I dislike some major Green Party stances (I think that genetically-enhanced food is one of the greatest agrarian achievements of mankind since selective breeding and the mechanization of farms).
Many of Cobb's other points were quite good -- but they are also points that most intelligent third-party candidates are going to support, rather than Green planks.
I'm not sure that I want a Green government, but I do think that we very desperately need vote reform, and that there are significant things wrong with the existing two-party system.
I'm more interested by the fact that Cobb felt that Slashdot was important enough to be worth speaking to directly (or, for all I know, a campaign employee of Cobb -- but Cobb is willing to commit to formal views to try to interest Slashdot). Slashdot is possibly the largest single online forum of like-minded people. Slashdotters are typically informed, tend to propagate views rapidly and widely, and fairly intelligent. I've been recently been becoming more and more aware of the political clout that Slashdot wields in recent EFF attempts to mobilize Slashdotters. This is interesting, as it could make legislators much more interested in dealing with the concerns of the sort of people that frequent Slashdot.
It's possible -- and I would say that it's pretty much a prerequisite for Green/Independent/Libertarian/etc to ever have a shot at significant political power. It makes candidates much more competitive. It won't be IRV-based presidential elections immediately, but if voting reform advocates can push through IRV in smaller elections (state and local) and the idea catches on, demand for IRV could increase significantly enough to eventually get the required amendment.
The best bet for IRV adoption is probably the same mechanism that has *ever* allowed new parties to become one of the top two US parties -- one "Big Two" party becomes split down the middle, and in desperation (since traditional voting normally eliminates the political power of that party), they secure enough influence to push in IRV to avoid their neutralization as a party. IRV as a concept needs to be in place by that time, though
I mean, I recognize that this is a significant effort and will take a while, but honestly, being a third party and not advocating vote reform of some sort as your top priority is pointless. Doing anything else just siphons voters off of their less-disliked Big Two party and weakens their political stance.
Oooh, you lost me at "I'm a colossal dumbass." People who use the word "racist" when there is absolutely no racial argument to be made whatsoever--not even an obviously specious one--are not worth our time or attention.
I take the same stance, but this is an argument made by many and is not without merit (at least, if I'm reading him correctly).
I think that the issue that he has is not so much with the Electoral College per se (as it might exist in a vacuum) as the existing electoral system (which in common parlance gets associated with the Electoral College).
And there *are* racially-biased policies involved with our existing voting system. Specifically, Southern states generally restrict sufferage of those jailed for felonies (of which many -- and perhaps most; I'm not familiar with the details involved -- are drug-related and overwhelmingly black).
This is pretty much a Republican dirty trick, as most of those people would otherwise vote Democrat. I'm sure that Democrats have plenty of their own dirty tricks to try to suppress Republican votes. This one tends to get a lot of interest from third party candidates because it's tied in with other controversial topics like the War on Drugs and racism.
Okay, I can understand that someone with a fundamentalist Christian background could take stands against gay/lesbian marriage and abortion, but what's your gripe with freedom and privacy?
You know, DALdredge, you represent a real quandry for me. You regularly say very intelligent things and have good insights. But you also regularly run out and troll and post particularly nasty and insulting posts, and I have a really hard time figuring out whether you should be on my Friends or Foes List. I generally feel uncomfortable with your positioning no matter where you are. And you're a fairly prolific poster, so the problem doesn't just go away.
Wow, I can't believe people are so selfish that they'd risk the U.S.'s relations with another country just so they, and _possibly_ others, can see what happened. If the FBI wants documents classified, the FBI has a good reason. I don't want another 9/11 in the U.S. or a foreign country just because people want to see some documents.
Why do you trust the people at the FBI more than you trust yourself and the other civilians that the people at the FBI are employed as servants of?
They could be specifically publically enumerated ("These are atomic weapon designs and we feel that we can't release them because they contain information that would let anyone bypass the research step to building a nuclear weapon"), and be very few in number, though.
No -- that's just what happens when you get highly-educated people together along with very effective means of communication. They tend to expose bullshit that Bush pushes.
