At least camping is an option. I live on the East Coast, and real darkness is many hours away. And even then the horizons are usually obscured by trees. But even I can see the conjunction.
I'm sure the light pollution is pretty bad in Houston, but Saturn and Venus are easily visible even against that, and given those indicators it's not hard to find Mercury. You may have to go to the 'burbs rather than in the city proper, but I bet you could find it on top of a large building. The planets are pretty bright, and the problem in a city is more about horizon than light pollution.
I suspect that fans of horse-opera westerns would be weirded out by the space trappings, even without any actual aliens.
Funny that you should bring up Star Trek, since Trek was originally conceived as a western set in space. Gene Roddenberry called it "Wagon Train to the Stars." For that matter, Star Wars was heavily influenced by Akira Kurosawa, who also influenced (and was influenced by) the great westerns (e.g. The Magnificient Seven and The Seven Samurai).
I no longer know what sci-fi as a genre is, because it's many, many things. I doubt you'll find any definition that includes everything you wish to call sci-fi without also including a lot of other things that you don't.
That is, unless you wish to take an extremely narrow view if sci-fi, as you have. That's not meant to be derogatory; apply the terms as you like. If space ships don't make it sci fi for you, OK. The language, visual design, and plots were all heavily influenced by westerns, but so was a lot of great "sci fi". But Star Wars and Star Trek are sci fi primarily because they're set in space and have aliens.
(Out of curiosity, if the "Indians" in Firefly were played by aliens, an apt analogy that was never used, would you find it more "sci fi"? Or would that just make it more Western?)
I don't know what it means to say "I like sci fi" or "I don't like sci fi" since it's so broad. I wouldn't be able to define a set of "premises, stories, and characters" that were sci fi, the way I can for Westerns.
The closest I could come is that sci fi always seems to involve at least one bit of scientific extrapolation (space travel, robots, time travel, aliens, apocalypse, technological advance a la Matrix or Neuromancer) and telling stories against that background of extrapolation. (We can argue whether Firefly fits that definition or not, or whether it's entirely appropriate.)
We seem to agree on the "western set in space" tag for Firefly. But I suspect that the best indicator of liking it is neither Star Trek nor The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, but Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The biggest defining feature is the tone of its writing, which strikes me as clever and incisive but strikes friends of mine as glib and pretentious. And its inventiveness with combining genres, which I find clever and interesting but others find dumb, weird, or just irrelevant.
Good answer, but I'm not certain it's going to change his mind, and I'm not sure it should.
Firefly is a character-driven series, which keeps the stories fairly small. It's a western set in space, a conceit I know some people didn't care for. Its writing is sharp and incisive in that Joss Whedon way, which not everybody goes for.
This guy appears to be a fan of B5, and seemingly nearly episode of it. I'm a Firefly fan and found B5 offensively bad: terrible writing, flat characters, a host of truly dreadful performances, cheesy special effects.
But clearly it appeals to many, many people. I'd say that those are people looking for different things in a TV show. Everybody who likes B5 raves about its long story arcs, which Firefly mostly lacks. There are a few continuing threads, but it doesn't have the enormous sweep that B5 has. Not to mention that B5 has nifty space battles that feel like a Flash Gordon episode (with better special effects.)
I did watch the entire series of B5, and it definitely gets less bad starting around the middle of season 3. I'd go so far as to say it was even OK, and occasionally good. There must be some overlap between Firefly fans and B5 fans, but I'm betting those in the overlap like each for very, very different reasons.
It's entirely possible that this guy would like the series if he saw it from the beginning, but if he wasn't at least intrigued by that one episode, I wouldn't bet on it. To each his own.
I haven't seen the rough cut myself, but several friends have, and they're all wildly enthusiastic about it. As in, enthusiastic enough to see it again, for money, when it comes out in a few months.
I'm afraid you're kinda screwed on this point. Slashdot is a news aggregator. This story is effectively a dupe of one that came before, but the "news" is that it's the New York Times publishing it, which has a far more important readership than PC World.
In other words, the news isn't that there are zombies, but that a very important mainstream newspaper is telling people that there are zombies, and lots of 'em. You can't get this story from any other source, because the source is the story.
And because the New York Times is so important, they get to charge for content. In this case the charge is cheap: you just let them know who you are, so that they can better sell ad space. That's not free, but it's pretty cheap.
