(Note that fecundity declines with higher IQ. [E.g. http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/762/1102/1600/chartiqbirth.1.jpg ] So human IQ is not limited by "the best evolution can do" and thus by chance mutations, but rather is, like height and other quantitative attributes, where it is due to a balance of evolutionary pressures.)
Why are either one of them focusing on mutations as if that's the route of evolutionary response to quantitative pressures?
Any quantitative attribute like IQ or height or emotional stability or whatever is the aggregate result of many (often hundreds of) genes, permutations of which already exist in our population gene pool in varying quantities. Individuals get these roughly at random and so fall on a bell curve. The mean of that bell curve (which is what people are concerned with when talking about population drift) can be highly responsive (big drift in a small number of generations) to environmental pressures with no mutations whatsoever just via reproductive enhancement of individuals who happen to fall to the preferred side of the bellcurve, thus increasing the relative proportion of pro- or anti- attribute genes. Mutation-based evolution is glacial by comparison. (I think maybe they like to focus on mutations because they're easier to track historically than population-wide shifts in proportions of existing variations... But that doesn't make them more relevant...)
This is bad news for anybody with an exceptionally high IQ, or really any spark whatsoever. I regularly get harassed in airports, and was even thrown out of a restaurant by the cops once for, as it turned out, looking around the room while waiting for my table rather than staring blankly into space. (Truly, I kid you not: see my full description if you're doubting.) I was also pulled aside in an airport once while just walking down the isle (pre-911!), and when I grilled the officer about why he singled me out, he said my eyes met the "profile". From what I learned at the restaurant incident, most of these profiling techniques, which are ostensibly about identifying criminals, pretty much describe someone who is alert and curious as opposed to mundane and full of sheep-like indifference. Most of these "between the lines" face reading techniques are about picking up thoughts that are going on behind the scenes. And while it may well be the case that this distinguishes some with criminal intent from your average Joe, it also distinguishes anybody with a high mental bandwidth from your average Joe and doesn't differentiate further. Mind you, from *my* perspective I'm a pretty low-key, average, mind-my-own-business sort, so it's not like I'm out there trying to make a point -- on the contrary, I do everything I can to be unnoticed (when flying, which I do a lot) and over the years I've gotten better at; and mostly what works is trying to look dumb! So, I view this as about Orwellian as it gets, and what bothers me the most is not that I have to act dumb (whatever) but that we're training everyone to do that and that I'm going to be surrounded by scared sheep! Go look in an airport and see if you see anyone with spark (if they have it, they're hiding it). How long before this starts bleeding outside of airports and into.. well, hell, I know for a fact it was finding its way into restaurant lobbies even before 911...
To make a long rant short: As someone who is a life-long "false positive", I am annoyed by the way things are going to say the least.
My mother decided she wanted to be a doctor in her mid 30's and got into NYU when she was maybe 38? She did fine, and became a great doctor. Before that she worked as a lab tech for a few years. Before that she was a waitress. A lot of my friends in college were "returning students" in their 30's getting CS degrees and went on to do good stuff. I've never personally witnessed anybody being "too old" to pull it off.
I had an astigmatism developing over many years and after some research decided it was likely due to excessive near-point work (i.t., staring at the computer too much). So I started wearing reading glasses even though I didn't need them, and after one year my vision had _improved_, though this hardly constitutes a statistical sample. See this link, third paragraph, and also here where I give some analysis of the optics and choice of reading glasses. Your mileage may vary!
It seems to me the patent office is routinely and grossly negligent in performing its duties, and this is costing businesses millions of dollars and the country as a whole billions. And I'm just talking about legal fees and unduly diverted revenue, not even touching on how the economy is being stifled (which is much harder to measure).
Isn't that grounds for a law suit?
Couldn't any company who has been sued for violating some patent that is eventually overturned as absurd seek to recover associated legal expenses (and lost revenues caused by any associated delays) from the patent office itself?
