On the one hand, you have a society based on the rule of law. You have leverage and force.
On the other hand, you have a society based on the association of free men. You have co-operation and self-determination.
The problem isn't the lawbreakers. The problems is the laws.
There should never be a situation where one person connives themselves to the top, then dictates that all his fellows must act according to his direction even where it is contrary to their own wishes, because the numbers say that he is in charge.
The solution isn't to incarcerate those who break the law. The solution is to disenfranchise those who have made a lifes work out of using the law to disenfranchise their fellows, rather than caring for themselves in a practical fashion. That group includes lawyers, bankers, politicians, old money business, venture capitalists, etc.
Most people are too close to the situation to understand what's really going on...
I will allow that violence is occasionally necessary. That does not make it glorious. Collecting the town's rubbish is necessary. Unblocking the sewers is necessary. Violence is to be classed alongside those: it is something that is inherently messy, ugly and often downright disgusting, but which needs to be done.
For myself I'm with Billy Cassidy on this one: the ones who go on about blood sacrifices and glory and beauty in fighting are the ones yeh fuckin' shoot first.
When a man is in fear of his life, fighting in the service of those who cannot defend themselves, it is glorious regardless of how ugly it is. Not because he overcame his enemy, but because he overcame his fear and made a sacrifice of himself.
To deny such a man his glory and lump him together with those who would engage in violence for fun or profit is a disgusting insult to his courage, no matter how misguided you might believe his cause to be.
That is an empty opinion, an expression of your distaste for violence and your desire to redefine words that might elevate it to a virtue. Your words don't mean a damn thing.
You're right. But, the first thing they do is, they express their anger as anonymously as they can, to find out if they are alone, because they know if they are alone, they cannot act effectively.
If they are not alone, they will come to see this fact. Together.
Then, after they realize they are not alone, one person will stand up and say "My name is Joe Crazy. I am not going to take this anymore. Who is with me?"
And THIS is when they will start cleaning up their society.
And when they finally do, it will be gloriously violent, as those who have been exploiting the rule of law to oppress their fellow man are hoisted by their own petard.
They will be hoisted by the masses who finally realize that they do not wish to live in an oppressive, efficient society based on the rule of law with the faint hope that they might one day get to be Dictator Bush, but just want to co-operate, take care of their needs and spend the rest of their time enjoying their life.
Good. There is a lot to be angry about, and people have been far too sheep-like for far too long.
Here's a fitting response to this article from the fictional Howard Beale:
I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth; banks are going bust; shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter; punks are running wild in the street, and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it.
We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat. And we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be!
We all know things are bad -- worse than bad -- they're crazy.
It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, "Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials, and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone."
Well, I'm not going to leave you alone.
I want you to get mad!
I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot. I don't want you to write to your Congressman, because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street.
All I know is that first, you've got to get mad.
You've gotta say, "I'm a human being, goddammit! My life has value!"
So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell,
By the way, although your rhetoric about re-enslaving black people in the US was quite vogue in the 1990's, I like to think that the fact that we are potentially about to elect a half-African president pretty thoroughly debunks that. Drug laws in the US are broken, drug laws do hit poor people unfairly, but they are not a racist conspiracy.
It sucks that we haven't taken the steps to create a citizens mesh network to replace the centrally managed networking we're relying on. Bitching and moaning isn't going to do anything if you're still materially dependent on systems under other peoples control.
Take the steps to build a mesh network by the citizenry for the citizenry, then when they start passing laws to shut it down and sending the police out to force everyone to stop, THAT is when you should be protesting. Well, probably fighting on the defensive rather than protesting, but you get the idea.
At this point, the only thing stopping this from happening is the laziness of a citizenry who would rather demand their rights to be dependent consumers be affirmed than actually take responsibility and take effective steps to remedy their situation.
The "perfect" encryption system (one that is totally unbreakable) will only exist once computer-brain interfaces move into the Neuromancer realm. Perfect? Yes. Same idea as before, for the one-time pad, but deliver the key and data to the subconcious. Then the person can act on the information without actually knowing they know it. This eliminates any form of social engineering and thus the only remaining weak point. It is also well beyond anything that will exist for a long long time, so will remain theoretical only. Nonetheless, as a theoretical concept, it does establish a method by which an unbreakable system could exist without violating any known physical or mathematical laws.
