There is nothing that says that defending oneself from false accusations comes without price, time or other resources.
There should be something that says that. I shouldn't have to go broke or spend hundreds of hours of my life trying to defend myself against a false accusation. The false accuser should have to pay ALL my costs and reimburse me for my time spent. The U.S. desperately needs a loser-pays-all judicial system.
In any social group, misinformation about a person or sub-group can cause very real damage (emotional, financial, discriminatory, etc) to the victim(s). Any person harmed in this way has the fundamental human right to demonstrate that the information is incorrect and to halt its spread.
It's about time the U.S. Constitution was ammended to explicitly protect that right. That would put a stop to so many modern problems (credit record screw-ups, false criminal accusations hanging over your head forever and denying you job opportunities, identity theft, corporate and government cover-ups and misinformation campaigns, religious zealots trying to inject fiction into public schools as fact, political campaign smear-ads, etc).
My anecdotal experience is that 95% of pirated copies do not represent lost sales.
In the vast majority of cases, people pirate simply because they can. If they couldn't, they wouldn't go out and buy it all instead -- in fact, they couldn't possibly afford to.
Of course, my experience is limited to the United States.
Oh, and for those people who never owned a 6-button Genesis controller, they were WAY better than the horrible 3-button controllers the original Genesis shipped with.
To me, the best game controller is one whose controls are well-positioned, reliably responsive, and require very little force to depress.
The xbox360's D-pad is pretty stiff (takes excessive force to depress) and doesn't respond as reliably as it should. Try playing that Street Fighter collection XBOX game on a 360's D-pad and you'll see.
I think the controller that was the absolute best for its time was SEGA's 6-button genesis controller. The D-pad on that thing was the best D-pad I've ever used -- incredibly responsive, very easy to depress, and coated in a rubbery non-slip grip. And it used a real six-button layout (like the Street Fighter 2 arcade machines did) rather than the goofy shoulder-button layout that the SNES controller used.
I think shoulder buttons are a bad idea in general because they are too easily accidentally depressed because they are placed where your fingers naturally hold the controller along the top anyway -- this is especially a problem with portables like the DS Lite.
As for the best "somewhat current gen" controller, I'd nominate the PS2 Dual Shock 2 controllers. Those things are awesome. Not the best D-pad, but decent, and the shoulder buttons are excusable because you've got the little handles to hold onto the controller with, thus freeing up your index fingers from holding the controller. I use two of them with a little DualJoy USB adaptor from from Lik-Sang as my primary game controllers for my PC.
But open-source is different because the fruits of someone's labor are given away for free, immediately undercutting every other competitor and destroying their ability to even so much as break even for their efforts.
Obviously in certain areas such as OSes this hasn't yet happened (due to other factors such as compatibility needs, etc), but one great example is windows FTP programs. Remember back when WS_FTP was the FTP client for Windows, and it was actually a commercial product you had to pay for to get all the features? Since open-source Windows FTP clients like FileZilla finally got good enough, the "market" for windows FTP clients has been demolished. It's not an area anyone can sell in anymore because anything 99% of people need is available completely for free.
That's not classic free-market competition. It's something else entirely that defies the old free-market game. A huge assumption built into basic economics is that no players are altruistic. The free market models all assume that people are only willing to work hard in exchange for equitable compensation. Open-source is all about altruism and giving away something for nothing. The models don't account for it.
It's actually more akin (in its results, anyway) to anti-competitive behavior. It's the same undercutting effect everyone bitches about when Microsoft gives away free stuff (like web browsers or media players) with Windows.
Microsoft is giving away their latest dev tools because THEY DO NOT MAKE REAL EXECUTABLES!
Everything MS compilers make now is P-code.
Uninformed and incorrect. The C++ compiler can still generate native, non-.NET-dependent executables (.EXE,.DLL,.OBJ,.LIB, etc), just like it always has.
But be aware, MS is giving away these new compilers for a REASON. They do not want programmers to be able to create fast, non-MS managed code.
Someone told me a few weeks ago that the radio stations have dried up because all the good content and programming has moved to satellite radio (XM and Sirius).
Last week I was out of town and had a rental car with Sirius radio, and I was honestly very impressed with the variety, selection, lack of commercials, and lack of annoying DJ chatter. It really seems like my friend was right -- all the good stuff has moved to satellite radio.
It sucks to have to pay a subscription fee, but on the other hand that's better than suffering through commercials and DJs.
