Don't dismiss the internet as unable to support a political campaign just yet
- I have begun my own political party here in Australia, based largely online:
www.neteffect.org.au (be gentle and
mirror if you can; I have 8GB monthly quota right now and don't want to get
it completely slashdotted)
Whilst it's early days for my idea, I'm hoping that I can generate enough support
to get a senate seat in our upcoming federal election at the end of the year.
We don't have the money politics you have in the States, nor do we have primaries
and the like. The only stipulation to getting on the ballot here is to have
500 members. There are lots of disenchanted people out there who are fed up
with the current climate of politics, and don't feel they have a say anymore. I hope to fix that by being truly representative of the people's choices.
As a party, we are aiming to be completely open in everything, from software,
to policy formation, to financial disclosure etc. We have an active forum where
we will hopefully gather ideas from all around the world on how to best serve
the people of Australia (which can have flow on effects elsewhere). You are
welcome to take our documentation and use it as the basis of your own political
party - I want to encourage others to run for politics, so as to try to reduce
the current two party system that operates here in Australia, as well as the
US etc.
I've taken a hard line against the imperialist ambitions of the current US
administration, but that doesn't mean I hate America. I've served with US forces
in Japan and they are just as dedicated to professionalism as we are, with the
same hopes and dreams for peace and prosperity. Sadly they're being told to
do things they'd rather not do, in far off places around the globe, to serve
the narrow interests of a few war-hawks in Washington.
Anyway, have a look if you are interested, and we'd especially like to hear
from you if you think you can implement an open source secure online voting
system we can use to allow members to vote on our policy formation. We plan
on setting up such a system in an open framework so all democratic people may
benefit from it in the future. If done correctly it could form the basis of
21st century representative politics - something that has been lacking for a
long time now.
I've started a new political party, using the internet as our major forum. We ARE advocating email and online response, and will be fighting this if we get elected this year.
Hand written letters are NOT preferred in our case. We're a new Aussie political party using 21st century technology to operate (shock horror!!), unlike the majors:
Voice your disgust to us in person. We are a newly formed political party,
and need your help to get 500 active members so we can run for election in the
Senate this year. We're also based online, to make it really easy to contact
us. Snail mail campaigns don't do much I'm afraid - better to have someone in
parliament who will give you a voice in the first place.
In this case, that someone will hopefully be me, and anyone else willing to
run for election this year under our banner. We are a new type of political
party that WILL oppose these stupid laws, and have the knowledge base to understand
their true implications.
You have a chance right now to DO something about it and MAKE this an issue
at the upcoming election. So visit our website, jump into our forum and support
us by becoming a member.
I think most people fear this camera creep, because right now it concentrates the power of surveillance in the hands of the minority - the police and/or private security firms, at a time when the major western governments are at the low point with public trust.
I too hate surveillance and consider it an invasion of privacy, but I would relent on one condition - that instead of having only a minority do the surveillance, allow everyone to have full access to all public camera footage, in real time. Open it all up to public scrutiny, and you're bound to have a thousand times as many eyes watching, plus you get the added benefit of knowing that since everyone is watching everyone else, corruption is less likely to occur in the system. This scenario also prevents any future totalitarian government from usurping the system for its own ends, because the system will be in the hands of everyone, not just a privileged few. How many current politicians do you think would support such a system? I'd wager not many, precisely because then THEY would be put in the spotlight.
Any politician who supports surveillance camera technology should be mandated to be under surveillance themselves, at all times, and I say this from a perspective of running for politics this year myself (www.neteffect.org.au). And no, I don't advocate surveillance cameras, because I think the right to privacy and anonymity outweighs any benefit in cutting down crime.
The argument that it's ok because you have nothing to hide doesn't wash, simply because if you truly believed that, you'd have no objection to 24/7 surveillance in your home and everywhere else.
After all, if you were watched 24/7, and you were then murdered, we'd be 100% certain of having the perpetrator on camera, right? So surely it's a benefit to watch you all the time?
What if you were old and frail and slipped in the shower? Be nice to have some remote "camera angel" to watch over you and alert the medics, right?
How about a camera in your bedroom? After all, lots of people die in their sleep. Why not mandate an infrared camera which can sense your heartbeat as well, so if you had a heart attack, you'd have instant medical dispatch to your home, increasing your survival chances markedly.
Oh, you don't like the idea of having your every move on camera? You cherish your privacy after all?
Now you begin to understand why the surveillance society is a BAD thing. Pre-crime is closer than you think.
