No, IMHO this is dramatically useful. I want this, and like many other people I'm sure, I've wanted something like it for as long as I've done anything related to computers, and specifically I've wanted an e-ink kind of solution ever since that became a technology available for manufacturing.
Imagine a user learning vi for the first time? Press escape..and the keys are instantly re-labelled.
Imagine any other tool of any type that you're starting to learn to use, or a tool you've used for a long time but with specific key combinations you haven't used for a while--you can see notes right on the keys and beside the keys instead of looking at documentation elsewhere, with keys changing as you press modifiers.
Put together your own system keyboard shortcuts? They get labelled, too.
Think of the top of the magic mouse being a display that changes around if you wanted to go into some odd mode (granted that's a less Apple-ish thing to do), or a touchpad that does the same.
And that's just the very beginning of possibilities.
This is something that will be dramatically useful. Just as with copying, Apple is very good at taking something that people have been desperately wanting for for decades and being the first to throw enough money that hardware manufacturers are finally willing to build it. It's not a question of creating a new solution by any means, it's simply convincing other people to manufacture what until then it's been hopeless to get anyone to manufacture.
(I remember being excited about some touchscreens back in the 1980's, talking with a friend about how cool multi-touch type interfaces could be, describing things that are commonly done today--my friend informed me of the sad reality that no matter how awesome (multi-touch) user interfaces would be, that it simply would not be possible to have or even to build until some preexisting large company decided to spend millions to actually build hardware that would support it--that it didn't matter how many people wanted similar things or were wanting to buy similar things or even make similar things, that they'd not be able to get anyone to manufacture it until some company could place an order for tens of millions of "new" devices. Then and only then would we be able to create things ourselves like this as the little guy, or even as a person or company engineer something similar and be able to afford to pay any manufacturer to build it--that we were basically screwed until a HUGE company made that first big purchase. It's the same thing with this sort of keyboard--once Apple makes it, others will finally be willing to make it, and we'll finally be able to have what a lot of us have wanted for decades, and it will be possible for other companies who've previously engineered the same things to be able to afford to have it manufactured. It's not that it's anything at all novel, it's just the financial reality.)
You're not purchasing it. You're licensing it. Hopefully you can find someone to sell it to you (not license it to you) at a price you and they can agree on. Note the difference in verbiage. That's essential and important to understand.
The US Supreme Court already heard a case where a publisher made that same claim, with the publisher even putting a note in the front of their book saying that it was licensed and not sold. The US Supreme court ruled that that claim was invalid, and the the book *was* sold, with the purchaser being able to do what he wanted with it, hence the "First Sale Doctrine" that we have today, (afterwards codified into US copyright law.)
I don't see where there's any difference when the book is printed using a new and improved paper that will last longer, or if it's a magazine that's being sold, or if it's an electronic document.
I see a claim by publishers saying that we can't resell electronic documents the same way I see claims by printer manufacturers that their printers work best with paper made by the same manufacturer--complete marketing nonsense (read lies) designed to fool us into over-purchases of their products.
First, the paper ballot should also list all the candidates the voter did *not* choose, so that a later recount can see if there were choices left off, which is something that should invalidate the election.
Secondly, neither the voting machine nor the verification/scanner machines should store any results. The only thing that should store the cumulative results during the day should be the ballot box itself, ie, the box that holds the voter-validated ballots.
I'm fine with a ballot box setup that causes incoming ballots to be permanently tied/secured together, and I'm fine with the ballot box doing electronic counting, and being used to generate an end-of-day printed tally that can be attached to the secured ballots.
In this way every step of the process is human auditable: A person can print out twenty different ballots, validate twenty different ballots, (verifying that the machine readable portion corresponds to the human-readable text), then throw away 19 of the 20 and put the one they really wanted in the ballot box. In any recount, a person can manually tally the paper votes and verify that it matches the printed tally per filled ballot box, and poll watchers can watch the number of ballot boxes, making sure none are switched out during the day, and getting a copy of tally printouts for each ballot box so they can each see that the same set of ballot box tally's for their precinct match the tally's reported centrally.
The same validation machines and ballot boxes can be used for any set of elections, without any reprogramming, and the hardware is all interchangeable, individually testable, and verifiable. There is no need to trust that supposedly audited code matches the code that is actually running in the machines. The only machines that need an updated data file for each election are the machines that print out the potential ballots themselves, but everything related to their fundamental purpose of displaying choices and printing ballots can be independently verified.
Please explain this concept of millionaires taking capital out of the economy; specifically, how does their further wealth growth affect me negatively? (On average, in the more general case, and not the outlier case, and please assume they're not buying laws, paying hit men, engaging in crony capitalism, etc.) I ask because I'm perfectly happy for their wealth to continue to grow.
Thank you. You are a wonderful person for being able to alter your stance on the basis of new evidence. It's easier to say but sometimes harder to do. Thanks again.
The Iowa caucus process has a caucus vote before the actual caucusing. Sadly, a lot of people go home after the vote but before the caucusing starts. Also sadly, the media lazily reports on and misleads the public into thinking that the initial caucus vote is relevant in the process.
Two things happen, one after the other: First there is a caucus vote. But it's only after that vote that the caucusing itself starts, which selects delegates to go to district and state conventions where the national delegates get selected. It's who those delegates support and who they vote for at the national convention that counts. The caucus vote doesn't make any difference to that process.
Again, the selection of the national delegates, and who they vote for, has *nothing* to do with the caucus votes that are reported on in TFA--those caucus votes are as much of a straw poll as the Iowa straw poll is, and sadly enough many people are taken in by that.
If the caucus-goers vote in that caucus vote that they are supporters of candidate A, but then vote for delegates who are supporters of candidate B, then it's candidate B that they're truly giving support to, (as those delegates will then vote for national delegates who are supporters of candidate B.)
The winner of the Iowa caucus process is the candidate who gets the most delegates supporting them, not the candidate who ended up winning the "caucus vote" poll that was done before caucusing started.
Confusing the two things is conceptually no different than a person telling a telephone pollster that they are voting for candidate A but then later in the ballot box actually voting for candidate B. It is also no different conceptually from the media continuing to report on poll numbers after an election and neglecting to report on the actual election numbers.
Winning means actually getting delegates. You can call winning a poll that has no effect on anything winning if you want, but it's a pointless use of the term.
This is a so-called solution that ignores the realities of the political process.
For one, in 2012, Ron Paul won Iowa, not Mitt Romney and not Rick Santorum.
The counted poll the article refers to is a just a straw poll, nothing more--the caucus itself, which happens afterwards, is what controls the selection of delegates. Folks who just voted in the straw poll and left before the caucus started didn't actually participate in caucusing for their candidate.
Sadly, the media reports these polls as if they were election/caucus results, and in 2012 mislead the public into thinking that Ron Paul, who was the winner in Iowa, somehow had no support even though he won Iowa.
