Of course NULL is part of the C language, you blathering idiot, and it always has been. The level of ignorance here astounds me. Don't post about things you don't understand.
Quoting from C89: (not C99, C89, the one that's older than dirt.)
4.1.5 Common definitions The following types and macros are defined in the standard header . Some are also defined in other headers, as noted in their respective sections.... NULL which expands to an implementation-defined null pointer constant... A.6.3.13 Library functions * The null pointer constant to which the macro NULL expands ($4.1.5).
The code is grabbing the value of the sk field of the tun struct, not its address. Did you misread the code, or do you not actually know C? Or are you perhaps just on the sauce?
You're claiming the code reads struct sock **sk = &tun->sk when in reality, it reads struct sock* sk = tun->sk, which is completely different.
Seems like you could make a killing, then, by taking a tree farm and letting conventional varieties of tree grow longer. If a tree takes twice as long to grow, but the wood sells for four times the price, you come out comfortably ahead.
So why aren't there more tree farms that focus on quality lumber?
Special exemptions for New York City are all over state law, usually written as "...except in a city with a population above such-and-such", which obviously means New York City. Really, the New York government views the entire state as the New York City megapolis with some unimportant country hinterland up north. It's frustrating.
In many less developed societies, it's common for people to believe that knowing someone's "true name" allows you to perform magic on that person. That cognitive process is still active today, however: we just consider social security numbers our "true names" and treat them accordingly.
Frankly, it's ridiculous either way. Social security numbers are just identifiers, and we need to stop treating mere identifiers as tokens imbued with power.
Hear hear --- too many people in the "sustainability" movement are just anti-corporatism reactionaries. I'm no fan of faceless corporations myself, but I acknowledge that economies of scale exist.
Some people oppose nuclear power just because of its organization aspects. Nuclear power requires large companies, they say, and because large companies are evil, we have to oppose the "nuclear industry". (Why do we never hear of GE described as the "wind power industry?")
But then these same people propose "small", "neighborhood" plants, call them "nuclear batteries", and suppose that despite the necessarily lower economies of scale and looser oversight, they're actually better than the large plans -- they're smaller, after all. Everything a large corporation does it evil, and everything a small company does is good.
Strictly speaking, that's true (and, in my opinion, a good thing.) But whether or not they should, judges do create an awful lot of law, either by coming up with new rules or by stretching their interpretations of existing legislation.
That's how it's supposed to work, for the better or for worse. The United States is a common law jurisdiction, meaning that judicial precedents have value, and in effect, lay out the rules for future cases. The alternative is civil law, in which judges decide cases on the basis of statute and statue alone.
Both systems have their advantages, but if I had to choose, I'd go with the flexibility of the common law system to the theoretical elegance of the civil law one.
That's exactly why I want the government to function according to it, no more and no less.
The problem is that there's quite a bit of room between "no more" and "no less". The founders intended for the constitution to be interpreted and applied to particular situations of the day. The constitution is not scripture: it doesn't contain the answers. Instead, it describes a good way of agreeing on the answer.
I believe that the common good is best served by a minimal government that has a moral justification for those things that it does do, and a citizenry which has as many freedoms as possible (as a side note, that includes the freedom to irresponsibly live your life and then accept the consequences which is why I reject the nanny state).
I'd agree with you if you deleted the word "moral". What does morality have to do with it? Either we're talking about utilitarian (or Kantian) morals, or we're talking about religious ones. In the first case, we're actually still talking about the common good, just indirectly. In the latter case, well, since when have religious morals led to a happy society?
To put this another way, we already have a good standard for what that "common good" means for the government and that standard is called the U.S. Constitution.
The constitution isn't as clear-cut as you make it sound. Consider the regulation of interstate commerce, a constitutionally-enumerated duty of the federal government: there are good ways to do it, and poor ways to do it. What better way is there to decide on a regulatory scheme than to see which one will lead to the greatest public good?