It's not as if Kerry hasn't had his own blunders exposed by the tecnoliterate. Dr. Joseph Newcomer was the gentleman that did the document publishing analysis that finally made CBS back down from their claims.
So *why*, exactly, don't you just turn off the politics section in your preferences? There are sections I don't like. I don't care about Apple fanatics screaming like Japanese fangirls every time Jobs looks at them. Do I go into the Apple forums and tell everyone that they're doing something idiotic and uninteresting? No -- I turn the Apple sections off. I could understand if the "politics" stories weren't separated out, but they *are*. If Slashdot wants to include a section for discussion to help isolate the *rest* of the topics from political discussion, thereby *helping* you avoid politics if you choose to do so, why do you have to protest?
The problem is that it isn't the jargon of techies. It's the jargon of people-trying-to-market-new-buzzwords.
The article is pimping ASPs. For those of you who have managed to avoid this particular bit of buzzwordspeke, it refers to "application service providers" (not the more common usage). Basically, the idea is that some vendor runs the backend of your applications on a remote server and admins them there, and you get the front end. It has the obvious appeal to vendors -- it lets you use a neat loophole in the GPL -- since you don't distribute code, you don't have to hand source out to anyone. It also provides basically impervious copy protection -- since you don't own the back end of the application, the vendor can cut you off at any time. It also gives the vendor tons of customer info, the ability to sell tiered service (i.e. price discriminate) and lots of control over the product. Oh, and a subscription-based sales moels, which is alway spossible. It falls prey to the obvious problems -- on the face of things, ASPs are generally a big loss for customers. The customer suddenly runs the risk of losing his apps if the service provider goes under, gives his vendors much more leverage over him, has to consume bandwidth, makes the not-very-reliable Internet a point of failure for his apps, etc.
The electoral college is less of a problem than the fact that we have one vote, one choice. We can't preferentially vote, there's no instant run-off, and so our incentive is always to use our sole vote for the first candidate or the second candidate.
I mean, there are issues with the electoral college, sure, but nothing really compares to the "single choice" model -- *that* is just screwed up.
Actually, because of the winner-take-all nature of the elections, an individual vote in Wyoming has essentially no chance of counting (since the state isn't a swing state), but in Pennsylvania it has a far greater chance of counting.
I am all in favor of this. The more absurd entries in the patent system, the sooner it is going to collapse.
I'll bet you also thought that the legal system would collapse when it reached the point of Person A suing Person B because Person A poured coffee on themselves.
How many times does this shit have to happen before the Patent Office is called to account for itself.
As I read this Slashdot story, I see a number of people doing one of the following:
(a) Blaming the USPTO and saying that they need to get their act together.
(b) Blaming Xybernaut for filing a bullshit patent.
Now, before you start writing, consider what you intend to accomplish.
Let's take a look. First, the people criticizing the USPTO for doing a poor job reviewing patents. The USPTO can't simply review patents "better". To some degree, this is a matter of money. You are dealing with documents (and often not very clear ones) that are often describing bleeding edge research, stuff that perhaps one or two people in the world fully understand. Even if it were possible to hire the PhDs and spend the desired time on each patent, it would be incredibly expensive, requiring vast amounts of funding to be channeled to the USPTO. Or, perhaps patent fees could be significantly increased -- which would make it difficult for the little independent inventors to obtain patents.
Then, the people criticizing Xybernaut. Usually, we have a gut reaction, learned in childhood, to blame and criticize people that do something that hurts us. The problem is that corporations are very carefully designed to make it as easy as possible to be as exploitative as possible and to ignore this sort of complaining -- if they *aren't*, they get quashed by someone else who *is* nastier. Many of the structures we have -- isolating upper management and decision makers from direct contact with the outside, making executives legally responsible to the shareholders of a company, paying executives based on what share prices and profits do -- are designed to prevent typical learned human reactions from coming into play. An executive is encouraged *not* to have his business donate $5,000 to the local school for sports equipment (unless, of course, the advertising value of the donation is greater than the cost). So, there isn't a lot of point in complaining about Xybernaut's behavior. They're doing exactly what the system is designed to encourage them to do. The CEO who thought he was so clever to keep patenting silly things really *is* clever, if he can use the patents to pull money away from someone else.