Which is WHY it's so important to do this as an open source project - that way no government can stop it, except by violent repression, and most people by now understand that repression always ends up with the repressor being either tried, evicted or killed, even if it sometimes takes many years.
If only people would realise their collective power, the world would be a better place. Imagine an entire nation, or even multiple nations, going on strike until the government agrees to their demands. Imagine a WORLD STRIKE against the occupation of Iraq, for example. No one works until their governments pull the troops out. Hit the power brokers where it hurts - the economic bottom line. Forget terrorist bombings - they serve only to piss off the people you should be enlisting the help of. Instead, just down tools at a national level until governments realise they are there to SERVE, not RULE. It IS possible, which is precisely why repressive governments try their utmost to prevent people communicating openly with each other and gathering together.
The internet can assist by providing a global staging point for such events that no one can stop. I only hope we can implement our secure online voting system such that it can be readily adapted for such uses. The whole world stands to benefit.
No, the reason I don't make it clickable is that we have 8GB bandwidth per month, and making it clickable makes it that much easier to click on it just for clicking's sake. By not making it clickable I'm in a sense making a tiny barrier to entry that means only interested parties will take the minute amount of time needed to copy and paste the URL into their browser.
If you wish to you can mirror the site and provide a clickable link, which would save our bandwidth as much as possible.
with the intent of using the internet to allow members to vote on policy formation etc.
I want to do this using open source software, whether we build it ourselves or not. Surely there exists a group of programmers out there who together can craft such a system?
I think it could be one of the most important examples of how open source benefits the greater good if we could pull it off, and the flow on effects could be enormous since it would be open for anyone to use across the globe. I'm more than willing to make our political party site the home of it if you are interested.
Come on Slashdot, if we as a group of geeks can't solve this problem, what hope is there that anyone else will?
You are welcome to post in our forum about such a system, and download our Constitution which lays out the rules we plan for online voting, so please have a look at what we're hoping to accomplish and see if it can indeed be done successfully.
I've started a political party which is currently looking for 500 members to get ourselves on the Federal ballot this upcoming election:
www.neteffect.org.au
If you want to have a representative in parliament who actually understands how this type of behaviour is a bad thing, and do something about it, then I recommend you visit our site and read through what we have to offer.
It's time that we Aussies had a REAL "younger generation" to represent our views instead of a 42 year old "young-un"; someone who knows what a frag is, someone who cares about our online rights and someone who understands the pickle we're in regarding current copyright/patent laws.
Oh, and someone (me of course) who's a regular Slashdot poster....
At the very least have a look at our policies and forum - I think you'll find that we're very much aiming to be a real force for change in Australia.
Same way as Slashdot does - by having only logged in users be able to moderate, and then only if they've built up a Google trust metric - karma, if you will. No bot should be able to vote a page up.
Yes, there is a huge backlash against GM crops in Europe and Africa (and other places too). It's NOT, however, due to the technology itself, but rather it's a backlash against the companies concerned making the modded seeds sterile, thus forcing farmers into subsistence and reliance on a single source of seeds forever (the ultimate genetic customer lock-in), or worse yet, having those seeds spread to normal crops, rendering THEM sterile. That's why countries refused shipments of American excess grain unless they were milled down - they didn't want their citizens planting the sterile seeds and condemning themselves to a barren wasteland when those seeds don't germinate.
You are right that open source software can just as easily be used for evil as proprietary software.
The fundamental difference though, is that open source, public domain software is given to the community at large to do with what they will without the authors being able to control its use, whereas proprietary software is knowingly sold to people/entities whose track record on human rights is usually pretty well known before the sale is made.
Lots of posts in this thread seem to be focusing on Google's diminishing value with the sheer size of results, and link farms etc, serving only to reduce its effectiveness, thus leaving room for other players to seize a niche and perhaps the whole search engine game in the future.
I think the best way to make Google better is to introduce a peer moderation system, much like we have here, only centered around the search results pages you get. That way, the link farms will be modded into oblivion while good search results begin to filter upwards with "positive" karma, so to speak.
If you implemented such a system you would have to prevent the same link farm/commercial players from distorting results, but again this could be done much like slashdot by modding the moderators. After all, millions of people use Google every day, and the ratio of those people to the commercial players is heavily weighted in the people's favour.
Google, in the spirit of copyleft, I am giving you this idea for free, to use as you see fit.
