Go and read the book "Jews for Buchanan". Other than being a very good (although biased) account of the 2000 Florida election, it did show copies of certain rejected votes. One that I recall had a checkmark by Al Gore's name, but then had the name "Al Gore" written in the write-in spot. By the rules, this was an invalid vote. By voter intent, this was a vote for Al Gore.
But I still agree with your sentiment. The rules for voting are too simple. We should dismiss the doctrine of "voter intent". I'd rather concentrate on voter education than highly-suspiciuous recount actions.
I can't think of why unmanned spaceflight also can't be privatized. All those lovely pictures and unseen mountains of data behind all those probes, could certainly have been sold to fund the entire effort. The nation's scientists could have become just another client base, instead of ensconced all comfy inside NASA.
Governments have failed miserably at spaceflight. They made some important first steps, which may have been overly risky and costly for so-called private enterprise. But now we know the risks, we know what we can find on the Moon and the asteroids... it just remains an exercise in sensible economics to find out how to make a decent profit over exploiting those resources.
Aren't you predicting after the fact? With rampant downloading of copyrighted material through software written by individuals, and overall a freely-available OS written by more of those frickin' individuals, it seems that we're deep into the CTR already. It strikes me as true that the next step must be taken soon, in that comparatively large numbers of people will simply shrug and break the law without hesitation, since that's the only way to exert what they see as their intrinsic freedoms. (I speculate that this step will exist among all non-corporate software developers.) As for more meatspace revolts... that remains to be seen.
This is mostly just a matter of expectations being reset to lower or higher levels. However, ATMs could well be inspiring banks to install many more than otherwise would be the case with installed Human tellers to service the customer base... hence, real losses can enter the picture.
I think you are quite overreaching in your statements, specifically your tone:
"made no impact"
"what success [...]?"
"no headway"
"distant and faded memory"
This is the kind of thinking that leads the winner of a simple majority to ignore the simple minority. Winning a primary certainly means something. But Dean received delegate votes, too. So did Kucinich.
"Winning" is necessary since there can be only one candidate in the end. But "winning" could only mean you have 51%, and that other 49% could be very, very pissed off at you. Hence, you may find yourself figuratively winning a battle while losing the entire war.
As for Dean's effect... well, it could well be there are over 600000 people out there who counted themselves as involved with Dean's message. If 600K people represent "no impact" to you, then there's nothing more I can tell you.
Ever heard of the military? You may have heard the military likes to lob explosive shells at targets of interest. Ever wonder how that wacky military manages to get those shells on target? INFOTECH! "Back then" they used mechanical marvels to perform the caluclations. And that certainly helped spur the state of the art in infotech.
Ever hear of Hollerith? Punched cards? Ring any bells? "IBM" maybe? IBM was doing infotech business long before NASA was a gleam in some legislator's eye. And IBM's business was supporting general business.
You sure have some crazy view of the mid 1900s. Infotech needs were VERY strong in the military and non-aerospace sectors. Attributing a strong connection between microchips and space funding is intellectually dishonest. Talk about a religion, Pal, you've got it bad.
I'd tell you to Google, but it appears you need some more powerful stuff. Go get a book. The history of computers should suffice.
After some reading, you can only conclude that if NASA didn't exist, military and non-aerospace infotech demands were more than enough to give us all the microchips we'd ever want today. Hence, space needs alone were only a bump on a long line of multi-sector consumer demand.
I seem to detect socio-economic cycles over time, such that a meme or event is carried on the back of socialists, then is passed to capitalists, then is transferred back, etc. Hence, I support the next cycle of space access upon the backs of the capitalists. Eventually, there will be significant bankruptcies in that sector, and space access may transfer over to government again. Hopefully by then, enough Humans will have escaped Earth that they can form their own societies without interference.
So, in effect, I'm calling for dupes and rubes to fund the Human expansion into space. After the investors lose their shirts, the end result will be stranded Humans who will have to continue expanding space operations in order to survive.
Sooo... what you're saying is, consumer demand for infotech didn't compare to the aerospace demand for it (attributed to NASA)? For example, plain ol' companies didn't seek infotech to automate their operations?
I've heard these "side-effect" and "fallout" arguments for space funding, and I just don't accept them. I raise the much revered Flag of Bulldada over your comments.
My point was that when the citizenry is faced with a 911 phone call that results in a long wait, or they see a lack of patrols while gangs rove areas and cause problems, that perhaps those same citizens start thinking about defending themselves directly. In my thinking, this is as it should have been all along.
