Republican democracy is intended to put immutable safeguards - in part the legendary "checks and balances - in place to prevent abuses, abuses either by a mob-like majority or a manipulative minority. Sadly, many of those safeguards have been eroded or removed outright, and this republican system has been compromised. Part of the trick with a republican system is actually keeping those immutable safeguards immutable, from one cast of ambitious self-centered bureaucrats to another. What's needed to do that is an educated, aware, and engaged citizenry... and that's exactly what the United States no longer has, if it ever did.
I wasn't playing with paradoxes; I just did a poor job of explaining my reasoning. If Switzerland is doing so much better, I'd like to know what they're doing that we should be adopting... assuming we won't be violating their intellectual property and risking a lawsuit, that is.;-)
Most days I perceive my corner of the world like Melvin Udall... the un-medicated Melvin. I have this fantasy that there is another pasture somewhere that is greener - and less populated by mindless farting bovines - than the one in which I've chained myself. I hope you're wrong, because I need that fantasy to come true some day.
The fact that this country is "managed" is not, in and of itself, a good thing: it happens to be managed for the primary benefit of a small minority. The rest of us get "trickle-down" scraps and picked-over bones. I taste sour grapes perhaps only because I'm not part of that particular minority and never will (and don't entirely want to) be. I'm well aware that NOT "all men are created equal" and that our founders got that wee bit seriously wrong - or were just humming what they knew the unequal ones wanted to hear - but we should be able to manage something more egalitarian than this. Call me picky.
Perhaps the population is actually educated and aware in Switzerland. I can't comment on it, because the only experience I have is with the distinctly ignorant and unaware population of the United States. I hope you're not gonna try to argue that point, because the jury's verdict was in on that one a long time ago. If you know of some secret island of intellect and sanity in this sea of stupidity, please do share and be specific, because I'd like to move there when the housing market rebounds and I don't have to lose my shirt in a sale. I have a book titled Getting Out: Your Guide to Leaving America, but I'd rather not use it if I can avoid it.
... that was coined by one of the "founding fathers": tyranny of the [simple] majority.
There are very good reasons not to have a "pure" democracy. A pure democracy is an ideal concept that can't be wholly applied in practice - much like socialism and libertarianism - because it relies on a peculiar breed of Homo sp. - an educated, aware, and engaged population - that does not exist... or at least doesn't yet exist in sufficient numbers.
I doubt if the FTC intends to abolish it altogether, and that's the only egalitarian way to "straighten out" this collection of wealth-concentrating tactics. Too bad the general population is too unaware, uneducated, and distracted with their nine-to-fives and other minutia to even know or care how they're being disadvantaged by it. It's mostly the very same minority who stands to gain from it, in one fashion or another, which has any real influence to its existence. That's why IP law exists in the first place; those who are NOT egalitarian sought to cement and further increase their gains, and they succeeded because of general ignorance (again). We've been stuck with it ever since (centuries), in one fashion or another and to varying degrees.
I'd never heard that quote (nor even mention of it) before, but this is what I have in mind:
people will run down to the post office and spend a dollar to buy a Presidential Lottery Ticket, which enters them into the lottery (and guarantees that the entire election system pays for itself on the backs of the losers, just like every "real" lottery);
a "candidate pool" of perhaps 500, 1000 (or more?) will be selected at random from all those tickets;
an "esteemed panel of judges" of some sort will grill the candidate pool - perhaps we can make a reality TV show out of it, similar to American Idol - and narrows the pool down to just a handful of finalists;
and finally, there would be a popular election to make a final choice.
Or something like that. We already use a similar system on a much smaller scale to select courtroom juries that make life-and-death decisions about people every day.
The goal, as I see it, is to shut out the excessively ambitious - and by definition ethically dubious and unbearably manipulative - people from the process, and hand it back over to The People... you know, as in government of the people by the people? This is not to imply that "The People" aren't ambitious nor manipulative at all, but rather to highlight and exclude the minority for whom those qualities are extreme, as is the case with virtually all of our existing elected officials. There are a rare handful of them that I would term "people" in that sense of class. The vast majority have perspectives and goals that do not mirror those of The People; those same elected officials will always claim that they are "just regular guys" but they never are, because of that ambition and how it makes them think and what it causes them to do (or not do).