I think what you're actually angry about is the government exceeding its constitutional authority in the name of the public good. That, I agree, is dangerous. The limitations expressed in the current constitution exist for a good reason, and exceeding them should require the full onerous amendment process to ensure that this expansion is really warranted.
I think another problem that makes you angry is that people often invoke the "public good" to justify policies that are demonstrably against it, like the Sonny Bono copyright act. I should remind you that "morality" has been used to justify bad laws just as often as the "public good" has. If you want to combat bad laws, combat bad laws, not their purported justification.
But within the bounds of the constitution, it's perfectly legitimate to argue for one policy over another for reasons of the "public good"
The best way it can do that is to never enable a new restriction unless all reasonable objections to it are first overcome.
I agree with you there. By default, we should be free, and bound only to the degree necessary to maintain a happy, civil society.
But this is already covered by existing copyright law. We don't even need the DMCA for this. The owner of the copyright just needs to sue the blog that copies more text than Fair Use allows.
The DMCA is helpful here, actually, since its takedown notice system works fairly well and does exactly what you propose. (Though we'd all like to see the system tweaked, I think the broad outline is reasonable.)
They are careful to make sure that whatever they report is factually accurate, yes. The techniques of modern propaganda are far more sophisticated than telling provably false lies. The biggest problem with the mainstream news is that they selectively omit information that doesn't suit a rather statist agenda.
It's important to remember that news sources don't consciously censor information. The establishment (I much prefer that word to "statist", because I'm a statist) bias in reporting is a structural issue. It's not a conspiracy or propaganda in the traditional meaning of these words.
Noam Chomsky examined these structural issues in his Propaganda Model of news reporting.
Your two problems have intertwined solutions, actually. We'll start to see certain independent blogs gain credibility naturally. The process has already started: consider Nate Silver's blog, or James Kwak and Simon Johnson's, both of which are top-rate sources of analysis that match anything you'll find in the paper. I think the emergence of credibly blogging will occur naturally: the Internet flocks to quality.
That leaves the problem of foreign news, but I don't think it's much a problem. Credible blogs will appear worldwide. Consider how much news we've been able to read from Tehran lately. If you'd like news from Madrid, or Tokyo, or Londom, you can look up a reputable blogger there and read the primary source directly. These native blogs will replace, to large part, foreign correspondents. (This change will be made possibly by the fact that English has become a lingua franca, and it's easier for people from across the world to talk to each other than ever before.)
This model, of course, will lead to rampant astroturfing, disinformation campaigns, partisan hackery, medical quackery (I'm looking at you, Huffington Post), and so on, and I'll miss the Gray Lady, but I don't think it's the end of the world. The discerning reader will still be able to find reliable news, and for the rest, well, they're already reading The Sun or watching Fox News.
How do you maintain a free press when free-riders can inexpensively and quickly copy and redistribute your original content?
What makes you think that a free press is incompatible with easy redistribution? Certainly the current newspaper model will need to adapt, but large, established newspapers are not synonymous with a free press.
In fact, when the Constitution was written, newspapers were more like today's blogs than today's papers: they were small, numerous, often partisan, and of varying quality. If the framers of the constitution thought the press at the time constituted a free press, then we should at least consider the idea that newspapers will need to change.
I also completely reject this concept (mentioned in your prior post) that the government should be worrying about any sort of "creation of the most good." All I want the government to do is to fulfill their duties as enumerated in the U.S. Constitution, no more and no less.
The constitution embodies the principles of the enlightenment (which we seem to have sadly forgotten), and those include the presence of a benevolent, utilitarian government that works for the common good (or "general welfare", to use a familiar phrase). Your argument that some abhorrent dictators did what they thought was for the common good, and therefore that the government should never act for the common good, is fallacious, cynical, and specious.