The notion that ordinary users should pay to have virus protection seems rather antiquated in this age of mass mailing worms etc that have more effect on businesses than homes.
I personally use a great freeware antivirus program from a German company called AntiVir (www.free-av.com), which gives it away for personal use but requires commercial use to have a licence (as a nice aside, it is WAY more efficient that the bloated Norton apps). This makes sense, as it's businesses that keep telling us they're losing millions of dollars when a virus hits them, whereas home users might be inconvenienced for a little while but not seriously affected in most instances.
How about having the government recommend some free antivirus programs, or even require companies to sponsor antivirus companies, since it's in their interests to do so?
This may sound funny at first, but let me explain. Most males I know surf for pr0n. Most of those also use IE to surf for pr0n. They don't have filters in place. They get hundreds of popups. They get spyware loaded onto their computers thanks to crappy ActiveX controls and hundreds of IE bugs. They have to browse one page at a time. In short, browsing for pr0n with IE sucks.
So here's the hook - you tell all your male friends (and any females you know who surf for it as well) that there's this cool new browser that makes surfing for pr0n more efficient. You don't have to elaborate until they ask why (and they will, trust me!). Then you explain to them that they won't get those nasty popups anymore, they won't get dodgy pr0n spyware installed, they can block out all those crappy flashing penis enlargement ads, and they can use cool extensions (such as Magpie and X to name two) to mass download a whole gallery in a few mouse clicks and erase their tracks afterwards.
Result - you'll have 90% browser domination in about one month.
"....but some of the enforcement powers in PATRIOT have also made a difference in our ability to avert another attack on the scale of what we saw in 2001."
Really? How do you know? Your argument is the same as saying this rock keeps away tigers. How do I know it works? You haven't seen any tigers around lately, have you?
Your government hasn't exactly been open and said "We foiled 13 major attacks last year due to PATRIOT."
No, instead they've cloaked EVERYTHING in secrecy including how the hell they allowed 9/11 to happen in the first place, and then asked you to enhance their powers to prevent another such event.
Wake up America, and smell your freedom disappearing one PATRIOT at a time.
Something I'd love to see from a visual perspective is pictures of the lander module, taken from the lip of the crater if the rover were able to get up and over the lip. Being able to look down on it with the crater in the background would provide the first photo taken from a position HIGHER than the landing site. Most photos of landmarks and feaures usually look better taken from either below the plane or above it, so you can discern depth.
I'm sick of a lot of things happening in the world right now, a well as in my own country (Australia). One issue is that of software patents and copyright. Another (far more important) is the American government's actions both domestic and foreign.
So instead of bitching about it, I decided to DO something about it. I have taken a political stand, by becoming political: www.neteffect.org.au
I'm currently seeking enough members to be officially recognised as an Australian political party (rules require 500) so if any Australians wish to help please visit the link.
The OpenOffice.org file formats are close to being what you describe - they are XML with CSS and other properties defined, and then zipped into, SXW or SXC files. You can open an SX* file using any application that supports unzipping, and extract the individual components as you like.
Perhaps OpenOffice.org could challenge the validity of MS's patent on the basis of prior art using XML in THEIR document formats!
First off, before lots of people visit our site, could one or two of you please, PLEASE mirror our site as we have very limited bandwidth (8GB per month).
I have just put up the beginnings of an Australian political party based largely online, and one of the central tenets is to have members be able to directly influence policy creation and modification by submitting secure, anonymous-yet-verifiable votes. In the age of near ubiquitous internet access I see this as the most logical progession of true democracy.
Of course, implementing it securely so that the system is free of possible coercion by design is very difficult, and one I am not able to create. I have set up the rules for our member voting in our party's constitution (please mirror this if you can) but the technical operation doesn't exist yet. We aim to use only open source software for all our needs (and currently do) so one of the ultimate aims is not only to have this for ourselves, but to give it all away freely to anyone else who wishes to begin their own party (that includes our website setup, constitution, and anything else). In my more far out visions I see our party (called Net Effect) having not only intra-country branches, but clones of itself in OTHER countries, with the only requirement being that the ideals remain the same.
So, if anyone thinks they can assist us in writing an open source, verifiable client for cross platform e-voting (for party issues, not actual federal/state elections) please contact us via our forum which can be accessed from our website:
www.neteffect.org.au
Many thanks in advance, and again, please mirror us if you can so we don't end up killing our very limited bandwidth! Could slashdot viewers please use any mirrors that emerge if possible before using our URL? Thankyou.
