I agree with your POV on the prospect of bribery effectively shifting from the elected to the electorate. And you are right that it may be cheaper because it is going on at the moment, in the form of advertising.
Extreme example - and at risk of taking the thread in an unwelcome direction - oil industry ads are very "green" these days. Surely the goal of those ads is to make us feel better about the product we are buying into?
There are a lot of things I like about the "Demarchy" idea (new to me) but I think it runs the risk - like any system - of becoming self-serving. Demarchy's goals need to be aligned with citizens', i.e. mankind's (etc., etc. - easy to say, but what are they?). I imagine it could be a very "responsive" system, given current technology.
I also agree with your "competency" point: maybe citizens might be allowed to nominate "proxies" to opine on their behalf on various topics (different proxies for different areas of expertise) and veto their proxy's (possibly explained?) vote instead of trying to understand subject matter 100% themselves. Of course, that idea opens another means for external interests to "game the system"; I don't think that kind of thing can go away until "the game" bans bots;-)
I think the subject makes us hard for us to put it in proportion but in quantative terms it is not widespread - and that is because of society (and the fact that people, on average, are normal), not necessarily police intervention.
I'm not suggesting that police shouldn't be interested - they have uncovered some serious things and made serious arrests - but I think their interest is disproportionate. It is over-simplifying to say it is just about the small chance of physical injury (although doubtless a factor): I'm sure it counts well towards "targets", too.
No, not yet.
I know the language is "innocent" but bear in mind that I'm posting on Slashdot (think of some alternative descriptions I could have used;-)
I have quite a nice paedo setup here, actually: living on my own, near a school!
Some 30-60 per cent of the case load for computer crime specialists globally relates to child pornography
Because child pornography certainly does not constitute 30-60 of computer crime (probably not even by "volume", i.e. Bytes).
A part of me can't help thinking that cops are so enthusiastic about child porn because perpetrators are typically solitary and quiet, hence easy to arrest.
Maximal kudos for minimal risk.
Known as Simple Image Preview Live Environment (SImPLE), the tool is heralded as the new frontier fighting cybercrime.
It uses a cut-down version of a Linux kernel and can be deployed on almost any standard operating system.
Here's something I find interesting: let's say Yahoo was only ever really worth 7.50. Yet brokers etc. were willing to trade them for much more than this. Microsoft claimed to be willing to pay much more than this with its own shareholders' money. Why does Jerry Yang get the lawsuit?
Is trading over-inflated stock - and artificially inflating stock prices - really much different to trading sub-prime mortgages?
Correction: I found the word "code" in an "embedded" story on the second page of that linked article:
Is Open Source the Answer for Risk Models?
By agreeing to rely on Wall Street's computer models to gauge investment risks, the SEC essentially outsourced that part of its regulatory duties to the systems of financial services firms, says Erik Gerding, an assistant professor of law at the University of New Mexico who does research on securities law.
Gerding's proposed fix: Make the software code that underlies the risk models open source -- a step that he claims would boost the transparency of risk calculations and potentially improve their accuracy.
"Just as with open-source software, other users would be able to copy and modify these models for their own use," Gerding said. And by looking at the code, business partners as well as credit-rating agencies could get a better picture of how financial services firms assess the transaction risks, he said.
Many Wall Street firms are already major users of open-source software. But Lisa Cash, executive vice president of sales and marketing at DFA Capital Management Inc., a vendor of risk management tools, said she thinks it would be difficult to get high-quality risk models into the market on an open-source basis.
Cash said that a better option for increasing transparency as well as confidence in risk models would be for U.S. regulators to emulate their counterparts in Europe, where watchdog agencies audit financial firms' risk models.
Peter Teuten, president of Keane Business Risk Management Solutions LLC, also questioned the wisdom of using open-source approaches in risk modeling. But he said that he does expect some modeling standards to emerge from the crisis.
Yes, I checked for this too. Even followed a link about Christopher Cox and risk models. At no point was a bug mentioned. The word "code" wasn't used.