So, all I can say is that complaining about poor review practices or "evil" behavior on the part of Xybernaut is not going to accomplish anything. Such actions just have no impact on the system as it stands. It's like politely asking a boulder that's in your way to move -- it's not an effective solution to the problem.
I, personally, think that the only effective way to solve the problem is the change the patent *system*, which is where the flaw is. Make patent challenges (especially prior art challenges) extremely simple and inexpensive, as idiot-proof as possible, so that they can be done without a lawyer. Make the *loser* of a patent challenge case, not the *challenger*, pay the patent challenge fees. Require the holder of a patent to have an opportunity to, before each challenge is examined, release their patent to the public domain. Include an "obviousness" restriction on patents (in the common sense, not in the current sense of obviousness consisting of differences from an existing patent). If a typical engineer in a field will come up with the patent given the problem the patent is intended to solve within five minutes, then the patent does not warrant the Constitutional granting of a monopoly -- the patent filer is not advancing the state of knowledge. This changes the system to have the characteristics that we want -- it is no longer in the interest of a company to file bullshit lawsuits, if such a bullshit patent does slip through it can be easily removed by anyone (instead of adding more garbage to the USPTO database until some court case comes along involving it). In addition, cap the number of claims per patent at a much smaller number (perhaps ten).
If you read the patent laws and policies, you'd see that innovation isn't hurt, but actually helped by "correct" patents. The problem is with patents being granted that do not meet the legal requirements in the first place.
Which, of course, brings up the question of whether it's feasible to make the patent system have an acceptably low level of bullshit patents being granted.
Just because the problem is "with individual patents" doesn't mean that a flaw with the system has not been raised.
Most Linux distros come with mplayer--is that a monopoly?
I believe that Red Hat is the most common distro, and they don't ship mplayer.
And as for your answer -- no, it isn't a monopoly. First, no single Linux distributor has a monopoly on the Linux market. Second, there's no concept of lock-in -- I can make "Debian (or someone that does ship mplayer) with xine instead of mplayer" if I want, and start handing out CDs. Microsoft does not make it legally possible for me to ship a modified version of Windows that contains a different movie player.
I really can't believe Kerry isn't doing better than he is. I mean whatever ideals or beliefs you have, he's taken your side. He's the only guy out there that will bravely take every position on every issue and defend all of them. With Bush, he just takes one position on each issue and sticks with it, it's crazy.
Clinton's Doonesbury symbol *was* a waffle. Kerry hasn't come close. Clinton is famous for saying nothing, not committing, and giving "I feel your pain" speeches.
So...who do you feel was a better president? Bush or Clinton? The Idiot Hawk Bible-Thumper or The Big Waffle With A Penis?
Because I kinda preferred Clinton's administration to Bush's (much less secretive and less interested in domestic surveillance, no Iraq, no economy in the shitter), and I figure that if that's the case, then any issues with *Kerry* waffling are even less of an issue.
Clinton and Gore used the Information Superhighway (okay, the Internet these days) as an important chunk of their platform. They are a major reason that so much funding and development went into the Internet, and why it spread so insanely quickly. I'm enjoying their legacy at the moment as I'm typing away. What's Bush's equivalent? Stopping medical research? Discouraging charities from informing people about condoms in AIDS-stricken areas? What positive things has Bush done? What good things can I remember him for four years after he's out of office? I can't think of anything other than fear-mongering and conducting new wars.
Slashdot Mirror
I dislike some major Green Party stances (I think that genetically-enhanced food is one of the greatest agrarian achievements of mankind since selective breeding and the mechanization of farms).
Many of Cobb's other points were quite good -- but they are also points that most intelligent third-party candidates are going to support, rather than Green planks.
I'm not sure that I want a Green government, but I do think that we very desperately need vote reform, and that there are significant things wrong with the existing two-party system.