Microsoft is now focusing on this irrelevant straw poll that doesn't represent the actual caucus results. But more importantly, even ignoring the fact that this straw poll doesn't actually have any real-world effect other than being useful as a way to mislead the public, listening to the video didn't answer any real questions about how their solution would really help even that process.
For instance, they talk about how the voting data (and they're talking about precinct and district level results for the unimportant straw polls), wouldn't be viewable to people in another political party. Well, if that's the case, how does anyone who participated in the straw poll verify that the totals were reported correctly? If that data is secret, then this is clearly a step in the wrong direction.
Then happens if there is a difference between the Microsoft-reported results and the paper mail reported results? If the mailed results take precedence, (which is ideal), then we're still back where we started--a correction to the straw poll is made weeks later. If the electronic results take precedence, then suddenly Microsoft is in control of the election.
I doubt they've put together a system that can be externally verified even in the presence of skilled bad actors at all levels. (ie, any vote counting system for political elections should be resilient against an attack of, say, all the designers, app store folks, and everyone at Microsoft related to the project working either individually or colluding together to give votes to a favored candidate. With a properly designed system, every single one of those people could be as nefarious as possible and vote rigging would still be detected.)
And..they talk about the "chair" being given credentials to report votes for his precinct/district, as if that has anything at all to do with the credentialing problem. So..how is that done specifically? Is Microsoft psychic? The chair isn't determined until a convention or a precinct begins--it's something that's voted on at the time.
So what happens if a different person is elected chair than the state party expects ahead of time? The vote totals for the straw poll are publicly known. A change of having those vote totals relayed via secure credentials given to a person the state party selects ahead of time (and who may or may not end up being the chair) and who may have a hidden agenda shared by the state party, isn't really a clear improvement over the same person relaying the very same, public information through a less secure channel and more error-prone channel.
In both cases we're completely dependent on there being external verifications of the process and in both cases we're screwed if those verifications don't happen.
So while it sounds all nice and shiny and such, and it will be nice that Microsoft is GPL'ing all the code to do this so that it can be adapted and used in any other project, (yes, I realize that isn't likely to be true--it will have either a proprietary license, or they'll try to pretend it is open-ish somehow), I don't see how it fundamentally solves any serious issue.
If you're in Tampa or St. Petersburg, FL, or really anywhere in Florida, the term "bay area" means the area around Tampa Bay. It's the common usage of the term--you have a bay in your state, and you know that's the area "bay area" refers to.
It is a pet peeve of mine that people mistakenly/rudely use the term as if it can only refer to one specific bay area in the world, instead of saying "SF Bay Area" in a headline, for instance. No matter how popular such incorrect and rude word usage is, using the general term as if it has global specificity is just annoying hubris.
Yes, and telephone lines and TV cable existed before the internet and will continue if streaming the internet were to disapear.
True, but they're increasingly carried over IP.
With this tax, cell phone users can end up being taxed for voice conversations, and definitely will be taxed for any voice calls over LTE. Even landline users could end up being taxed.
With this tax, anyone watching any video-on-demand shows on their cable TV setup can end up taxed just as much as if they watched on something like Netflix.
With this tax, even the Hungarian government's public TV station MTV (Magyar Televízió) will have to pay additional taxes due to the fact that they offer streaming.
I wonder if the Hungarian government has budgeted for the additional tax that its public TV station will now have to pay?
The Doctor needs an Optic Screwdriver now. (Or is this optical functionality already integrated into his current tool, accessible by a different setting, like a Harmony remote that automatically switches the right units on and off and set to the correct configuration?)
The idea behind the Open Patent License is for owners of patents (and non-patent IP that still ends up behaving like patents from a practical real-world extent--amazing how that actually happens) to be able to license them in a copyleft-type manner, ideally handling more than just the software patent situation.
The goal is for all players to be able to participate in a growing patent pool and have open and free access to this pool under copyleft-type conditions, whether they're small players or larger players.
Don't be thrown by the badly-worded license--I had it as a starting-point for discussion/work, getting ideas out there, and ended up having a few lawyers come out of the woodwork, offer to help, then realize it was a bigger project than they had expected. After a number of rounds of that I ended up putting the project on the back burner, as you can see. I need to get it more active again. Anyone who is interested in contributing in any sense, please contact me.
Also, I've since realized that a far, FAR, shorter license probably makes sense. A structure of something similar to Google's license from their CLA for instance, or Redhat's patent promise, made a bit more generic and made to cover patent-like IP, is probably a better idea, and I am planning to re-start the license wording along those lines.
I will happily accept help from anyone who is interested.
You could have a totally free market, in which independent organizations certify particular restaurants as "safe", but then the customers would have to constantly be checking those certifications.
In the US state where I live, that's what we have with government regulations, and I suspect that's what we would privately develop without them.
It's not at all a big deal, and it's actually pretty cool.
Health inspectors come at random times to each restaurant, and the restaurants are required to PUBLICLY POST THEIR REPORTS in the restaurant itself.
The result is that people read these reports, really! Folks shy away from going to restaurants with lower scores, and the fact that a place has a high score is something that will invariably come up in conversations. It's not some goofy thing that only a few people do, it's something that people notice and then talk about if the score is particularly high or low.
(Just a few days ago I went back to a place for the first time in a year since they got a bad score--82, a score which of course included written notes on all the problems found. Now their score is 100, which is really unusual, and I won't be hesitant to go back for cleanliness reasons. These scores make a real difference in people's behavior.)
I know that in some US states that these reports aren't published the same way, so people can't make decisions on whether to eat somewhere based on the problems found in the previous inspection.
Given that the existence of government testing will in practical terms preclude the development of private testing in most areas, if you don't have real-world transparency in the testing process that the state government provides/enforces, then people will just become used to the fact that the information isn't there, and possibly just assume that it's too much information for individuals to keep up with or even pay attention to anyway.
But if you're used to seeing these results, it's a natural thing to look for the posted health report. It's as natural a thing as to look for as credit card logos, or noting whether this is a place where you pay your bill at a cashier up front versus paying at the table. You really just do it and don't think much of it.
Well, unless you're writing a reply to a slashdot comment.:-)
For a different industry, look at the history of Underwriter's Laboratories. Before their existence, there were neither private nor governmental regulations on the safety of electrical devices. Since unsafe devices were being sold and causing homes and businesses to burn, insurance companies that bore the brunt of the financial side of the resulting losses got together to make their own private testing agency, and arranged their policies to encourage the use of only UL-tested and certified electrical devices.
The market was allowed to work in that case, in that it was allowed to develop private certification agencies that people and companies do pay attention to. While technically it's possible to buy and sell non-UL tested devices even today, for the most part you'll not find them in stores as stores won't sell them as a mass-market item at all, and if you did buy such a product you'd have insurance problems if/when they caused a fire, and you'd probably have liability problems if you actually used them in a business.
