The republicans are a financially conservative party that wants to interfere with your personal life The democrats are a financially conservative party that doesn't want to interfere with your personal life
So, both major parties in the USA are very liberal in how they spend other people's money (they just have different priorities). Also, both of them want to interfere in your personal life. E.g. the Dems don't want you to use drugs, and the Repubs don't want you to have an abortion (or use drugs). Both parties are also on the right-wing (e.g. strong supporters of corporatism).
I think what you meant to write was "America doesn't have a financially conservative party".
Newtown? I think you mean Port Arthur. Maybe you thought Newtown (there are three or four or so places with that name in Australia according to Wikipedia) because the killer was from New Town (note the space), Hobart.
Also, the level of gun violence in Australia is still about the same level it was. Mostly confined to "criminal bikie gangs" ("outlaw motorcycle gangs").
Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Australia says: "Firearm laws in Tasmania and Queensland remained relatively relaxed for longarms. In 1995, Tasmania had the second lowest rate of homicides per head of population."
In 2005 the head of the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, Don Weatherburn,[34] noted that the level of legal gun ownership in New South Wales increased in recent years, and that the 1996 legislation had had little to no effect on violence. Professor Simon Chapman, former co-convenor of the Coalition for Gun Control, complained that his words "will henceforth be cited by every gun-lusting lobby group throughout the world in their perverse efforts to stall reforms that could save thousands of lives".[35] Weatherburn responded, "The fact is that the introduction of those laws did not result in any acceleration of the downward trend in gun homicide. They may have reduced the risk of mass shootings but we cannot be sure because no one has done the rigorous statistical work required to verify this possibility. It is always unpleasant to acknowledge facts that are inconsistent with your own point of view. But I thought that was what distinguished science from popular prejudice."[36]
Maybe instead of a strong federal government the better idea is a weak federal government, and weak corporations? Bring about an end to the era of strong corporations. Break them up. Forbid them to own property in more than five states. Forbid them to operate in more than five states. Forbid them from colluding, and actually enforce competition laws. Forbid foreign companies from operating more than three subsidiaries in the country. Enforce the law.
And the states are now powerful enough to fuck with the corporations, and you don't have a strong federal government that is fucking with everyone.
RequestPolicy will block all third party requests by default, which will block the cookies that come with it. (They do allow, by default, links between a site and it's CDN domain though.)
Why do anon cowards make these demands but then provide no method of means of complying? Maybe if you provided a location and a method of contacting you, I could comply. But simply demanding something in the fashion you have is just silly. You should write it something like:
shut up and suck my dick. you can come to my place at any time after 9pm, im at 1600 pennsylvania ave nw washington dc.
Then, assuming I could make it to Washington DC, I could, if I was interested, come around and knock on your door. If I liked your looks, and you didn't smell, and your place was not to messy, and you offered me a decent drink, etc., I might well, "shut up and suck your dick". But you know, just making random demands on the Internet isn't enough. You've got to put effort into it.
I'm going off topic here, but I want to make a complaint./. has gone down hill since being bought by Dice. In the old days/. would make it clear if there was some relationship between/. a site it linked to (e.g. "Slashdot and SourceForge are both part of OSDN"). However, now this doesn't happen any more. And it should. Not only that, if a submitter is related to Dice or to/., it should be made clear. And if you are only linking to an article on/. (e.g. in the ridiculous BI or SlashCloud sections) it should also be made clear.
Now mod me down (I shall become more powerful than you can imagine).
OK, let's be honest. I like Bitcoin. But I think that Namecoin is a bloody stupid idea. Instead, why not go with a distributed web of trust type system? At the moment most people just trust the root servers. Well, that's a mistake. Simplified example of how it might work like: I trust John and Mary each 100%, if they say that domain example.com belongs to Tim, I believe them. John though, has tendency to trust people I think are a bit sketchy, so anyone he trusts is only going to get 25% from me. That means that at least four of his friends need to agree for me to believe that domain example.org belongs to Jane. However, Mary's alright. Her friends get 50% trust from me. So one of Mary's friends, and two of John's is enough, or just two of Mary's. Because I don't trust John's friends much, any of their friends are basically going to get a 5% trust rating. However, Mary's friend's friends will get a 15% rating. Then, we look at it. So, for example.org, we have three of John's friends say it belongs to Jack. And two of Mary's friends say it belongs to Jill. Funny thing, I'm going to think it belongs to Jill.