Assuming the subconsious is "write only". Though, really, it sounds like poppycock. And, even if it wasn't, the participants would be monsters to be driven to extinction through violence. Who would be prepared to live in the presence of such?
"For text boxes, our computers automatically choose words from the site that has the form; for select menus, check boxes and radio buttons on the form, we choose from among the values of the HTML," they noted in a blog post. "Having chosen the values for each input, we generate and then try to crawl URLs that correspond to a possible query a user may have made. If we ascertain that the Web page resulting from our query is valid, interesting and includes content not in our index, we may include it in our index much as we would include any other Web page."
This is not very far removed from a brute force hack on your website. Better make sure you do proper fuzz testing
The thing is, when people are faced with more than two choices, they tend to panic and dither and get put off.
Tell me about it. Should I use the BBC, or should I just stick to getting my fix of British culture off bittorrent sites...
Yeah, too confusing. I'm going to stick to torrents. No one ever told me that they had to erect barriers around me in the name of other peoples 'interests' on a torrent site.
One-way hash functions are supposed to have two properties. One, they're one way. This means that it is easy to take a message and compute the hash value, but it's impossible to take a hash value and recreate the original message. (By "impossible" I mean "can't be done in any reasonable amount of time.") Two, they're collision free. This means that it is impossible to find two messages that hash to the same hash value.
This is funny. These two properties, discounting the redefinition of impossible, are mutually exclusive. If each message hashes to a unique value, and there are no collisions, then recreating the original message from the hash is as simple as putting a million monkeys to work writing a million works of gibberish and store the hash and gibberish in a dictionary. If you instructed your monkeys to start from the smallest works of gibberish and work towards the longer works, your dictionary would be complete for any message whose length is equal to or less than the longest message in the dictionary.
So basically, this would mean a large number of the worlds finest mathematicians are working tirelessly to create something that is by definition mathematically impossible.
I try rather hard to share my beer (which is good), because I acquire beer faster than I drink it. I make 5 gallon batches, and can do 1-2 a month but make fewer than that; as it turns out, over time I collect more and more beer. By sharing my beer, I can run out; this means I have more free empty bottles, and can make another batch and bottle it without getting more bottles, which in turn means my apartment doesn't become a sea of full beer bottles.
Reminds me of first year university. I made beer to save money, 5 dozen beer a week, ready to broach every Monday. Didn't take long before I had way more than I needed and gave it away to guys in residence when they came over to our room for card night. Didn't mind, only cost me 20c a beer.
Except, eventually it reached a point where my beer was running out by Friday night. If I had told them they couldn't have a 20c beer anymore, they would have thought I was a cheap bastard. If I had sold the stuff, aside from it being work and responsibility I didn't want, I would have gotten kicked out of school or worse. So, I just started adding more hops to the mix until it was bitter enough for my personal taste, but too bitter for most people to drink. Then, when friends came on card night with beer, I'd ask why they were buying the things for a buck each when I had them for free. People started explaining that they didn't like my beer, so I told them hey, if you don't like the way I make it, you can buy a bucket and a carboy, borrow my thermometers and hydrometers and whatnot, I'll teach you how to make it, and you can make your own.
By the end of the year, there were 14 of us on my floor in residence brewing off my equipment, making 70 dozen beer a week. And damn, did we throw the best parties on campus. Much better result than selling it or cutting production.
You're right, of course. The prostitute is at least giving the johns something of value for their money in a clean exchange. The musician is using their music to manipulate people, and getting paid by those who are directing the manipulation. So, the musician is actually worse.
Not at all. My system is the democratic system, with some holes patched.
Look at current democracies, they have two huge problems. One, the person you elect to represent you can talk out of one corner of his mouth when he's campaigning and then engage in behavior that is totally contrary to what you elected him to do, and you're stuck with it for years to come. And two, you can never elect the person you trust most to lead you, but only one of a short list of people.