Ignoring the presence of genuinely malevolent bad actors, sometimes those in government will get it wrong, and a mismatch between the actual good and perceived good will result. In a dictatorship, there is no mechanism to correct this mismatch. But the entire point of a democracy is to provide a feedback mechanism to ensure that what the government thinks is for the common good, actually is. In a democracy, it's good and right for a government to act to improve the lot of its people.
I'm not certain linking to someone else's work is completely under the umbrella of speech
I am. I think we can agree that "you can find X by going to example.com and clicking the link called foo" is protected speech, yes? If you want to argue that deep-linking is no covered by free speech, then you must show that either:
A URL and the aforementioned sentence are dissimilar
The URL itself it protected speech, but its machine-readable form, the link, is not
I reject #1 above because any linguistic transformation of protected speech is still protected speech, and can think of no contrary precedent. I reject #2 because I think of no situation in which a machine-readable form of speech is treated differently from the same speech in a different, non-machine-readable fixed medium.
Now, some very powerful people have argued that sentence #2 should be true, but perceived (or even actual) economic harm is not a justification for abridgment of free speech. The traditionally-recognized exceptions to free speech are:
Defamation
Causing panic
Fighting words (an exception seldom used today)
Incitement to crime
Sedition
Obscenity
Establishment of religion
Deep linking is not exempted from being free speech by falling into any of the above categories. Therefore, it is protected speech.
There is no category called "likely to cause economic harm to a corporation with lobbyists".
And the positive feedback between C02 and H20 alleged
Really? Seems plausible to me. Warm water has a higher vapor pressure than cold water, which leads to more water vapor in the atmosphere.
From that the nov55.com site:
The ice accumulates for about 80 thousand years and then melts for about 20 thousand years. Scientists used to assume that ice ages were a natural result of ice accumulating and melting in a cyclic manner. But the timing is too precise for natural environmental effects, which vary a lot. I therefore theorize that the cause is hot spots rotating in the earth's center and heating the oceans. Rotations in the earth's molten center could cycle in a precise way. It cannot be a coincidence that the tilt of the earths orbit also cycles at the same interval of 100 thousand years. Perhaps the central core of the earth is pulled off center causing more heat to get to the surface where there are more oceans.
Ha ha ha, that's a good one. Wait --- he's serious? This guy's a crackpot. That fact throws into doubt both his claims and the claims of the people to whom he links.
That works, but only when there are two candidates. More generally, you're talking about having people remember a function f and a parameter a such that f(a, apparent-vote) -> real-vote. You can define an f that will work with multiple candidates, sure, but people will forget a. You can't tell them what it is, and if you make them show up in person to get a new a, that's just as convenient as casting a vote on the spot anyway.
Besides, if a is totally random, an attacker wouldn't change anything by forcing a group to vote a certain way. But I'd bet that if you randomly coerced some people into voting, most of them would input the correct a, and the coerced voting would have a weaker effect that went in the intended direction.
Mitigated with the use of HTTPS, but users must not bypass warnings of bad certificates!
On a somewhat related note, does anyone else think users should be trained to disregard padlock icons in web pages pages and pay attention only to browser UI?
Often, I'll see a bank with an unencrypted homepage that has a login box. Submitting the form goes to an SSL-encrypted page, but the user has no way of knowing that. For all he knows, he could be looking at a phishing site. (And before you tell him to look at the URL, DNS can be hijacked.) Sure, something fishy will happen after he enters his login information, but by that point, it'll be too late.
Is there any track record of the anyone making anything having to do with the internet secure short of keeping everyone out? I don't see any reason to suspect government is necessarily worse than everyone at security.
This "government is bad at everything" meme has to die.
Why should gov't be exempt from oversight or second-guessing?
That's a strawman. I never said that. Of course the government needs oversight --- that's the whole point of a democracy.
I'm arguing that even with the problems you mention, government is still worth the trouble. Do you disagree with me on this point?
Show me a government benefit, and I can easily show you two (or more) examples of waste or sloth or plain incompetency.
