- The moderation system is not perfect, but it is a heck of a lot better than most (if not all) other systems. Be very careful about changing it, lest you break an advantage that Slashdot has. Sure, it has problems, but I have not seen any better system. They all have flaws. By fixing one, you're likely to introduce another.
As someone who has been reading/. for over 15 years, and who rarely posts but always moderates when I get points, I wholeheartedly agree with this. I come here to see interesting and informative discussion about tech-related (broadly speaking) topics, and sometimes to get a tech point of view about other issues (like politics, though this is where/. discussions and moderation becomes least functional, which isn't surprising when comparing to similar discussions elsewhere on the internet). To me, the good of the current moderation system outweighs the bad. On the margins, there are changes to be made, but a complete overhaul is unnecessary.
Moderation doesn't have to be perfect. It's about generating a rough ranking of the comments on the question of "does this comment add to the discussion?". Back in the heyday of/., if I was busy, I could browse certain discussions at +4 or even +5 and get the highlights of the discussion. Now, I feel that there are fewer comments and less moderation, so there's more noise; I generally browse at +2. But the basic idea is to roughly separate the best from the worst comments. We don't need more than a -1 to +5 range to make those distinctions, and I don't think moderation abuse is so great that we need to significantly overhaul how it's done. If there are enough people commenting and enough people moderating, things tend to settle out. And that's why I come here -- the signal to noise ratio in the comments is still better than anywhere else.
If you want to "fix" Slashdot, you don't need to change the bones. I think there are two classes of changes to be made. First, attract people back with better content: more interesting stories rather than product placement and random editorials; fewer dupes; better and more clearly edited articles. Second, make it easier to comment and use Slashdot: fix the unicode and JS issues, clean up the UI, and so on. I think the/. herd has been on point so far.
Seriously? Even if you're right, posting "a few [atypical] immature soldiers" to guard someone who is arguably the highest value target in Iraq is a massive failure on the part of the Marine commanders, and they fact that they allowed these things to happen under their watch is a massive failure of the chain of command.
And isn't that what the military is all about after all? Chain of command?
Oh come now. A natural monopoly is a well-defined economic term. It arises in when there is a product that has a high cost of entry, but low or near-zero marginal cost (such that the cost of serving each additional consumer is de minimis). Thus, once a firm has entered the market, no other firm will enter to compete because it can never make up its up-front costs (because the original firm can always undercut the competing firm). This allows the firm in the market to charge monopoly rents without worry about competition.
We can disagree on whether Bell was a natural monopoly or not. (Though I would argue that any last-mile system, in the absence of new technologies that make it cheaper for multiple firms to fill in the last mile, are natural monopolies.) But you can't seriously argue that natural monopolies don't exist in even the most ideal market. Even Chicago school economists recognize the possibility of natural monopolies.
It's funny that you start your comment with "That is absolutely made up." Because I'm fairly certain your "99.99%" statistic is "absolutely made up" as well.
In Canada, disabled may get somebody to help them.
That's true in the United States, as well. Disabled groups have pushed for electronic machines precisely because they do not want to require the help of others. As the argument goes, such a system necessarily makes them beholden to others and casts disabled voters as second class citizens.
We have other laws to protect private information: privacy laws, theft laws, even classified information laws. The DMCA is a copyright law. Copyright law is not meant to protect secret information, it's meant to protect the copying of published information. However, government works are typically in the public domain.
If they want to stop the dissemination of the video because it's classifiied or private, the NJ government can do that. But they can't use the DMCA (assuming you buy the GP's argument).
Now, you may well ask, how come the IRS has the authority to overrule the Supreme Court? That is an extremely good question that I would really, really love to see answered.
I am not familiar with the Supreme Court case you are referring to, but depending on the situation, it is possible for an administrative agency to rule opposite to what the Supreme Court does. If the Supreme Court is deciding a case that requires it to interpret a statute or an agency rule, they might rule one way. If the agency has rulemaking power, then it can later change the rule.
I'm not saying that happened here, but it can happen.
I think one thing that seems to be ignored is that this is only one professor's decision. His decision in no way relates to what the rest of the university is doing.
Many professors already have their lectures taped. Some of these are available online for free, some are only for students of the course, and some are spefically for distance ed. courses. There is also a growing number of professors who are offering podcasts of or related to their lectures. The university is working on a framework to allow those professors who aren't quite as tech savvy to put up podcasts in a central location.
Actually, the gasoline tax, like most use taxes, is regressive because poorer people spend a greater percentage of their real income on gas than rich people do.