So basically I doubt Slashdot is ever going to "quit posting stories taht you have to register for to read", because that's where the good news is. If you'd like to establish an open source news gathering organization and make it available for free without registration, feel free.
That's news "gathering" like the Times, not "aggregating", like Slashdot. News gathering is usually considered pretty expensive. You have to have a lot of reporters, and editors. And it takes time to establish the reputation that the Times has. And like software, news depends on trust.
But hey, news, like software, is free to distribute once it's created, so maybe the open source model will apply. Go for it.
Alternatively, stop bitching about what people are giving you for free (Slashdot summaries) or cheap (New York Times articles for the price of some trivial and easily lied about demographics). Your choice.
How about "may not break the standard"?
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Microsoft To Extend RSS
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Let's say "may not break the standard". There are approved, compatible ways to extend it, but it's really hard to design extensibility into a standard. Often extensions are unforseen and won't fit into the way you expected to extend it.
Not to mention Microsoft's history (with Java and HTML) of making extensions designed to lock you in. They succeeded with HTML; they failed with Java (though perhaps that's more Sun's fault than Microsoft's).
Of course, if they have good ideas (and they have an awful lot of smart people working for them) the improvements will be propagated into the standard, and then all of the other RSS readers will want to implement them, too.
Stevens, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer, JJ., joined. Scalia, J., filed an opinion concurring in the judgment. O'Connor, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which Rehnquist, C. J., and Thomas, J., joined as to all but Part III. Thomas, J., filed a dissenting opinion.
Actually, I think what they said was that it was up to the state courts, not the federal courts, to determine what constituted "public good". The owner can contest the seizure, but only as far as the state allows.
You may also have found yourself agreeing with Rehnquist and Thomas (but not Scalia) with respect to the medical marijuana case a few weeks ago.
Yeah, it's making me feel kind of dirty to be agreeing with them, too.
But they seem to be genuine small-government government conservatives, as opposed to Christian fundamentlaist conservatives, and those with libertarian instincts run a lot closer to "conservative" than big-government "liberal". But for some reason the two types of conservatives are in bed together and they're hard to prise apart. Scalia went puritanical on the medical marijuana decision, since he falls closer to the religious side of the conservative spectrum.
It could be, but I'm finding it hard to imagine a micropayments strategy that couldn't be described as "person-to-person stored-value payments system".
Micropayments for reading articles are person-to-website rather than person-to-person, but the former would be adapted to the latter really, really quickly, at least if they allow anybody who sets up a web site to be a payee. But maybe not; I'll get back to that in a second.
And micropayments are usually "stored-value payments systems", because the best way to reduce the overhead is to give the central guys $20 and have them shift $.02 from one account to another (which is cheap) and only occasionally turning it into real money (which is expensive). Of course that's effectively what Paypal does.
Perhaps I'm misreading Schmidt's statement, but it just doesn't sound like micropayments to me. At least not generalized micropayments. You may be spot on with the limited notion, where the only valid payees are large corporations like the New York Times. It would still be a stored-payments system in all likelihood (you just can't charge $.02 to a Mastercard), but the asymmetry might make it profitable.
his description of the original paper as "shoveled dirt onto the coffin of DRM as a business model" is nonsensical.
I wouldn't go that far. From the conclusion:
This means that a vendor will probably make more money by selling unprotected objects than protected objects. In short, if you are competing with the darknet, you must compete on the darknet's own terms: that is convenience and low cost rather than additional security.
"Shoveling dirt" may be a slight overstatement (it's obviously not dead yet), but the paper clearly concludes that DRM is not beneficial. It's only a short step from predicting that it's not beneficial to forcing a change to the business model.
I don't precisely agree with the paper; Apple's iTunes shows that there is considerable market for DRM-protected "consumer IP-goods". But I think that the summary accurately reflects the tone of the paper.
It is remarkable. eBay is an auction site, which in theory is the best way to make a profit. eBay's overhead should be fairly low, since they're just running a web engine (as opposed to having a large warehouse, manufacturing, inventory, and fulfilment employees) and therefore its prices should be low.
And for years people established businesses there, and it was a good way for people to make a business selling stuff without the overhead of having their own web site. This article says that's changing and examines why.
So maximizing profit isn't news, but abandoning eBay sure is.
Presumably without trading favors, they are more careful about what they pass, though it's entirely possible that in some cases they can't pass anything at all. A political system is a balance between too much brake and too much gas.
An honor system would also be a nice feature, but the higher the stakes, the more money there is to help compromise your honor.