I still don't understand your point. Let's take roads, for example. If the government builds a highway, people benefit from decreased travel time and lower transportation costs.
During the construction of the highway, construction workers might not work as hard as they could, let's say, or some Highway Department bureaucrat might award the contract at a higher than necessary cost to his nephew's construction company. Both these problems create inefficiency --- i.e., the highway cost more to build than it could have. But the highway creates a benefit that far exceeds even the slightly inflated cost caused by this inefficiency. Therefore, the government is a net good here.
Of course we should make government more efficient, but I hardly think that "two (or more) examples of waste or sloth or plain incompetency" constitute a reason to claim that government can't get things done.
All of these "improvements" are based on the premise that we need to make voting more convenient because increasing participation is important.
Actually, I disagree with you on that point. Increased participation has two major effects. First, it increases the perceived legitimacy of government, which can give elected leaders more political capital to work with.
Second, and more importantly, increased turnout ensures that it's more difficult for a small, but determined group to sway policy.
Consider an imaginary town with a population of 100, 20 of whom own businesses in that town. There's candidate on the ballot who promises to eliminate taxes on businesses and shift them to the general population. All 20 members of the business community vote for that candidate, with the rest of the people being 2-1 against him.
If, due to voter apathy, only 50 people from the 80 members of the general population show up, then the pro-business-screw-everyone-else candidate will win (20+16)=36 to 33. Granted, when this politician's term is up, more people will vote and he'll be thrown out of office. But by that time, the damage will already have been done.
If everyone had voted, then the pro-business-screw-everyone-else candidate would have lost (20+26) = 46 to 53.
That's why voter turnout is important: it avoids small special interests controlling the government. Some places have mandatory voting, with a fine for people who don't show up: I wholeheartedly support mandatory voting. It's far better for a few people to vote for Lizard People than for special interests to distort government.
Thank you for the post. It's the kind of thing reasonable people can argue about.:-)
if temperatures turn up again before sunspots do, well then I'll take that as quite sufficient disproof. If I was you I wouldn't put any money on that actually happening, but we'll see, won't we?
Sounds like the perfect setup for an InTrade market, yes?
C02 levels track the temperature, not lead it, by an 800-odd year margin.
Well, there are precision problems with that measurement, but there is a lag. All that shows is that CO2 increases proportionally to temperature increases, and amplifies cycles that are already underway. Increasing the CO2 directly, then, will cause a temperature increase just as if the CO2 increase had been bootstrapped by a temperature increase caused by a different mechanism.
water absorbs C02 proportionally to temperature -- you've noticed the recent spate of articles about "ocean acidification" yes? -- and therefore your graph is the expected consequence of oceanic temperature rise
Maybe I'm misinterpreting something, but shouldn't an increase in the ocean's CO2 capacity lead to a decrease in atmospheric CO2 concentration relative to the prior equilibrium?
results of the CERN CLOUD experiments
I'm also looking forward to seeing those results, though I'm not quite as confident as you that a meaningful relationship will be found.
higher temperatures mean more rotting plant material
And as permafrost thaws, the area formerly covered in it becomes a productive biome, which acts as a carbon sink. (Of course, that might be offset by desertification elsewhere, but you're right: either way, it's a second-order effect.)
Unlike AGW theory, this is not inconsistent with any observed data; and none of the theoretical links are controversial except the GCR-cloud link, which we can confidently expect will soon be proven beyond reasonable doubt, unless the entrenched AGW interests manage to defund it through politics.
It's not the effects that are in doubt, but their magnitude. Let's say you're right, and warming episodes are initiated by changes in the solar cycle. Temperature increases, which releases more CO2 --- that CO2 would then lead to additional heat retention (modulo second-order effects) and lead to further CO2 release. Even if we jump-start the process ourselves by directly pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, the result will be the same.