From what I have read in the past, the patent office seems to be motivated internally by revenue. While I'm all for not wasting taxpayer money, I would rather have my taxes pay for a well-run, highly scrupulous patent system that grants only sparingly than pay nothing for one that costs me far far more in indirect consequences.
What happens if you find a dead person in any of the other schemes that have been proposed?
If you find enough bogus voters to potentially change the results of the election, you hold it again. This would be very expensive and very bad, but it's better than the vote being hacked. And as long as the worst case outcome is the election is held again, there's little incentive to hack the vote.
This system could also be extended to allowing people to vote online, which would greatly reduce the cost. Instead of a printed receipt, you would get a digitally-signed e-receipt.
The computer prints the ballot along with a unique identifier, which is your receipt.
Two lists are published on the web: a list of the names of people who voted, and a list of identifiers and what votes they placed.
Anyone can verify the two lists are the same size. Anyone can examine the list for deceased people or other suspicious populations of voters. Anyone can tally the votes themselves. And anyone who voted can compare their receipt against the website and verify their vote is properly tallied.
Cheap, simple, easy, and I'd think pretty hard to hack.
This is just one example of many, taken from their own site, of the "scientific method" being employed here.
From http://noosphere.princeton.edu/story.html
"The main GCP prediction was similar to that for the preceding New Year, namely that there would be an accumulation of deviant EGG data during a 10 minute period around midnight. The result in this case was positive but not very impressive compared to the year before. On the other hand, a striking outcome was generated with a different analytical approach applied by Dean Radin. He predicted that the variation among the individual eggs (we had 27 running by this time) would decrease near the transition to the new year, and become very small just as everyone's focus centered on the stroke of midnight. His analysis showed a spectacular confirmation of that idea, with a highly improbable spike in the data, registering its greatest deviation just a few seconds from 12:00. The probability for this outcome was very impressive, on the order of 1 in 1000, even with an appropriate adjustment for multiple tests. As in other cases, this strong result provoked a flurry of independent analyses, and again we found that the exact definition of terms is a strong determinant of the outcome; some apparently similar approaches showed little evidence of an effect at midnight. [Emphasis added. And yet still he goes on to say...] Nevertheless, several converging analytical efforts appear to give support for the conclusion that the data around midnight going from 1999 to 2000 differ quite remarkably from the random quality they should have according to theory. In other words, the EGG data aren't random at that time, but instead show signs of having been affected by global consciousness."
In other words: "If we look at the data after the fact in whatever ways make it appear meaningful, it appears meaningful."
There is nothing to see here. Move along, move along.
What if: filing a patent were essentially free (say $20 to prevent spamming the database) but didn't actually mean anything other than to time-stamp your filing, and then if and when it proved worthwhile, one could pay a much much larger fee to cover the costs of the patent office properly (i.e., unlike now) investigating the worthiness of the patent, including assigning a meaningful time limit to it?
This way, "poor" inventers could still file the initial patent, and then get backing if ever they needed to invoke it, but at the same time nobody (large companies or other) would be able to sue until a serious effort had been made to investigate the patent.
One of the problems now, which I think is partly to blame for how poorly patents are reviewed, is how to balance the cost of filing against the cost of properly investigating the patents. This pretty much solves that problem, since the initial dirt-cheap effortless filing is a placeholder which can be used in more free-market-like negotiations. (E.g., any sure-win patent never even needs to be properly instantiated [thus saving lots of legal fees] since both parties can see the inevitable outcome and would rather not waste the money. Similarly, a holder of a likely-win patent initial filing ought to be able to garner external funding for the more expensive filing. Etc.)
The goal here is to enable/require way more diligence before giving someone the "right to sue" (since as y'all know it's often just the cost of the suit that kills, even if the patent is ridiculous).
Go hang out on Stanford campus, sit in on some choice MBA-related classes, look for the guys with spark in their eyes and introduce yourself. Meet their friends, and their professors, hang out with them, and tap into the same social network they will be using for the rest of their own business careers.