The system could be like Convergence for TSL/SSL proposed by Moxie Marlinspike, or like the OpenPGP WOT, or a combination. The point is, you choose who to trust. And being distributed it can't be attacked like the current "trust the root" system. The only flaw is to decided who gets to allocate names. I'm sure that can be worked out.
You do realize that PDF can store the OCRed text along side (or above? it's another layer) the original scanned text.
Also, because the reference software of DJVU is GPLed, it's never going to see widespread commercial use (as all the big software companies only want to take and take).
A standard subset of PDF (e.g. PDF/A) is a much better option, and if you're worried about the amount of file space taken up, you can always use GZIP or ZIP.
I should note, you need to be careful to make sure you use the same spelling and wording for each org and doc type. You don't want to end up with Murphies, Murphy's, Murphy's Inc., Murphpy's Beer Company Inc. etc., each with invoice, inv., invoise and envoice. It would be better if your script forced you to pick a doc type, and showed a list of already existing companies. This applies no matter what solution you end up running with.
Also, for documents that cover a period, you have multiple options. The first is to give 00 as the day and month (e.g. 2012-12-00), and the second 01 as the start (e.g. 2012-12-01). Another is to have two dates (2012-12-01-to-2013-01-01) in place of the yyyy-mm-dd suggested in my first post. Also, don't even think of having the dates in any other order than year, month, day.
Some places have a working year (e.g. a tax year) that crosses two calendar years. In that case, you should be careful about where you put documents. Because if you put them in the first year, and then go "OK, it's been 7 years, and I no longer need any docs from 2005", you'll be burnt. A solution is to hardlink them into both years.
My suggestion would be to just scan and OCR your files, and then store them in your file system. Hierarchy might be something like: ~/scans/year/project/sorted
Within each sorted subdir, you'd have three folders. Date, organizationThatGeneratedTheDoc and TypeOfDoc. So in the folder ~/scans/year/project/sorted/org The file names would be something like: organizationThatGeneratedTheDoc-yyyy-mm-dd-TypeOfDoc.pdf In the folder ~/scans/year/project/sorted/TypeOfDoc The file names would be like: TypeOfDoc-yyyy-mm-dd-organizationThatGeneratedTheDoc.pdf Etc.
You'd use links (symlinks or hard links) to make sure that each document is accessible in more than one place. (You can also use links to put documents in more than one project folder.)
Types of documents would be things like invoices, receipts, legal threats, court orders etc. In the event that a document has more than one type, or more than one organization, you simply have more links. So invoice-2013-04-07-webdevteamawesome.pdf and legalthreat-2013-04-07-webdevteamawesome.pdf are the same document, because the first page is an invoice, and the second a threat to take you to court if you don't pay. (This then exists six times, three times for each type, but with the magic of hard links only takes up the space of 1.001 documents.)
With the OCRed text being saved with the PDF scan, you can also run text searches with in your files to find specific information (such as bill amount, seriously, how often would you use that information?)
This allows you maximum flexibility, and prevents you from being locked into a particular piece of software (as you can do everything manually). Moreover, once you've got it setup, it's easy to run with each new document. Steps would be: 1) Scan and OCR doc, saving the PDF into the staging area folder. 2) Run your script, which asks for the date, project, org name, doc type. 3) The script then saves the document in the appropriate folders, generating links as required. 4) Profit!
Wiredlogic offered some advice on turning off third-party cookies. I'll go one step further and suggest you install CookieMonster (or another cookie manager addon), NoScript, and RequestPolicy, and block almost all tracking by default. OK, so RequestPolicy isn't the easiest addon to use, and a lot of sites are hosted at WordPress.com but have their own domains, so you still have to whitelist the WP.com CDNs a lot, but still.
As well, learn to use and browse with different profiles. It's not as convenient, but it sure does cut down on the tracking.