I'm more interested by the fact that Cobb felt that Slashdot was important enough to be worth speaking to directly (or, for all I know, a campaign employee of Cobb -- but Cobb is willing to commit to formal views to try to interest Slashdot). Slashdot is possibly the largest single online forum of like-minded people. Slashdotters are typically informed, tend to propagate views rapidly and widely, and fairly intelligent. I've been recently been becoming more and more aware of the political clout that Slashdot wields in recent EFF attempts to mobilize Slashdotters. This is interesting, as it could make legislators much more interested in dealing with the concerns of the sort of people that frequent Slashdot.
It's possible -- and I would say that it's pretty much a prerequisite for Green/Independent/Libertarian/etc to ever have a shot at significant political power. It makes candidates much more competitive. It won't be IRV-based presidential elections immediately, but if voting reform advocates can push through IRV in smaller elections (state and local) and the idea catches on, demand for IRV could increase significantly enough to eventually get the required amendment.
The best bet for IRV adoption is probably the same mechanism that has *ever* allowed new parties to become one of the top two US parties -- one "Big Two" party becomes split down the middle, and in desperation (since traditional voting normally eliminates the political power of that party), they secure enough influence to push in IRV to avoid their neutralization as a party. IRV as a concept needs to be in place by that time, though
I mean, I recognize that this is a significant effort and will take a while, but honestly, being a third party and not advocating vote reform of some sort as your top priority is pointless. Doing anything else just siphons voters off of their less-disliked Big Two party and weakens their political stance.
Oooh, you lost me at "I'm a colossal dumbass." People who use the word "racist" when there is absolutely no racial argument to be made whatsoever--not even an obviously specious one--are not worth our time or attention.
I take the same stance, but this is an argument made by many and is not without merit (at least, if I'm reading him correctly).
I think that the issue that he has is not so much with the Electoral College per se (as it might exist in a vacuum) as the existing electoral system (which in common parlance gets associated with the Electoral College).
And there *are* racially-biased policies involved with our existing voting system. Specifically, Southern states generally restrict sufferage of those jailed for felonies (of which many -- and perhaps most; I'm not familiar with the details involved -- are drug-related and overwhelmingly black).
This is pretty much a Republican dirty trick, as most of those people would otherwise vote Democrat. I'm sure that Democrats have plenty of their own dirty tricks to try to suppress Republican votes. This one tends to get a lot of interest from third party candidates because it's tied in with other controversial topics like the War on Drugs and racism.
Okay, I can understand that someone with a fundamentalist Christian background could take stands against gay/lesbian marriage and abortion, but what's your gripe with freedom and privacy?
You know, DALdredge, you represent a real quandry for me. You regularly say very intelligent things and have good insights. But you also regularly run out and troll and post particularly nasty and insulting posts, and I have a really hard time figuring out whether you should be on my Friends or Foes List. I generally feel uncomfortable with your positioning no matter where you are. And you're a fairly prolific poster, so the problem doesn't just go away.
Wow, I can't believe people are so selfish that they'd risk the U.S.'s relations with another country just so they, and _possibly_ others, can see what happened. If the FBI wants documents classified, the FBI has a good reason. I don't want another 9/11 in the U.S. or a foreign country just because people want to see some documents.
Why do you trust the people at the FBI more than you trust yourself and the other civilians that the people at the FBI are employed as servants of?
They could be specifically publically enumerated ("These are atomic weapon designs and we feel that we can't release them because they contain information that would let anyone bypass the research step to building a nuclear weapon"), and be very few in number, though.
Oh, *SHIT*.
Where's that cyanide pill? Where?
What, you haven't heard? Lennon got added to the "Patrick Stewart" and "William Shatner" cannon of "geeks must like" material.
No -- that's just what happens when you get highly-educated people together along with very effective means of communication. They tend to expose bullshit that Bush pushes.
It's not as if Kerry hasn't had his own blunders exposed by the tecnoliterate. Dr. Joseph Newcomer was the gentleman that did the document publishing analysis that finally made CBS back down from their claims.