You'd pretty much have to go out of your way to purchase something like this today, meaning that you'd be doing so only if you had a real reason to, (maybe you're stripping the device for parts, or comparing something between multiple devices of the same type, working on things in your own electronics lab and the like.)
In any event, government fortunately happened not to try to develop it's own system of electronic safety certification that would preempt the development of private certification, so we have a working private system that can pay attention to the actual real safety issues, and get less bogge
Ah, documentation. On linux, most entries in the online reference manual (`man pages') send you off to *censored* info requiring a *censored* "info viewer" that expects you to know emacs and two to one will give you the manpage again only this time you need *censored* emacs contortions to get out of dodge.
Use "pinfo" to read info pages: apt-get install pinfo
pinfo is the opposite of "info" in almost every respect:
It's simple to use. No contortions necessary. (Use arrow keys and "q").
Color highlighting makes the info pages easy on the eyes.
Arrow-up and arrow-down moves you between highlighted and very visible info-hyperlinks within the document, without the need to visually hunt for special "::"-delimited links.
And as a bonus, you can use it to read man pages too:
If there's no info page, it will show you the man page instead.
If you want to read a specific man page when there is already an info page, use syntax such as "pinfo -m 2 mount" versus "pinfo -m 8 mount" to read the section 2 versus section 8 man page. (This is nice if you want to pretend you're in lynx and select one man page from within another, or select a web page from within a man page.)
As a real simple first blush at a solution, you take the credit card data from the customer, send it straight to visa, signed with your key, and get back a value that you store and then authorize against. It's tied to your key so only you can use it, and it probably expires soon. It probably also allows you to do credits for a longer period of time than you can do debits to handle returns. And you never write the credit card number to disk.
A Web 2.0 thing would probably have the client retrieving the key straight from Visa with a request signed by the merchant so the merchant doesn't see the credit card data ever.
I asked for the very same thing of a processing gateway company a few years ago, right when I was first investigating getting a merchant account and an account at a gateway processor. I asked them if they were thinking of anything along those lines, and suggested it as a feature if not. (This is a gateway that accepts batch transactions via xml posts and responses, or individual post/get requests, has great documentation and tech support, and would be just the perfect place to try to be the first to offer a basic feature like this.)
With all their features and programmatic convenience they offered, I figured that this would be something that could be a real selling point for them, (and a convenience for me.)
While the guy I spoke with (programming support guy) thought it would be a useful feature, I was told that it just wasn't something that was really in demand, and they didn't have any plans for something like this.
(!)
(Well, if someone offered it, I can't see why it wouldn't be in demand, and a gateway processor would be able to offer this as a feature whether visa/mc/amex/dc/... did or not. As long as you *could* get the data back with human intervention, ie, no vendor lock-in, it would be a definite win for customers with any sense of security issues.)
So I was amazed that this wasn't something that had been out there from day one and amazed that folks weren't simply clamoring for left and right. I'm even more amazed that this service is *still* as far as I know, not offered by any gateway provider. (I would have bet money that it would be a standard feature by now.)
And the worst part is that all the while visa has continued their poorly thought-out campaign of requirements that if followed to the letter effectively forces merchants to open security holes in their systems.
The problem is that most anti-spam filtering systems also block an unknown (and unknowable) amount of email.
That IMHO would represent a serious misconfiguration of an email filtering system.
When a mailserver receives an incoming message attempt, it should accept the mail for delivery or reject it. If it accepts it for delivery and then later decides not to deliver the message, it should bounce the mail. (*)
IMHO, it is in no case acceptable for the incoming mailserver to claim that it's accepting an email for delivery, and then just silently drop the message.
(That's like a company mailroom signing for a package on your behalf, then throwing the package away without telling anyone. Saying that "email" is unreliable is like saying that "FedEx" is unreliable because some mail rooms throw away FedEx packages after signing for them.)
Anyone whose ISP or corporate mailserver is doing that should IMHO complain to their ISP or their IT department. At the very least, instead of saying things like "email is unreliable", folks should in that situation say the truth using statements such as "our corporate email system is unreliable."
This situation has been brought on by both spammers and vigilante anti-spammers.
Or moreso by confused admins who don't comprehend the importance of safely rejecting emails so that legitimate senders will know there was a problem.
(*) Of course, nowadays it's a good idea to do these sorts of anti-spam or anti-forgery tests during the SMTP connection if at all possible, so that you don't contribute to bounce-spam.
SenderID is an extension of SPF, which is not proprietary.
The proprietary (purportedly patent-encumbered) SenderID abuses non-proproprietary SPF records, meaning that SenderID is an extension to SPF in the abusive "embrace, extend, and extinguish" sense.
A valid SPF record will be picked up by any conforming SenderID processor as a SenderID record.
I would word that as: "Conforming MS-senderid processes will not only misinterpret valid SPF records, but they will use those misinterpreted results in an invalid context, to provide you with inaccurate, useless, and effectively dishonest results."
The reasoning here is that MS's sender ID uses spf records, but those two types of records are not compatible:
There are differences in syntax between the spf record format and the ms-senderid record format. You can't parse one record using the syntax of another, but MS pretends that you can.
There are differences in meaning between the two records. You can't use a test meant to answer whether a specific localpart and domain is permitted by the domain holder for use in MAIL FROM and HELO arguments and go from there to assume anything about whether the same thing is true for PRA arguments. MS pretends that you can do so, but if you do, you'll get wrong answers.
The SPF drafteven mentions this second point specifically:
Without explicit approval of the domain owner, checking other
identities against SPF version 1 records is NOT RECOMMENDED because
there are cases that are known to give incorrect results.
The address we send to is a virtual domain that does not offer POP3 mailboxes, only forwarding service. This is not under our control.
But it is under the control of the recipient.
It forwards to a third domain, also not under our control, that rejects based on SPF, because the second server - the forwarding service - does not rewrite the MAIL FROM address (and is not supposed to, so far as I know, under the RFCS).
So we have a sender sending to the recipient's forwarder sending to the recipient.
Recipients who are using a forwarding service know who those services are--it's under their control after all. So, if they're going to enable spf checking for their account, they need to either whitelist their forwarders, or check to see that their forwarders do something like SRS, (ie, check to see that their forwarder's don't "forge" return paths under spf's definition of forgery.)
So:
Recipients who don't want their forwarding service's mail to be rejected should whitelist their forwarders before enabling SPF checking for their account.
Forwarding services not wanting to have their spf-checking customer's to worry about (1) should set up SRS.
ISP's wanting to use a temporary workaround of whitelisting known forwarders can have the use of the trusted-forwarder list, (which all spf libraries support) can set that up as the default option for users with spf checking enabled.
Senders who want to go the extra ten miles to make sure that their records *still* work through forwarding even if the forwarder doesn't support SRS *and* the forwarder isn't on the trusted-forwarder list *and* the recipient stupidly enabled spf checking for their own account without whitelisting their known forwarders, can use SES signing of their return-paths, tie that into their DNS server, and add an appropriate exists: statement in their spf record.