Just because you post (submit) something on a web site owned and operated by someone else, that doesn't give you the "right" to force them to publish it or keep serving it up. You're not entitled to that.
If I submit a "letter to the editor" to my local newspaper, I don't have the "right" to force the newspaper to publish my letter. Whether they publish it or not is up to them, not me, because they own the publication. They are not violating my free speech rights if they refuse to publish my letter, because I am free to publish it myself or to utilize some other forum.
It's no different with the web. Really. If I post something on Slashdot or Digg or whatever, and they decide to take it down, that's their right as "publishers". I'm free to go post my speech somewhere else, or to set up and operate my own web server and publish it myself, so they're not violating my free speech rights.
Nintendo's success has come about because of two things.
First, it doesn't just rush shitty games or shitty hardware to market. They treat console design and game-making like the artistic, design-centric crafts they really are.
Second, they strike exactly the right balance between features/price with their hardware, and they revise the hardware appropriatley as time goes on to ensure their offerings continue to strike the right balance at any given time (as technology advances and more/better features can be had for the same price).
In those two regards, Nintendo has been operating very much like Apple -- but doing it even better than Apple does.
It's good to see companies really take pride in what they do, execute well on it, and get rewarded by the market for it. It gives you just a little glimmer of hope that capitalism can still bring about good things.
Most pirated copies do not equal lost sales! Most pirated copies do not equal lost sales! Most pirated copies do not equal lost sales!
Piracy is just free advertising! Piracy is just free advertising! Piracy is just free advertising!
Piracy is not the same as counterfitting! Piracy is not the same as counterfitting! Piracy is not the same as counterfitting!
I went to college not so long ago, back when MP3s were first becoming the rage (before Napster). We all downloaded and shared pirates MP3s and built up large MP3 collections.
Did any of those copied MP3s result in lost sales for the record companies? No, hardly any did. We were poor college students. If we couldn't have pirated copies for free, we would have simply gone without.
This is true of every form of content piracy I've ever witnessed. I know someone who modded a PS2 and loaded it up with hundreds of pirated games. Would he have bought most of those games if he couldn't have pirated them? Of course not -- he couldn't afford to. He would have simply not had the games.
Piracy does not have much real impact on sales, and most stats citing "industry losses due to piracy" are fabricated bullshit. All piracy does is allow people who can't afford the product still get access to it. And that's not a bad thing, as it's free advertising.
As an college degree-holding adult who can now afford things, I bought many CDs by bands I only knew about because I had pirated their early stuff back in college. Had I not done that, I wouldn't have bought their CDs years later, because I wouldn't have even known about them. Similarly, I can now afford to purchase software like Photoshop that I wouldn't know how to use (and wouldn't have any reason to buy) today if I hadn't pirated the software back in college so that I could learn how to use it. Just more evidence that piracy is the strongest form of free advertising, and companies should learn to leverage that instead of trying to stomp it out.
I know it's in vogue to claim that schools just want to control kids and stick them in little boxes.
It's not just "in vogue", it also happens to be true. Public schools, at least, aren't primarily about educating children, even though that is supposed to be their primary function. In reality, they are primarily about providing a place for working parents to dump their kids during the day so they can go to work. Toward that end, schools are more interested in keeping children under control (and keeping parents happy) than teaching students to think for themselves.
http://goat.cx/ - No six year old should stumble upon the nastier version of that site. Heck I'm not a prude but I wish I'd never stumbled upon it. Think a 3rd grader doing a report on beavers (the kind that make dams) won't accidentally see something they are too young to understand?
No child is too young to be taught about sex. Society just has an unfounded puritanical fear of teaching children about sex because parents are afraid their "little ones" will run out and start having it if they even know what it is, which is of course ridiculous.
Parents - After some kid spends four hours trying to bypass filters and manages to see a breast then they (or the kid sitting next to them) quickly goes home to tell mom and dad how they saw someone having sex on the school computers. Some parents are shocked that their "innocent" child was exposed to something like that and will call all of their neighbors to warn them. At least we can tell the angry mob that shows up that we are making an honest effort to block access to that stuff. Then usually they put down the pitchforks.
Where's the teacher in this scenario? There should be a teacher making frequent rounds around the room to see what the students are actually doing on the computer. If the kid is doing something they shouldn't be, then the burden should be on the teacher (not filtering software or sysadmins) to stop them. Teacher too busy or apathetic to carry out this role? Then fire him/her and hire more, better teachers.