It's fucking annoying isn't it. I leave Firefox open for, well, until I have to restart it due to updates. I have a modern computer, running a modern OS, and the only time I restart my computer is for kernel updates. But, I still have to restart Firefox every few weeks because they insist on making a new version.
I used to think that the people complaining about Firefox switching to a Chrome-like quick update were just complaining for the sake of it. Now I can see a major disadvantage to it.
Hey, I sell a beer called "Extra Large T-Shirt", and I'll have you know, the name is protected by trademark law. No other company can legally sell a beer called "Extra Large T-Shirt" in my geographical region. In fact, I sell a variety of beers with the "T-Shirt" mark, "Extra Large" just being one. "Large", "Medium" and "Small" are the others. The alcohol content goes from 12% for the XL, 9% for the L, 6% for the M and 3% for the S.
I ran a backup to my local external HD yesterday, and today decided to do it again, this time with all my music and moving pictures. I'm also investigating how to use Duplicity on its own to backup my personal material to online places (such as Ubuntu One).
Unfortunately the Deja Dup developers decided that profiles or similar, where you could define different types of backups, where too complicated for the program. I mean, they said it would complicate the program too much for end users.
Ideally I want to backup everything to my external HD. I also want to backup my material (stuff I created) to Ubuntu One etc. It's a lot easier to replace music than it is to replace a six thousand word essay on the future of/. (rocks fall; everyone dies).
It just works, except that you have to fiddle with text files to turn caps lock into another ctrl, and the keyboard switcher doesn't quite work as well, and there's no obvious way to indicate that you've been working for an hour and need to take a break (OK, in Gnome 3 there isn't either, but the software was easy to find, because it's just a fork of the Gnome 2 software).
All in all, I've tried Xfce, and I keep switching back to Gnome 3. Xfce isn't as good as Gnome 2 was, and isn't as good as Gnome 3 with enough extensions. I would still prefer Gnome 2 with some of the fancy effects from Gnome 3, but I'll take Gnome 3 with extensions over Xfce.
Who gets.mcdonalds? Who gets.burgerking ("The burgers are better at Hungry Jack's")
And I could repeat trademarks that apply in different geographical areas, and in different business areas. I sell computer services under the name Coca Cola, does that mean I can prevent a global beverage company from squatting on.cocacola?
In other words, as previously mentioned, this whole this is a scam.
"The whole point of having a national capital is to encourage your representatives to take a wider view of things." I thought the whole point was to have a single point where all the reps (or whoever) could go and meet each other. Because, you know, most of human history has been without the sorts of ICT that makes telecommuting possible. How's a legislature supposed to operate without everyone in one place? Well, the answer, now, but not for most of the existence of legislatures, is ICT.
Also, because a representative is supposed to represent a certain area, having them in that area, and susceptible to lobbying from organizations in that area, is far better than having them in the capital and susceptible to lobbying from national organizations who aim to create bad laws (for the rest of us). Would the DMCA have passed if there were "content" cartel lobbyists in Washington easily able to access all the reps?
I've done it enough to know that it can be done well. Just sink enough money into it. And you'll still save money on airfares, private jets, 2nd houses, etc.
And not only parliaments and similar, but also the various international gatherings, like the G20, APEC, and similar. Think of all the money that is spent on security at these big international conferences, protecting some of the scum (floats to the top) from the protesters. You could spend that money upgrading telecommunication links, invest in some really good videoconferencing stuff, and go.
And it would work just as well for parliaments and congresses. The same argument for upgrading telecommunications links, which should go down well in rural areas. It would reduce the number of fist fights (one of the few downsides), get rid of heckling (the speaker can simply refuse to let a person's microphone be live) and so on. It would save a silly amount of money on airfares, 2nd houses etc. It would also reduce the amount of influence lobbyists have, as they can't just spend a day going and seeing six different people (30 in a week). They would actually have to fly or otherwise travel to each home district.
Now, someone is thinking, but the real business gets done in the corridors, not in the actual meetings. And? All those lackeys can just get on the phone and talk to each other that way. It might even reduce the number of laws passed!
Really I can't think of a major downside (OK, it does make it harder to bomb them all and thus wipe them all out at once).