The line-item veto only applied to budgets, so it couldn't be used to remove the broadcast flag. It could, however, be used to zero out the budget used to enforce it. Of course he wouldn't have, but any future President could have. That's part of the reason they overturned the line item veto; it violates the separation of powers.
Re:Stopped reading it when it got so political...
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The Onion in 2056
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· Score: 1
It's spotty (and personal; my favories are very different from yours). It's not brilliant every week, but sometimes it's pure genius. So it stays in the rotation.
I don't mind the politics; they're a news satire and politics is news. They do have a liberal bias, but they'll take targets of opportunity as they come up. I appreciate them when they're clever, no matter who is the butt of the joke. Just like some of my favorite episodes of South Park are among the most conservative, though they too can descend to simple bashing rather than insight when they're having an off week.
It's that old past perfect tense. The scientists had said one thing, but now that's over and the Russian scientists are saying a different thing.
So either the US scientists were wrong (and they never got a signal; the article says "possibly") or they couldn't find it, then they found it, then they lost it again.
There's really no contradiction; they may or may not have found it, but it sounds like it's gone now.
Getting the nonsense stopped is harder than it sounds.
The US Congressional procedures are very strange. Bills are created by committees; they don't usually go to the floor until it's been approved by the committee. After that, it's tricky to change the bill.
Most deliberative bodies have a "motion to split", which allows you to take a bill and chop it into pieces and vote the separate pieces. The US Congress rules of order don't have a motion to split. That means that you actually have to amend the bill to remove offending language. On the floor, debate and amendments are limited.
The point of not having the motion to split is to allow compromises to be enforced. If somebody says, "OK, I'll let you have your restriction on cadmium disposal, but only if I can have $15 million for my district to build roads." If you remove one piece or the other from the bill, the compromise falls apart.
It's hard to make compromises in a 435-member House (or even a 100 member Senate). That's why bills come out of committees, where there are usually a dozen people at most. In theory that also allows them to be experts (or at least have experts on hand) in transportation/defense/telecommuncations/etc.
The point is that your senator has less than 1% input into most bills. In theory he makes up for it with more than 1% input into other bills, depending on seniority. Of course it never works out that way, depending on favors he's done, whether he's in the majority or minority, etc.
So ultimately even when it comes down to the up-or-down vote, your senator could be forced to say, "I'm going to vote against this entire bill guaranteeing proper nutrition for kittycats because I don't like the broadcast flag that's gotten crammed into it." And when he runs for re-election, the opposition says, "Senator Bob vote to starve kittycats!"
The Republicans absolutely REAMED Kerry in the last election because of this. It's one reason that Senators haven't been elected to Congress in forever: they end up leaving these long track records of voting against things they agree with.
It didn't help that Kerry fumbled the answer, "Well, I voted for that bill before they crammed all that pork into it" (the correct answer) came out as, "I voted for it before I voted against it," and the election pretty much ended right then.
So Senators on the committee have massive power to write legislative pork and do favors for friends. That won't go away without a rewrite of the rules. Sadly, you'll discover that whatever party has 51% of the vote is not likely to vote to change the rules, since it tends to limit their power.
Just for reference, the guys who put price stickers on things try to avoid having you "buy them in a heartheat". They make the same amount of money if you just barely buy it as if you buy it with your whole heart.
The price is determined by where they think they can get the most money out of you. That's $15 for a CD; $10 for a crippled digital album.
To reiterate: if you're happy with the price, they're not. If you buy it for $5, they'd rather you bought it for $6.
Instead, it costs $15. If they sold it for $5, would you buy two and give one as a gift? Maybe. But you probably wouldn't buy three, which is what it would take.
Call it "supply and demand". Or call it "greed". But it's hardly "insanity". It's self-interest, and according to TFA, people are buying it at the price they set. If they charged more and made less money, that would be insanity. If they charged less and made less money, that would also be insanity. But self-interest is eminently rational. Greedy, perhaps, but rational.
Credit cards never have been safe, but that doesn't mean that they can't ever possibly be safe.
There are ways to do secure payments, usually involving cryptography. Generally, it works like a "digital check" where you create an authorization for a payment, digitally sign and date it, and then hand it over. They never have access to your credit card number, because the real secret is your private key, which never leaves your PDA/smart card/phone/etc. Your bank ensures that the "check" is only cashed once, and because of the crypto it can't be forged or altered without immense resources.