Federal/State laws - While we can't be hauled in to jail for not filtering we can have money withheld. If you think your school is doing a poor job then how good do you think it would be if they had 1/2 of the budget to pay for things like teachers, books or electricity?
Honestly, I think most schools would be much better off if they were forced to reevaluate their priorities. My high school, for instance, had 12 football coaches, while simultaneously claiming they didn't have the funds to pay for new beakers for the chemistry lab. Forced to make the choice, I guarantee you they would have to favor the investments that actually resulted in bringing up test scores and pass rates.
PC Access - We had MUCH looser filters a few years ago. Then the lab assistants called to let us know that regularly every computer in the lab was in use by someone using chat or web-based email often for the entire hour.
Again, why is the teacher MIA in this scenario? Why is the school letting students use the computers completely unsupervised?
Nobody is shutting down web sites. Nobody is telling you that you can't watch videos of some chick getting it on with a horse. Nobody is censoring anything. You are free to view/read what you want online in your own home with your own computer using Internet access that you or your parents pay for. We're just saying, "No, not here, not with things funded by the public for the purpose of education." Schools aren't (and shouldn't be) your private ISP.
Filtering is a form of censorship. Censorship doesn't have to involve shutting the publisher down. It can involve blocking people's access to the publisher. Would you claim that China's firewall blocking access to tons of sites isn't censorship?
Now ask yourself... how much time did you just spend doing nothing but blocking proxy sites?
Then maybe you and the school district should take the hint and get a clue and stop trying to CONTROL CHILDREN by using CENSORSHIP. Censorship is never an appropriate solution to anything, regardless of circumstances, and children should be guided and educated rather than controlled or restricted.
Apple switched to Intel in large part because Intel was able to provide laptop processors chipsets that offered a strong balance between performance and power efficiency.
Last time I checked, Intel was still kicking AMD's ass in the latop realm. AMD had CPUs and chipsets that were designed for laptops, but they sucked power and underperformed compared to Intel's offerings in the same space. And Intel had a convincing roadmap for growth in that area, whereas AMD doesn't really appear to.
You can remove the need for users to "metavote" on each other, and make calculation of user trustworthiness an automatic part of the system.
Assume a ten-point trustworthiness scale for web sites. Suppose a given web site has a current trustworthiness score of 7, and suppose I think the site is really untrustworthy and I rank it as 2.
Just the act of my voting "2" implies that I don't really trust people who gave the site radically different scores. I might mostly trust someone who gave the site a "3", but I really don't trust someone who gave the site a "10". So the system automatically casts a vote, on my behalf, for "9" (10-(3-2)) for the person who voted the site as "3", and automatically casts a vote for "3" (10-(9-2)) for the person who voted the site as "10". Now those user's trustworthiness scores are accurately affected.
How can Thwarte or Verisign or whatever be at the root of a "web of trust"? Trust from whom. Not from me.
That is indeed the fundamental problem with SSL-type usage of certificates. Most visitors to a web site don't even know who or what "VeriSign" or a "Certificate Authority" is. When they get a pop-up from their browser saying a CA is unrecognized or a certificate has been revoked, most web surfers just proceed anyway because they don't understand what it means and don't care.
What is needed is a better integration between the human concept of "trust", the web brower's UI, and the technical implementation of security. "Trustworthiness" is something users should (and do) decide for themselves, not something that users believe blindly on the word of some company like VeriSign.
A better system would be if every web surfer and every web site had a "collective trust score", calculated from individual web surfers' votes. The "collective trust score" would be a weighted average computed such that the votes provided by more trustworthy web surfers counted more. That way, if some user goes around upvoting untrustworthy sites, the community can vote that user's trustworthiness down so that their tactics have little influence on the site scores.
My browser's UI (via a plug-in or otherwise) would automatically show me the "collective trust score" for every site I visited, and give me the opportunity to rank the site myself. Furthermore, I could drill down and do meta-voting things like "for all users who ranked this site above 8 on the 10-point ranking scale, rank their trustworthiness as 0", or "rank user Superbob347 as a perfect 10 on the trustworthiness scale (perhaps because I personally know and trust him)".
This isn't exactly "open source" (whatever that means in the context of security architecture), and it isn't exactly bullet-proof security, but it's an open, distributed model in which the whole notion of "trust" is put back in the hands of users (where it should be). It doesn't treat trust as black-and-white decision, but as a matter of degree, which better matches the human concept of trust. And it's a system that constantly re-evaluates the trustworthiness of every user and site rather than having to rely on CA's to certify/revoke given entities in a timely manner.