Coders would spot that;-)
Here's an interesting philosophical question. After the first autocatalytic sets and simple replicators, but before the first cell walls, was the entire Earth a single organism?
Philosophically: if Earth were an organism, life would be sustaining Earth, not the other way around.
It's hard to imagine that all life on Earth arose from a single point (particularly if there were an abundace of "building blocks" available).
Therefore "life as we know it" is more likely to be a product of competition, collisions and co-operation between independently-originating life forms. Or even plans, if you will.
Who knows, maybe cell walls were invented before autocatalytic sets and simple replicators. Imagine how they might have got together: I wonder if it was an accident? Probably not: a plan that can protect itself is, given the trials and tribulations that come with time, more likely to survive. It probably didn't happen once or in one way. There were probably many failures.
You can take "plan" thing even further: plans that don't replicate (i.e. don't share information) are going to be hard to find because, quite simply, a lot of stuff has happened everywhere. How can you plan for everything?
A unique plan is statistically likely to be "snuffed out" (even if it does some really cool things), a "shared" plan will survive a lot.
And who owns the government?
Can anybody give a vaild citation for the report I heard somewhere that fannie mae/freddy mac were "almost forced" into buying a load of bad loans in the run-up to their being nationalised?
I hadn't heard of them two weeks ago, so I'm open to being accuesd of throwing oil on the fire here;-)
So ordinary citizens have ended up paying for a government scheme designed to benefit ordinary citizens, with some of the money going towards corporate expenses.
There aren't many areas of public interest that businesses can pull out of without damaging their own interests in the process, thankfully. For example, if transport services shut down, how would people get to work? If there weren't pension funds, why would share prices have to rise?
Maybe we'll see what happens in the future: some countries have maybe learnt their lesson and hopefully others can learn without making the same mistakes.
I'm not suggesting that the World Bank is corrupt, rather that they open the door to corruption. They are more likely to grant a loan to countries that allow inward investment (common sense) but those "inward investing" companies do not necessarily give a country the best deal.
Good example is the Volta Dam in Ghana (a producer of "fair trade" cocoa but not Aluminium, in spite of quite large resouces). The World Bank warned Ghana's government that the deal they were getting from Kaiser Aluminium might not help their economy but then gave them the loan anyway. Within a few years, the country was bankrupt (they got a dam - run for the benefit of Kaiser - plus some roads, buildings and monuments for their trouble).
Should the World Bank have given the loan? It's tricky - would Ghana be worse off if they hadn't?
Actually, I think you've hit the nail on the head here: they shouldn't charge for any of these things! If a customer wants one of these things, they should be provided by a third party (publisher), with the publisher paying the producer their "cut" of the sale. If the producer is the publisher (as is often the case for "big" media), then let them bill themselves (it's SOX-friendly;-)
By separating production and publishing, we can get out of the situation whereby "back catalogues" can be made arbitrarily unavailable (producers would need to have their entire catalogue available in order to maximise profit in this model). Also, we would avoid the whole "media-shifting" mystery: company x supplies content y on media z - so if customer wants a copy on media w, company v (on inspection of media w for integrity or maybe on checking customer's license on company x's database) should be able to supply a copy on media w at cost (or close).
It's reasonable to assume that it's the only loan going.
Unless you're willing to borrow from Russia, join the axis of Evil and face economic sanctions (of course, being part of Russia's "sphere of influence" has a non-monetary price too).
Well I didn't go out and measure it: the sea is damn cold where I am.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here: that current climate models are wrong or incomplete? That's models for you. A temperature scale is a very simplistic model based around the idea that the amount of heat energy you put into something equals the amount of heat energy you can get out if you reverse the temperature gradient, which isn't how things work in real life. Suggesting that "climate change" is about temperature is a bit like saying that the current financial crisis is about money;-)
I didn't RTFA but the idea seems plausible.
I recall Richard Dawkins saying that eyes tend to evolve from photoreceptive skin cells.
The brain is the most important organ that "sees"; it's the thing that does the image processing. Or, if you look at it another way, the brain constructs the image from available data.