So basically, every party has a way to solve the so-called forwarding problem.
Right now as a temporary workaround, a lot of forwarding services are in the trusted-forwarders list. However, if you as a recipient are about to enable spf testing for your account, you really should whitelist your forwarders, unless you know they do SRS--right now that's part of what it means to enable spf checking.
Eventually, I expect that most every forwarder will be implementing SRS and you won't have to worry about this sort of whitelisting.
Re:Sound cancelling headphones
on
Cubicle Privacy
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· Score: 1
It's the same feeling you get if you've every been in a truly quiet environment (like an anechoic chamber
While I haven't been in an anechoic chamber, I have been other very-quiet places, (such as a microwave-shielded room with special panels on the walls, floor, and ceiling that happened to also deaden all outside sound amazingly effectively.) I know the feeling you're talking about and this isn't it.
In any event, when you turn these heasets on, they don't muffle all the sound by any means. You can still easily carry on a conversation with everyone around you, and hear pretty much everything you heard before.
It's just in addition to it suddenly being a little bit quieter, there's this additional annoying pressure feeling that's similar, but milder than, the pain mentioned earlier.
This feeling doesn't exist with low-tech sound-muffling headsets, or any of the dozen or so types of earplugs I've ever used, or any super-quiet settings that I've been in including the microwave testing room, or any of the settings/situations in which you hear and feel your own bloodflow, (such as having a cold, being in a quiet area, and both hearing and feeling your blood pumping.)
Just a hunch that the gp was not referring to pressure of the sound waves themselves, but the foam/plastic/[other material] that must surround your entire ear for them to be effective. The "pressure" from those can indeed be quite irritating for long periods.
Although I know it's not literal pressure, I feel the same thing.
I've always assumed that these devices, that are intended to be noice cancellation devices, are only designed to cancel out frequencies in the so-called audible range, but that they have the effect of magnifying sounds outside that range when trying to cancel out sounds within the range.
The reason I think this is that when turning on these headsets I feel part of that same uncomfortable feeling of pain that some of us get around ultrasonic pest controllers, and even more folks shirk from from the backs or undersides of CRTs.
I figure that eventually they'll cancel out sounds up to a much higher frequency, and then the problem will go away.
Seriously, can my girlfriend complain to the FCC about this?
Even better, she could set up her mail client to connect to her external server via the mail submission port 587 rather than the (blocked) mail relay port 25.
Suppose I have an account at a university that allows me to send mail from my mail client on my desktop through their mail server after I authenticate (ie: username/pass, certificate, etc). They don't particularly care about encrypting the connection, so their mail server listens on port 25 for relays of authorized email. If your ISP (since you're living off campus, or... god forbid, your university doesn't have on-site residence) blocks outbound port 25, you cannot send email via your university account.
You can if your university also listens for mail submissions on the port set aside for that purpose: Port 587.
If they do, (and they really should being doing so!), you should be able to submit mail to your university's mailservers from inside or outside their network, using the same mail submission machine.
It requires all email to be sent through "authorized" servers, which can cause problems when people are working from home and want to send email, or when you are in a cyber cafe.
There's a simple solution: Send the mail through your proper authorized server(s) all the time--then it doesn't matter where you're connecting from, as you're always submitting your mail via mailserver(s) you have permissions on.
In your mail reader, configure your various email accounts to send mail to the appropriate mailserver for each account, connecting to the port that was allocated specifically for new mail submissions, port 587, the mail submission port.
People who still configure their mailreaders to connect directly to the MTA-to-MTA mail relay port 25 will likely be blocked by their ISP and by cyber cafe's.
But practically no one who allows outbound connections in the first place blocks port 587, so people who connect to mail submission port 587 shouldn't be blocked, and they don't have to reconfigure anything related to mail as they travel.
Simple, easy, and as the various user tools finish migrating to setting up mail submissions to go to port 587 instead of 25 by default, it will become a non-issue over time.
Remember the events leading to the '92 election? There was a sense that the two parties had become so combative that there was gridlock in Washington. There was an air of anti-incumbency (for all elected offices) and "Throw the rascals out!" became the popular slogan. It was on this sentiment that Ross Perot built the Reform Party and seized on the populist message. Yes, he had money, but money doesn't buy you votes as a third-party candidate. Belief in the message does.
THAT is the kind of groundswell support that Badnarik needs to capture if he's going to be taken seriously.
Been there, done that.
You're deluding yourself with pleasant-sounding and seemingly-logical assumptions that unfortunately have consistently proven themselves to be wrong.
To go into your 1992 example:
Before the 1992 debates, there were times in that year's Presidential campaign where the Libertarian candidate Andre Marrou was polling higher than Ross Perot. (In places and times when the LP spent a lot of money campaigning, independent polls showed Marrou leading Perot.)
Isn't it interesting that the major media were quiet about those places and times, but yet when the Reform party would start spending more and the LP less for an area, the major media would suddenly start reporting Perot's numbers there again?
To be clear, I don't think of this as any sort of conscious conspiracy on media's part--rather I imagine the reponsible parties merely didn't report on data that didn't fit their preconceived notions, using such unstated logic as: "Perot seems popular to me, and both I and my competitors are reporting him as popular. Therefore, Perot must actually be popular. Given this undeniable fact that Perot is popular, I will endeavor to report the true and correct data about his popularity, and not report on this other data that challanges my comfortable assumptions."
So given that the general population's impressions didn't match all the facts, one has to wonder why that was the case. I'm guessing that money is a good answer. (Combined with the sort of self-selection of data as mentioned above.)
So when you say "money doesn't buy you votes as a third-party candidate. Belief in the message does", how do you reconcile that with the fact that the only consistent advantage that Perot had was his money?
And if he can prove that people are lining up behind him in droves in response to his campaigning, then absolutely put him in the debates.
Marrou's higher polling didn't put him into the debates.
But somehow Perot got in. It wasn't just popularity, and it wasn't just ballot access that got him there; if it were, Marrou would have been there too.
It's just a shame that the Commision on Presidential Debates excluded Marrou for no logically apparent reason.
(Okay, IMHO there *was* a logically apparent, but unstated reason for the CPD to exclude him: The (partison) Commission on Presidential Debates realized that if voters heard Marrou's message in the "legitimizing" forum of the "official" debates, that both the Republican and Democrats would lose votes to Marrou. It was far better to have a comparative oddball like Perot in there, risk fewer votes lost to another party, and still look to the general public as if you're sponsering open debates with reasonable inclusion critera. IMHO that's why they even openly stated that they would not actually decide on their specific inclusion critera for the 1992 debates until after all the debates were over. One thing's for sure: Whatever the criteria really was, it wasn't popularity, and it wasn't ballot access.)