You're right about the first part: the US hasn't stopped attacking other countries for 50 years, and shows no signs of stopping. Talk about tech in the wrong hands.
Crackpots can be well-dressed. Crackpots can be entire educated societies. The 21st Century is shaping up to take the 20th's mega-violence to a whole new level of threat against billions of people. We do NOT have to accept being squished between fanatics in robes and fanatics in suits. We are not condemned to be ground up into Human hamburger between murderous Empires.
In prior Centuries, people learned to leave other people alone. This "backward" thinking should be re-adopted in Western culture before the tac nukes start going off from both "sides".
Credit where it was due, when it came to interplanetary probes and the Deep Space Network for retrieving the data, NASA shined like the stars it allegedly reached for. NASA did a good job and continues to perform very well in that limited area.
But for space colonization and general access to space, Tom Ridge could do a better job, and he's kind of a jackass.
NASA's time is certainly over. It must shrink into a probe agency with a couple of small sites, some launch pads, a sensor net across the world, and finally a core of dedicated engineers who I don't mind paying for. The real meat of space access and colonization is now up to the rest of us. Private industry must bring the concept of investment and profit to the equation... as Gerard K. O'Neill tried to point out, lo those many years ago.
Now it's 2004. We've been to the Moon, we gave it up because we wanted to spend the money on killing Vietnamese people, and nobody seems to care anymore.
We cared enough to classify another set of folks (Arab Mulsims) as The Enemy {tm}, so we can now feel all warm and fuzzy about spending hundreds of billions killing them too. In another generation, I'm sure we'll find another set of people, probably South American (those damned Brazzies!), to waste more money on murdering.
Empires: These murder machines are so damned expensive to run. We should outsource and offshore the killers and their killing machines to save money for the next round of assaults.
I'm personally waiting for the real cuts to hit things like the police force. If you think things are bad now, wait for that to happen. (Prediction: Gun sales will go through the roof when the citizens finally realize that the only people who really care about their security and defense are themselves.)
Wow, that's just great. Just think of how large the Federal budget deficit will be in 2005, since it will be such a spendathon from the "budget-minded tax cutt[ing]" of late 2004. {gripe whine snarl}
Some people have taken a bit of an issue to your statement "company could theoretically own itself". I just thought I'd clarify.
Let's say firstly that state law and your corporate charter allows this to happen.
Then, say you have a like-thinking group who control the majority of issued shares, hence will always win shareholder/proxy votes. It's likely this group will be the board and major execs.
Finally, these majority holders reduce all stockholdings through stock repurchase -- including their own, having the corporation they control buy their owned stock -- until they end up the largest block of shares, but the block of issued shares falls below 50%.
Result: A self-owning corporation. The majority of issued shares are owned by the company, not by a real person.
What does this mean? I still haven't figured that out. In practical terms, there are still shareholders. Hence, there are still owners of the corporation that you can legally challenge.
In the extreme case, you can end up with a company with a couple of guys holding a few percent of the issued shares, but with the majority of the issued shares held by the company itself.
I can only imagine that there could be law quirks (no, not law clerks) that allow this to happen, varying by state, which forgive the "minority shareholders" from certain fiscal responsibilities... turning said corporation into a sort of LLC. But with the advent of the LLC, why bother to do this anymore?
As pointed out in David Cay Johnston's new book, "Perfectly Legal", the rich DO find the difference to be of consequence. Billy-boy could pay a $2 billion tax payment... then again, he could pay some big accounting firm $10 million to reduce that tax payment to $1 billion. Savings: $990 million.
This happens all the time, and after all, it's "perfectly legal". That bottom line is all the rich tend to care about... which is why they have all kinds of access to organizations with special tax status like the Bill Gates Foundation. You may think it's charitable, but contrary and most of all it gives the Gates family significant tax-avoidance methods that you'd kill for.
Now, it's time to back to your middle-class life, where at least 40% of your income is swallowed up by taxes and fees.
This is preaching to the converted, but go get David Cay Johnston's new book "Perfectly Legal". The real extent of corporate tax evasion is just stunning.
A good proposal. But, quickly enough, we note that an individual homeowner is taxed on his property; hence, the question arises of: why should we exclude corporate properties from property taxes? Homes and office buildings just sit there, and both need to be maintained, so it's not like the office buildings are double-taxed.
Mind? Of course I do. Scenario: Crook who hacked his ID chip comes into building and murders someone. I'm in the floor above. The cops check their ID tracking records, then tag me as the likely suspect. Now I'm in big legal trouble, since dolts like you think ID tracking data is the very definition of reliable evidence.