This system would fix both of those failings. It's not like we're all just going to fall to pieces, people naturally self-organize themselves by their very nature. Most of our problems arise when we hand a small group of people absolute power because it's necessary, and then can't take it back when it's unnecessary without destroying and replacing the system.
I have a plan for a new government system. I'm still working out the particulars of how it can be implemented, but this is how it would operate:
Every person in the country has the right to introduce a bill, or a plan, or a budget.
Every person in the country has the right to vote on every individual bill, plan or budget.
Every person in the country has the right to choose a representative to speak for them. Not just from a list of politicians on a piece of paper. They have the right to choose any citizen they wish to speak for them.
Every person in the country has the right to revoke their choice of representative at any time. Not just at a regular interval measured in years, but instantly, the very moment they realize that this person does not share their vision of how the system should operate.
Every vote, by every person, is public information. No secret ballot. It's just as public as if you were a Roman citizen, raising your hand to vote in the Colosseum in full sight of your peers.
This system will allow us to recreate the current conditions if we wish. We can choose to assemble ourselves into rigid vertically managed hierarchical structures if we see the justification, such as if we are under threat.
However, it would also allow us to gracefully decentralize our decision making without the need for revolution.
Power could flow in to the middle or out to the edges as the population saw fit, rather than our current structure, which ensures that there is an absolute authority running the show, even if we don't want or agree with such a hierarchy.
Now, the Islamic people, they have a system for creating government within territory claimed by an existing government. They set up a system of courts, and when someone has a grievance, they don't go to the government authorities, they go to the Islamic court, and abide by its decisions.
This is a suitable model for recreating our government.
Thing to do is figure out how to build the infrastructure to support what I have described above. Once that's figured out, we all start building that infrastructure as fast as we can, together with anyone who will help.
It will be a joke at first, like if they had an election in World of Warcraft. Meaningless.
It will be meaningless right up until the moment that more of the country is participating than not.
At which point, the citizenry can together declare that this system IS the new government, and it will be our social responsibility to ignore the old government and be bound by the new one.
I believe the answer to making this practical lies in creating systems where an individual can verify that the public records of their vote reflect the reality of their vote, and ensuring that the system by nature of its operation leaves too large an amount of forensic evidence to make tampering without a trace possible.
I envision a scenario where people carry a device on their person, a write-once data recorder that will keep a copy of their vote as they cast it as evidence, and automatically replicate that information across multiple physically separated nodes in a citizen run mesh network in addition to submitting the data to a central point for tabulation.
The way the electronic voting is done these days, it's all about maintaining the status quo. Either we embrace it, they corrupt it and there's no evidence, or we reject it, the vision I've described becomes impossible, and they stuff the ballot boxes the old fashioned way, business as usual. Win-Win if you're already in power.
Electronic voting has the power to liberate the human race. It just needs to be done properly. But it will never be built by those who achieve power from the current system, any more than you would expect a company like Microsoft to be the pioneer behind the GPL. When it's done right, it will be some crazy unlikeable radical like RMS who will do it, and it will take on a life of its own that leaves its founder behind and marches forward as the new normal.
If someone more clever than I wants to steal this idea, please do.
You like pointless video games, and I don't like pointless pursuits.
You think I'm an asshole.
Which is fine, because I think you, and everyone else who participates in these ridiculous activities are losers. Like one of those slow people that you can't get to stop touching their genitalia.
I always bitch when I see grown adults dedicating weeks of their time developing skills in inane games of pretend. Particularly when they start trying to show off how "awesome" they are at it like they're looking for a cookie. It's disgusting.
yes, i know there are direct downloads, i was commenting on the statement of 'using the power of p2p'.
Not everyone comes from a primitive culture like yours, you know...
When normal people make statements that amount to "I'm not going to send data packets in that electric current running from my house. I might want to save them for later." with a straight face and expect to be taken seriously, clearly, the culture is not particularly sane and rational.
Anyway, you're clearly just sore because "harmonica hero" hasn't come out yet. Out of curiosity, are harmonica players considered musicians? You say "musicians get chicks." What type of chicks go nuts over harmonicas, exactly?