Sure, it's comfortable to think that a person with just a good message can be sure to sway popular sentiment enough to get into the debates and get public mindshare on just the quality of their message, but history has shown us that this simply isn't true.
A groundswell of support doesn't last without money, it doesn't
Generally, to get into any debate whether it be persidential, state, or local, one needs only to contact the organizing agency
That's pretty generally speaking and it's also false. Third party candidates, especially Libertarian candidates, have contacted debate organizers time and time again for months preceeding debates only to be rebuffed with red tape or outright ignored. Harry Brown (US-president) went through this in 2000 and Ed Thompson (WI-gov) had the same problem in 2002.
An even more extreme example was in 1992, where the Commission on Presidential Debates' official response when asked about the requirements to be allowed to debate was, even while the debates were going on, that the requirements for that year's debates had not yet been decided upon, but that they would be decided upon and published after all the debates had occurred.
In other words, third parties wishing to participate in the debate were effectively told that they proper time to petition for inclusion was after the debates had come and gone.
(1992 was also the year Perot was invited to the debates. One would have thought that there would be published, objective criteria that the commission would have used to include him, but given that the Libertarian candidate Andre Marrou had polled higher than Perot (!) at some points in the year, and that the LP was on the ballot in all 50 states while the Reform party wasn't, it's not clear to me what sort of objective criteria they could have been using.)
what we do to our bodies should be our decision, not the government's. the problem that remains, however, is sobriety testing, which is important. just as we shouldn't drive drunk, we shouldn't drive high or tripping either.
I really only care whether a person is competent to drive. The reasons underlying their temporary or permanent incompetence are not directly important to me.
Instead of privacy-violating tests of breath, blood, or urine, for an ever-increasing range of substances, age-requirements, medical tests for the presence of degenerative diseases and the like, and any other tests that could be added to this list were we to continue to test for underylying causes...
Why not just test for driving competence directly?
There used to be a few companies who made such "performance testing" devices, (I remember one was called "Performance Factors, Inc.", but it has since gone bankrupt unfortunately.)
The devices were basically little videogames handed to drivers. If you can pass their reaction-time tests and other similar tests, then you are judged competent to drive.
No privacy-violating tests necessary, and the test tested exactly what we're fundamentally worried about.
It doesn't matter if you've drunk too much, or if you're old enough that you really shouldn't be driving, or if you're too sleepy to drive, or if your prescription drugs have bad side effects, or if you've succumbed to any number of other things that could reduce your reaction time.
Just do these sorts of reaction-time tests directly, and a whole slew of problems drift away.
Plus, we won't have legislators making feel-good legislation lowering blood alcohol limits past far past sanity--if they legislated performance limits instead, there'd be a natural checks-and-balances built in as such limits couldn't be made so strict that the majority of the population--and the legislators--couldn't pass.
We'd also be able to get rid of silly open-container laws.
It would become easier to create public awareness of other unsafe driving problems, such as drowsy driving.
(I would *hope* that such testing devices became widely and cheaply available for general purchase. It should be far easier to trust a handheld game to be properly calibrated than trust a chemical tester to be properly calibrated--and harder to use the device incorrectly.)
And yes, playing a handheld videogame is not a comprehensive test of driving ability, but it is far more comprehensive, far less error-prone, and far less susceptible to abuse than chemical tests.
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine a user learning vi for the first time? Press escape..and the keys are instantly re-labelled.
Imagine any other tool of any type that you're starting to learn to use, or a tool you've used for a long time but with specific key combinations you haven't used for a while--you can see notes right on the keys and beside the keys instead of looking at documentation elsewhere, with keys changing as you press modifiers.
Put together your own system keyboard shortcuts? They get labelled, too.
Think of the top of the magic mouse being a display that changes around if you wanted to go into some odd mode (granted that's a less Apple-ish thing to do), or a touchpad that does the same.
And that's just the very beginning of possibilities.
This is something that will be dramatically useful. Just as with copying, Apple is very good at taking something that people have been desperately wanting for for decades and being the first to throw enough money that hardware manufacturers are finally willing to build it. It's not a question of creating a new solution by any means, it's simply convincing other people to manufacture what until then it's been hopeless to get anyone to manufacture.
(I remember being excited about some touchscreens back in the 1980's, talking with a friend about how cool multi-touch type interfaces could be, describing things that are commonly done today--my friend informed me of the sad reality that no matter how awesome (multi-touch) user interfaces would be, that it simply would not be possible to have or even to build until some preexisting large company decided to spend millions to actually build hardware that would support it--that it didn't matter how many people wanted similar things or were wanting to buy similar things or even make similar things, that they'd not be able to get anyone to manufacture it until some company could place an order for tens of millions of "new" devices. Then and only then would we be able to create things ourselves like this as the little guy, or even as a person or company engineer something similar and be able to afford to pay any manufacturer to build it--that we were basically screwed until a HUGE company made that first big purchase. It's the same thing with this sort of keyboard--once Apple makes it, others will finally be willing to make it, and we'll finally be able to have what a lot of us have wanted for decades, and it will be possible for other companies who've previously engineered the same things to be able to afford to have it manufactured. It's not that it's anything at all novel, it's just the financial reality.)
The US Supreme Court already heard a case where a publisher made that same claim, with the publisher even putting a note in the front of their book saying that it was licensed and not sold. The US Supreme court ruled that that claim was invalid, and the the book *was* sold, with the purchaser being able to do what he wanted with it, hence the "First Sale Doctrine" that we have today, (afterwards codified into US copyright law.)
I don't see where there's any difference when the book is printed using a new and improved paper that will last longer, or if it's a magazine that's being sold, or if it's an electronic document.
I see a claim by publishers saying that we can't resell electronic documents the same way I see claims by printer manufacturers that their printers work best with paper made by the same manufacturer--complete marketing nonsense (read lies) designed to fool us into over-purchases of their products.
Some other things should be added.
First, the paper ballot should also list all the candidates the voter did *not* choose, so that a later recount can see if there were choices left off, which is something that should invalidate the election.
Secondly, neither the voting machine nor the verification/scanner machines should store any results. The only thing that should store the cumulative results during the day should be the ballot box itself, ie, the box that holds the voter-validated ballots.
I'm fine with a ballot box setup that causes incoming ballots to be permanently tied/secured together, and I'm fine with the ballot box doing electronic counting, and being used to generate an end-of-day printed tally that can be attached to the secured ballots.
In this way every step of the process is human auditable: A person can print out twenty different ballots, validate twenty different ballots, (verifying that the machine readable portion corresponds to the human-readable text), then throw away 19 of the 20 and put the one they really wanted in the ballot box. In any recount, a person can manually tally the paper votes and verify that it matches the printed tally per filled ballot box, and poll watchers can watch the number of ballot boxes, making sure none are switched out during the day, and getting a copy of tally printouts for each ballot box so they can each see that the same set of ballot box tally's for their precinct match the tally's reported centrally.