If it were medically possible to stimulate a patch of skin cells to transmit more light information to the brain - and correspondingly stimulate a neural pathway (who knows, maybe even all the way to a "visual" area) - then the subject might be able to form a usable "image" of their surroundings by "scanning" (moving their stimulated skin around;-).
Even for personal purposes? What constitutes "personal"?
If someone has, for example, a linkedIn account, do they have to close it if they get elected?
Just because energy is increasing in the atmosphere, that doesn't mean that temperatures have to increase: that energy can be transferred as "latent heat" and used to cause phase change in a substance like ice.
A lot of ice melted over the last couple of years. That ice was cold;-)
It was once stacked in a big crystal, now it's travelling everywhere.
Last couple of Summers in northern Europe have been cool, previous couple of years being gradually warmer.
If northern Europe were getting cooler because of a general cooling trend, I wouldn't expect the Polar ice cap to be melting at an increasing rate.
Alternatively, the coolness could due to an increase in humidity of air being dragged from the North Pole towards the equator (polar winds are being forced backwards - north-east, towards Europe - by the Gulf Stream).
Well, I've read through the thread til I got to your post and nobody has done any better than say that they might.
If they have no intention of providing replacements for unsupported tracks, then it's just another example of people who run an institution getting ordinary people to pay for that institution's mistakes, isn't it? The customer will pay back the cost of Wal-Mart's DRM experiment (MS tax) by buying the track without DRM now.
In other words, the government gave citizens' (future) money to the commercial banks by buying their debts and Fannie and Freddie effectively provided laundry services for the transaction?
I need a good speech.
The institutions that the left put in place are just as responsible for this mess.
I had to re-read that sentence several times before I figured out what you were saying: I didn't know that there was a "left" in Washington!
The way I look at it: it's all people, and it goes all the way down. Some did it in ignorance, some out of necessity, most lied to themselves about what they were doing, making it harder for them to comprehend consequences. When things started looking bad, some people began to think that they might need money later.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with your POV on the prospect of bribery effectively shifting from the elected to the electorate. And you are right that it may be cheaper because it is going on at the moment, in the form of advertising. ;-)
Extreme example - and at risk of taking the thread in an unwelcome direction - oil industry ads are very "green" these days. Surely the goal of those ads is to make us feel better about the product we are buying into?
There are a lot of things I like about the "Demarchy" idea (new to me) but I think it runs the risk - like any system - of becoming self-serving. Demarchy's goals need to be aligned with citizens', i.e. mankind's (etc., etc. - easy to say, but what are they?). I imagine it could be a very "responsive" system, given current technology.
I also agree with your "competency" point: maybe citizens might be allowed to nominate "proxies" to opine on their behalf on various topics (different proxies for different areas of expertise) and veto their proxy's (possibly explained?) vote instead of trying to understand subject matter 100% themselves. Of course, that idea opens another means for external interests to "game the system"; I don't think that kind of thing can go away until "the game" bans bots
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1019609&cid=25649859
I think the subject makes us hard for us to put it in proportion but in quantative terms it is not widespread - and that is because of society (and the fact that people, on average, are normal), not necessarily police intervention.
I'm not suggesting that police shouldn't be interested - they have uncovered some serious things and made serious arrests - but I think their interest is disproportionate. It is over-simplifying to say it is just about the small chance of physical injury (although doubtless a factor): I'm sure it counts well towards "targets", too.
No, not yet. ;-)
I know the language is "innocent" but bear in mind that I'm posting on Slashdot (think of some alternative descriptions I could have used
I have quite a nice paedo setup here, actually: living on my own, near a school!
Some 30-60 per cent of the case load for computer crime specialists globally relates to child pornography
Because child pornography certainly does not constitute 30-60 of computer crime (probably not even by "volume", i.e. Bytes).
A part of me can't help thinking that cops are so enthusiastic about child porn because perpetrators are typically solitary and quiet, hence easy to arrest.
Maximal kudos for minimal risk.