Well, I doubt John Popper has a hard time finding groupies, and he doesn't even play particularly well. I've got more of a Little Walter influence, personally... but I've pulled out a harp to amuse myself at the bus stop and had women approach me several times in the last month.
How often does that happen with Guitar Hero? Oh, right. Never.
I know you were being funny, but I think at this point who knows how things will go. It used to be that having your music in a commercial was 'selling out'. Now bands/musicians realize it's a crazy good way to get themselves in front of people. Games are the same way, especially a music oriented game.
There are a lot of beautiful whores in the red light district in Amsterdam, sitting naked behind glass windows where walkers buy can see them. It used to be that those girls just shared their beauty with those that they cared about. But now they realize that it's a crazy good way to get their beauty in front of a lot of people and make some money.
Yeah... fun is when you get a case of beer and all your buddies come over, you jam for 3 hours and record everything, then kick back and laugh at some of the weird shit you recorded, and tell each other how much better you're sounding these days.
Just because something is inane and pointless doesn't mean it's fun.
I don't get it... you can buy a mixing board and a small stack for a couple of hundred dollars. You can do your own recording and production work on any modern computer. Instruments are not that expensive. Musicians get chicks for free. I'm a right brained computer programmer with the creativity of a stick, but I can still grab my harmonica and jam with my buddies once a week and have it sound good enough to get on a stage from time to time.
Why the hell is this popular? Are all these people idiots? I mean, it's Simon Says with a soundtrack.
It's not the capacity to fight that gives you liberty. It's the capacity to be personally involved in the systems that assure your own life and the capacity to walk away from non-essential systems that you don't want to participate in.
If you don't have your eyes and hands directly involved in the systems that keep you alive, you have no liberty, only helpless, ignorant dependence.
Which pretty much describes most of the western world, and explains why we keep participating in systems that screw us over, year after year, decade after decade.
You want to give a man freedom, you don't give him guns. You give him tools.
Slashdot Mirror
On the one hand, you have a society based on the rule of law. You have leverage and force.
On the other hand, you have a society based on the association of free men. You have co-operation and self-determination.
The problem isn't the lawbreakers. The problems is the laws.
There should never be a situation where one person connives themselves to the top, then dictates that all his fellows must act according to his direction even where it is contrary to their own wishes, because the numbers say that he is in charge.
The solution isn't to incarcerate those who break the law. The solution is to disenfranchise those who have made a lifes work out of using the law to disenfranchise their fellows, rather than caring for themselves in a practical fashion. That group includes lawyers, bankers, politicians, old money business, venture capitalists, etc.
Most people are too close to the situation to understand what's really going on...
I will allow that violence is occasionally necessary. That does not make it glorious. Collecting the town's rubbish is necessary. Unblocking the sewers is necessary. Violence is to be classed alongside those: it is something that is inherently messy, ugly and often downright disgusting, but which needs to be done.
For myself I'm with Billy Cassidy on this one: the ones who go on about blood sacrifices and glory and beauty in fighting are the ones yeh fuckin' shoot first.
When a man is in fear of his life, fighting in the service of those who cannot defend themselves, it is glorious regardless of how ugly it is. Not because he overcame his enemy, but because he overcame his fear and made a sacrifice of himself.
To deny such a man his glory and lump him together with those who would engage in violence for fun or profit is a disgusting insult to his courage, no matter how misguided you might believe his cause to be.
That is an empty opinion, an expression of your distaste for violence and your desire to redefine words that might elevate it to a virtue. Your words don't mean a damn thing.
You're right. But, the first thing they do is, they express their anger as anonymously as they can, to find out if they are alone, because they know if they are alone, they cannot act effectively.
If they are not alone, they will come to see this fact. Together.
Then, after they realize they are not alone, one person will stand up and say "My name is Joe Crazy. I am not going to take this anymore. Who is with me?"
And THIS is when they will start cleaning up their society.
And when they finally do, it will be gloriously violent, as those who have been exploiting the rule of law to oppress their fellow man are hoisted by their own petard.
They will be hoisted by the masses who finally realize that they do not wish to live in an oppressive, efficient society based on the rule of law with the faint hope that they might one day get to be Dictator Bush, but just want to co-operate, take care of their needs and spend the rest of their time enjoying their life.