Nor are the systems that have been purposed as replacements.
Actually, any system with a proper ballot is verifiable (ie, a paper ballot), assuming you can trust the usability of the ballot (meaning you can trust that the voter properly recorded his or her choice).
The known failure rate is a problem with any system that you use because somewhere along the line something will break. The goal should be to reduce that rate as much as possible.
I agree. And I think that the failure rate for lever systems is too high. I wasn't arguing that current electronic systems are better; I just think that a lever system isn't the best system out there.
Do you see a problem with the NYS system of two inspectors from each party who are sworn to secrecy? Do you see a problem with being allowed help from a family member if so desired?
Unless laws are written very carefully, there is potential for fraud here. This was especially the case back in the days of the big political machines, like the Boss Tweed days. If you're allowed to take anyone with you into the booth, what's to stop a mobster from forcing you to take him into the booth with you to make sure you vote for his candidate? Sure, you could refuse at the election place, but then his friend will break your legs later. I assume the NY laws take this into account by only allowing family or election officials. This is much better, but still open to possible attacks. What happens in small towns where you know all the election officials, and you wish to keep your voting preferences private? Maybe we have to be willing to accept that limitation. Maybe not.
I'm still not totally convinced as to why we need electronic voting machines. But if we _must_ have them then the only system that I would support is one that shows you a printed ballot under glass.
I think many disabled people would tell you they really want to have voting systems they can use, and they have powerful lobbies. So I think we're definitely going to see electronic voting systems in the future.
But I agree wholly with that last sentiment. Any system NEEDS a paper trail (or something equivalent that computers can't change and that voters can read) in order to be reliable, secure, and verifiable.
I've done some extensive study of voting systems and equipment. No voting systems and techniques are perfect.
Care to tell me what exactly is wrong with the lever based voting machines that New York has used for the last 40 years?
Lever-based machines are not verifiable. If there is a problem (a malfunction, among many other scenarios), there is no way to check those votes. The final count of the machine is all you have. Add to this the fact that the gearing systems in lever machines are very complex, and it's infeasible to test each one fully before an election. Don't think these are just theoretical problems either -- lever machines have a known failure rate. They are also completely not accessible for people with many common disabilities.
In NYS you are allowed to take anybody into the poll with you other then your employer or union offical.
To most people, this sounds like a great idea. However, it's not just employers and union officials that like to cheat the vote. If you can take anyone in the booth with you, then that person knows how you voted, violating the requirement of anonymity in voting. This opens the door to all kinds of fraud (by either coercion or voting for money, for example).
In all, I just want to point out that not every system is perfect, and many laws that prohibit things that you might find silly have some reasoning behind them. The trick is to find the right combination of laws and technologies that make the final tally as close to what the voters wanted as possible.
I agree that many locales have screwed up voting laws. And I agree that most current electronic voting systems are horrid right now. However, the fact of the matter is that electronic systems are theoretically able to guarantee enfranchisement to more people, more reliably than any other system. I just don't think that's possible unless a machine has a voter-verifiable paper trail.
I respectfully disagree. Programming isn't necessarily computer science; rather, it's an application of computer science. Professional programmers are more like software engineers. You don't need math to be a software engineer, but it certainly helps to clarify the underlying concepts.
However, computer science is DEFINITELY a math-based field. It's the science of controlling what is nothing more than a counting machine, and everything that stems from that. Computer science is more or less a theoretical field.
Certainly, these days, software engineering and computer science and the like are all lumped together at many schools, but that's for practical reasons more than anything.
Sure, you don't need to understand math all that well to implement quicksort, but you most certainly need to understand math to have come up with it!
Usable simple text editing app (TextEdit). Both Wordpad and Notepad have unique issues that means you can't just automatically use one or the other (why do you think they are both still there). Heck in Tiger you can just use TextEdit for 99% of your word processing since it reads/writes Word files and supports things like tables.
Whoa there! I'm sorry for going off-topic, but TextEdit supports tables?!? Are you sure?
I love my PowerBook, but the one thing that bothers me about it is the lack of a decent editor, requiring me to load up Word whenever I want to type anything remotely complicated.
As far as I know, TextEdit doesn't do margins, headers, footers, pagebreaks, or footnotes, to say nothing of tables. I would be very interested in knowing if TextEdit can do anything like that. In that respect, I consider WordPad (and it's predecessor Write) superior to TextEdit.
I'm not asking for something as full featured as Word. But when I can't even set my margins...