Here's the thing, encryption and backups are two separate things. I once didn't encrypt, nor did I backup. I then accidentally deleted some very important things. Whoops. I then started backing up (and taking greater care with the command line). I then got paranoid and started encrypting stuff using the built in encrypting stuff that comes with Ubuntu (and Debian and similar). Backups were still going to an unencrypted external HD though. So then I started using the built in encryption thing for that too.
And then I started using DejaDup (GUI front end to Duplicity) instead of my home rolled rsync based script. And it does backups the correct way.
So, my suggestions: 1) Use a Linux based OS, such as Ubuntu. Encryption comes free. If you have some stuff that needs M$ Windoze you can run it in a VM. 2) Forget about your OS and programs. Your data is number 1! 3) Don't backup huge encrypted containers. Mount them, and then backup the contents (to another encrypted location).
With regard the second one (visa and fee), I suggest asking for a receipt. With the third one (taxi), just walk away, find another taxi. With the fourth one (machete), just walk away; the person will probably call you back. You might not get the $40 price (white man tax) but you should be able to get it down to $60 or so.
OK, I can't speak for Ghana, but I think that just walking away is a good option in almost any case like the ones you mentioned (where you have other options anyway, which is obviously not the case with the govt.).
With regards actual bribery to government officials, I don't have much advice.
Assuming by "hookers" you mean "prostitutes", then you don't buy them. Just like you don't sell your body when you go to work, neither do prostitutes. Prostitutes sell a service, just like hair dressers and masseurs do. So, really, you should say that the person should buy, not "hookers", but rather "the services of hookers".
Moreover, you could probably get free sex with a million dollars, even if you are 68.
This is obviously the first step to being able to upload. First it will be fish (e.g. lobsters), then kittens, and sooner or later, humans. But we should make sure we get the ethics and legal aspects sorted out first, I wouldn't want to die, and then wake up a slave to someone else.
A bright new trans and/or post human future awaits us!
Ideals like, it's ok to make treaties with other nations and then break them. It's ok to invade and steal someone else's land. It's ok to have colonies and empire, so long as you don't call them that. It's ok for big business to hire thugs to shoot workers who just want a fair deal.
Slashdot Mirror
The republicans are a financially conservative party that wants to interfere with your personal life
The democrats are a financially conservative party that doesn't want to interfere with your personal life
America doesn't have a financially liberal party
Er. fiscal conservative = "One who favors a balanced budget, prefering spending cuts or tax increases to borrowing, and wants to decrease government size, and promote a free market."
Liberal = "Generous, willing to give unsparingly" (etc.) E.g. don't sprinkle salt on your food so liberally.
So, both major parties in the USA are very liberal in how they spend other people's money (they just have different priorities). Also, both of them want to interfere in your personal life. E.g. the Dems don't want you to use drugs, and the Repubs don't want you to have an abortion (or use drugs). Both parties are also on the right-wing (e.g. strong supporters of corporatism).
I think what you meant to write was "America doesn't have a financially conservative party".
Newtown? I think you mean Port Arthur. Maybe you thought Newtown (there are three or four or so places with that name in Australia according to Wikipedia) because the killer was from New Town (note the space), Hobart.
Also, the level of gun violence in Australia is still about the same level it was. Mostly confined to "criminal bikie gangs" ("outlaw motorcycle gangs").
Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Australia says:
"Firearm laws in Tasmania and Queensland remained relatively relaxed for longarms. In 1995, Tasmania had the second lowest rate of homicides per head of population."
Etc.
In other words, I think that you are not correct.
Maybe instead of a strong federal government the better idea is a weak federal government, and weak corporations? Bring about an end to the era of strong corporations. Break them up. Forbid them to own property in more than five states. Forbid them to operate in more than five states. Forbid them from colluding, and actually enforce competition laws. Forbid foreign companies from operating more than three subsidiaries in the country. Enforce the law.
And the states are now powerful enough to fuck with the corporations, and you don't have a strong federal government that is fucking with everyone.
RequestPolicy will block all third party requests by default, which will block the cookies that come with it. (They do allow, by default, links between a site and it's CDN domain though.)