See if there aren't some classes where the students have to give presentations, and take your lunch hour every other day to sit in the back with a sandwich and listen. One day, one of them will get up and give his schpiel, and you'll be "Yo, that's my man."
Oh, and if you find two, please send me one (I think the nearest university to me specializes in animal husbandry) -- like you, I've kicked a few products out in my time, too, and have a pile of new technology I am actively working on but which will fade away under-utilized if I don't either switch back to sales mode or find myself a Steve Jobs. As someone else commented earlier: join the club.
Abstract/creative sciences require a balance of concrete and intuitive thinking--programming is an art as much as it is a science. Not to say that highly gendered males don't grok art, but just that people who are somewhat cross-gendered in the womb (which is what the article was about) may well end up with more of a mixture of skills than their strongly gendered counterparts, allowing them to excel at certain tasks (programming, research, etc.) which require a combination of normally disparate skills.
The demand for responsible consultants never seems to dwindle. When times are tough, companies chuck all the dead wood, and want consultants more than ever (since they're generally "fresh" and get more done for the money than employees settled in for the long haul). I certainly didn't notice any decline in available work.
My whole strategy is what one might call measured early retirement.:) Seriously, I've been retiring for longer and longer periods as I get older, and I'm well on track to retire permanently in good time. Don't get me wrong -- when I'm working, I'm working long and hard, and at the end of every cycle, I aim to be better off than before. I'm not advocating goofing off until your broke and start again--I'm saying quite simply if you spend less frivilously, you can turn some of that extra cash into savings, and invest some into your own "play" time. And if you play hard and creatively, you can probably turn that into cash too.
More directly to your question, note that as a schedule-C filer, you can put about 15% of your annual income tax free into an SEP IRA. Also check out HSAs (health savings accounts). Etc. Lots of options open -- better than relying on your company's poorly invested 401K or (laugh) Social Security.
Bottom line is freelance is no different than salaried work this way, except that you are more directly responsible for setting the money aside.
I was raised by a single mom (receiving no alimony or child care) who worked as a waitress while going to school part-time. She earned a lot less than I ever did, and we got by (we even backpacked around Europe a couple of times, when I was three and five). I learned a lot from that about what is necessary in life and what is optional. The margin between what people think they need to spend and what they actually need to spend is HUGE.
One thing that's important to understand is that all productivity is the leveraging of capital, where capital is essentially the sum of the value of your body, knowledge, and property. If you let yourself go into debt (car loans, etc.), you are falling behind the curve. The closer to a net-value of zero you get, the less you have to leverage and the longer it will take to dig yourself out. Conversely, the more you can get ahead of the curve, the more leverage you have, the easier it is to move forward. The lesson in this is: earn first, spend later, never the other way around. Tighten your belts until you get ahead of the curve, and then you can loosen them in measure.
I recommend the book The Millionaire Next Door; also The Richest Man in Babylon. Both of them basically tell the same story: whatever you're living on now, cut it by a mere 10% and save that. Most anybody can manage that, and the long-term results are spectacular. People (by and large) don't get rich by earning a lot, they get rich by spending less than they earn, over many years.
In the end, money is time...
(FWIW, I started consulting at 18, bought my first house at 21, and lived there with two empty bedrooms, and a [debt-free] car I rarely used, for many years. The extra cost of a family would have been incidental.)
Agreed. This has worked quite well for me. Do consulting contracts that are challenging enough to be both interesting in themselves, and high paying. Work your butt off, and don't spend any money you don't have to (I drove one used $3000 Toyota truck for 10 years). Then when you have enough of a buffer saved up (shouldn't take long!), take a few months or years off to work on your own hobbies. Next thing you know, someone will be wanting to hire you to apply your "hobbies" to their problem, so during those few months a year you do have to work, it will be on something you really enjoy.