That's funny, I mount WebDAV shares read/write all the time on OS X. Sure, I don't have a nice "iDisk" menu option (cmd-shift-I), but I get a dialog box from which to choose my WebDAV share when I hit cmd-shift-K. That also lets you mount FTP and Kerberos and AFP shares pretty easily.
If you really hate it, put a proxy on your computer that maps mac.com to wherever you put your WebDAV share. Problem solved.
I grant, integration isn't as nice when you don't have the product being integrated, but Apple isn't going out of its way to make connections to other servers any harder.
There is a huge difference, in fact. The GPL gives you MORE rights than traditional copyright; if you choose to accept it and follow its rules, you are able to do more than you would under the terms of fair use. These include access to source and allowances for complete redistribution.
With licenses on today's music, as well as laws such as the DMCA, corporations are trying to limit what you can do with music, moreso than is allowed with copyright. This is true of copy-protected CDs and of most DRM'ed music.
If you decide not to accept the GPL, then your rights go back to regular copyright, which is more limiting. That's why you should respect the GPL--because it gives you a real choice in accepting a contract. "Take it or do what the law tells you."
Not so with modern music licenses. I don't condone breaking copyright law. However, I do think I should be able to make backup copies of my music. I think that I should be allowed to make a copy to put on my computer, as well as one for the car, one for work, and one for my iPod. I think I should be allowed to give my brother music I think he'll like, and likewise with my girlfriend. I think I should be allowed to make mix CDs for myself and others. Music licenses are trying to prevent all that; I don't think that's fair--give me fair use.
Actually, a lot of news organizations have taken to lowercasing acronyms which can be pronounced as words. This leads to words like Nascar, Aids, Nasa, etc. The idea is that this style makes such words much easier to read and also allows news media to fix words from organizations that use crazy capitalization (or punctuation a la Yahoo!) to get more attention in print.
Personally, I haven't decided yet if I like this. Sometimes I do, and then there are other examples that are crazy.
Really? Funny that. I go to NCSU, and here in the not-so-progressive Raleigh (or so the stereotype goes), right down the road from you, I see iPods all the time.
Except the record company dropped them because Wilco wouldn't make music the way they wanted. That means Tweedy and the rest of Wilco were free to do whatever they wanted, including streaming the album on the Internet.
But I mean, come off it man. You sound like those silly MPAA trailers before movies.
I guess I should know better than to feed the trolls.
Funny you should ask. My senior capstone is on this subject. There are six basic requirements of democratic voting.
Anonymity - this is obvious. The vote cannot be tracked back to whomever cast it.
Verifiability - the ability to go back and recount ballots.
Reliability - the count is done the same way each time and accurately reflects the intent of the voter. Punchcards are unreliable because of chads. Processes like optical scanning give different counts when run mutliple times because of borderline ballots
Usability - the design of the voting system reduces the likelihood of mistakes. Butterfly ballots are the obvious bad example here.
Security - the system is secure from tampering, such as system hacking or stuffing the ballot box
Accessibility - all of the above remains true for all demographics, such as the disabled. For instance, being blind should not mean that you can't vote anonymously
No system as yet developed fits all of these for a scale such as a national election in the US.
Other, less important requirements include cost,speed of tallying and administrative ease-of-use.
Don't forget that the State Fair is held in Wake County, which is predominantly democratic (and most of the visitors to the fair, especially on weekdays are from Raleigh and Durham. In fact, most large city centers in NC are democratic. The question is whether the increased population and turnout in the cities will offset that of the rural areas.
I think that the pollsters will be found to be off, but I think when the smoke clears, we'll still be a red state.
I've done a lot of research into e-voting machines. Verification is a big problem. I think the lack of a paper trail is the biggest problem plaguing these machines. That having been said, there are safeguards and code audits that try to make sure things go smoothly. The idea is good, but these things can always be subverted.
As for drive failures, this is less of a possibility. Each machine has three separate locations to back up the data--usually to a combination of flash memory and hard disk space, though some use battery-backed-up RAM.
The WinVote machine also has 802.11b capability, so it's not necessarily true that data is only stored on the machine, though for the most part, officials disable the wireless capabilities until after the election, to aid in reporting.
I predict that 90-95% of machines will properly report results and will work without problems. That's better than some other methods of voting. In an election that's going to be decided by 1-2% margins, it's definitely not enough.
This is a very valid point; however, most people who support government legislating morality don't think like this. They think that pornography is morally decrepit. To them, if the government does not stand specifically against "moral decrepitude", that is the same position as condoning it.