Why do anon cowards make these demands but then provide no method of means of complying? Maybe if you provided a location and a method of contacting you, I could comply. But simply demanding something in the fashion you have is just silly.
You should write it something like:
Then, assuming I could make it to Washington DC, I could, if I was interested, come around and knock on your door. If I liked your looks, and you didn't smell, and your place was not to messy, and you offered me a decent drink, etc., I might well, "shut up and suck your dick". But you know, just making random demands on the Internet isn't enough. You've got to put effort into it.
I'm going off topic here, but I want to make a complaint. /. has gone down hill since being bought by Dice. In the old days /. would make it clear if there was some relationship between /. a site it linked to (e.g. "Slashdot and SourceForge are both part of OSDN"). However, now this doesn't happen any more. And it should. Not only that, if a submitter is related to Dice or to /., it should be made clear. And if you are only linking to an article on /. (e.g. in the ridiculous BI or SlashCloud sections) it should also be made clear.
Now mod me down (I shall become more powerful than you can imagine).
OK, let's be honest. I like Bitcoin. But I think that Namecoin is a bloody stupid idea. Instead, why not go with a distributed web of trust type system? At the moment most people just trust the root servers. Well, that's a mistake.
Simplified example of how it might work like:
I trust John and Mary each 100%, if they say that domain example.com belongs to Tim, I believe them. John though, has tendency to trust people I think are a bit sketchy, so anyone he trusts is only going to get 25% from me. That means that at least four of his friends need to agree for me to believe that domain example.org belongs to Jane. However, Mary's alright. Her friends get 50% trust from me. So one of Mary's friends, and two of John's is enough, or just two of Mary's.
Because I don't trust John's friends much, any of their friends are basically going to get a 5% trust rating. However, Mary's friend's friends will get a 15% rating.
Then, we look at it. So, for example.org, we have three of John's friends say it belongs to Jack. And two of Mary's friends say it belongs to Jill. Funny thing, I'm going to think it belongs to Jill.
The system could be like Convergence for TSL/SSL proposed by Moxie Marlinspike, or like the OpenPGP WOT, or a combination. The point is, you choose who to trust. And being distributed it can't be attacked like the current "trust the root" system.
The only flaw is to decided who gets to allocate names. I'm sure that can be worked out.
You do realize that PDF can store the OCRed text along side (or above? it's another layer) the original scanned text.
Also, because the reference software of DJVU is GPLed, it's never going to see widespread commercial use (as all the big software companies only want to take and take).
A standard subset of PDF (e.g. PDF/A) is a much better option, and if you're worried about the amount of file space taken up, you can always use GZIP or ZIP.
I should note, you need to be careful to make sure you use the same spelling and wording for each org and doc type. You don't want to end up with Murphies, Murphy's, Murphy's Inc., Murphpy's Beer Company Inc. etc., each with invoice, inv., invoise and envoice.
It would be better if your script forced you to pick a doc type, and showed a list of already existing companies.
This applies no matter what solution you end up running with.
Also, for documents that cover a period, you have multiple options. The first is to give 00 as the day and month (e.g. 2012-12-00), and the second 01 as the start (e.g. 2012-12-01). Another is to have two dates (2012-12-01-to-2013-01-01) in place of the yyyy-mm-dd suggested in my first post. Also, don't even think of having the dates in any other order than year, month, day.
Some places have a working year (e.g. a tax year) that crosses two calendar years. In that case, you should be careful about where you put documents. Because if you put them in the first year, and then go "OK, it's been 7 years, and I no longer need any docs from 2005", you'll be burnt. A solution is to hardlink them into both years.
Do post back when you have a solution!
My suggestion would be to just scan and OCR your files, and then store them in your file system.
Hierarchy might be something like: ~/scans/year/project/sorted
Within each sorted subdir, you'd have three folders. Date, organizationThatGeneratedTheDoc and TypeOfDoc.
So in the folder ~/scans/year/project/sorted/org
The file names would be something like: organizationThatGeneratedTheDoc-yyyy-mm-dd-TypeOfDoc.pdf
In the folder ~/scans/year/project/sorted/TypeOfDoc
The file names would be like: TypeOfDoc-yyyy-mm-dd-organizationThatGeneratedTheDoc.pdf
Etc.