So why haven't we implemented this yet? Infrastructure, mostly. There's a LOT of infrastructure for the present system. It's expensive. Smart cards are expensive. The only thing that's more expensive is credit card companies getting massively ripped off. Perhaps you'll be getting your smart card right soon.
Perhaps not. Another reason is that the infrastructure represents a substantial agreement between the major credit card companies. Changing it involves getting a lot of people to agree on something. That's hard to do, especially when it has to be RIGHT. If they choose the wrong crypto algorithm, or if there are other weaknesses in the system they choose, you could be WAY more doomed than 68,000 missing credit card numbers.
So while there is a tradeoff between convenience and security, there are clearly better balance points than the one we have. Sadly, as long as inertia is an even stronger attractor, we may live this way for a while longer.
No prob. If you read my other posts you'll see that I'm actually quite sympathetic; I'm an American living in a blue state and was horrified last November to learn that despite all the shouting 52% of the country considered something other than "tens of thousands of dead people" or "over a thousand dead Americans" to be the most important factor in determining who should run the country.
I'm getting to be of an age where running for office is a serious possibility. There's no way I could displace the existing congressmen, and because I live in a blue state I wouldn't want to. But I would love to see if I could improve the level of discourse at a national level and see if it trickles down.
I get the impression that this product is actually going to be marketed, as opposed to the Fujitsu prototype. The technology isn't new, but it seems to be taking a very long time to get those last few bugs out (and bring the manufacturing costs low enough) to make it consumer-grade.
You probably wouldn't want this under your skin, because it doesn't glow like an LED. It just reflects light, like a piece of paper with writing. Yeah, there's a thin transparent layer of skin, but you're still going to lose light coming in and going out so it won't look very good. I think that a flexible OLED would make a better choice for implants.
The world is already full of message boards, and they don't seem to have raised the level of dialogue. Check out slashdot any time a controversial topic is raised, and you'll see the supposedly smarter group of people here ranting like children.
As far as I can tell, the level of national dialogue has declined at the same rate as communication has improved. I think a few weeks of national time-out, where nobody is allowed to discuss Iraq, abortion, or evolution, are in order.
Slashdot Mirror
At least camping is an option. I live on the East Coast, and real darkness is many hours away. And even then the horizons are usually obscured by trees. But even I can see the conjunction.
I'm sure the light pollution is pretty bad in Houston, but Saturn and Venus are easily visible even against that, and given those indicators it's not hard to find Mercury. You may have to go to the 'burbs rather than in the city proper, but I bet you could find it on top of a large building. The planets are pretty bright, and the problem in a city is more about horizon than light pollution.
I suspect that fans of horse-opera westerns would be weirded out by the space trappings, even without any actual aliens.
Funny that you should bring up Star Trek, since Trek was originally conceived as a western set in space. Gene Roddenberry called it "Wagon Train to the Stars." For that matter, Star Wars was heavily influenced by Akira Kurosawa, who also influenced (and was influenced by) the great westerns (e.g. The Magnificient Seven and The Seven Samurai).
I no longer know what sci-fi as a genre is, because it's many, many things. I doubt you'll find any definition that includes everything you wish to call sci-fi without also including a lot of other things that you don't.
That is, unless you wish to take an extremely narrow view if sci-fi, as you have. That's not meant to be derogatory; apply the terms as you like. If space ships don't make it sci fi for you, OK. The language, visual design, and plots were all heavily influenced by westerns, but so was a lot of great "sci fi". But Star Wars and Star Trek are sci fi primarily because they're set in space and have aliens.
(Out of curiosity, if the "Indians" in Firefly were played by aliens, an apt analogy that was never used, would you find it more "sci fi"? Or would that just make it more Western?)
I don't know what it means to say "I like sci fi" or "I don't like sci fi" since it's so broad. I wouldn't be able to define a set of "premises, stories, and characters" that were sci fi, the way I can for Westerns.
The closest I could come is that sci fi always seems to involve at least one bit of scientific extrapolation (space travel, robots, time travel, aliens, apocalypse, technological advance a la Matrix or Neuromancer) and telling stories against that background of extrapolation. (We can argue whether Firefly fits that definition or not, or whether it's entirely appropriate.)
We seem to agree on the "western set in space" tag for Firefly. But I suspect that the best indicator of liking it is neither Star Trek nor The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, but Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The biggest defining feature is the tone of its writing, which strikes me as clever and incisive but strikes friends of mine as glib and pretentious. And its inventiveness with combining genres, which I find clever and interesting but others find dumb, weird, or just irrelevant.