Slashdot Mirror
I hear the landfills on Earth are all filling up... finally, a new hole to throw shit into!
Well, for a little while, anyway.
There is nothing that says that defending oneself from false accusations comes without price, time or other resources.
There should be something that says that. I shouldn't have to go broke or spend hundreds of hours of my life trying to defend myself against a false accusation. The false accuser should have to pay ALL my costs and reimburse me for my time spent. The U.S. desperately needs a loser-pays-all judicial system.
In any social group, misinformation about a person or sub-group can cause very real damage (emotional, financial, discriminatory, etc) to the victim(s). Any person harmed in this way has the fundamental human right to demonstrate that the information is incorrect and to halt its spread.
It's about time the U.S. Constitution was ammended to explicitly protect that right. That would put a stop to so many modern problems (credit record screw-ups, false criminal accusations hanging over your head forever and denying you job opportunities, identity theft, corporate and government cover-ups and misinformation campaigns, religious zealots trying to inject fiction into public schools as fact, political campaign smear-ads, etc).
My anecdotal experience is that 95% of pirated copies do not represent lost sales.
In the vast majority of cases, people pirate simply because they can. If they couldn't, they wouldn't go out and buy it all instead -- in fact, they couldn't possibly afford to.
Of course, my experience is limited to the United States.
Oh, and for those people who never owned a 6-button Genesis controller, they were WAY better than the horrible 3-button controllers the original Genesis shipped with.
Here's a page that shows the 6-button controller.
To me, the best game controller is one whose controls are well-positioned, reliably responsive, and require very little force to depress.
The xbox360's D-pad is pretty stiff (takes excessive force to depress) and doesn't respond as reliably as it should. Try playing that Street Fighter collection XBOX game on a 360's D-pad and you'll see.
I think the controller that was the absolute best for its time was SEGA's 6-button genesis controller. The D-pad on that thing was the best D-pad I've ever used -- incredibly responsive, very easy to depress, and coated in a rubbery non-slip grip. And it used a real six-button layout (like the Street Fighter 2 arcade machines did) rather than the goofy shoulder-button layout that the SNES controller used.
I think shoulder buttons are a bad idea in general because they are too easily accidentally depressed because they are placed where your fingers naturally hold the controller along the top anyway -- this is especially a problem with portables like the DS Lite.
As for the best "somewhat current gen" controller, I'd nominate the PS2 Dual Shock 2 controllers. Those things are awesome. Not the best D-pad, but decent, and the shoulder buttons are excusable because you've got the little handles to hold onto the controller with, thus freeing up your index fingers from holding the controller. I use two of them with a little DualJoy USB adaptor from from Lik-Sang as my primary game controllers for my PC.
But open-source is different because the fruits of someone's labor are given away for free, immediately undercutting every other competitor and destroying their ability to even so much as break even for their efforts.
Obviously in certain areas such as OSes this hasn't yet happened (due to other factors such as compatibility needs, etc), but one great example is windows FTP programs. Remember back when WS_FTP was the FTP client for Windows, and it was actually a commercial product you had to pay for to get all the features? Since open-source Windows FTP clients like FileZilla finally got good enough, the "market" for windows FTP clients has been demolished. It's not an area anyone can sell in anymore because anything 99% of people need is available completely for free.
That's not classic free-market competition. It's something else entirely that defies the old free-market game. A huge assumption built into basic economics is that no players are altruistic. The free market models all assume that people are only willing to work hard in exchange for equitable compensation. Open-source is all about altruism and giving away something for nothing. The models don't account for it.
It's actually more akin (in its results, anyway) to anti-competitive behavior. It's the same undercutting effect everyone bitches about when Microsoft gives away free stuff (like web browsers or media players) with Windows.
Microsoft is giving away their latest dev tools because THEY DO NOT MAKE REAL EXECUTABLES!
.DLL, .OBJ, .LIB, etc), just like it always has.
Everything MS compilers make now is P-code.
Uninformed and incorrect. The C++ compiler can still generate native, non-.NET-dependent executables (.EXE,
But be aware, MS is giving away these new compilers for a REASON. They do not want programmers to be able to create fast, non-MS managed code.
Uninformed and paranoid.
While the 'selfless' act helps the customer directly, it robs the producer of what is being 'selflessly' given away
It doesn't rob the producer of anything, because the consumer of the pirated copy couldn't afford to buy it (which is why they are pirating it).