You'd use links (symlinks or hard links) to make sure that each document is accessible in more than one place. (You can also use links to put documents in more than one project folder.)
Types of documents would be things like invoices, receipts, legal threats, court orders etc. In the event that a document has more than one type, or more than one organization, you simply have more links. So invoice-2013-04-07-webdevteamawesome.pdf and legalthreat-2013-04-07-webdevteamawesome.pdf are the same document, because the first page is an invoice, and the second a threat to take you to court if you don't pay. (This then exists six times, three times for each type, but with the magic of hard links only takes up the space of 1.001 documents.)
With the OCRed text being saved with the PDF scan, you can also run text searches with in your files to find specific information (such as bill amount, seriously, how often would you use that information?)
This allows you maximum flexibility, and prevents you from being locked into a particular piece of software (as you can do everything manually). Moreover, once you've got it setup, it's easy to run with each new document.
Steps would be:
1) Scan and OCR doc, saving the PDF into the staging area folder.
2) Run your script, which asks for the date, project, org name, doc type.
3) The script then saves the document in the appropriate folders, generating links as required.
4) Profit!
Wiredlogic offered some advice on turning off third-party cookies. I'll go one step further and suggest you install CookieMonster (or another cookie manager addon), NoScript, and RequestPolicy, and block almost all tracking by default. OK, so RequestPolicy isn't the easiest addon to use, and a lot of sites are hosted at WordPress.com but have their own domains, so you still have to whitelist the WP.com CDNs a lot, but still.
As well, learn to use and browse with different profiles. It's not as convenient, but it sure does cut down on the tracking.
It's fucking annoying isn't it. I leave Firefox open for, well, until I have to restart it due to updates. I have a modern computer, running a modern OS, and the only time I restart my computer is for kernel updates. But, I still have to restart Firefox every few weeks because they insist on making a new version.
I used to think that the people complaining about Firefox switching to a Chrome-like quick update were just complaining for the sake of it. Now I can see a major disadvantage to it.
Hey, I sell a beer called "Extra Large T-Shirt", and I'll have you know, the name is protected by trademark law. No other company can legally sell a beer called "Extra Large T-Shirt" in my geographical region. In fact, I sell a variety of beers with the "T-Shirt" mark, "Extra Large" just being one. "Large", "Medium" and "Small" are the others. The alcohol content goes from 12% for the XL, 9% for the L, 6% for the M and 3% for the S.
I ran a backup to my local external HD yesterday, and today decided to do it again, this time with all my music and moving pictures. I'm also investigating how to use Duplicity on its own to backup my personal material to online places (such as Ubuntu One).
Unfortunately the Deja Dup developers decided that profiles or similar, where you could define different types of backups, where too complicated for the program. I mean, they said it would complicate the program too much for end users.
Ideally I want to backup everything to my external HD. I also want to backup my material (stuff I created) to Ubuntu One etc. It's a lot easier to replace music than it is to replace a six thousand word essay on the future of /. (rocks fall; everyone dies).
Duplicity duplicity.nongnu.org/ is backup done correctly. That is, encrypted, hopefully off-site, and hopefully regularly.
It just works, except that you have to fiddle with text files to turn caps lock into another ctrl, and the keyboard switcher doesn't quite work as well, and there's no obvious way to indicate that you've been working for an hour and need to take a break (OK, in Gnome 3 there isn't either, but the software was easy to find, because it's just a fork of the Gnome 2 software).
All in all, I've tried Xfce, and I keep switching back to Gnome 3. Xfce isn't as good as Gnome 2 was, and isn't as good as Gnome 3 with enough extensions. I would still prefer Gnome 2 with some of the fancy effects from Gnome 3, but I'll take Gnome 3 with extensions over Xfce.
You may now commence burning the heretic.
Who gets .mcdonalds? Who gets .burgerking ("The burgers are better at Hungry Jack's")
And I could repeat trademarks that apply in different geographical areas, and in different business areas. I sell computer services under the name Coca Cola, does that mean I can prevent a global beverage company from squatting on .cocacola?
In other words, as previously mentioned, this whole this is a scam.