I don't know (and doubt) that Buckley's point was exactly the same, but the end result is still the same, isn't it?
The most substantive change that Obama could make would be the successful promotion and adoption of electoral lotteries to replace our current travesty of democracy (and even republicanism). He won't do that, however, because it would cut him and his political friends out of the political landscape in the future. Even if he dared to try, our political Good Old Boys network would shoot him down, just as they did Dennis Kucinich when he tried to propose finally doing the ethical thing and impeaching our current treasonous executives.
Re: degree of security != degree of value TO CROOK
on
D.I.Y. Home Security
·
· Score: 1
nope. cus he's got cameras and that means stuff inside that is valuable. The amount of security you have also indicates the amount of stuff you have.
Actually, what it describes is the person's degree of emotional attachment to said stuff, rather than its actual intrinsic value. "Value" in a human - as opposed to Vulcan? - mind is rarely objective and almost always subjective (which is why capitalism is so good at allowing concentration of material resources). It's just as likely the stuff would be junk to anyone else even though this person values it enough to secure it with high-tech devices.
Thievery could be much better targeted in a true socialist society where "objective valuation" was the norm, since then the crook would always know he would be getting something worthy of his time if it was protected like that. Who knew that socialism was actually beneficial for crooks?
Guess what? I musta been drunk with my modding success and not paying attention, because the decrypted ones do indeed add a carriage return! I'm totally psyched now.:-P
It's worth noting that I'll now have a beef with actually trying to use these things (aside from the obvious one with the serial number and phoning home... been there DONE with that):
the decrypted output simply ends with the final digit of the barcode.
This will be less than ideal when trying to use it as a barcode input device into any sort of tabulation system (spreadsheet, database, etc.), since having it "terminate" the barcode sequence with a space, tab, carriage return, or other recognizable delimiter would greatly streamline the process. Perhaps there's a way of modding the critters to add that, too, but I'm not that devoted to my:Cats.
This is a problem because, of course, the:Cats act as a phantom (inline) extension of the keyboard, and as such it's impossible (I think) to distinguish its output from that of the actual keyboard; if it were a separate device on a USB or other port, then there would be dedicated interfacing software that could be tweaked accordingly.
This news prompted me to drag out my two:Cats and decrypt the output on them, so I can finally use them as raw scanners. I dug out the copper trace to pin 10 of the Hyundai IC on both of them and, voila, it outputs raw numeric ASCII data whenever it spies a barcode. I've had archived details on how to do this for years, but never got a round tuit (those tuits are pretty scarce and hard to find in their own right). Turns out I Googled the part number on the PCBs and found several pages detailing the process for that specific PCB.
It doesn't matter which one of these two (American) candidates gets your vote. It's not this or that candidate that is either The Problem or The Electoral Messiah (TM). It's the system that is broken, stupid... you can't fix it from within regardless which candidate wins. Virtually all of the people able to run for office within the current system are part of the problem; well, no, actually they are the problem, collectively.
If you want to fix this (American) system, it will take another revolution, and probably not a bloodless one, in order to do it. We'll have to forcibly kick the money changers and Good Old Boys out of the temple first, and they won't go quietly. Dennis Kucinich tried to lead a charge, I think (impeachment), and look how that has turned out.
We're not yet ready to be The Land of the Free (again).
Here we go again: another attempt to maneuver people toward software subscriptions and changing the perception of software as a tool to an image of software as content... for which people are already accustomed - habituated, in traditional Pavlovian fashion - to forking over cash every month without really analyzing the big picture. (This is one tactic used by manipulative people to concentrate massive amounts of material wealth... toward themselves and away from everyone else. It's totally Darwinian but not very ethical.)
Preachin' to the choir! (I never cared for the in-game TA-Spring UI, FWIW, but I certainly know all about it, unlike the oblivious reviewer.) I did rather minor modding of TA myself right up until this year. My favorite pastime had to be inventing bizarre new "mutators" to use with TA:Mutation.;-)
The reviewer is obviously too young or too obsessed with the present state of modding, since not even one of the many dozens of mods and thousands of units created by fans for Total Annihilation was mentioned. It's still being actively modded now, even though the game is over ten years old and has more recent "sequels".