The same validation machines and ballot boxes can be used for any set of elections, without any reprogramming, and the hardware is all interchangeable, individually testable, and verifiable. There is no need to trust that supposedly audited code matches the code that is actually running in the machines. The only machines that need an updated data file for each election are the machines that print out the potential ballots themselves, but everything related to their fundamental purpose of displaying choices and printing ballots can be independently verified.
Please explain this concept of millionaires taking capital out of the economy; specifically, how does their further wealth growth affect me negatively? (On average, in the more general case, and not the outlier case, and please assume they're not buying laws, paying hit men, engaging in crony capitalism, etc.) I ask because I'm perfectly happy for their wealth to continue to grow.
Thank you. You are a wonderful person for being able to alter your stance on the basis of new evidence. It's easier to say but sometimes harder to do. Thanks again.
The Iowa caucus process has a caucus vote before the actual caucusing. Sadly, a lot of people go home after the vote but before the caucusing starts. Also sadly, the media lazily reports on and misleads the public into thinking that the initial caucus vote is relevant in the process.
Two things happen, one after the other: First there is a caucus vote. But it's only after that vote that the caucusing itself starts, which selects delegates to go to district and state conventions where the national delegates get selected. It's who those delegates support and who they vote for at the national convention that counts. The caucus vote doesn't make any difference to that process.
Again, the selection of the national delegates, and who they vote for, has *nothing* to do with the caucus votes that are reported on in TFA--those caucus votes are as much of a straw poll as the Iowa straw poll is, and sadly enough many people are taken in by that.
If the caucus-goers vote in that caucus vote that they are supporters of candidate A, but then vote for delegates who are supporters of candidate B, then it's candidate B that they're truly giving support to, (as those delegates will then vote for national delegates who are supporters of candidate B.)
The winner of the Iowa caucus process is the candidate who gets the most delegates supporting them, not the candidate who ended up winning the "caucus vote" poll that was done before caucusing started.
Confusing the two things is conceptually no different than a person telling a telephone pollster that they are voting for candidate A but then later in the ballot box actually voting for candidate B. It is also no different conceptually from the media continuing to report on poll numbers after an election and neglecting to report on the actual election numbers.
Winning means actually getting delegates. You can call winning a poll that has no effect on anything winning if you want, but it's a pointless use of the term.
Articles at the time talking about this:
This is a so-called solution that ignores the realities of the political process.
For one, in 2012, Ron Paul won Iowa, not Mitt Romney and not Rick Santorum.
The counted poll the article refers to is a just a straw poll, nothing more--the caucus itself, which happens afterwards, is what controls the selection of delegates. Folks who just voted in the straw poll and left before the caucus started didn't actually participate in caucusing for their candidate.
Sadly, the media reports these polls as if they were election/caucus results, and in 2012 mislead the public into thinking that Ron Paul, who was the winner in Iowa, somehow had no support even though he won Iowa.
Microsoft is now focusing on this irrelevant straw poll that doesn't represent the actual caucus results. But more importantly, even ignoring the fact that this straw poll doesn't actually have any real-world effect other than being useful as a way to mislead the public, listening to the video didn't answer any real questions about how their solution would really help even that process.
For instance, they talk about how the voting data (and they're talking about precinct and district level results for the unimportant straw polls), wouldn't be viewable to people in another political party. Well, if that's the case, how does anyone who participated in the straw poll verify that the totals were reported correctly? If that data is secret, then this is clearly a step in the wrong direction.
Then happens if there is a difference between the Microsoft-reported results and the paper mail reported results? If the mailed results take precedence, (which is ideal), then we're still back where we started--a correction to the straw poll is made weeks later. If the electronic results take precedence, then suddenly Microsoft is in control of the election.
I doubt they've put together a system that can be externally verified even in the presence of skilled bad actors at all levels. (ie, any vote counting system for political elections should be resilient against an attack of, say, all the designers, app store folks, and everyone at Microsoft related to the project working either individually or colluding together to give votes to a favored candidate. With a properly designed system, every single one of those people could be as nefarious as possible and vote rigging would still be detected.)
And..they talk about the "chair" being given credentials to report votes for his precinct/district, as if that has anything at all to do with the credentialing problem. So..how is that done specifically? Is Microsoft psychic? The chair isn't determined until a convention or a precinct begins--it's something that's voted on at the time.
So what happens if a different person is elected chair than the state party expects ahead of time? The vote totals for the straw poll are publicly known. A change of having those vote totals relayed via secure credentials given to a person the state party selects ahead of time (and who may or may not end up being the chair) and who may have a hidden agenda shared by the state party, isn't really a clear improvement over the same person relaying the very same, public information through a less secure channel and more error-prone channel.
In both cases we're completely dependent on there being external verifications of the process and in both cases we're screwed if those verifications don't happen.
So while it sounds all nice and shiny and such, and it will be nice that Microsoft is GPL'ing all the code to do this so that it can be adapted and used in any other project, (yes, I realize that isn't likely to be true--it will have either a proprietary license, or they'll try to pretend it is open-ish somehow), I don't see how it fundamentally solves any serious issue.
If you're in Tampa or St. Petersburg, FL, or really anywhere in Florida, the term "bay area" means the area around Tampa Bay. It's the common usage of the term--you have a bay in your state, and you know that's the area "bay area" refers to.
It is a pet peeve of mine that people mistakenly/rudely use the term as if it can only refer to one specific bay area in the world, instead of saying "SF Bay Area" in a headline, for instance. No matter how popular such incorrect and rude word usage is, using the general term as if it has global specificity is just annoying hubris.
True, but they're increasingly carried over IP.
With this tax, cell phone users can end up being taxed for voice conversations, and definitely will be taxed for any voice calls over LTE. Even landline users could end up being taxed.
With this tax, anyone watching any video-on-demand shows on their cable TV setup can end up taxed just as much as if they watched on something like Netflix.
With this tax, even the Hungarian government's public TV station MTV (Magyar Televízió) will have to pay additional taxes due to the fact that they offer streaming.
I wonder if the Hungarian government has budgeted for the additional tax that its public TV station will now have to pay?
The Doctor needs an Optic Screwdriver now. (Or is this optical functionality already integrated into his current tool, accessible by a different setting, like a Harmony remote that automatically switches the right units on and off and set to the correct configuration?)
The idea behind the Open Patent License is for owners of patents (and non-patent IP that still ends up behaving like patents from a practical real-world extent--amazing how that actually happens) to be able to license them in a copyleft-type manner, ideally handling more than just the software patent situation.
The goal is for all players to be able to participate in a growing patent pool and have open and free access to this pool under copyleft-type conditions, whether they're small players or larger players.