Good answer, but I'm not certain it's going to change his mind, and I'm not sure it should.
Firefly is a character-driven series, which keeps the stories fairly small. It's a western set in space, a conceit I know some people didn't care for. Its writing is sharp and incisive in that Joss Whedon way, which not everybody goes for.
This guy appears to be a fan of B5, and seemingly nearly episode of it. I'm a Firefly fan and found B5 offensively bad: terrible writing, flat characters, a host of truly dreadful performances, cheesy special effects.
But clearly it appeals to many, many people. I'd say that those are people looking for different things in a TV show. Everybody who likes B5 raves about its long story arcs, which Firefly mostly lacks. There are a few continuing threads, but it doesn't have the enormous sweep that B5 has. Not to mention that B5 has nifty space battles that feel like a Flash Gordon episode (with better special effects.)
I did watch the entire series of B5, and it definitely gets less bad starting around the middle of season 3. I'd go so far as to say it was even OK, and occasionally good. There must be some overlap between Firefly fans and B5 fans, but I'm betting those in the overlap like each for very, very different reasons.
It's entirely possible that this guy would like the series if he saw it from the beginning, but if he wasn't at least intrigued by that one episode, I wouldn't bet on it. To each his own.
I haven't seen the rough cut myself, but several friends have, and they're all wildly enthusiastic about it. As in, enthusiastic enough to see it again, for money, when it comes out in a few months.
I'm afraid you're kinda screwed on this point. Slashdot is a news aggregator. This story is effectively a dupe of one that came before, but the "news" is that it's the New York Times publishing it, which has a far more important readership than PC World.
In other words, the news isn't that there are zombies, but that a very important mainstream newspaper is telling people that there are zombies, and lots of 'em. You can't get this story from any other source, because the source is the story.
And because the New York Times is so important, they get to charge for content. In this case the charge is cheap: you just let them know who you are, so that they can better sell ad space. That's not free, but it's pretty cheap.
So basically I doubt Slashdot is ever going to "quit posting stories taht you have to register for to read", because that's where the good news is. If you'd like to establish an open source news gathering organization and make it available for free without registration, feel free.
That's news "gathering" like the Times, not "aggregating", like Slashdot. News gathering is usually considered pretty expensive. You have to have a lot of reporters, and editors. And it takes time to establish the reputation that the Times has. And like software, news depends on trust.
But hey, news, like software, is free to distribute once it's created, so maybe the open source model will apply. Go for it.
Alternatively, stop bitching about what people are giving you for free (Slashdot summaries) or cheap (New York Times articles for the price of some trivial and easily lied about demographics). Your choice.
Let's say "may not break the standard". There are approved, compatible ways to extend it, but it's really hard to design extensibility into a standard. Often extensions are unforseen and won't fit into the way you expected to extend it.
Not to mention Microsoft's history (with Java and HTML) of making extensions designed to lock you in. They succeeded with HTML; they failed with Java (though perhaps that's more Sun's fault than Microsoft's).
Of course, if they have good ideas (and they have an awful lot of smart people working for them) the improvements will be propagated into the standard, and then all of the other RSS readers will want to implement them, too.
Believe it
Stevens, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer, JJ., joined. Scalia, J., filed an opinion concurring in the judgment. O'Connor, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which Rehnquist, C. J., and Thomas, J., joined as to all but Part III. Thomas, J., filed a dissenting opinion.
Actually, I think what they said was that it was up to the state courts, not the federal courts, to determine what constituted "public good". The owner can contest the seizure, but only as far as the state allows.
You may also have found yourself agreeing with Rehnquist and Thomas (but not Scalia) with respect to the medical marijuana case a few weeks ago.
Yeah, it's making me feel kind of dirty to be agreeing with them, too.
But they seem to be genuine small-government government conservatives, as opposed to Christian fundamentlaist conservatives, and those with libertarian instincts run a lot closer to "conservative" than big-government "liberal". But for some reason the two types of conservatives are in bed together and they're hard to prise apart. Scalia went puritanical on the medical marijuana decision, since he falls closer to the religious side of the conservative spectrum.
It could be, but I'm finding it hard to imagine a micropayments strategy that couldn't be described as "person-to-person stored-value payments system".