Known as Simple Image Preview Live Environment (SImPLE), the tool is heralded as the new frontier fighting cybercrime.
It uses a cut-down version of a Linux kernel and can be deployed on almost any standard operating system.
Here's something I find interesting: let's say Yahoo was only ever really worth 7.50. Yet brokers etc. were willing to trade them for much more than this. Microsoft claimed to be willing to pay much more than this with its own shareholders' money. Why does Jerry Yang get the lawsuit?
Is trading over-inflated stock - and artificially inflating stock prices - really much different to trading sub-prime mortgages?
Is Open Source the Answer for Risk Models?
By agreeing to rely on Wall Street's computer models to gauge investment risks, the SEC essentially outsourced that part of its regulatory duties to the systems of financial services firms, says Erik Gerding, an assistant professor of law at the University of New Mexico who does research on securities law.
Gerding's proposed fix: Make the software code that underlies the risk models open source -- a step that he claims would boost the transparency of risk calculations and potentially improve their accuracy.
"Just as with open-source software, other users would be able to copy and modify these models for their own use," Gerding said. And by looking at the code, business partners as well as credit-rating agencies could get a better picture of how financial services firms assess the transaction risks, he said.
Many Wall Street firms are already major users of open-source software. But Lisa Cash, executive vice president of sales and marketing at DFA Capital Management Inc., a vendor of risk management tools, said she thinks it would be difficult to get high-quality risk models into the market on an open-source basis.
Cash said that a better option for increasing transparency as well as confidence in risk models would be for U.S. regulators to emulate their counterparts in Europe, where watchdog agencies audit financial firms' risk models.
Peter Teuten, president of Keane Business Risk Management Solutions LLC, also questioned the wisdom of using open-source approaches in risk modeling. But he said that he does expect some modeling standards to emerge from the crisis.
Yes, I checked for this too. Even followed a link about Christopher Cox and risk models. At no point was a bug mentioned. The word "code" wasn't used. ;-)
Coders would spot that
OK.
Here's an interesting philosophical question. After the first autocatalytic sets and simple replicators, but before the first cell walls, was the entire Earth a single organism?
Philosophically: if Earth were an organism, life would be sustaining Earth, not the other way around.
It's hard to imagine that all life on Earth arose from a single point (particularly if there were an abundace of "building blocks" available).
Therefore "life as we know it" is more likely to be a product of competition, collisions and co-operation between independently-originating life forms. Or even plans, if you will.
Who knows, maybe cell walls were invented before autocatalytic sets and simple replicators. Imagine how they might have got together: I wonder if it was an accident? Probably not: a plan that can protect itself is, given the trials and tribulations that come with time, more likely to survive. It probably didn't happen once or in one way. There were probably many failures.
You can take "plan" thing even further: plans that don't replicate (i.e. don't share information) are going to be hard to find because, quite simply, a lot of stuff has happened everywhere. How can you plan for everything?
A unique plan is statistically likely to be "snuffed out" (even if it does some really cool things), a "shared" plan will survive a lot.
YAANAMB?
And who owns the government? ;-)
Can anybody give a vaild citation for the report I heard somewhere that fannie mae/freddy mac were "almost forced" into buying a load of bad loans in the run-up to their being nationalised?
I hadn't heard of them two weeks ago, so I'm open to being accuesd of throwing oil on the fire here
So ordinary citizens have ended up paying for a government scheme designed to benefit ordinary citizens, with some of the money going towards corporate expenses.
There aren't many areas of public interest that businesses can pull out of without damaging their own interests in the process, thankfully. For example, if transport services shut down, how would people get to work? If there weren't pension funds, why would share prices have to rise?
Maybe we'll see what happens in the future: some countries have maybe learnt their lesson and hopefully others can learn without making the same mistakes.
I'm not suggesting that the World Bank is corrupt, rather that they open the door to corruption. They are more likely to grant a loan to countries that allow inward investment (common sense) but those "inward investing" companies do not necessarily give a country the best deal.