Actually, it's not that hard, because artificially raised C02 environments do not show significantly raised heat retention. This indicates that there's much less energy actually available for absorption by C02 to make any difference in the real atmosphere as opposed to idealized physics models.
Everything I've read indicates that CO2 absorbs a significant amount of infrared radiation and that this climate sensitivity is important -- on the order of 3 degrees C for a doubling of CO2. Why would this heating not be important as a positive feedback mechanism?
we plunge into a new Little Ice Age.
If we do, I'll eat my socks.:-) At least we know how to mitigate an ice age better than we know how to mitigate global warming --- we can always just add a little more methane to the atmosphere. But still, it seems to me that the conventional AGW scenario is the better-supported theory today, though your idea seems offer a plausible bootstrap mechanism for climactic cycles.
I think there's still some cultural inertia against this kind of vote manipulation, but the taboo against it will slowly weaken. I think we'll start seeing more of it in closely-contested races where it's easier to hide.
Party strategy wonks would have to be stupid not to consider the possibility, and considering that questionable tactics like gerrymandering and voter suppression are the norm today, I don't see why clandestine vote-buying might not be slowly added to the toolbox. Also, the problem isn't limited to vote-buying. What about a boss of a company requiring his employees vote a certain way? (Or for you conservative folk, what about a union boss doing the same thing?) What about a spouse demanding that his or her partner vote a certain way? As soon as you can verify a vote, you can coerce somebody else's vote.
And yes, vote manipulation is a problem with conventional absentee ballots: that's why, until recently, you had to provide a good reason to get an absentee ballot. Only recently have states started sending them out to anyone who asks. When you limit the total number of absentee ballots, you limit the total potential for fraud.
Even in states that do offer unrestricted absentee ballots, going to a polling place is still the cultural norm. That's why vote-by-mail is so dangerous: it substantially increases the total number of votes vulnerable to this attack.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course NULL is part of the C language, you blathering idiot, and it always has been. The level of ignorance here astounds me. Don't post about things you don't understand.
Quoting from C89: (not C99, C89, the one that's older than dirt.)
NULL wasn't even "added" in C89: NULL appears in the oldest, cruftiest UNIX code you can imagine. (That link is the original cat command from 1979.)
No. You are wrong.
The code is grabbing the value of the sk field of the tun struct, not its address. Did you misread the code, or do you not actually know C? Or are you perhaps just on the sauce?
You're claiming the code reads struct sock **sk = &tun->sk when in reality, it reads struct sock* sk = tun->sk, which is completely different.
Seems like you could make a killing, then, by taking a tree farm and letting conventional varieties of tree grow longer. If a tree takes twice as long to grow, but the wood sells for four times the price, you come out comfortably ahead.
So why aren't there more tree farms that focus on quality lumber?
Why on earth would that be?
Special exemptions for New York City are all over state law, usually written as "...except in a city with a population above such-and-such", which obviously means New York City. Really, the New York government views the entire state as the New York City megapolis with some unimportant country hinterland up north. It's frustrating.
In many less developed societies, it's common for people to believe that knowing someone's "true name" allows you to perform magic on that person. That cognitive process is still active today, however: we just consider social security numbers our "true names" and treat them accordingly.
Frankly, it's ridiculous either way. Social security numbers are just identifiers, and we need to stop treating mere identifiers as tokens imbued with power.
The gays are corrupting our precious bodily fluids, after all.
Hear hear --- too many people in the "sustainability" movement are just anti-corporatism reactionaries. I'm no fan of faceless corporations myself, but I acknowledge that economies of scale exist.
Some people oppose nuclear power just because of its organization aspects. Nuclear power requires large companies, they say, and because large companies are evil, we have to oppose the "nuclear industry". (Why do we never hear of GE described as the "wind power industry?")
But then these same people propose "small", "neighborhood" plants, call them "nuclear batteries", and suppose that despite the necessarily lower economies of scale and looser oversight, they're actually better than the large plans -- they're smaller, after all. Everything a large corporation does it evil, and everything a small company does is good.