Add to that the more forceful argument that allowing such actions to continue will only cause it to spread until even the children are exposed daily. Won't someone think of the children!
You make an excellent point, but it won't convince the people who think like this. And as long as those people vote and occupy a large group of the citizenry, your position (and, IMO, the public's liberty) will be disregarded. Any ideas how to convince them?
That's a silly argument. There's nothing in the story about government intevention versus no government intervention. The story is about the government making telco outage data classified data versus government requiring telco outage data to be published and public (which is how it was before). Either way, there's government intervention
Taking the government out of the equation would only mean that the telco wouldn't be required to publish the data. Then we'd be in the same boat we are now... You can argue that perhaps some telcos would start releasing it because people demanded the data. Even so, that has nothing to do with this story -- the two options, before and after, both involve intervention
Get your logic straight before spouting ideology. Because in this case, your ideology doesn't apply.
Slashdot Mirror
- The moderation system is not perfect, but it is a heck of a lot better than most (if not all) other systems. Be very careful about changing it, lest you break an advantage that Slashdot has. Sure, it has problems, but I have not seen any better system. They all have flaws. By fixing one, you're likely to introduce another.
As someone who has been reading /. for over 15 years, and who rarely posts but always moderates when I get points, I wholeheartedly agree with this. I come here to see interesting and informative discussion about tech-related (broadly speaking) topics, and sometimes to get a tech point of view about other issues (like politics, though this is where /. discussions and moderation becomes least functional, which isn't surprising when comparing to similar discussions elsewhere on the internet). To me, the good of the current moderation system outweighs the bad. On the margins, there are changes to be made, but a complete overhaul is unnecessary.
Moderation doesn't have to be perfect. It's about generating a rough ranking of the comments on the question of "does this comment add to the discussion?". Back in the heyday of /., if I was busy, I could browse certain discussions at +4 or even +5 and get the highlights of the discussion. Now, I feel that there are fewer comments and less moderation, so there's more noise; I generally browse at +2. But the basic idea is to roughly separate the best from the worst comments. We don't need more than a -1 to +5 range to make those distinctions, and I don't think moderation abuse is so great that we need to significantly overhaul how it's done. If there are enough people commenting and enough people moderating, things tend to settle out. And that's why I come here -- the signal to noise ratio in the comments is still better than anywhere else.
If you want to "fix" Slashdot, you don't need to change the bones. I think there are two classes of changes to be made. First, attract people back with better content: more interesting stories rather than product placement and random editorials; fewer dupes; better and more clearly edited articles. Second, make it easier to comment and use Slashdot: fix the unicode and JS issues, clean up the UI, and so on. I think the /. herd has been on point so far.
Seriously? Even if you're right, posting "a few [atypical] immature soldiers" to guard someone who is arguably the highest value target in Iraq is a massive failure on the part of the Marine commanders, and they fact that they allowed these things to happen under their watch is a massive failure of the chain of command. And isn't that what the military is all about after all? Chain of command?
Oh come now. A natural monopoly is a well-defined economic term. It arises in when there is a product that has a high cost of entry, but low or near-zero marginal cost (such that the cost of serving each additional consumer is de minimis). Thus, once a firm has entered the market, no other firm will enter to compete because it can never make up its up-front costs (because the original firm can always undercut the competing firm). This allows the firm in the market to charge monopoly rents without worry about competition.
We can disagree on whether Bell was a natural monopoly or not. (Though I would argue that any last-mile system, in the absence of new technologies that make it cheaper for multiple firms to fill in the last mile, are natural monopolies.) But you can't seriously argue that natural monopolies don't exist in even the most ideal market. Even Chicago school economists recognize the possibility of natural monopolies.
It's funny that you start your comment with "That is absolutely made up." Because I'm fairly certain your "99.99%" statistic is "absolutely made up" as well.
That's true in the United States, as well. Disabled groups have pushed for electronic machines precisely because they do not want to require the help of others. As the argument goes, such a system necessarily makes them beholden to others and casts disabled voters as second class citizens.
We have other laws to protect private information: privacy laws, theft laws, even classified information laws. The DMCA is a copyright law. Copyright law is not meant to protect secret information, it's meant to protect the copying of published information. However, government works are typically in the public domain.
If they want to stop the dissemination of the video because it's classifiied or private, the NJ government can do that. But they can't use the DMCA (assuming you buy the GP's argument).