Repeat after me:
a pirated copy is not a lost sale
a pirated copy is not a lost sale
a pirated copy is not a lost sale
Someone told me a few weeks ago that the radio stations have dried up because all the good content and programming has moved to satellite radio (XM and Sirius).
Last week I was out of town and had a rental car with Sirius radio, and I was honestly very impressed with the variety, selection, lack of commercials, and lack of annoying DJ chatter. It really seems like my friend was right -- all the good stuff has moved to satellite radio.
It sucks to have to pay a subscription fee, but on the other hand that's better than suffering through commercials and DJs.
Just because you post (submit) something on a web site owned and operated by someone else, that doesn't give you the "right" to force them to publish it or keep serving it up. You're not entitled to that.
If I submit a "letter to the editor" to my local newspaper, I don't have the "right" to force the newspaper to publish my letter. Whether they publish it or not is up to them, not me, because they own the publication. They are not violating my free speech rights if they refuse to publish my letter, because I am free to publish it myself or to utilize some other forum.
It's no different with the web. Really. If I post something on Slashdot or Digg or whatever, and they decide to take it down, that's their right as "publishers". I'm free to go post my speech somewhere else, or to set up and operate my own web server and publish it myself, so they're not violating my free speech rights.
Nintendo's success has come about because of two things.
First, it doesn't just rush shitty games or shitty hardware to market. They treat console design and game-making like the artistic, design-centric crafts they really are.
Second, they strike exactly the right balance between features/price with their hardware, and they revise the hardware appropriatley as time goes on to ensure their offerings continue to strike the right balance at any given time (as technology advances and more/better features can be had for the same price).
In those two regards, Nintendo has been operating very much like Apple -- but doing it even better than Apple does.
It's good to see companies really take pride in what they do, execute well on it, and get rewarded by the market for it. It gives you just a little glimmer of hope that capitalism can still bring about good things.
Then upgrade to Firefox 2.x. It works fine there.
I don't control the way Microsoft chooses to code its "Windows Live Spaces" service.
I've Been Misled
Involuntary Bowel Movement
It Beats Microsoft
So what (in a nutshell) is IBM Global Services? What do they do?
Most pirated copies do not equal lost sales!
Most pirated copies do not equal lost sales!
Most pirated copies do not equal lost sales!
Piracy is just free advertising!
Piracy is just free advertising!
Piracy is just free advertising!
Piracy is not the same as counterfitting!
Piracy is not the same as counterfitting!
Piracy is not the same as counterfitting!
I went to college not so long ago, back when MP3s were first becoming the rage (before Napster). We all downloaded and shared pirates MP3s and built up large MP3 collections.
Did any of those copied MP3s result in lost sales for the record companies? No, hardly any did. We were poor college students. If we couldn't have pirated copies for free, we would have simply gone without.
This is true of every form of content piracy I've ever witnessed. I know someone who modded a PS2 and loaded it up with hundreds of pirated games. Would he have bought most of those games if he couldn't have pirated them? Of course not -- he couldn't afford to. He would have simply not had the games.
Piracy does not have much real impact on sales, and most stats citing "industry losses due to piracy" are fabricated bullshit. All piracy does is allow people who can't afford the product still get access to it. And that's not a bad thing, as it's free advertising.
As an college degree-holding adult who can now afford things, I bought many CDs by bands I only knew about because I had pirated their early stuff back in college. Had I not done that, I wouldn't have bought their CDs years later, because I wouldn't have even known about them. Similarly, I can now afford to purchase software like Photoshop that I wouldn't know how to use (and wouldn't have any reason to buy) today if I hadn't pirated the software back in college so that I could learn how to use it. Just more evidence that piracy is the strongest form of free advertising, and companies should learn to leverage that instead of trying to stomp it out.
Is Virtual Rape a Crime?
It's a virtual crime, only punishable by playing "Law & Order: The Video Game".
It's not just "in vogue", it also happens to be true. Public schools, at least, aren't primarily about educating children, even though that is supposed to be their primary function. In reality, they are primarily about providing a place for working parents to dump their kids during the day so they can go to work. Toward that end, schools are more interested in keeping children under control (and keeping parents happy) than teaching students to think for themselves.
No child is too young to be taught about sex. Society just has an unfounded puritanical fear of teaching children about sex because parents are afraid their "little ones" will run out and start having it if they even know what it is, which is of course ridiculous.