I've spent the last year just working on my own (programming and more recently robotics) projects, while living in Sweden, Tahoe, and now New Zealand. And my point is not "oh look how studly I am" but quite the opposite -- look how easy it is. My annual budget is about US$15,000, including rent, travel, toys, and food. (It helps that I don't drink, and also that I don't have to drive to "work" every day.) How much consulting do you have to do a year to earn that? Don't forget that if that's *all* you earn, you pay very little taxes. Part of the trick here is to live and earn light, where it's tax-efficient, and then eventually to leap-frog the horrible middle-ground where all your time goes to taxes and living expenses. If you spent six to eight months a year working on your own hobbies, how many years before you had something you could turn into a business of your own?
This cycle has worked for me for about 18 years now. It took me a couple years consulting full time to kick it off (get my skills and savings up to snuff), and it's been less and less work and more and more "play" ever since. And even those first two years were fun stuff, since it's easier to find a fun short contract than a fun full-time job.
In short, my answer is: don't try to divide the hours of your day into work and play, because as you imply you just can't occupy your brain with all that stuff in one day. Instead, divide the years or months of your life into work and play. It's no harder--it just takes the discipline not to spend the money you're building up.
I was involved in a simulation project for a chain restaurant that saved them $54 million over the next few years according to their own computations. The first time we showed the simulation to the president of the company--and mind you, there was vast quantities of kick ass technology on display here--his only comment was that the icons for one of the food products didn't show enough cheese.
Partner up with someone who likes to make things flashy. He'll bring in the checks and first-time customers, and your technology will bring the reputation and repeat business.
I bought a Fujitsu P1120 and put Linux on it. It weighs 2.5 pounds with the extended battery installed (~4.5 to 7 hours depending on backlight) and has built in wireless. And 256MB mem, 30G drive, and a touch screen so you can navigate the web by plonking on the screen with your fingers when you're bored with the clitermouse. With the built in wireless, you can use any open wireless net you come accross... I download my photos, compile my journal, handle all my email, etc.. locally, and then have scripts that synchronize stuff whenever I'm online. I'm replying to you from Linkoping, Sweden at the moment, by the way. Click on my URL for my journal link, and look down a few entries for my notes on Linux on the P1120 if you want more details. Enjoy your travels,
-Simon
Step 1) Everybody who registers to vote gets a unique ID sent or given to them. This ID is large, and randomly generated (but remembered; like credit card number assignment), so hard to generate fakes. It is analogous to a voting ballot; it could literally be handed to you at the voting booth, or it could be mailed or emailed to you if you aren't paranoid that they will keep a record of the association. I.e., note that your name is not associated with the number -- they check your name off the list when they hand you a random number, but they don't write down the number next to your name.
Step 2) You vote online or in a booth using this number, scanned in by barcode (booth) or typed in (online). You keep the number (on official paper) as your receipt.
Step 3) All votes are published online (probably along with voting location and approximate time) where anybody can count them, and more importantly where anybody can see and verify their own vote.
No one in history to my knowledge has proven or even provided a sound argument that patents are a net benefit. They are an artificial monopoly that prevents competition. People assume/argue that without patents there would be no incentive to innovate or to invest in innovation, but history just does not bear that out. I could go on at length about this, but the bottom line is we need to evolve beyond the assumption that patents are a good idea and re-evaluate that basic question.
Incidentally, I have six patents of my own, and will probably be applying for a number of new ones soon -- yet still on net analysis I beleive I would be better off in a world without patents.
Slashdot Mirror
(Note that fecundity declines with higher IQ. [E.g. http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/762/1102/1600/chartiqbirth.1.jpg ] So human IQ is not limited by "the best evolution can do" and thus by chance mutations, but rather is, like height and other quantitative attributes, where it is due to a balance of evolutionary pressures.)
Why are either one of them focusing on mutations as if that's the route of evolutionary response to quantitative pressures?