Total Annihilation is very likely the most heavily modded game of all time, and it wasn't even mentioned? Pffft.
Haven't you people learned anything yet about sniffing out true motivations, even the usually obvious corporate variety? The key phrase here that identifies Google's motivation here is "... and a better platform for developers." Did you notice that Google doesn't say "more useful homepage for users"? That's probably because it's more useful to developers and Google itself rather than end users.
That's why the changes have been rammed down users' throats: they're not for the benefit of users but rather for the benefit of Google and its partners in evil.
... would have to start with electoral lotteries and a flattening of the hierarchy. Keeping the current electoral system(s) and government structure would just preserve the corrupting hierarchical element. It's that hierarchical element that leads to all the trouble, and the current electoral system is actually tailored to benefit those who are excessively ambitious and ethically dubious. The current system is a lose-lose for We The People.
... because I don't fit their liberal living-space profile at all! Not even remotely. And I'm not even remotely conservative (I ridicule and despise tradition and ceremony for the sakes of themselves).
They should have included me in their little study. I would have been the fly in the statistical ointment.
No, not possible: you forgot about that ZPM down in Antarctica. How many data centers can ya power with a ZPM? Doctor McKay probably knows... let's ask him.
... to finally emigrate to Sweden. The writing is so clearly on the wall, with both this and the Wall Street Bailout getting rammed through even an allegedly Democratic-controlled Congress. McCain is likely to be worse than Bush, and Obama isn't messianic and nowhere close to revolutionary enough to kick the money changers out of the damned temple. Kucinich would have done it, though. Hell, he's risked his career trying to drive stakes through the hearts of a couple of them (impeachment). Who else had the balls to do that?
This country is irrecoverably ruled by greed and dominated by stupidity now. We The People are too stupid to revolt again as they once did.
... because the cost of providing SMS infrastructure is so astronomical compared to that for digitized voice services! How could they not attempt to recoup at least a small fraction of that huge expense?
This is why I love unrestrained capitalism and despise anything that hints of socialism.
(No, I'm not happy to see you, that's my facetious tongue in cheek.)
Slashdot Mirror
I will investigate the book. I have a copy of it now.
Republican democracy is intended to put immutable safeguards - in part the legendary "checks and balances - in place to prevent abuses, abuses either by a mob-like majority or a manipulative minority. Sadly, many of those safeguards have been eroded or removed outright, and this republican system has been compromised. Part of the trick with a republican system is actually keeping those immutable safeguards immutable, from one cast of ambitious self-centered bureaucrats to another. What's needed to do that is an educated, aware, and engaged citizenry... and that's exactly what the United States no longer has, if it ever did.
I wasn't playing with paradoxes; I just did a poor job of explaining my reasoning. If Switzerland is doing so much better, I'd like to know what they're doing that we should be adopting... assuming we won't be violating their intellectual property and risking a lawsuit, that is. ;-)
Most days I perceive my corner of the world like Melvin Udall... the un-medicated Melvin. I have this fantasy that there is another pasture somewhere that is greener - and less populated by mindless farting bovines - than the one in which I've chained myself. I hope you're wrong, because I need that fantasy to come true some day.
The fact that this country is "managed" is not, in and of itself, a good thing: it happens to be managed for the primary benefit of a small minority . The rest of us get "trickle-down" scraps and picked-over bones. I taste sour grapes perhaps only because I'm not part of that particular minority and never will (and don't entirely want to) be. I'm well aware that NOT "all men are created equal" and that our founders got that wee bit seriously wrong - or were just humming what they knew the unequal ones wanted to hear - but we should be able to manage something more egalitarian than this. Call me picky.
Perhaps the population is actually educated and aware in Switzerland. I can't comment on it, because the only experience I have is with the distinctly ignorant and unaware population of the United States. I hope you're not gonna try to argue that point, because the jury's verdict was in on that one a long time ago. If you know of some secret island of intellect and sanity in this sea of stupidity, please do share and be specific, because I'd like to move there when the housing market rebounds and I don't have to lose my shirt in a sale. I have a book titled Getting Out: Your Guide to Leaving America, but I'd rather not use it if I can avoid it.