It's inevitable.
Good. There is a lot to be angry about, and people have been far too sheep-like for far too long.
Here's a fitting response to this article from the fictional Howard Beale:
I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth; banks are going bust; shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter; punks are running wild in the street, and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it.
We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat. And we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be!
We all know things are bad -- worse than bad -- they're crazy.
It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, "Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials, and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone."
Well, I'm not going to leave you alone.
I want you to get mad!
I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot. I don't want you to write to your Congressman, because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street.
All I know is that first, you've got to get mad.
You've gotta say, "I'm a human being, goddammit! My life has value!"
So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell,
"I'm as mad as hell,
and I'm not going to take this anymore!!"
When the laws are criminal, only criminals will show respect for the law.
By the way, although your rhetoric about re-enslaving black people in the US was quite vogue in the 1990's, I like to think that the fact that we are potentially about to elect a half-African president pretty thoroughly debunks that. Drug laws in the US are broken, drug laws do hit poor people unfairly, but they are not a racist conspiracy.
Lead us to freedom, Uncle Tom!!
It sucks that we haven't taken the steps to create a citizens mesh network to replace the centrally managed networking we're relying on. Bitching and moaning isn't going to do anything if you're still materially dependent on systems under other peoples control.
Take the steps to build a mesh network by the citizenry for the citizenry, then when they start passing laws to shut it down and sending the police out to force everyone to stop, THAT is when you should be protesting. Well, probably fighting on the defensive rather than protesting, but you get the idea.
At this point, the only thing stopping this from happening is the laziness of a citizenry who would rather demand their rights to be dependent consumers be affirmed than actually take responsibility and take effective steps to remedy their situation.
The "perfect" encryption system (one that is totally unbreakable) will only exist once computer-brain interfaces move into the Neuromancer realm. Perfect? Yes. Same idea as before, for the one-time pad, but deliver the key and data to the subconcious. Then the person can act on the information without actually knowing they know it. This eliminates any form of social engineering and thus the only remaining weak point. It is also well beyond anything that will exist for a long long time, so will remain theoretical only. Nonetheless, as a theoretical concept, it does establish a method by which an unbreakable system could exist without violating any known physical or mathematical laws.
Assuming the subconsious is "write only". Though, really, it sounds like poppycock. And, even if it wasn't, the participants would be monsters to be driven to extinction through violence. Who would be prepared to live in the presence of such?
You're mistaken.
"For text boxes, our computers automatically choose words from the site that has the form; for select menus, check boxes and radio buttons on the form, we choose from among the values of the HTML," they noted in a blog post. "Having chosen the values for each input, we generate and then try to crawl URLs that correspond to a possible query a user may have made. If we ascertain that the Web page resulting from our query is valid, interesting and includes content not in our index, we may include it in our index much as we would include any other Web page."
This is not very far removed from a brute force hack on your website. Better make sure you do proper fuzz testing
The thing is, when people are faced with more than two choices, they tend to panic and dither and get put off.
Tell me about it. Should I use the BBC, or should I just stick to getting my fix of British culture off bittorrent sites...
Yeah, too confusing. I'm going to stick to torrents. No one ever told me that they had to erect barriers around me in the name of other peoples 'interests' on a torrent site.
From the article:
One-way hash functions are supposed to have two properties. One, they're one way. This means that it is easy to take a message and compute the hash value, but it's impossible to take a hash value and recreate the original message. (By "impossible" I mean "can't be done in any reasonable amount of time.") Two, they're collision free. This means that it is impossible to find two messages that hash to the same hash value.
This is funny. These two properties, discounting the redefinition of impossible, are mutually exclusive. If each message hashes to a unique value, and there are no collisions, then recreating the original message from the hash is as simple as putting a million monkeys to work writing a million works of gibberish and store the hash and gibberish in a dictionary. If you instructed your monkeys to start from the smallest works of gibberish and work towards the longer works, your dictionary would be complete for any message whose length is equal to or less than the longest message in the dictionary.