I am not familiar with the Supreme Court case you are referring to, but depending on the situation, it is possible for an administrative agency to rule opposite to what the Supreme Court does. If the Supreme Court is deciding a case that requires it to interpret a statute or an agency rule, they might rule one way. If the agency has rulemaking power, then it can later change the rule.
I'm not saying that happened here, but it can happen.
I think one thing that seems to be ignored is that this is only one professor's decision. His decision in no way relates to what the rest of the university is doing.
Many professors already have their lectures taped. Some of these are available online for free, some are only for students of the course, and some are spefically for distance ed. courses. There is also a growing number of professors who are offering podcasts of or related to their lectures. The university is working on a framework to allow those professors who aren't quite as tech savvy to put up podcasts in a central location.
Actually, the gasoline tax, like most use taxes, is regressive because poorer people spend a greater percentage of their real income on gas than rich people do.
I've done some extensive study of voting systems and equipment. No voting systems and techniques are perfect.
Lever-based machines are not verifiable. If there is a problem (a malfunction, among many other scenarios), there is no way to check those votes. The final count of the machine is all you have. Add to this the fact that the gearing systems in lever machines are very complex, and it's infeasible to test each one fully before an election. Don't think these are just theoretical problems either -- lever machines have a known failure rate. They are also completely not accessible for people with many common disabilities.
To most people, this sounds like a great idea. However, it's not just employers and union officials that like to cheat the vote. If you can take anyone in the booth with you, then that person knows how you voted, violating the requirement of anonymity in voting. This opens the door to all kinds of fraud (by either coercion or voting for money, for example).
In all, I just want to point out that not every system is perfect, and many laws that prohibit things that you might find silly have some reasoning behind them. The trick is to find the right combination of laws and technologies that make the final tally as close to what the voters wanted as possible.
I agree that many locales have screwed up voting laws. And I agree that most current electronic voting systems are horrid right now. However, the fact of the matter is that electronic systems are theoretically able to guarantee enfranchisement to more people, more reliably than any other system. I just don't think that's possible unless a machine has a voter-verifiable paper trail.
I respectfully disagree. Programming isn't necessarily computer science; rather, it's an application of computer science. Professional programmers are more like software engineers. You don't need math to be a software engineer, but it certainly helps to clarify the underlying concepts.
However, computer science is DEFINITELY a math-based field. It's the science of controlling what is nothing more than a counting machine, and everything that stems from that. Computer science is more or less a theoretical field.
Certainly, these days, software engineering and computer science and the like are all lumped together at many schools, but that's for practical reasons more than anything.
Sure, you don't need to understand math all that well to implement quicksort, but you most certainly need to understand math to have come up with it!
Actually, I think he writes about it in Blink. He may also have done so in The Tipping Point, but I doubt it.
Good books!-Alex
Whoa there! I'm sorry for going off-topic, but TextEdit supports tables?!? Are you sure?
I love my PowerBook, but the one thing that bothers me about it is the lack of a decent editor, requiring me to load up Word whenever I want to type anything remotely complicated.
As far as I know, TextEdit doesn't do margins, headers, footers, pagebreaks, or footnotes, to say nothing of tables. I would be very interested in knowing if TextEdit can do anything like that. In that respect, I consider WordPad (and it's predecessor Write) superior to TextEdit.
I'm not asking for something as full featured as Word. But when I can't even set my margins...
-Alinux
That's funny, I mount WebDAV shares read/write all the time on OS X. Sure, I don't have a nice "iDisk" menu option (cmd-shift-I), but I get a dialog box from which to choose my WebDAV share when I hit cmd-shift-K. That also lets you mount FTP and Kerberos and AFP shares pretty easily.
If you really hate it, put a proxy on your computer that maps mac.com to wherever you put your WebDAV share. Problem solved.
I grant, integration isn't as nice when you don't have the product being integrated, but Apple isn't going out of its way to make connections to other servers any harder.
-Alex
There is a huge difference, in fact. The GPL gives you MORE rights than traditional copyright; if you choose to accept it and follow its rules, you are able to do more than you would under the terms of fair use. These include access to source and allowances for complete redistribution.
With licenses on today's music, as well as laws such as the DMCA, corporations are trying to limit what you can do with music, moreso than is allowed with copyright. This is true of copy-protected CDs and of most DRM'ed music.
If you decide not to accept the GPL, then your rights go back to regular copyright, which is more limiting. That's why you should respect the GPL--because it gives you a real choice in accepting a contract. "Take it or do what the law tells you."