Any quantitative attribute like IQ or height or emotional stability or whatever is the aggregate result of many (often hundreds of) genes, permutations of which already exist in our population gene pool in varying quantities. Individuals get these roughly at random and so fall on a bell curve. The mean of that bell curve (which is what people are concerned with when talking about population drift) can be highly responsive (big drift in a small number of generations) to environmental pressures with no mutations whatsoever just via reproductive enhancement of individuals who happen to fall to the preferred side of the bellcurve, thus increasing the relative proportion of pro- or anti- attribute genes. Mutation-based evolution is glacial by comparison. (I think maybe they like to focus on mutations because they're easier to track historically than population-wide shifts in proportions of existing variations... But that doesn't make them more relevant...)
I still prefer this: http://sifter.org/~simon/journal/20081009.html (if I don't say so myself...)
Thoughts on this?
To make a long rant short: As someone who is a life-long "false positive", I am annoyed by the way things are going to say the least.
My mother decided she wanted to be a doctor in her mid 30's and got into NYU when she was maybe 38? She did fine, and became a great doctor. Before that she worked as a lab tech for a few years. Before that she was a waitress. A lot of my friends in college were "returning students" in their 30's getting CS degrees and went on to do good stuff. I've never personally witnessed anybody being "too old" to pull it off.
Out of curiosity, how do you define conspiracy?
I had an astigmatism developing over many years and after some research decided it was likely due to excessive near-point work (i.t., staring at the computer too much). So I started wearing reading glasses even though I didn't need them, and after one year my vision had _improved_, though this hardly constitutes a statistical sample. See this link, third paragraph, and also here where I give some analysis of the optics and choice of reading glasses. Your mileage may vary!
It seems to me the patent office is routinely and grossly negligent in performing its duties, and this is costing businesses millions of dollars and the country as a whole billions. And I'm just talking about legal fees and unduly diverted revenue, not even touching on how the economy is being stifled (which is much harder to measure).
Isn't that grounds for a law suit?
Couldn't any company who has been sued for violating some patent that is eventually overturned as absurd seek to recover associated legal expenses (and lost revenues caused by any associated delays) from the patent office itself?
From what I have read in the past, the patent office seems to be motivated internally by revenue. While I'm all for not wasting taxpayer money, I would rather have my taxes pay for a well-run, highly scrupulous patent system that grants only sparingly than pay nothing for one that costs me far far more in indirect consequences.
Fair point!
What happens if you find a dead person in any of the other schemes that have been proposed?
If you find enough bogus voters to potentially change the results of the election, you hold it again. This would be very expensive and very bad, but it's better than the vote being hacked. And as long as the worst case outcome is the election is held again, there's little incentive to hack the vote.
This system could also be extended to allowing people to vote online, which would greatly reduce the cost. Instead of a printed receipt, you would get a digitally-signed e-receipt.
The computer prints the ballot along with a unique identifier, which is your receipt.
Two lists are published on the web: a list of the names of people who voted, and a list of identifiers and what votes they placed.
Anyone can verify the two lists are the same size.
Anyone can examine the list for deceased people or other suspicious populations of voters.
Anyone can tally the votes themselves.
And anyone who voted can compare their receipt against the website and verify their vote is properly tallied.
Cheap, simple, easy, and I'd think pretty hard to hack.
From http://noosphere.princeton.edu/story.html
"The main GCP prediction was similar to that for the preceding New Year, namely that there would be an accumulation of deviant EGG data during a 10 minute period around midnight. The result in this case was positive but not very impressive compared to the year before. On the other hand, a striking outcome was generated with a different analytical approach applied by Dean Radin. He predicted that the variation among the individual eggs (we had 27 running by this time) would decrease near the transition to the new year, and become very small just as everyone's focus centered on the stroke of midnight. His analysis showed a spectacular confirmation of that idea, with a highly improbable spike in the data, registering its greatest deviation just a few seconds from 12:00. The probability for this outcome was very impressive, on the order of 1 in 1000, even with an appropriate adjustment for multiple tests. As in other cases, this strong result provoked a flurry of independent analyses, and again we found that the exact definition of terms is a strong determinant of the outcome; some apparently similar approaches showed little evidence of an effect at midnight. [Emphasis added. And yet still he goes on to say...] Nevertheless, several converging analytical efforts appear to give support for the conclusion that the data around midnight going from 1999 to 2000 differ quite remarkably from the random quality they should have according to theory. In other words, the EGG data aren't random at that time, but instead show signs of having been affected by global consciousness."