Where's the teacher in this scenario? There should be a teacher making frequent rounds around the room to see what the students are actually doing on the computer. If the kid is doing something they shouldn't be, then the burden should be on the teacher (not filtering software or sysadmins) to stop them. Teacher too busy or apathetic to carry out this role? Then fire him/her and hire more, better teachers.
Honestly, I think most schools would be much better off if they were forced to reevaluate their priorities. My high school, for instance, had 12 football coaches, while simultaneously claiming they didn't have the funds to pay for new beakers for the chemistry lab. Forced to make the choice, I guarantee you they would have to favor the investments that actually resulted in bringing up test scores and pass rates.
Again, why is the teacher MIA in this scenario? Why is the school letting students use the computers completely unsupervised?
Filtering is a form of censorship. Censorship doesn't have to involve shutting the publisher down. It can involve blocking people's access to the publisher. Would you claim that China's firewall blocking access to tons of sites isn't censorship?
Censorship is never the answer because the
Now ask yourself... how much time did you just spend doing nothing but blocking proxy sites?
Then maybe you and the school district should take the hint and get a clue and stop trying to CONTROL CHILDREN by using CENSORSHIP. Censorship is never an appropriate solution to anything, regardless of circumstances, and children should be guided and educated rather than controlled or restricted.
I wish they'd kept "monad" as the name.
Yeah, because then the free GNU implementation of it could be called gonad.
Apple switched to Intel in large part because Intel was able to provide laptop processors chipsets that offered a strong balance between performance and power efficiency.
Last time I checked, Intel was still kicking AMD's ass in the latop realm. AMD had CPUs and chipsets that were designed for laptops, but they sucked power and underperformed compared to Intel's offerings in the same space. And Intel had a convincing roadmap for growth in that area, whereas AMD doesn't really appear to.
So "pi", "e", Avagadro's number, and "42" must be keys to something important, right?
I had a follow-up idea.
You can remove the need for users to "metavote" on each other, and make calculation of user trustworthiness an automatic part of the system.
Assume a ten-point trustworthiness scale for web sites. Suppose a given web site has a current trustworthiness score of 7, and suppose I think the site is really untrustworthy and I rank it as 2.
Just the act of my voting "2" implies that I don't really trust people who gave the site radically different scores. I might mostly trust someone who gave the site a "3", but I really don't trust someone who gave the site a "10". So the system automatically casts a vote, on my behalf, for "9" (10-(3-2)) for the person who voted the site as "3", and automatically casts a vote for "3" (10-(9-2)) for the person who voted the site as "10". Now those user's trustworthiness scores are accurately affected.
How can Thwarte or Verisign or whatever be at the root of a "web of trust"? Trust from whom. Not from me.
That is indeed the fundamental problem with SSL-type usage of certificates. Most visitors to a web site don't even know who or what "VeriSign" or a "Certificate Authority" is. When they get a pop-up from their browser saying a CA is unrecognized or a certificate has been revoked, most web surfers just proceed anyway because they don't understand what it means and don't care.
What is needed is a better integration between the human concept of "trust", the web brower's UI, and the technical implementation of security. "Trustworthiness" is something users should (and do) decide for themselves, not something that users believe blindly on the word of some company like VeriSign.
A better system would be if every web surfer and every web site had a "collective trust score", calculated from individual web surfers' votes. The "collective trust score" would be a weighted average computed such that the votes provided by more trustworthy web surfers counted more. That way, if some user goes around upvoting untrustworthy sites, the community can vote that user's trustworthiness down so that their tactics have little influence on the site scores.
My browser's UI (via a plug-in or otherwise) would automatically show me the "collective trust score" for every site I visited, and give me the opportunity to rank the site myself. Furthermore, I could drill down and do meta-voting things like "for all users who ranked this site above 8 on the 10-point ranking scale, rank their trustworthiness as 0", or "rank user Superbob347 as a perfect 10 on the trustworthiness scale (perhaps because I personally know and trust him)".
This isn't exactly "open source" (whatever that means in the context of security architecture), and it isn't exactly bullet-proof security, but it's an open, distributed model in which the whole notion of "trust" is put back in the hands of users (where it should be). It doesn't treat trust as black-and-white decision, but as a matter of degree, which better matches the human concept of trust. And it's a system that constantly re-evaluates the trustworthiness of every user and site rather than having to rely on CA's to certify/revoke given entities in a timely manner.