"The whole point of having a national capital is to encourage your representatives to take a wider view of things."
I thought the whole point was to have a single point where all the reps (or whoever) could go and meet each other. Because, you know, most of human history has been without the sorts of ICT that makes telecommuting possible.
How's a legislature supposed to operate without everyone in one place? Well, the answer, now, but not for most of the existence of legislatures, is ICT.
Also, because a representative is supposed to represent a certain area, having them in that area, and susceptible to lobbying from organizations in that area, is far better than having them in the capital and susceptible to lobbying from national organizations who aim to create bad laws (for the rest of us). Would the DMCA have passed if there were "content" cartel lobbyists in Washington easily able to access all the reps?
I've done it enough to know that it can be done well. Just sink enough money into it. And you'll still save money on airfares, private jets, 2nd houses, etc.
And not only parliaments and similar, but also the various international gatherings, like the G20, APEC, and similar. Think of all the money that is spent on security at these big international conferences, protecting some of the scum (floats to the top) from the protesters. You could spend that money upgrading telecommunication links, invest in some really good videoconferencing stuff, and go.
And it would work just as well for parliaments and congresses. The same argument for upgrading telecommunications links, which should go down well in rural areas. It would reduce the number of fist fights (one of the few downsides), get rid of heckling (the speaker can simply refuse to let a person's microphone be live) and so on. It would save a silly amount of money on airfares, 2nd houses etc. It would also reduce the amount of influence lobbyists have, as they can't just spend a day going and seeing six different people (30 in a week). They would actually have to fly or otherwise travel to each home district.
Now, someone is thinking, but the real business gets done in the corridors, not in the actual meetings. And? All those lackeys can just get on the phone and talk to each other that way. It might even reduce the number of laws passed!
Really I can't think of a major downside (OK, it does make it harder to bomb them all and thus wipe them all out at once).
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=22890&cid=2463249
See my journal for +4 redundant and offtopic links as well.
Here's the thing, encryption and backups are two separate things. I once didn't encrypt, nor did I backup. I then accidentally deleted some very important things. Whoops. I then started backing up (and taking greater care with the command line). I then got paranoid and started encrypting stuff using the built in encrypting stuff that comes with Ubuntu (and Debian and similar). Backups were still going to an unencrypted external HD though. So then I started using the built in encryption thing for that too.
And then I started using DejaDup (GUI front end to Duplicity) instead of my home rolled rsync based script. And it does backups the correct way.
So, my suggestions:
1) Use a Linux based OS, such as Ubuntu. Encryption comes free. If you have some stuff that needs M$ Windoze you can run it in a VM.
2) Forget about your OS and programs. Your data is number 1!
3) Don't backup huge encrypted containers. Mount them, and then backup the contents (to another encrypted location).
With regard the second one (visa and fee), I suggest asking for a receipt.
With the third one (taxi), just walk away, find another taxi.
With the fourth one (machete), just walk away; the person will probably call you back. You might not get the $40 price (white man tax) but you should be able to get it down to $60 or so.
OK, I can't speak for Ghana, but I think that just walking away is a good option in almost any case like the ones you mentioned (where you have other options anyway, which is obviously not the case with the govt.).
With regards actual bribery to government officials, I don't have much advice.
Assuming by "hookers" you mean "prostitutes", then you don't buy them. Just like you don't sell your body when you go to work, neither do prostitutes. Prostitutes sell a service, just like hair dressers and masseurs do. So, really, you should say that the person should buy, not "hookers", but rather "the services of hookers".
Moreover, you could probably get free sex with a million dollars, even if you are 68.
This is obviously the first step to being able to upload. First it will be fish (e.g. lobsters), then kittens, and sooner or later, humans. But we should make sure we get the ethics and legal aspects sorted out first, I wouldn't want to die, and then wake up a slave to someone else.
A bright new trans and/or post human future awaits us!
Ideals like, it's ok to make treaties with other nations and then break them. It's ok to invade and steal someone else's land. It's ok to have colonies and empire, so long as you don't call them that. It's ok for big business to hire thugs to shoot workers who just want a fair deal.
Yeah, the USA is exceptional alright.