Good example is the Volta Dam in Ghana (a producer of "fair trade" cocoa but not Aluminium, in spite of quite large resouces). The World Bank warned Ghana's government that the deal they were getting from Kaiser Aluminium might not help their economy but then gave them the loan anyway. Within a few years, the country was bankrupt (they got a dam - run for the benefit of Kaiser - plus some roads, buildings and monuments for their trouble).
Should the World Bank have given the loan? It's tricky - would Ghana be worse off if they hadn't?
Actually, I think you've hit the nail on the head here: they shouldn't charge for any of these things! If a customer wants one of these things, they should be provided by a third party (publisher), with the publisher paying the producer their "cut" of the sale. If the producer is the publisher (as is often the case for "big" media), then let them bill themselves (it's SOX-friendly ;-)
By separating production and publishing, we can get out of the situation whereby "back catalogues" can be made arbitrarily unavailable (producers would need to have their entire catalogue available in order to maximise profit in this model). Also, we would avoid the whole "media-shifting" mystery: company x supplies content y on media z - so if customer wants a copy on media w, company v (on inspection of media w for integrity or maybe on checking customer's license on company x's database) should be able to supply a copy on media w at cost (or close).
It's reasonable to assume that it's the only loan going.
Unless you're willing to borrow from Russia, join the axis of Evil and face economic sanctions (of course, being part of Russia's "sphere of influence" has a non-monetary price too).
Well I didn't go out and measure it: the sea is damn cold where I am. ;-)
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here: that current climate models are wrong or incomplete? That's models for you. A temperature scale is a very simplistic model based around the idea that the amount of heat energy you put into something equals the amount of heat energy you can get out if you reverse the temperature gradient, which isn't how things work in real life. Suggesting that "climate change" is about temperature is a bit like saying that the current financial crisis is about money
I didn't RTFA but the idea seems plausible. ;-).
I recall Richard Dawkins saying that eyes tend to evolve from photoreceptive skin cells.
The brain is the most important organ that "sees"; it's the thing that does the image processing. Or, if you look at it another way, the brain constructs the image from available data.
If it were medically possible to stimulate a patch of skin cells to transmit more light information to the brain - and correspondingly stimulate a neural pathway (who knows, maybe even all the way to a "visual" area) - then the subject might be able to form a usable "image" of their surroundings by "scanning" (moving their stimulated skin around
Even for personal purposes? What constitutes "personal"?
If someone has, for example, a linkedIn account, do they have to close it if they get elected?
Maybe they can use that heat energy to power the fans?
Just because energy is increasing in the atmosphere, that doesn't mean that temperatures have to increase: that energy can be transferred as "latent heat" and used to cause phase change in a substance like ice.
A lot of ice melted over the last couple of years. That ice was cold ;-)
It was once stacked in a big crystal, now it's travelling everywhere.
Last couple of Summers in northern Europe have been cool, previous couple of years being gradually warmer.
If northern Europe were getting cooler because of a general cooling trend, I wouldn't expect the Polar ice cap to be melting at an increasing rate.
Alternatively, the coolness could due to an increase in humidity of air being dragged from the North Pole towards the equator (polar winds are being forced backwards - north-east, towards Europe - by the Gulf Stream).
Well, I've read through the thread til I got to your post and nobody has done any better than say that they might.
If they have no intention of providing replacements for unsupported tracks, then it's just another example of people who run an institution getting ordinary people to pay for that institution's mistakes, isn't it? The customer will pay back the cost of Wal-Mart's DRM experiment (MS tax) by buying the track without DRM now.
In other words, the government gave citizens' (future) money to the commercial banks by buying their debts and Fannie and Freddie effectively provided laundry services for the transaction?
I need a good speech.
The institutions that the left put in place are just as responsible for this mess.
I had to re-read that sentence several times before I figured out what you were saying: I didn't know that there was a "left" in Washington!
The way I look at it: it's all people, and it goes all the way down. Some did it in ignorance, some out of necessity, most lied to themselves about what they were doing, making it harder for them to comprehend consequences. When things started looking bad, some people began to think that they might need money later.