... that was coined by one of the "founding fathers": tyranny of the [simple] majority.
There are very good reasons not to have a "pure" democracy. A pure democracy is an ideal concept that can't be wholly applied in practice - much like socialism and libertarianism - because it relies on a peculiar breed of Homo sp. - an educated, aware, and engaged population - that does not exist... or at least doesn't yet exist in sufficient numbers.
I doubt if the FTC intends to abolish it altogether, and that's the only egalitarian way to "straighten out" this collection of wealth-concentrating tactics. Too bad the general population is too unaware, uneducated, and distracted with their nine-to-fives and other minutia to even know or care how they're being disadvantaged by it. It's mostly the very same minority who stands to gain from it, in one fashion or another, which has any real influence to its existence. That's why IP law exists in the first place; those who are NOT egalitarian sought to cement and further increase their gains, and they succeeded because of general ignorance (again). We've been stuck with it ever since (centuries), in one fashion or another and to varying degrees.
I'd never heard that quote (nor even mention of it) before, but this is what I have in mind:
Or something like that. We already use a similar system on a much smaller scale to select courtroom juries that make life-and-death decisions about people every day.
The goal, as I see it, is to shut out the excessively ambitious - and by definition ethically dubious and unbearably manipulative - people from the process, and hand it back over to The People... you know, as in government of the people by the people? This is not to imply that "The People" aren't ambitious nor manipulative at all, but rather to highlight and exclude the minority for whom those qualities are extreme, as is the case with virtually all of our existing elected officials. There are a rare handful of them that I would term "people" in that sense of class. The vast majority have perspectives and goals that do not mirror those of The People; those same elected officials will always claim that they are "just regular guys" but they never are, because of that ambition and how it makes them think and what it causes them to do (or not do).
I don't know (and doubt) that Buckley's point was exactly the same, but the end result is still the same, isn't it?
The most substantive change that Obama could make would be the successful promotion and adoption of electoral lotteries to replace our current travesty of democracy (and even republicanism). He won't do that, however, because it would cut him and his political friends out of the political landscape in the future. Even if he dared to try, our political Good Old Boys network would shoot him down, just as they did Dennis Kucinich when he tried to propose finally doing the ethical thing and impeaching our current treasonous executives.
Actually, what it describes is the person's degree of emotional attachment to said stuff, rather than its actual intrinsic value. "Value" in a human - as opposed to Vulcan? - mind is rarely objective and almost always subjective (which is why capitalism is so good at allowing concentration of material resources). It's just as likely the stuff would be junk to anyone else even though this person values it enough to secure it with high-tech devices.
Thievery could be much better targeted in a true socialist society where "objective valuation" was the norm, since then the crook would always know he would be getting something worthy of his time if it was protected like that. Who knew that socialism was actually beneficial for crooks?
Guess what? I musta been drunk with my modding success and not paying attention, because the decrypted ones do indeed add a carriage return! I'm totally psyched now. :-P
It's worth noting that I'll now have a beef with actually trying to use these things (aside from the obvious one with the serial number and phoning home... been there DONE with that):
This will be less than ideal when trying to use it as a barcode input device into any sort of tabulation system (spreadsheet, database, etc.), since having it "terminate" the barcode sequence with a space, tab, carriage return, or other recognizable delimiter would greatly streamline the process. Perhaps there's a way of modding the critters to add that, too, but I'm not that devoted to my :Cats.
This is a problem because, of course, the :Cats act as a phantom (inline) extension of the keyboard, and as such it's impossible (I think) to distinguish its output from that of the actual keyboard; if it were a separate device on a USB or other port, then there would be dedicated interfacing software that could be tweaked accordingly.
This news prompted me to drag out my two :Cats and decrypt the output on them, so I can finally use them as raw scanners. I dug out the copper trace to pin 10 of the Hyundai IC on both of them and, voila, it outputs raw numeric ASCII data whenever it spies a barcode. I've had archived details on how to do this for years, but never got a round tuit (those tuits are pretty scarce and hard to find in their own right). Turns out I Googled the part number on the PCBs and found several pages detailing the process for that specific PCB.