So basically, this would mean a large number of the worlds finest mathematicians are working tirelessly to create something that is by definition mathematically impossible.
Well, we're going to find out, because I'm going to build it regardless.
I try rather hard to share my beer (which is good), because I acquire beer faster than I drink it. I make 5 gallon batches, and can do 1-2 a month but make fewer than that; as it turns out, over time I collect more and more beer. By sharing my beer, I can run out; this means I have more free empty bottles, and can make another batch and bottle it without getting more bottles, which in turn means my apartment doesn't become a sea of full beer bottles.
Reminds me of first year university. I made beer to save money, 5 dozen beer a week, ready to broach every Monday. Didn't take long before I had way more than I needed and gave it away to guys in residence when they came over to our room for card night. Didn't mind, only cost me 20c a beer.
Except, eventually it reached a point where my beer was running out by Friday night. If I had told them they couldn't have a 20c beer anymore, they would have thought I was a cheap bastard. If I had sold the stuff, aside from it being work and responsibility I didn't want, I would have gotten kicked out of school or worse. So, I just started adding more hops to the mix until it was bitter enough for my personal taste, but too bitter for most people to drink. Then, when friends came on card night with beer, I'd ask why they were buying the things for a buck each when I had them for free. People started explaining that they didn't like my beer, so I told them hey, if you don't like the way I make it, you can buy a bucket and a carboy, borrow my thermometers and hydrometers and whatnot, I'll teach you how to make it, and you can make your own.
By the end of the year, there were 14 of us on my floor in residence brewing off my equipment, making 70 dozen beer a week. And damn, did we throw the best parties on campus. Much better result than selling it or cutting production.
You're right, of course. The prostitute is at least giving the johns something of value for their money in a clean exchange. The musician is using their music to manipulate people, and getting paid by those who are directing the manipulation. So, the musician is actually worse.
Not at all. My system is the democratic system, with some holes patched.
Look at current democracies, they have two huge problems. One, the person you elect to represent you can talk out of one corner of his mouth when he's campaigning and then engage in behavior that is totally contrary to what you elected him to do, and you're stuck with it for years to come. And two, you can never elect the person you trust most to lead you, but only one of a short list of people.
This system would fix both of those failings. It's not like we're all just going to fall to pieces, people naturally self-organize themselves by their very nature. Most of our problems arise when we hand a small group of people absolute power because it's necessary, and then can't take it back when it's unnecessary without destroying and replacing the system.
I have a plan for a new government system. I'm still working out the particulars of how it can be implemented, but this is how it would operate:
Every person in the country has the right to introduce a bill, or a plan, or a budget.
Every person in the country has the right to vote on every individual bill, plan or budget.
Every person in the country has the right to choose a representative to speak for them. Not just from a list of politicians on a piece of paper. They have the right to choose any citizen they wish to speak for them.
Every person in the country has the right to revoke their choice of representative at any time. Not just at a regular interval measured in years, but instantly, the very moment they realize that this person does not share their vision of how the system should operate.
Every vote, by every person, is public information. No secret ballot. It's just as public as if you were a Roman citizen, raising your hand to vote in the Colosseum in full sight of your peers.
This system will allow us to recreate the current conditions if we wish. We can choose to assemble ourselves into rigid vertically managed hierarchical structures if we see the justification, such as if we are under threat.
However, it would also allow us to gracefully decentralize our decision making without the need for revolution.
Power could flow in to the middle or out to the edges as the population saw fit, rather than our current structure, which ensures that there is an absolute authority running the show, even if we don't want or agree with such a hierarchy.
Now, the Islamic people, they have a system for creating government within territory claimed by an existing government. They set up a system of courts, and when someone has a grievance, they don't go to the government authorities, they go to the Islamic court, and abide by its decisions.
This is a suitable model for recreating our government.
Thing to do is figure out how to build the infrastructure to support what I have described above. Once that's figured out, we all start building that infrastructure as fast as we can, together with anyone who will help.
It will be a joke at first, like if they had an election in World of Warcraft. Meaningless.
It will be meaningless right up until the moment that more of the country is participating than not.