In other words: "If we look at the data after the fact in whatever ways make it appear meaningful, it appears meaningful."
There is nothing to see here. Move along, move along.
-Simon
This way, "poor" inventers could still file the initial patent, and then get backing if ever they needed to invoke it, but at the same time nobody (large companies or other) would be able to sue until a serious effort had been made to investigate the patent.
One of the problems now, which I think is partly to blame for how poorly patents are reviewed, is how to balance the cost of filing against the cost of properly investigating the patents. This pretty much solves that problem, since the initial dirt-cheap effortless filing is a placeholder which can be used in more free-market-like negotiations. (E.g., any sure-win patent never even needs to be properly instantiated [thus saving lots of legal fees] since both parties can see the inevitable outcome and would rather not waste the money. Similarly, a holder of a likely-win patent initial filing ought to be able to garner external funding for the more expensive filing. Etc.)
The goal here is to enable/require way more diligence before giving someone the "right to sue" (since as y'all know it's often just the cost of the suit that kills, even if the patent is ridiculous).
More on this idea here.
Anybody see why this wouldn't help (at least somewhat)?
See if there aren't some classes where the students have to give presentations, and take your lunch hour every other day to sit in the back with a sandwich and listen. One day, one of them will get up and give his schpiel, and you'll be "Yo, that's my man."
Oh, and if you find two, please send me one (I think the nearest university to me specializes in animal husbandry) -- like you, I've kicked a few products out in my time, too, and have a pile of new technology I am actively working on but which will fade away under-utilized if I don't either switch back to sales mode or find myself a Steve Jobs. As someone else commented earlier: join the club.
Abstract/creative sciences require a balance of concrete and intuitive thinking--programming is an art as much as it is a science. Not to say that highly gendered males don't grok art, but just that people who are somewhat cross-gendered in the womb (which is what the article was about) may well end up with more of a mixture of skills than their strongly gendered counterparts, allowing them to excel at certain tasks (programming, research, etc.) which require a combination of normally disparate skills.
The demand for responsible consultants never seems to dwindle. When times are tough, companies chuck all the dead wood, and want consultants more than ever (since they're generally "fresh" and get more done for the money than employees settled in for the long haul). I certainly didn't notice any decline in available work.
More directly to your question, note that as a schedule-C filer, you can put about 15% of your annual income tax free into an SEP IRA. Also check out HSAs (health savings accounts). Etc. Lots of options open -- better than relying on your company's poorly invested 401K or (laugh) Social Security.
Bottom line is freelance is no different than salaried work this way, except that you are more directly responsible for setting the money aside.
One thing that's important to understand is that all productivity is the leveraging of capital, where capital is essentially the sum of the value of your body, knowledge, and property. If you let yourself go into debt (car loans, etc.), you are falling behind the curve. The closer to a net-value of zero you get, the less you have to leverage and the longer it will take to dig yourself out. Conversely, the more you can get ahead of the curve, the more leverage you have, the easier it is to move forward. The lesson in this is: earn first, spend later, never the other way around. Tighten your belts until you get ahead of the curve, and then you can loosen them in measure.
I recommend the book The Millionaire Next Door; also The Richest Man in Babylon. Both of them basically tell the same story: whatever you're living on now, cut it by a mere 10% and save that. Most anybody can manage that, and the long-term results are spectacular. People (by and large) don't get rich by earning a lot, they get rich by spending less than they earn, over many years.