No fuckin' thanks. Our society is not a frenzied slashfest of murders and rapes that ever warrants constant suveillance. If you think so, then you need mental help.
I typically consider capable, motivated employees to be an investment
You should have been the one, then, to teach business methods to my IT dept's VP, since he recently said we were an "expense" and a "necessary evil"... and then he outsourced us. I wonder how he categorizes his salary?
Anyway, keeping in tune with your sentiment, I'm sure he's going to find out the price to be paid for engaging in fatal cost cutting.
Come see us live, that's where we do make the money.
It could be that I'm wrong, but your presence in that sector is getting assimilated. The music industry is moving towards capturing halls for their use. Can you really make your living playing to smaller and smaller audiences at each session, as the larger auditoriums are reserved?
Yeah, no kidding! People can fold all kinds of unofficial data streams into the DRM-approved streams, like mob letters stuffed into government-stamped envelopes, and form their own piratenet. You'd have a bandwidth hit, but not much of one considering the full bandwidth net will deny you the material in the first place.
An insightful commentary, but I'd like to amend it a bit.
The thing about gaming companies and consoles misses the point about balance. The Xbox is not the same as the PS2, and the game code is not the same either... but both media are the same: CD. What happens to CDs? Yes, they can be copied... easily. Now why would you, the game manufacturer, put up with that? If you own the console (or the rights to produce a game for it) you have total control over the physical equipment, so you'd think the first think you'd do is release each game on a medium that cannot be copied except by a very determined pirate with specialized equipment. This essentially means a cartridge. But we haven't seen cartridges on the major game systems for a while. And that is due to the balance... the urge to secure the console balanced against greed, greed, greed. As far as software goes, greed is winning.
I have little symapthy for people who release software on easily-copied media, and less that zero sympathy for those who won't tack a couple more dollars onto the price of a game to cover the cost of a cartridge, chip or other hard security feature.
This falls under the same heading as those who are using the Internet for distribution, and who then complain about losses due to fraud and piracy. If you want to keep something secure, get your own distribution network.
Slashdot Mirror
Go and read the book "Jews for Buchanan". Other than being a very good (although biased) account of the 2000 Florida election, it did show copies of certain rejected votes. One that I recall had a checkmark by Al Gore's name, but then had the name "Al Gore" written in the write-in spot. By the rules, this was an invalid vote. By voter intent, this was a vote for Al Gore.
But I still agree with your sentiment. The rules for voting are too simple. We should dismiss the doctrine of "voter intent". I'd rather concentrate on voter education than highly-suspiciuous recount actions.
Maybe we should be getting the banks to handle the elections?
That one thought is worth a Score: 6, Insightful. Alas, you probably aren't an elected official.
I can't think of why unmanned spaceflight also can't be privatized. All those lovely pictures and unseen mountains of data behind all those probes, could certainly have been sold to fund the entire effort. The nation's scientists could have become just another client base, instead of ensconced all comfy inside NASA.
... it just remains an exercise in sensible economics to find out how to make a decent profit over exploiting those resources.
Governments have failed miserably at spaceflight. They made some important first steps, which may have been overly risky and costly for so-called private enterprise. But now we know the risks, we know what we can find on the Moon and the asteroids
Aren't you predicting after the fact? With rampant downloading of copyrighted material through software written by individuals, and overall a freely-available OS written by more of those frickin' individuals, it seems that we're deep into the CTR already. It strikes me as true that the next step must be taken soon, in that comparatively large numbers of people will simply shrug and break the law without hesitation, since that's the only way to exert what they see as their intrinsic freedoms. (I speculate that this step will exist among all non-corporate software developers.) As for more meatspace revolts ... that remains to be seen.
This is mostly just a matter of expectations being reset to lower or higher levels. However, ATMs could well be inspiring banks to install many more than otherwise would be the case with installed Human tellers to service the customer base ... hence, real losses can enter the picture.
I think you are quite overreaching in your statements, specifically your tone:
... well, it could well be there are over 600000 people out there who counted themselves as involved with Dean's message. If 600K people represent "no impact" to you, then there's nothing more I can tell you.
"made no impact"
"what success [...]?"
"no headway"
"distant and faded memory"
This is the kind of thinking that leads the winner of a simple majority to ignore the simple minority. Winning a primary certainly means something. But Dean received delegate votes, too. So did Kucinich.
"Winning" is necessary since there can be only one candidate in the end. But "winning" could only mean you have 51%, and that other 49% could be very, very pissed off at you. Hence, you may find yourself figuratively winning a battle while losing the entire war.