Don't be thrown by the badly-worded license--I had it as a starting-point for discussion/work, getting ideas out there, and ended up having a few lawyers come out of the woodwork, offer to help, then realize it was a bigger project than they had expected. After a number of rounds of that I ended up putting the project on the back burner, as you can see. I need to get it more active again. Anyone who is interested in contributing in any sense, please contact me.
Also, I've since realized that a far, FAR, shorter license probably makes sense. A structure of something similar to Google's license from their CLA for instance, or Redhat's patent promise, made a bit more generic and made to cover patent-like IP, is probably a better idea, and I am planning to re-start the license wording along those lines.
I will happily accept help from anyone who is interested.
In the US state where I live, that's what we have with government regulations, and I suspect that's what we would privately develop without them.
It's not at all a big deal, and it's actually pretty cool.
Health inspectors come at random times to each restaurant, and the restaurants are required to PUBLICLY POST THEIR REPORTS in the restaurant itself.
The result is that people read these reports, really! Folks shy away from going to restaurants with lower scores, and the fact that a place has a high score is something that will invariably come up in conversations. It's not some goofy thing that only a few people do, it's something that people notice and then talk about if the score is particularly high or low.
(Just a few days ago I went back to a place for the first time in a year since they got a bad score--82, a score which of course included written notes on all the problems found. Now their score is 100, which is really unusual, and I won't be hesitant to go back for cleanliness reasons. These scores make a real difference in people's behavior.)
I know that in some US states that these reports aren't published the same way, so people can't make decisions on whether to eat somewhere based on the problems found in the previous inspection.
Given that the existence of government testing will in practical terms preclude the development of private testing in most areas, if you don't have real-world transparency in the testing process that the state government provides/enforces, then people will just become used to the fact that the information isn't there, and possibly just assume that it's too much information for individuals to keep up with or even pay attention to anyway.
But if you're used to seeing these results, it's a natural thing to look for the posted health report. It's as natural a thing as to look for as credit card logos, or noting whether this is a place where you pay your bill at a cashier up front versus paying at the table. You really just do it and don't think much of it.
Well, unless you're writing a reply to a slashdot comment. :-)
For a different industry, look at the history of Underwriter's Laboratories. Before their existence, there were neither private nor governmental regulations on the safety of electrical devices. Since unsafe devices were being sold and causing homes and businesses to burn, insurance companies that bore the brunt of the financial side of the resulting losses got together to make their own private testing agency, and arranged their policies to encourage the use of only UL-tested and certified electrical devices.
The market was allowed to work in that case, in that it was allowed to develop private certification agencies that people and companies do pay attention to. While technically it's possible to buy and sell non-UL tested devices even today, for the most part you'll not find them in stores as stores won't sell them as a mass-market item at all, and if you did buy such a product you'd have insurance problems if/when they caused a fire, and you'd probably have liability problems if you actually used them in a business. You'd pretty much have to go out of your way to purchase something like this today, meaning that you'd be doing so only if you had a real reason to, (maybe you're stripping the device for parts, or comparing something between multiple devices of the same type, working on things in your own electronics lab and the like.)
In any event, government fortunately happened not to try to develop it's own system of electronic safety certification that would preempt the development of private certification, so we have a working private system that can pay attention to the actual real safety issues, and get less bogge
Use "pinfo" to read info pages: apt-get install pinfo
pinfo is the opposite of "info" in almost every respect:
And as a bonus, you can use it to read man pages too:
With all their features and programmatic convenience they offered, I figured that this would be something that could be a real selling point for them, (and a convenience for me.)
While the guy I spoke with (programming support guy) thought it would be a useful feature, I was told that it just wasn't something that was really in demand, and they didn't have any plans for something like this.
(!)
(Well, if someone offered it, I can't see why it wouldn't be in demand, and a gateway processor would be able to offer this as a feature whether visa/mc/amex/dc/... did or not. As long as you *could* get the data back with human intervention, ie, no vendor lock-in, it would be a definite win for customers with any sense of security issues.)
So I was amazed that this wasn't something that had been out there from day one and amazed that folks weren't simply clamoring for left and right. I'm even more amazed that this service is *still* as far as I know, not offered by any gateway provider. (I would have bet money that it would be a standard feature by now.)
And the worst part is that all the while visa has continued their poorly thought-out campaign of requirements that if followed to the letter effectively forces merchants to open security holes in their systems.
When a mailserver receives an incoming message attempt, it should accept the mail for delivery or reject it. If it accepts it for delivery and then later decides not to deliver the message, it should bounce the mail. (*)
IMHO, it is in no case acceptable for the incoming mailserver to claim that it's accepting an email for delivery, and then just silently drop the message.
(That's like a company mailroom signing for a package on your behalf, then throwing the package away without telling anyone. Saying that "email" is unreliable is like saying that "FedEx" is unreliable because some mail rooms throw away FedEx packages after signing for them.)
Anyone whose ISP or corporate mailserver is doing that should IMHO complain to their ISP or their IT department. At the very least, instead of saying things like "email is unreliable", folks should in that situation say the truth using statements such as "our corporate email system is unreliable."
Or moreso by confused admins who don't comprehend the importance of safely rejecting emails so that legitimate senders will know there was a problem.(*) Of course, nowadays it's a good idea to do these sorts of anti-spam or anti-forgery tests during the SMTP connection if at all possible, so that you don't contribute to bounce-spam.
The reasoning here is that MS's sender ID uses spf records, but those two types of records are not compatible:
- There are differences in syntax between the spf record format and the ms-senderid record format. You can't parse one record using the syntax of another, but MS pretends that you can.
- There are differences in meaning between the two records. You can't use a test meant to answer whether a specific localpart and domain is permitted by the domain holder for use in MAIL FROM and HELO arguments and go from there to assume anything about whether the same thing is true for PRA arguments. MS pretends that you can do so, but if you do, you'll get wrong answers.
The SPF drafteven mentions this second point specifically:Recipients who are using a forwarding service know who those services are--it's under their control after all. So, if they're going to enable spf checking for their account, they need to either whitelist their forwarders, or check to see that their forwarders do something like SRS, (ie, check to see that their forwarder's don't "forge" return paths under spf's definition of forgery.)
So:
- Recipients who don't want their forwarding service's mail to be rejected should whitelist their forwarders before enabling SPF checking for their account.
- Forwarding services not wanting to have their spf-checking customer's to worry about (1) should set up SRS.
- ISP's wanting to use a temporary workaround of whitelisting known forwarders can have the use of the trusted-forwarder list, (which all spf libraries support) can set that up as the default option for users with spf checking enabled.
- Senders who want to go the extra ten miles to make sure that their records *still* work through forwarding even if the forwarder doesn't support SRS *and* the forwarder isn't on the trusted-forwarder list *and* the recipient stupidly enabled spf checking for their own account without whitelisting their known forwarders, can use SES signing of their return-paths, tie that into their DNS server, and add an appropriate exists: statement in their spf record.