In the end, money is time...
(FWIW, I started consulting at 18, bought my first house at 21, and lived there with two empty bedrooms, and a [debt-free] car I rarely used, for many years. The extra cost of a family would have been incidental.)
Agreed. This has worked quite well for me. Do consulting contracts that are challenging enough to be both interesting in themselves, and high paying. Work your butt off, and don't spend any money you don't have to (I drove one used $3000 Toyota truck for 10 years). Then when you have enough of a buffer saved up (shouldn't take long!), take a few months or years off to work on your own hobbies. Next thing you know, someone will be wanting to hire you to apply your "hobbies" to their problem, so during those few months a year you do have to work, it will be on something you really enjoy. I've spent the last year just working on my own (programming and more recently robotics) projects, while living in Sweden, Tahoe, and now New Zealand. And my point is not "oh look how studly I am" but quite the opposite -- look how easy it is. My annual budget is about US$15,000, including rent, travel, toys, and food. (It helps that I don't drink, and also that I don't have to drive to "work" every day.) How much consulting do you have to do a year to earn that? Don't forget that if that's *all* you earn, you pay very little taxes. Part of the trick here is to live and earn light, where it's tax-efficient, and then eventually to leap-frog the horrible middle-ground where all your time goes to taxes and living expenses. If you spent six to eight months a year working on your own hobbies, how many years before you had something you could turn into a business of your own? This cycle has worked for me for about 18 years now. It took me a couple years consulting full time to kick it off (get my skills and savings up to snuff), and it's been less and less work and more and more "play" ever since. And even those first two years were fun stuff, since it's easier to find a fun short contract than a fun full-time job. In short, my answer is: don't try to divide the hours of your day into work and play, because as you imply you just can't occupy your brain with all that stuff in one day. Instead, divide the years or months of your life into work and play. It's no harder--it just takes the discipline not to spend the money you're building up.
I was involved in a simulation project for a chain restaurant that saved them $54 million over the next few years according to their own computations. The first time we showed the simulation to the president of the company--and mind you, there was vast quantities of kick ass technology on display here--his only comment was that the icons for one of the food products didn't show enough cheese. Partner up with someone who likes to make things flashy. He'll bring in the checks and first-time customers, and your technology will bring the reputation and repeat business.
I bought a Fujitsu P1120 and put Linux on it. It weighs 2.5 pounds with the extended battery installed (~4.5 to 7 hours depending on backlight) and has built in wireless. And 256MB mem, 30G drive, and a touch screen so you can navigate the web by plonking on the screen with your fingers when you're bored with the clitermouse. With the built in wireless, you can use any open wireless net you come accross... I download my photos, compile my journal, handle all my email, etc.. locally, and then have scripts that synchronize stuff whenever I'm online. I'm replying to you from Linkoping, Sweden at the moment, by the way. Click on my URL for my journal link, and look down a few entries for my notes on Linux on the P1120 if you want more details. Enjoy your travels, -Simon
Step 1) Everybody who registers to vote gets a unique ID sent or given to them. This ID is large, and randomly generated (but remembered; like credit card number assignment), so hard to generate fakes. It is analogous to a voting ballot; it could literally be handed to you at the voting booth, or it could be mailed or emailed to you if you aren't paranoid that they will keep a record of the association. I.e., note that your name is not associated with the number -- they check your name off the list when they hand you a random number, but they don't write down the number next to your name.
Step 2) You vote online or in a booth using this number, scanned in by barcode (booth) or typed in (online). You keep the number (on official paper) as your receipt.
Step 3) All votes are published online (probably along with voting location and approximate time) where anybody can count them, and more importantly where anybody can see and verify their own vote.
Incidentally, I have six patents of my own, and will probably be applying for a number of new ones soon -- yet still on net analysis I beleive I would be better off in a world without patents.
Dunno if you're serious or not so I'll answer straight: Staples = paper towels, laundry soap, stuff like that.