in pure isolation from everyone else? Not really, because that kind of speech does not need legal protection. Even in communist Russia you could travel to Siberia, stand on top of an iceberg and shout obscenities. You could do that here too, and the constitution won't either help or hinder you. What the First Amendment protects is the ability to make yourself heard by fellow citizens. This was immediately understood by the early judicial statements that interpreted the First Ammendment as a protection of the marketplace of ideas. THe first ammendment is there to create a public space in which ideas can compete on their own merit and cannot be bullied away by power. The ability to shout louder than everybody else does not therefore deserve a the highest constitutional protection, because that would undermine the very purpose of the First Ammendment. It destroys the marketplace of ideas by preventing most of the speakers from being heard.
the only real problem is practical. This is the famous 'slippery slope' argument. How do we protect 'the market place of ideas' without letting regulation itself kill it. This is a problem similar to anti-trust in essence. And in both cases, since the problem is practical I find the idea that we should stick with abstract principle no matter what counter-productive. Providing practical solutions involves evaluating risks as trade-offs. The fear of excessive regulation should be put against the fear of self-destruction, and we should ask ourselves first what the reality is now. Do we have a marketplace of ideas in good order, or are we in fact living in in a system in which only bullies have effective access to their fellow citizens ears? We may still differ on our answers to this question. But I believe this is the question that must frame any free-speech vs. money debate.
My favorite anal scientist?
Now really, I am afraid it would be indiscreet of me to answer that question.
Never heard any criticism, only bitching, what criticism did you hear?
Yours is the typical pavlovian libertarian's reaction. On hearing about a new threat to privacy that comes from THE CORPORATE world, you immediately bitch about the government. What's the matter with you guys?
That reminds me of a sociological reasearch that concluded the amazing fact that 50% of divorcees in Israel's kibutz are women.
I assume that somewhere in late October scientists with unused annual grants panick. There should be a journal for such researh:
how about:
THe Journal of "Pure" Science
international Sqanderer
Laughingstock Quarterly
Eyebrow Raiser Almanac
While, your argument seems intuitively right, statistical data suggests most time on line is spent by people who are earning around $30000. It seems that some interesting path crossing between cyberspace and social class is yet to come.
The more computers are ubiquitous the more programmers you need. And the more programmers you need the more you must do with not very bright programmers, and the more you restrict yourself to the brightest programers the more your production costs soar.
and so, there is no escape from the conclusion that the killer language of the future will be judged by one feature above all else: how much it allows mediocre coders to write reasonable code reasonably fast.
BTW, I think perl already wins on this criteria for write-once code.
Yes, and I did the same, but this is exactly my point. The 'issue' is realy a soundbite that must be decoded as part of a particular political identity, rather than a starting point for intelligent discussion. We are not disagreeing about the 'issues', rather we use issues to signal our emotional investment in the same way the Serbians use nationality.
<p>
Either I decide what to do with my money or it is used to pay for other obligations. If I invest it, and I earn 1M because I'm a brilliant investor, than I expect to be payed that 1M extra when I retire, and hence you cannot use this 1M to pay for other obligations. this is not high Math. Or has the new economy changed that too?
isn't such a clear separation since some of the invested portion will end up paying for retirees in future decades.
Prey explain how my investment will pay for other peoples retirement without stopping to be mine.
The plan calls for restrictions on the investments to prevent people from gambling with their money in high risk or agressive growth investments.
Now let me understand, Bush is turning the social security system into an investment banking seminary. You get your money, and you get managers that evaluate what is risky and what is not, and they decide say, you can invest in these 10 stocks, and you can have X volatlity and Y concentration, and then I pick my favorites. And I innocently thought Bush was the party of reducing the government. Is he in favor of privatization or of creating a national MBA?
The Bush plan is carefully designed This sentence captures everything that pissed me off to start with. You must have spent too much time on Mars lately.
Bush had not spent a single thought on the Social Security System throughout his life until the day after the Democratic Convention. Then, realizing that his plan to run on Monica Lewinski wasn't working, his advisers sat down and pieced together in a night's work a 'program' to 'save' social security that saves nothing and would get a D+ if it were offered as a term paper at a two year college. But they sprinkled it with the right buzzwords, 'private', 'return on investment', etc, knowing that this 'resonates' with a certain part of the electorate. And lo and behold, you respond precisely as expected.
I don't support Gore's plan, because he has none really. I am just amazed by how easily you put the label of 'good', 'preferable' and ,'carefully designed' to a last moment stunt, in a issue that is so complex and so far reaching. And then you want politicians to respect you.