So basically, every party has a way to solve the so-called forwarding problem.Right now as a temporary workaround, a lot of forwarding services are in the trusted-forwarders list. However, if you as a recipient are about to enable spf testing for your account, you really should whitelist your forwarders, unless you know they do SRS--right now that's part of what it means to enable spf checking.
Eventually, I expect that most every forwarder will be implementing SRS and you won't have to worry about this sort of whitelisting.
In any event, when you turn these heasets on, they don't muffle all the sound by any means. You can still easily carry on a conversation with everyone around you, and hear pretty much everything you heard before.
It's just in addition to it suddenly being a little bit quieter, there's this additional annoying pressure feeling that's similar, but milder than, the pain mentioned earlier.
This feeling doesn't exist with low-tech sound-muffling headsets, or any of the dozen or so types of earplugs I've ever used, or any super-quiet settings that I've been in including the microwave testing room, or any of the settings/situations in which you hear and feel your own bloodflow, (such as having a cold, being in a quiet area, and both hearing and feeling your blood pumping.)
I've always assumed that these devices, that are intended to be noice cancellation devices, are only designed to cancel out frequencies in the so-called audible range, but that they have the effect of magnifying sounds outside that range when trying to cancel out sounds within the range.
The reason I think this is that when turning on these headsets I feel part of that same uncomfortable feeling of pain that some of us get around ultrasonic pest controllers, and even more folks shirk from from the backs or undersides of CRTs.
I figure that eventually they'll cancel out sounds up to a much higher frequency, and then the problem will go away.
If they do, (and they really should being doing so!), you should be able to submit mail to your university's mailservers from inside or outside their network, using the same mail submission machine.
In your mail reader, configure your various email accounts to send mail to the appropriate mailserver for each account, connecting to the port that was allocated specifically for new mail submissions, port 587, the mail submission port.
People who still configure their mailreaders to connect directly to the MTA-to-MTA mail relay port 25 will likely be blocked by their ISP and by cyber cafe's.
But practically no one who allows outbound connections in the first place blocks port 587, so people who connect to mail submission port 587 shouldn't be blocked, and they don't have to reconfigure anything related to mail as they travel.
Simple, easy, and as the various user tools finish migrating to setting up mail submissions to go to port 587 instead of 25 by default, it will become a non-issue over time.
Been there, done that.
You're deluding yourself with pleasant-sounding and seemingly-logical assumptions that unfortunately have consistently proven themselves to be wrong.
To go into your 1992 example:
Before the 1992 debates, there were times in that year's Presidential campaign where the Libertarian candidate Andre Marrou was polling higher than Ross Perot. (In places and times when the LP spent a lot of money campaigning, independent polls showed Marrou leading Perot.)
Isn't it interesting that the major media were quiet about those places and times, but yet when the Reform party would start spending more and the LP less for an area, the major media would suddenly start reporting Perot's numbers there again?
To be clear, I don't think of this as any sort of conscious conspiracy on media's part--rather I imagine the reponsible parties merely didn't report on data that didn't fit their preconceived notions, using such unstated logic as: "Perot seems popular to me, and both I and my competitors are reporting him as popular. Therefore, Perot must actually be popular. Given this undeniable fact that Perot is popular, I will endeavor to report the true and correct data about his popularity, and not report on this other data that challanges my comfortable assumptions."
So given that the general population's impressions didn't match all the facts, one has to wonder why that was the case. I'm guessing that money is a good answer. (Combined with the sort of self-selection of data as mentioned above.)
So when you say "money doesn't buy you votes as a third-party candidate. Belief in the message does", how do you reconcile that with the fact that the only consistent advantage that Perot had was his money?
Marrou's higher polling didn't put him into the debates.
But somehow Perot got in. It wasn't just popularity, and it wasn't just ballot access that got him there; if it were, Marrou would have been there too.
It's just a shame that the Commision on Presidential Debates excluded Marrou for no logically apparent reason.
(Okay, IMHO there *was* a logically apparent, but unstated reason for the CPD to exclude him: The (partison) Commission on Presidential Debates realized that if voters heard Marrou's message in the "legitimizing" forum of the "official" debates, that both the Republican and Democrats would lose votes to Marrou. It was far better to have a comparative oddball like Perot in there, risk fewer votes lost to another party, and still look to the general public as if you're sponsering open debates with reasonable inclusion critera. IMHO that's why they even openly stated that they would not actually decide on their specific inclusion critera for the 1992 debates until after all the debates were over. One thing's for sure: Whatever the criteria really was, it wasn't popularity, and it wasn't ballot access.) Sure, it's comfortable to think that a person with just a good message can be sure to sway popular sentiment enough to get into the debates and get public mindshare on just the quality of their message, but history has shown us that this simply isn't true.
A groundswell of support doesn't last without money, it doesn't
In other words, third parties wishing to participate in the debate were effectively told that they proper time to petition for inclusion was after the debates had come and gone.
(1992 was also the year Perot was invited to the debates. One would have thought that there would be published, objective criteria that the commission would have used to include him, but given that the Libertarian candidate Andre Marrou had polled higher than Perot (!) at some points in the year, and that the LP was on the ballot in all 50 states while the Reform party wasn't, it's not clear to me what sort of objective criteria they could have been using.)
Instead of privacy-violating tests of breath, blood, or urine, for an ever-increasing range of substances, age-requirements, medical tests for the presence of degenerative diseases and the like, and any other tests that could be added to this list were we to continue to test for underylying causes...
Why not just test for driving competence directly?
There used to be a few companies who made such "performance testing" devices, (I remember one was called "Performance Factors, Inc.", but it has since gone bankrupt unfortunately.)
The devices were basically little videogames handed to drivers. If you can pass their reaction-time tests and other similar tests, then you are judged competent to drive.
No privacy-violating tests necessary, and the test tested exactly what we're fundamentally worried about.
It doesn't matter if you've drunk too much, or if you're old enough that you really shouldn't be driving, or if you're too sleepy to drive, or if your prescription drugs have bad side effects, or if you've succumbed to any number of other things that could reduce your reaction time.
Just do these sorts of reaction-time tests directly, and a whole slew of problems drift away.
Plus, we won't have legislators making feel-good legislation lowering blood alcohol limits past far past sanity--if they legislated performance limits instead, there'd be a natural checks-and-balances built in as such limits couldn't be made so strict that the majority of the population--and the legislators--couldn't pass.
We'd also be able to get rid of silly open-container laws.
It would become easier to create public awareness of other unsafe driving problems, such as drowsy driving.
(I would *hope* that such testing devices became widely and cheaply available for general purchase. It should be far easier to trust a handheld game to be properly calibrated than trust a chemical tester to be properly calibrated--and harder to use the device incorrectly.)
And yes, playing a handheld videogame is not a comprehensive test of driving ability, but it is far more comprehensive, far less error-prone, and far less susceptible to abuse than chemical tests.