That's how it's supposed to work, for the better or for worse. The United States is a common law jurisdiction, meaning that judicial precedents have value, and in effect, lay out the rules for future cases. The alternative is civil law, in which judges decide cases on the basis of statute and statue alone.
Both systems have their advantages, but if I had to choose, I'd go with the flexibility of the common law system to the theoretical elegance of the civil law one.
The problem is that there's quite a bit of room between "no more" and "no less". The founders intended for the constitution to be interpreted and applied to particular situations of the day. The constitution is not scripture: it doesn't contain the answers. Instead, it describes a good way of agreeing on the answer.
I'd agree with you if you deleted the word "moral". What does morality have to do with it? Either we're talking about utilitarian (or Kantian) morals, or we're talking about religious ones. In the first case, we're actually still talking about the common good, just indirectly. In the latter case, well, since when have religious morals led to a happy society?
The constitution isn't as clear-cut as you make it sound. Consider the regulation of interstate commerce, a constitutionally-enumerated duty of the federal government: there are good ways to do it, and poor ways to do it. What better way is there to decide on a regulatory scheme than to see which one will lead to the greatest public good?
I think what you're actually angry about is the government exceeding its constitutional authority in the name of the public good. That, I agree, is dangerous. The limitations expressed in the current constitution exist for a good reason, and exceeding them should require the full onerous amendment process to ensure that this expansion is really warranted.
I think another problem that makes you angry is that people often invoke the "public good" to justify policies that are demonstrably against it, like the Sonny Bono copyright act. I should remind you that "morality" has been used to justify bad laws just as often as the "public good" has. If you want to combat bad laws, combat bad laws, not their purported justification.
But within the bounds of the constitution, it's perfectly legitimate to argue for one policy over another for reasons of the "public good"
I agree with you there. By default, we should be free, and bound only to the degree necessary to maintain a happy, civil society.
Some of us can comprehend, and even write sentences without having to read them aloud.
The DMCA is helpful here, actually, since its takedown notice system works fairly well and does exactly what you propose. (Though we'd all like to see the system tweaked, I think the broad outline is reasonable.)
It's important to remember that news sources don't consciously censor information. The establishment (I much prefer that word to "statist", because I'm a statist) bias in reporting is a structural issue. It's not a conspiracy or propaganda in the traditional meaning of these words.
Noam Chomsky examined these structural issues in his Propaganda Model of news reporting.
Your two problems have intertwined solutions, actually. We'll start to see certain independent blogs gain credibility naturally. The process has already started: consider Nate Silver's blog, or James Kwak and Simon Johnson's, both of which are top-rate sources of analysis that match anything you'll find in the paper. I think the emergence of credibly blogging will occur naturally: the Internet flocks to quality.
That leaves the problem of foreign news, but I don't think it's much a problem. Credible blogs will appear worldwide. Consider how much news we've been able to read from Tehran lately. If you'd like news from Madrid, or Tokyo, or Londom, you can look up a reputable blogger there and read the primary source directly. These native blogs will replace, to large part, foreign correspondents. (This change will be made possibly by the fact that English has become a lingua franca, and it's easier for people from across the world to talk to each other than ever before.)
This model, of course, will lead to rampant astroturfing, disinformation campaigns, partisan hackery, medical quackery (I'm looking at you, Huffington Post), and so on, and I'll miss the Gray Lady, but I don't think it's the end of the world. The discerning reader will still be able to find reliable news, and for the rest, well, they're already reading The Sun or watching Fox News.
What makes you think that a free press is incompatible with easy redistribution? Certainly the current newspaper model will need to adapt, but large, established newspapers are not synonymous with a free press.
In fact, when the Constitution was written, newspapers were more like today's blogs than today's papers: they were small, numerous, often partisan, and of varying quality. If the framers of the constitution thought the press at the time constituted a free press, then we should at least consider the idea that newspapers will need to change.