As for Dean's effect
Ever heard of the military? You may have heard the military likes to lob explosive shells at targets of interest. Ever wonder how that wacky military manages to get those shells on target? INFOTECH! "Back then" they used mechanical marvels to perform the caluclations. And that certainly helped spur the state of the art in infotech.
Ever hear of Hollerith? Punched cards? Ring any bells? "IBM" maybe? IBM was doing infotech business long before NASA was a gleam in some legislator's eye. And IBM's business was supporting general business.
You sure have some crazy view of the mid 1900s. Infotech needs were VERY strong in the military and non-aerospace sectors. Attributing a strong connection between microchips and space funding is intellectually dishonest. Talk about a religion, Pal, you've got it bad.
I'd tell you to Google, but it appears you need some more powerful stuff. Go get a book. The history of computers should suffice.
After some reading, you can only conclude that if NASA didn't exist, military and non-aerospace infotech demands were more than enough to give us all the microchips we'd ever want today. Hence, space needs alone were only a bump on a long line of multi-sector consumer demand.
I seem to detect socio-economic cycles over time, such that a meme or event is carried on the back of socialists, then is passed to capitalists, then is transferred back, etc. Hence, I support the next cycle of space access upon the backs of the capitalists. Eventually, there will be significant bankruptcies in that sector, and space access may transfer over to government again. Hopefully by then, enough Humans will have escaped Earth that they can form their own societies without interference.
So, in effect, I'm calling for dupes and rubes to fund the Human expansion into space. After the investors lose their shirts, the end result will be stranded Humans who will have to continue expanding space operations in order to survive.
Sooo ... what you're saying is, consumer demand for infotech didn't compare to the aerospace demand for it (attributed to NASA)? For example, plain ol' companies didn't seek infotech to automate their operations?
I've heard these "side-effect" and "fallout" arguments for space funding, and I just don't accept them. I raise the much revered Flag of Bulldada over your comments.
My point was that when the citizenry is faced with a 911 phone call that results in a long wait, or they see a lack of patrols while gangs rove areas and cause problems, that perhaps those same citizens start thinking about defending themselves directly. In my thinking, this is as it should have been all along.
You're right about the first part: the US hasn't stopped attacking other countries for 50 years, and shows no signs of stopping. Talk about tech in the wrong hands.
Crackpots can be well-dressed. Crackpots can be entire educated societies. The 21st Century is shaping up to take the 20th's mega-violence to a whole new level of threat against billions of people. We do NOT have to accept being squished between fanatics in robes and fanatics in suits. We are not condemned to be ground up into Human hamburger between murderous Empires.
In prior Centuries, people learned to leave other people alone. This "backward" thinking should be re-adopted in Western culture before the tac nukes start going off from both "sides".
... and good riddance to it!
... as Gerard K. O'Neill tried to point out, lo those many years ago.
Credit where it was due, when it came to interplanetary probes and the Deep Space Network for retrieving the data, NASA shined like the stars it allegedly reached for. NASA did a good job and continues to perform very well in that limited area.
But for space colonization and general access to space, Tom Ridge could do a better job, and he's kind of a jackass.
NASA's time is certainly over. It must shrink into a probe agency with a couple of small sites, some launch pads, a sensor net across the world, and finally a core of dedicated engineers who I don't mind paying for. The real meat of space access and colonization is now up to the rest of us. Private industry must bring the concept of investment and profit to the equation
Now it's 2004. We've been to the Moon, we gave it up because we wanted to spend the money on killing Vietnamese people, and nobody seems to care anymore.
We cared enough to classify another set of folks (Arab Mulsims) as The Enemy {tm}, so we can now feel all warm and fuzzy about spending hundreds of billions killing them too. In another generation, I'm sure we'll find another set of people, probably South American (those damned Brazzies!), to waste more money on murdering.
Empires: These murder machines are so damned expensive to run. We should outsource and offshore the killers and their killing machines to save money for the next round of assaults.
10,000 years from now, when we are hopefully spread across the galaxy, what historial event will stand out?
... George W. Bush, in a flight suit, standing on an aircraft carrier under a banner saying "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED".
{CUE: sound of vomiting}
(Sorry, man, you hand me a straight line like that, what do you expect me to do?)
Yay!! Another fellow fiscal conservative!
I'm personally waiting for the real cuts to hit things like the police force. If you think things are bad now, wait for that to happen. (Prediction: Gun sales will go through the roof when the citizens finally realize that the only people who really care about their security and defense are themselves.)