Micropayments for reading articles are person-to-website rather than person-to-person, but the former would be adapted to the latter really, really quickly, at least if they allow anybody who sets up a web site to be a payee. But maybe not; I'll get back to that in a second.
And micropayments are usually "stored-value payments systems", because the best way to reduce the overhead is to give the central guys $20 and have them shift $.02 from one account to another (which is cheap) and only occasionally turning it into real money (which is expensive). Of course that's effectively what Paypal does.
Perhaps I'm misreading Schmidt's statement, but it just doesn't sound like micropayments to me. At least not generalized micropayments. You may be spot on with the limited notion, where the only valid payees are large corporations like the New York Times. It would still be a stored-payments system in all likelihood (you just can't charge $.02 to a Mastercard), but the asymmetry might make it profitable.
his description of the original paper as "shoveled dirt onto the coffin of DRM as a business model" is nonsensical.
I wouldn't go that far. From the conclusion:
This means that a vendor will probably make more money by selling unprotected objects than protected objects. In short, if you are competing with the darknet, you must compete on the darknet's own terms: that is convenience and low cost rather than additional security.
"Shoveling dirt" may be a slight overstatement (it's obviously not dead yet), but the paper clearly concludes that DRM is not beneficial. It's only a short step from predicting that it's not beneficial to forcing a change to the business model.
I don't precisely agree with the paper; Apple's iTunes shows that there is considerable market for DRM-protected "consumer IP-goods". But I think that the summary accurately reflects the tone of the paper.
It is remarkable. eBay is an auction site, which in theory is the best way to make a profit. eBay's overhead should be fairly low, since they're just running a web engine (as opposed to having a large warehouse, manufacturing, inventory, and fulfilment employees) and therefore its prices should be low.
And for years people established businesses there, and it was a good way for people to make a business selling stuff without the overhead of having their own web site. This article says that's changing and examines why.
So maximizing profit isn't news, but abandoning eBay sure is.
That's correct. The real question is why the top-level poster was writing in French in the first place.
Presumably without trading favors, they are more careful about what they pass, though it's entirely possible that in some cases they can't pass anything at all. A political system is a balance between too much brake and too much gas.
An honor system would also be a nice feature, but the higher the stakes, the more money there is to help compromise your honor.
The line-item veto only applied to budgets, so it couldn't be used to remove the broadcast flag. It could, however, be used to zero out the budget used to enforce it. Of course he wouldn't have, but any future President could have. That's part of the reason they overturned the line item veto; it violates the separation of powers.
It's spotty (and personal; my favories are very different from yours). It's not brilliant every week, but sometimes it's pure genius. So it stays in the rotation.
I don't mind the politics; they're a news satire and politics is news. They do have a liberal bias, but they'll take targets of opportunity as they come up. I appreciate them when they're clever, no matter who is the butt of the joke. Just like some of my favorite episodes of South Park are among the most conservative, though they too can descend to simple bashing rather than insight when they're having an off week.
U.S. scientists had said earlier
It's that old past perfect tense. The scientists had said one thing, but now that's over and the Russian scientists are saying a different thing.
So either the US scientists were wrong (and they never got a signal; the article says "possibly") or they couldn't find it, then they found it, then they lost it again.
There's really no contradiction; they may or may not have found it, but it sounds like it's gone now.
Getting the nonsense stopped is harder than it sounds.
The US Congressional procedures are very strange. Bills are created by committees; they don't usually go to the floor until it's been approved by the committee. After that, it's tricky to change the bill.
Most deliberative bodies have a "motion to split", which allows you to take a bill and chop it into pieces and vote the separate pieces. The US Congress rules of order don't have a motion to split. That means that you actually have to amend the bill to remove offending language. On the floor, debate and amendments are limited.
The point of not having the motion to split is to allow compromises to be enforced. If somebody says, "OK, I'll let you have your restriction on cadmium disposal, but only if I can have $15 million for my district to build roads." If you remove one piece or the other from the bill, the compromise falls apart.
It's hard to make compromises in a 435-member House (or even a 100 member Senate). That's why bills come out of committees, where there are usually a dozen people at most. In theory that also allows them to be experts (or at least have experts on hand) in transportation/defense/telecommuncations/etc.
The point is that your senator has less than 1% input into most bills. In theory he makes up for it with more than 1% input into other bills, depending on seniority. Of course it never works out that way, depending on favors he's done, whether he's in the majority or minority, etc.