So *why*, exactly, don't you just turn off the politics section in your preferences? There are sections I don't like. I don't care about Apple fanatics screaming like Japanese fangirls every time Jobs looks at them. Do I go into the Apple forums and tell everyone that they're doing something idiotic and uninteresting? No -- I turn the Apple sections off. I could understand if the "politics" stories weren't separated out, but they *are*. If Slashdot wants to include a section for discussion to help isolate the *rest* of the topics from political discussion, thereby *helping* you avoid politics if you choose to do so, why do you have to protest?
As to "serious jail time" (5+ years)...
You would consider *four* years in prison to be a laughing matter?
You have got to be kidding. On the Internet, Kerry enjoys vastly more supporters.
Look at Internet polls (as opposed to phone polls) at places like CNN.com -- they regularly slant against Bush.
Look at the majority of people on Slashdot and Kuro5hin.
How many major pro-Bush forums are there -- FreeRepublic and RightNation? Now compare to the hordes of anti-Bush forums.
Why on earth would MS astroturf on Slashdot?
The problem is that it isn't the jargon of techies. It's the jargon of people-trying-to-market-new-buzzwords.
The article is pimping ASPs. For those of you who have managed to avoid this particular bit of buzzwordspeke, it refers to "application service providers" (not the more common usage). Basically, the idea is that some vendor runs the backend of your applications on a remote server and admins them there, and you get the front end. It has the obvious appeal to vendors -- it lets you use a neat loophole in the GPL -- since you don't distribute code, you don't have to hand source out to anyone. It also provides basically impervious copy protection -- since you don't own the back end of the application, the vendor can cut you off at any time. It also gives the vendor tons of customer info, the ability to sell tiered service (i.e. price discriminate) and lots of control over the product. Oh, and a subscription-based sales moels, which is alway spossible. It falls prey to the obvious problems -- on the face of things, ASPs are generally a big loss for customers. The customer suddenly runs the risk of losing his apps if the service provider goes under, gives his vendors much more leverage over him, has to consume bandwidth, makes the not-very-reliable Internet a point of failure for his apps, etc.
The electoral college is less of a problem than the fact that we have one vote, one choice. We can't preferentially vote, there's no instant run-off, and so our incentive is always to use our sole vote for the first candidate or the second candidate.
I mean, there are issues with the electoral college, sure, but nothing really compares to the "single choice" model -- *that* is just screwed up.
Actually, because of the winner-take-all nature of the elections, an individual vote in Wyoming has essentially no chance of counting (since the state isn't a swing state), but in Pennsylvania it has a far greater chance of counting.
I am all in favor of this. The more absurd entries in the patent system, the sooner it is going to collapse.
I'll bet you also thought that the legal system would collapse when it reached the point of Person A suing Person B because Person A poured coffee on themselves.
How many times does this shit have to happen before the Patent Office is called to account for itself.
As I read this Slashdot story, I see a number of people doing one of the following:
(a) Blaming the USPTO and saying that they need to get their act together.
(b) Blaming Xybernaut for filing a bullshit patent.
Now, before you start writing, consider what you intend to accomplish.
Let's take a look. First, the people criticizing the USPTO for doing a poor job reviewing patents. The USPTO can't simply review patents "better". To some degree, this is a matter of money. You are dealing with documents (and often not very clear ones) that are often describing bleeding edge research, stuff that perhaps one or two people in the world fully understand. Even if it were possible to hire the PhDs and spend the desired time on each patent, it would be incredibly expensive, requiring vast amounts of funding to be channeled to the USPTO. Or, perhaps patent fees could be significantly increased -- which would make it difficult for the little independent inventors to obtain patents.
Then, the people criticizing Xybernaut.
Usually, we have a gut reaction, learned in childhood, to blame and criticize people that do something that hurts us. The problem is that corporations are very carefully designed to make it as easy as possible to be as exploitative as possible and to ignore this sort of complaining -- if they *aren't*, they get quashed by someone else who *is* nastier. Many of the structures we have -- isolating upper management and decision makers from direct contact with the outside, making executives legally responsible to the shareholders of a company, paying executives based on what share prices and profits do -- are designed to prevent typical learned human reactions from coming into play. An executive is encouraged *not* to have his business donate $5,000 to the local school for sports equipment (unless, of course, the advertising value of the donation is greater than the cost). So, there isn't a lot of point in complaining about Xybernaut's behavior. They're doing exactly what the system is designed to encourage them to do. The CEO who thought he was so clever to keep patenting silly things really *is* clever, if he can use the patents to pull money away from someone else.