Wow, that's just great. Just think of how large the Federal budget deficit will be in 2005, since it will be such a spendathon from the "budget-minded tax cutt[ing]" of late 2004. {gripe whine snarl}
Some people have taken a bit of an issue to your statement "company could theoretically own itself". I just thought I'd clarify.
... turning said corporation into a sort of LLC. But with the advent of the LLC, why bother to do this anymore?
Let's say firstly that state law and your corporate charter allows this to happen.
Then, say you have a like-thinking group who control the majority of issued shares, hence will always win shareholder/proxy votes. It's likely this group will be the board and major execs.
Finally, these majority holders reduce all stockholdings through stock repurchase -- including their own, having the corporation they control buy their owned stock -- until they end up the largest block of shares, but the block of issued shares falls below 50%.
Result: A self-owning corporation. The majority of issued shares are owned by the company, not by a real person.
What does this mean? I still haven't figured that out. In practical terms, there are still shareholders. Hence, there are still owners of the corporation that you can legally challenge.
In the extreme case, you can end up with a company with a couple of guys holding a few percent of the issued shares, but with the majority of the issued shares held by the company itself.
I can only imagine that there could be law quirks (no, not law clerks) that allow this to happen, varying by state, which forgive the "minority shareholders" from certain fiscal responsibilities
As pointed out in David Cay Johnston's new book, "Perfectly Legal", the rich DO find the difference to be of consequence. Billy-boy could pay a $2 billion tax payment ... then again, he could pay some big accounting firm $10 million to reduce that tax payment to $1 billion. Savings: $990 million.
... which is why they have all kinds of access to organizations with special tax status like the Bill Gates Foundation. You may think it's charitable, but contrary and most of all it gives the Gates family significant tax-avoidance methods that you'd kill for.
This happens all the time, and after all, it's "perfectly legal". That bottom line is all the rich tend to care about
Now, it's time to back to your middle-class life, where at least 40% of your income is swallowed up by taxes and fees.
This is preaching to the converted, but go get David Cay Johnston's new book "Perfectly Legal". The real extent of corporate tax evasion is just stunning.
A good proposal. But, quickly enough, we note that an individual homeowner is taxed on his property; hence, the question arises of: why should we exclude corporate properties from property taxes? Homes and office buildings just sit there, and both need to be maintained, so it's not like the office buildings are double-taxed.
Mind? Of course I do. Scenario: Crook who hacked his ID chip comes into building and murders someone. I'm in the floor above. The cops check their ID tracking records, then tag me as the likely suspect. Now I'm in big legal trouble, since dolts like you think ID tracking data is the very definition of reliable evidence.
No fuckin' thanks. Our society is not a frenzied slashfest of murders and rapes that ever warrants constant suveillance. If you think so, then you need mental help.
I typically consider capable, motivated employees to be an investment
... and then he outsourced us. I wonder how he categorizes his salary?
You should have been the one, then, to teach business methods to my IT dept's VP, since he recently said we were an "expense" and a "necessary evil"
Anyway, keeping in tune with your sentiment, I'm sure he's going to find out the price to be paid for engaging in fatal cost cutting.
Come see us live, that's where we do make the money.
It could be that I'm wrong, but your presence in that sector is getting assimilated. The music industry is moving towards capturing halls for their use. Can you really make your living playing to smaller and smaller audiences at each session, as the larger auditoriums are reserved?
huge subchannels where information flows freely
Yeah, no kidding! People can fold all kinds of unofficial data streams into the DRM-approved streams, like mob letters stuffed into government-stamped envelopes, and form their own piratenet. You'd have a bandwidth hit, but not much of one considering the full bandwidth net will deny you the material in the first place.
An insightful commentary, but I'd like to amend it a bit.
... but both media are the same: CD. What happens to CDs? Yes, they can be copied ... easily. Now why would you, the game manufacturer, put up with that? If you own the console (or the rights to produce a game for it) you have total control over the physical equipment, so you'd think the first think you'd do is release each game on a medium that cannot be copied except by a very determined pirate with specialized equipment. This essentially means a cartridge. But we haven't seen cartridges on the major game systems for a while. And that is due to the balance ... the urge to secure the console balanced against greed, greed, greed. As far as software goes, greed is winning.
The thing about gaming companies and consoles misses the point about balance. The Xbox is not the same as the PS2, and the game code is not the same either
I have little symapthy for people who release software on easily-copied media, and less that zero sympathy for those who won't tack a couple more dollars onto the price of a game to cover the cost of a cartridge, chip or other hard security feature.
This falls under the same heading as those who are using the Internet for distribution, and who then complain about losses due to fraud and piracy. If you want to keep something secure, get your own distribution network.