Not so with modern music licenses. I don't condone breaking copyright law. However, I do think I should be able to make backup copies of my music. I think that I should be allowed to make a copy to put on my computer, as well as one for the car, one for work, and one for my iPod. I think I should be allowed to give my brother music I think he'll like, and likewise with my girlfriend. I think I should be allowed to make mix CDs for myself and others. Music licenses are trying to prevent all that; I don't think that's fair--give me fair use.
-Alex
Actually, a lot of news organizations have taken to lowercasing acronyms which can be pronounced as words. This leads to words like Nascar, Aids, Nasa, etc. The idea is that this style makes such words much easier to read and also allows news media to fix words from organizations that use crazy capitalization (or punctuation a la Yahoo!) to get more attention in print.
Personally, I haven't decided yet if I like this. Sometimes I do, and then there are other examples that are crazy.
-Alex
Really? Funny that. I go to NCSU, and here in the not-so-progressive Raleigh (or so the stereotype goes), right down the road from you, I see iPods all the time.
-Alex
Except the record company dropped them because Wilco wouldn't make music the way they wanted. That means Tweedy and the rest of Wilco were free to do whatever they wanted, including streaming the album on the Internet.
But I mean, come off it man. You sound like those silly MPAA trailers before movies.
I guess I should know better than to feed the trolls.
-Alex
Funny you should ask. My senior capstone is on this subject. There are six basic requirements of democratic voting.
Anonymity - this is obvious. The vote cannot be tracked back to whomever cast it.
Verifiability - the ability to go back and recount ballots.
Reliability - the count is done the same way each time and accurately reflects the intent of the voter. Punchcards are unreliable because of chads. Processes like optical scanning give different counts when run mutliple times because of borderline ballots
Usability - the design of the voting system reduces the likelihood of mistakes. Butterfly ballots are the obvious bad example here.
Security - the system is secure from tampering, such as system hacking or stuffing the ballot box
Accessibility - all of the above remains true for all demographics, such as the disabled. For instance, being blind should not mean that you can't vote anonymously
No system as yet developed fits all of these for a scale such as a national election in the US.
Other, less important requirements include cost,speed of tallying and administrative ease-of-use.
Don't forget that the State Fair is held in Wake County, which is predominantly democratic (and most of the visitors to the fair, especially on weekdays are from Raleigh and Durham. In fact, most large city centers in NC are democratic. The question is whether the increased population and turnout in the cities will offset that of the rural areas.
I think that the pollsters will be found to be off, but I think when the smoke clears, we'll still be a red state.
-Alex
I know it's none of my business, but I'm just curious. What state do you live in? What is your demographic? (Age, race, ethnicity...)
Given your story, I think it's plausible that you were discriminated against. I'm just curious what could have caused that.
-Alex
I've done a lot of research into e-voting machines. Verification is a big problem. I think the lack of a paper trail is the biggest problem plaguing these machines. That having been said, there are safeguards and code audits that try to make sure things go smoothly. The idea is good, but these things can always be subverted.
As for drive failures, this is less of a possibility. Each machine has three separate locations to back up the data--usually to a combination of flash memory and hard disk space, though some use battery-backed-up RAM.
The WinVote machine also has 802.11b capability, so it's not necessarily true that data is only stored on the machine, though for the most part, officials disable the wireless capabilities until after the election, to aid in reporting.
I predict that 90-95% of machines will properly report results and will work without problems. That's better than some other methods of voting. In an election that's going to be decided by 1-2% margins, it's definitely not enough.
-Alex
This is a very valid point; however, most people who support government legislating morality don't think like this. They think that pornography is morally decrepit. To them, if the government does not stand specifically against "moral decrepitude", that is the same position as condoning it.
Add to that the more forceful argument that allowing such actions to continue will only cause it to spread until even the children are exposed daily. Won't someone think of the children!
You make an excellent point, but it won't convince the people who think like this. And as long as those people vote and occupy a large group of the citizenry, your position (and, IMO, the public's liberty) will be disregarded. Any ideas how to convince them?
-Alex
That's a silly argument. There's nothing in the story about government intevention versus no government intervention. The story is about the government making telco outage data classified data versus government requiring telco outage data to be published and public (which is how it was before). Either way, there's government intervention
Taking the government out of the equation would only mean that the telco wouldn't be required to publish the data. Then we'd be in the same boat we are now... You can argue that perhaps some telcos would start releasing it because people demanded the data. Even so, that has nothing to do with this story -- the two options, before and after, both involve intervention
Get your logic straight before spouting ideology. Because in this case, your ideology doesn't apply.
-Alex