The constitution embodies the principles of the enlightenment (which we seem to have sadly forgotten), and those include the presence of a benevolent, utilitarian government that works for the common good (or "general welfare", to use a familiar phrase). Your argument that some abhorrent dictators did what they thought was for the common good, and therefore that the government should never act for the common good, is fallacious, cynical, and specious.
Ignoring the presence of genuinely malevolent bad actors, sometimes those in government will get it wrong, and a mismatch between the actual good and perceived good will result. In a dictatorship, there is no mechanism to correct this mismatch. But the entire point of a democracy is to provide a feedback mechanism to ensure that what the government thinks is for the common good, actually is. In a democracy, it's good and right for a government to act to improve the lot of its people.
I am. I think we can agree that "you can find X by going to example.com and clicking the link called foo" is protected speech, yes? If you want to argue that deep-linking is no covered by free speech, then you must show that either:
I reject #1 above because any linguistic transformation of protected speech is still protected speech, and can think of no contrary precedent. I reject #2 because I think of no situation in which a machine-readable form of speech is treated differently from the same speech in a different, non-machine-readable fixed medium.
Now, some very powerful people have argued that sentence #2 should be true, but perceived (or even actual) economic harm is not a justification for abridgment of free speech. The traditionally-recognized exceptions to free speech are:
Deep linking is not exempted from being free speech by falling into any of the above categories. Therefore, it is protected speech.
There is no category called "likely to cause economic harm to a corporation with lobbyists".
Really? Seems plausible to me. Warm water has a higher vapor pressure than cold water, which leads to more water vapor in the atmosphere.
From that the nov55.com site:
Ha ha ha, that's a good one. Wait --- he's serious? This guy's a crackpot. That fact throws into doubt both his claims and the claims of the people to whom he links.
That works, but only when there are two candidates. More generally, you're talking about having people remember a function f and a parameter a such that f(a, apparent-vote) -> real-vote. You can define an f that will work with multiple candidates, sure, but people will forget a. You can't tell them what it is, and if you make them show up in person to get a new a, that's just as convenient as casting a vote on the spot anyway.
Besides, if a is totally random, an attacker wouldn't change anything by forcing a group to vote a certain way. But I'd bet that if you randomly coerced some people into voting, most of them would input the correct a, and the coerced voting would have a weaker effect that went in the intended direction.
On a somewhat related note, does anyone else think users should be trained to disregard padlock icons in web pages pages and pay attention only to browser UI?
Often, I'll see a bank with an unencrypted homepage that has a login box. Submitting the form goes to an SSL-encrypted page, but the user has no way of knowing that. For all he knows, he could be looking at a phishing site. (And before you tell him to look at the URL, DNS can be hijacked.) Sure, something fishy will happen after he enters his login information, but by that point, it'll be too late.
Is there any track record of the anyone making anything having to do with the internet secure short of keeping everyone out? I don't see any reason to suspect government is necessarily worse than everyone at security.
This "government is bad at everything" meme has to die.
That's a strawman. I never said that. Of course the government needs oversight --- that's the whole point of a democracy.
I'm arguing that even with the problems you mention, government is still worth the trouble. Do you disagree with me on this point?
I still don't understand your point. Let's take roads, for example. If the government builds a highway, people benefit from decreased travel time and lower transportation costs.
During the construction of the highway, construction workers might not work as hard as they could, let's say, or some Highway Department bureaucrat might award the contract at a higher than necessary cost to his nephew's construction company. Both these problems create inefficiency --- i.e., the highway cost more to build than it could have. But the highway creates a benefit that far exceeds even the slightly inflated cost caused by this inefficiency. Therefore, the government is a net good here.
Of course we should make government more efficient, but I hardly think that "two (or more) examples of waste or sloth or plain incompetency" constitute a reason to claim that government can't get things done.