So, all I can say is that complaining about poor review practices or "evil" behavior on the part of Xybernaut is not going to accomplish anything. Such actions just have no impact on the system as it stands. It's like politely asking a boulder that's in your way to move -- it's not an effective solution to the problem.
I, personally, think that the only effective way to solve the problem is the change the patent *system*, which is where the flaw is. Make patent challenges (especially prior art challenges) extremely simple and inexpensive, as idiot-proof as possible, so that they can be done without a lawyer. Make the *loser* of a patent challenge case, not the *challenger*, pay the patent challenge fees. Require the holder of a patent to have an opportunity to, before each challenge is examined, release their patent to the public domain. Include an "obviousness" restriction on patents (in the common sense, not in the current sense of obviousness consisting of differences from an existing patent). If a typical engineer in a field will come up with the patent given the problem the patent is intended to solve within five minutes, then the patent does not warrant the Constitutional granting of a monopoly -- the patent filer is not advancing the state of knowledge. This changes the system to have the characteristics that we want -- it is no longer in the interest of a company to file bullshit lawsuits, if such a bullshit patent does slip through it can be easily removed by anyone (instead of adding more garbage to the USPTO database until some court case comes along involving it). In addition, cap the number of claims per patent at a much smaller number (perhaps ten).
If you read the patent laws and policies, you'd see that innovation isn't hurt, but actually helped by "correct" patents. The problem is with patents being granted that do not meet the legal requirements in the first place.
Which, of course, brings up the question of whether it's feasible to make the patent system have an acceptably low level of bullshit patents being granted.
Just because the problem is "with individual patents" doesn't mean that a flaw with the system has not been raised.
As opposed to you?
"...I don't know any person at Linux..."
Me either. Coincidence?
He must still be geared up to compete with companies instead of communities.
Most Linux distros come with mplayer--is that a monopoly?
I believe that Red Hat is the most common distro, and they don't ship mplayer.
And as for your answer -- no, it isn't a monopoly. First, no single Linux distributor has a monopoly on the Linux market. Second, there's no concept of lock-in -- I can make "Debian (or someone that does ship mplayer) with xine instead of mplayer" if I want, and start handing out CDs. Microsoft does not make it legally possible for me to ship a modified version of Windows that contains a different movie player.
What, I know several people at Linux, they say it's a great place to work and they have a beautiful campus and stuff...
The place has a lousy cafeteria, though. Herring this and herring that.
I really can't believe Kerry isn't doing better than he is. I mean whatever ideals or beliefs you have, he's taken your side. He's the only guy out there that will bravely take every position on every issue and defend all of them. With Bush, he just takes one position on each issue and sticks with it, it's crazy.
Clinton's Doonesbury symbol *was* a waffle. Kerry hasn't come close. Clinton is famous for saying nothing, not committing, and giving "I feel your pain" speeches.
So...who do you feel was a better president? Bush or Clinton? The Idiot Hawk Bible-Thumper or The Big Waffle With A Penis?
Because I kinda preferred Clinton's administration to Bush's (much less secretive and less interested in domestic surveillance, no Iraq, no economy in the shitter), and I figure that if that's the case, then any issues with *Kerry* waffling are even less of an issue.
Clinton and Gore used the Information Superhighway (okay, the Internet these days) as an important chunk of their platform. They are a major reason that so much funding and development went into the Internet, and why it spread so insanely quickly. I'm enjoying their legacy at the moment as I'm typing away. What's Bush's equivalent? Stopping medical research? Discouraging charities from informing people about condoms in AIDS-stricken areas? What positive things has Bush done? What good things can I remember him for four years after he's out of office? I can't think of anything other than fear-mongering and conducting new wars.