So ultimately even when it comes down to the up-or-down vote, your senator could be forced to say, "I'm going to vote against this entire bill guaranteeing proper nutrition for kittycats because I don't like the broadcast flag that's gotten crammed into it." And when he runs for re-election, the opposition says, "Senator Bob vote to starve kittycats!"
The Republicans absolutely REAMED Kerry in the last election because of this. It's one reason that Senators haven't been elected to Congress in forever: they end up leaving these long track records of voting against things they agree with.
It didn't help that Kerry fumbled the answer, "Well, I voted for that bill before they crammed all that pork into it" (the correct answer) came out as, "I voted for it before I voted against it," and the election pretty much ended right then.
So Senators on the committee have massive power to write legislative pork and do favors for friends. That won't go away without a rewrite of the rules. Sadly, you'll discover that whatever party has 51% of the vote is not likely to vote to change the rules, since it tends to limit their power.
Viva la revolucion!
Just for reference, the guys who put price stickers on things try to avoid having you "buy them in a heartheat". They make the same amount of money if you just barely buy it as if you buy it with your whole heart.
The price is determined by where they think they can get the most money out of you. That's $15 for a CD; $10 for a crippled digital album.
To reiterate: if you're happy with the price, they're not. If you buy it for $5, they'd rather you bought it for $6.
Instead, it costs $15. If they sold it for $5, would you buy two and give one as a gift? Maybe. But you probably wouldn't buy three, which is what it would take.
Call it "supply and demand". Or call it "greed". But it's hardly "insanity". It's self-interest, and according to TFA, people are buying it at the price they set. If they charged more and made less money, that would be insanity. If they charged less and made less money, that would also be insanity. But self-interest is eminently rational. Greedy, perhaps, but rational.
Credit cards never have been safe, but that doesn't mean that they can't ever possibly be safe.
There are ways to do secure payments, usually involving cryptography. Generally, it works like a "digital check" where you create an authorization for a payment, digitally sign and date it, and then hand it over. They never have access to your credit card number, because the real secret is your private key, which never leaves your PDA/smart card/phone/etc. Your bank ensures that the "check" is only cashed once, and because of the crypto it can't be forged or altered without immense resources.
So why haven't we implemented this yet? Infrastructure, mostly. There's a LOT of infrastructure for the present system. It's expensive. Smart cards are expensive. The only thing that's more expensive is credit card companies getting massively ripped off. Perhaps you'll be getting your smart card right soon.
Perhaps not. Another reason is that the infrastructure represents a substantial agreement between the major credit card companies. Changing it involves getting a lot of people to agree on something. That's hard to do, especially when it has to be RIGHT. If they choose the wrong crypto algorithm, or if there are other weaknesses in the system they choose, you could be WAY more doomed than 68,000 missing credit card numbers.
So while there is a tradeoff between convenience and security, there are clearly better balance points than the one we have. Sadly, as long as inertia is an even stronger attractor, we may live this way for a while longer.
No prob. If you read my other posts you'll see that I'm actually quite sympathetic; I'm an American living in a blue state and was horrified last November to learn that despite all the shouting 52% of the country considered something other than "tens of thousands of dead people" or "over a thousand dead Americans" to be the most important factor in determining who should run the country.
I'm getting to be of an age where running for office is a serious possibility. There's no way I could displace the existing congressmen, and because I live in a blue state I wouldn't want to. But I would love to see if I could improve the level of discourse at a national level and see if it trickles down.
It's called a joke, son.
I get the impression that this product is actually going to be marketed, as opposed to the Fujitsu prototype. The technology isn't new, but it seems to be taking a very long time to get those last few bugs out (and bring the manufacturing costs low enough) to make it consumer-grade.
You probably wouldn't want this under your skin, because it doesn't glow like an LED. It just reflects light, like a piece of paper with writing. Yeah, there's a thin transparent layer of skin, but you're still going to lose light coming in and going out so it won't look very good. I think that a flexible OLED would make a better choice for implants.
It would make a nifty watch, though.
I was in a cynical mood when I wrote that. I agree with everything you said.
I still think the national time out is a good idea.
The world is already full of message boards, and they don't seem to have raised the level of dialogue. Check out slashdot any time a controversial topic is raised, and you'll see the supposedly smarter group of people here ranting like children.
As far as I can tell, the level of national dialogue has declined at the same rate as communication has improved. I think a few weeks of national time-out, where nobody is allowed to discuss Iraq, abortion, or evolution, are in order.