Actually, I disagree with you on that point. Increased participation has two major effects. First, it increases the perceived legitimacy of government, which can give elected leaders more political capital to work with.
Second, and more importantly, increased turnout ensures that it's more difficult for a small, but determined group to sway policy.
Consider an imaginary town with a population of 100, 20 of whom own businesses in that town. There's candidate on the ballot who promises to eliminate taxes on businesses and shift them to the general population. All 20 members of the business community vote for that candidate, with the rest of the people being 2-1 against him.
If, due to voter apathy, only 50 people from the 80 members of the general population show up, then the pro-business-screw-everyone-else candidate will win (20+16)=36 to 33. Granted, when this politician's term is up, more people will vote and he'll be thrown out of office. But by that time, the damage will already have been done.
If everyone had voted, then the pro-business-screw-everyone-else candidate would have lost (20+26) = 46 to 53.
That's why voter turnout is important: it avoids small special interests controlling the government. Some places have mandatory voting, with a fine for people who don't show up: I wholeheartedly support mandatory voting. It's far better for a few people to vote for Lizard People than for special interests to distort government.
Thank you for the post. It's the kind of thing reasonable people can argue about. :-)
Sounds like the perfect setup for an InTrade market, yes?
Well, there are precision problems with that measurement, but there is a lag. All that shows is that CO2 increases proportionally to temperature increases, and amplifies cycles that are already underway. Increasing the CO2 directly, then, will cause a temperature increase just as if the CO2 increase had been bootstrapped by a temperature increase caused by a different mechanism.
Maybe I'm misinterpreting something, but shouldn't an increase in the ocean's CO2 capacity lead to a decrease in atmospheric CO2 concentration relative to the prior equilibrium?
I'm also looking forward to seeing those results, though I'm not quite as confident as you that a meaningful relationship will be found.
And as permafrost thaws, the area formerly covered in it becomes a productive biome, which acts as a carbon sink. (Of course, that might be offset by desertification elsewhere, but you're right: either way, it's a second-order effect.)
It's not the effects that are in doubt, but their magnitude. Let's say you're right, and warming episodes are initiated by changes in the solar cycle. Temperature increases, which releases more CO2 --- that CO2 would then lead to additional heat retention (modulo second-order effects) and lead to further CO2 release. Even if we jump-start the process ourselves by directly pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, the result will be the same.
Everything I've read indicates that CO2 absorbs a significant amount of infrared radiation and that this climate sensitivity is important -- on the order of 3 degrees C for a doubling of CO2. Why would this heating not be important as a positive feedback mechanism?
If we do, I'll eat my socks. :-) At least we know how to mitigate an ice age better than we know how to mitigate global warming --- we can always just add a little more methane to the atmosphere. But still, it seems to me that the conventional AGW scenario is the better-supported theory today, though your idea seems offer a plausible bootstrap mechanism for climactic cycles.
I think there's still some cultural inertia against this kind of vote manipulation, but the taboo against it will slowly weaken. I think we'll start seeing more of it in closely-contested races where it's easier to hide.
Party strategy wonks would have to be stupid not to consider the possibility, and considering that questionable tactics like gerrymandering and voter suppression are the norm today, I don't see why clandestine vote-buying might not be slowly added to the toolbox. Also, the problem isn't limited to vote-buying. What about a boss of a company requiring his employees vote a certain way? (Or for you conservative folk, what about a union boss doing the same thing?) What about a spouse demanding that his or her partner vote a certain way? As soon as you can verify a vote, you can coerce somebody else's vote.
And yes, vote manipulation is a problem with conventional absentee ballots: that's why, until recently, you had to provide a good reason to get an absentee ballot. Only recently have states started sending them out to anyone who asks. When you limit the total number of absentee ballots, you limit the total potential for fraud.
Even in states that do offer unrestricted absentee ballots, going to a polling place is still the cultural norm. That's why vote-by-mail is so dangerous: it substantially increases the total
number of votes vulnerable to this attack.