At which point, the citizenry can together declare that this system IS the new government, and it will be our social responsibility to ignore the old government and be bound by the new one.
I believe the answer to making this practical lies in creating systems where an individual can verify that the public records of their vote reflect the reality of their vote, and ensuring that the system by nature of its operation leaves too large an amount of forensic evidence to make tampering
without a trace possible.
I envision a scenario where people carry a device on their person, a write-once data recorder that will keep a copy of their vote as they cast it as evidence, and automatically replicate that information across multiple physically separated nodes in a citizen run mesh network in addition to submitting the data to a central point for tabulation.
The way the electronic voting is done these days, it's all about maintaining the status quo. Either we embrace it, they corrupt it and there's no evidence, or we reject it, the vision I've described becomes impossible, and they stuff the ballot boxes the old fashioned way, business as usual. Win-Win if you're already in power.
Electronic voting has the power to liberate the human race. It just needs to be done properly. But it will never be built by those who achieve power from the current system, any more than you would expect a company like Microsoft to be the pioneer behind the GPL. When it's done right, it will be some crazy unlikeable radical like RMS who will do it, and it will take on a life of its own that leaves its founder behind and marches forward as the new normal.
If someone more clever than I wants to steal this idea, please do.
You like pointless video games, and I don't like pointless pursuits.
You think I'm an asshole.
Which is fine, because I think you, and everyone else who participates in these ridiculous activities are losers. Like one of those slow people that you can't get to stop touching their genitalia.
Deal with it.
I always bitch when I see grown adults dedicating weeks of their time developing skills in inane games of pretend. Particularly when they start trying to show off how "awesome" they are at it like they're looking for a cookie. It's disgusting.
yes, i know there are direct downloads, i was commenting on the statement of 'using the power of p2p'.
Not everyone comes from a primitive culture like yours, you know...
When normal people make statements that amount to "I'm not going to send data packets in that electric current running from my house. I might want to save them for later." with a straight face and expect to be taken seriously, clearly, the culture is not particularly sane and rational.
Anyway, you're clearly just sore because "harmonica hero" hasn't come out yet. Out of curiosity, are harmonica players considered musicians? You say "musicians get chicks." What type of chicks go nuts over harmonicas, exactly?
Well, I doubt John Popper has a hard time finding groupies, and he doesn't even play particularly well. I've got more of a Little Walter influence, personally... but I've pulled out a harp to amuse myself at the bus stop and had women approach me several times in the last month.
How often does that happen with Guitar Hero? Oh, right. Never.
I know you were being funny, but I think at this point who knows how things will go. It used to be that having your music in a commercial was 'selling out'. Now bands/musicians realize it's a crazy good way to get themselves in front of people. Games are the same way, especially a music oriented game.
There are a lot of beautiful whores in the red light district in Amsterdam, sitting naked behind glass windows where walkers buy can see them. It used to be that those girls just shared their beauty with those that they cared about. But now they realize that it's a crazy good way to get their beauty in front of a lot of people and make some money.
Yeah... fun is when you get a case of beer and all your buddies come over, you jam for 3 hours and record everything, then kick back and laugh at some of the weird shit you recorded, and tell each other how much better you're sounding these days.
Just because something is inane and pointless doesn't mean it's fun.
I don't get it... you can buy a mixing board and a small stack for a couple of hundred dollars. You can do your own recording and production work on any modern computer. Instruments are not that expensive. Musicians get chicks for free. I'm a right brained computer programmer with the creativity of a stick, but I can still grab my harmonica and jam with my buddies once a week and have it sound good enough to get on a stage from time to time.
Why the hell is this popular? Are all these people idiots? I mean, it's Simon Says with a soundtrack.
Ok, try this on for size:
It's not the capacity to fight that gives you liberty. It's the capacity to be personally involved in the systems that assure your own life and the capacity to walk away from non-essential systems that you don't want to participate in.
If you don't have your eyes and hands directly involved in the systems that keep you alive, you have no liberty, only helpless, ignorant dependence.
Which pretty much describes most of the western world, and explains why we keep participating in systems that screw us over, year after year, decade after decade.
You want to give a man freedom, you don't give him guns. You give him tools.