It doesn't matter which one of these two (American) candidates gets your vote. It's not this or that candidate that is either The Problem or The Electoral Messiah (TM). It's the system that is broken, stupid... you can't fix it from within regardless which candidate wins. Virtually all of the people able to run for office within the current system are part of the problem; well, no, actually they are the problem, collectively.
If you want to fix this (American) system, it will take another revolution, and probably not a bloodless one, in order to do it. We'll have to forcibly kick the money changers and Good Old Boys out of the temple first, and they won't go quietly. Dennis Kucinich tried to lead a charge, I think (impeachment), and look how that has turned out.
We're not yet ready to be The Land of the Free (again).
Here we go again: another attempt to maneuver people toward software subscriptions and changing the perception of software as a tool to an image of software as content... for which people are already accustomed - habituated, in traditional Pavlovian fashion - to forking over cash every month without really analyzing the big picture. (This is one tactic used by manipulative people to concentrate massive amounts of material wealth... toward themselves and away from everyone else. It's totally Darwinian but not very ethical.)
Preachin' to the choir! (I never cared for the in-game TA-Spring UI, FWIW, but I certainly know all about it, unlike the oblivious reviewer.) I did rather minor modding of TA myself right up until this year. My favorite pastime had to be inventing bizarre new "mutators" to use with TA:Mutation. ;-)
I just love false positives, don't you? I'd like to extend that to my phone calls as well as my e-mail... can you do that for me? Thanks!
The reviewer is obviously too young or too obsessed with the present state of modding, since not even one of the many dozens of mods and thousands of units created by fans for Total Annihilation was mentioned. It's still being actively modded now, even though the game is over ten years old and has more recent "sequels".
Total Annihilation is very likely the most heavily modded game of all time, and it wasn't even mentioned? Pffft.
This is rich: "I Will Guarantee You With My Own Money That You Will Not Be Dissatisfied."
That is the arrogant boast of IX Webhosting's CEO, Fathi Said:
http://www.ixwebhosting.com/index.php/v2/pages.ourPromiseToYou
I'll wager I know of one customer who wants to take him up on that bet... after they've slapped him around a bit for good measure.
Haven't you people learned anything yet about sniffing out true motivations, even the usually obvious corporate variety? The key phrase here that identifies Google's motivation here is "... and a better platform for developers." Did you notice that Google doesn't say "more useful homepage for users"? That's probably because it's more useful to developers and Google itself rather than end users.
That's why the changes have been rammed down users' throats: they're not for the benefit of users but rather for the benefit of Google and its partners in evil.
... would have to start with electoral lotteries and a flattening of the hierarchy. Keeping the current electoral system(s) and government structure would just preserve the corrupting hierarchical element. It's that hierarchical element that leads to all the trouble, and the current electoral system is actually tailored to benefit those who are excessively ambitious and ethically dubious. The current system is a lose-lose for We The People.
I can honestly say that I know quite a few web simpletons, but no singletons.
... because I don't fit their liberal living-space profile at all! Not even remotely. And I'm not even remotely conservative (I ridicule and despise tradition and ceremony for the sakes of themselves).
They should have included me in their little study. I would have been the fly in the statistical ointment.
No, not possible: you forgot about that ZPM down in Antarctica. How many data centers can ya power with a ZPM? Doctor McKay probably knows... let's ask him.
... to finally emigrate to Sweden. The writing is so clearly on the wall, with both this and the Wall Street Bailout getting rammed through even an allegedly Democratic-controlled Congress. McCain is likely to be worse than Bush, and Obama isn't messianic and nowhere close to revolutionary enough to kick the money changers out of the damned temple. Kucinich would have done it, though. Hell, he's risked his career trying to drive stakes through the hearts of a couple of them (impeachment). Who else had the balls to do that?
This country is irrecoverably ruled by greed and dominated by stupidity now. We The People are too stupid to revolt again as they once did.
... because the cost of providing SMS infrastructure is so astronomical compared to that for digitized voice services! How could they not attempt to recoup at least a small fraction of that huge expense?
This is why I love unrestrained capitalism and despise anything that hints of socialism.
(No, I'm not happy to see you, that's my facetious tongue in cheek.)