I watched an article on this on the news last night, and they indeed showed aerial pictures of the Dresden firebombing, as well as D-Day, Pegasus Bridge and many other photos.
I commented then to my wife that if Slashdot posted it, no one would see it until next week;) Seems I was right....
Incidentally it was interesting to see the Pegasus Bridge photo as I had not too recently played that level in Call of Duty!
The idea is sound in principle, but the practicalities leave something to be desired.
Whilst new aircraft such as the A380, or the Boeing 7E7 could be designed to incorporate such double doors, retrofitting older aircraft is not easy as they have pretty tight layouts down front.
I think having a camera or two would be pretty trivial to do, and would certainly enhance security when opening the door, or perhaps even having a curtain drawn across the area so that a terrorist waiting for the door to open wouldn't see it happen.
You could even put cameras throughout the aircraft so the pilots can see what's happening everywhere, plus you could also perhaps hook those to an external feed so the pilots could downlink it if necessary to ground personnel. It could also be linked to the flight data recorder (or have its own 30min loop recorder) so if there was a crash it would give you the last 30min of what happened as audio and video security tape (or digital which is more likely).
Slashdot Mirror
We'll help:
www.neteffect.org.au
Don't dismiss the internet as unable to support a political campaign just yet - I have begun my own political party here in Australia, based largely online:
www.neteffect.org.au (be gentle and mirror if you can; I have 8GB monthly quota right now and don't want to get it completely slashdotted)
Whilst it's early days for my idea, I'm hoping that I can generate enough support to get a senate seat in our upcoming federal election at the end of the year. We don't have the money politics you have in the States, nor do we have primaries and the like. The only stipulation to getting on the ballot here is to have 500 members. There are lots of disenchanted people out there who are fed up with the current climate of politics, and don't feel they have a say anymore. I hope to fix that by being truly representative of the people's choices.
As a party, we are aiming to be completely open in everything, from software, to policy formation, to financial disclosure etc. We have an active forum where we will hopefully gather ideas from all around the world on how to best serve the people of Australia (which can have flow on effects elsewhere). You are welcome to take our documentation and use it as the basis of your own political party - I want to encourage others to run for politics, so as to try to reduce the current two party system that operates here in Australia, as well as the US etc.
I've taken a hard line against the imperialist ambitions of the current US administration, but that doesn't mean I hate America. I've served with US forces in Japan and they are just as dedicated to professionalism as we are, with the same hopes and dreams for peace and prosperity. Sadly they're being told to do things they'd rather not do, in far off places around the globe, to serve the narrow interests of a few war-hawks in Washington.
Anyway, have a look if you are interested, and we'd especially like to hear from you if you think you can implement an open source secure online voting system we can use to allow members to vote on our policy formation. We plan on setting up such a system in an open framework so all democratic people may benefit from it in the future. If done correctly it could form the basis of 21st century representative politics - something that has been lacking for a long time now.
I've started a new political party, using the internet as our major forum. We ARE advocating email and online response, and will be fighting this if we get elected this year.
www.neteffect.org.au
Hand written letters are NOT preferred in our case. We're a new Aussie political party using 21st century technology to operate (shock horror!!), unlike the majors:
www.neteffect.org.au
Voice your disgust to us in person. We are a newly formed political party, and need your help to get 500 active members so we can run for election in the Senate this year. We're also based online, to make it really easy to contact us. Snail mail campaigns don't do much I'm afraid - better to have someone in parliament who will give you a voice in the first place.
In this case, that someone will hopefully be me, and anyone else willing to run for election this year under our banner. We are a new type of political party that WILL oppose these stupid laws, and have the knowledge base to understand their true implications.
You have a chance right now to DO something about it and MAKE this an issue at the upcoming election. So visit our website, jump into our forum and support us by becoming a member.
We are a new Australian political party attempting to get 500 members and based online.
Our stance is that the FTA and specifically this DMCA provision runs contrary to Australia's best interests, so if elected we will strike it down.
We also oppose software patents and call for a dramatic reduction in copyright terms back to the 10 year timeframe or similar.
Visit our website, and more importantly our forum, for more in depth information and a chance to actively shape our policies.
I think most people fear this camera creep, because right now it concentrates the power of surveillance in the hands of the minority - the police and/or private security firms, at a time when the major western governments are at the low point with public trust.
I too hate surveillance and consider it an invasion of privacy, but I would relent on one condition - that instead of having only a minority do the surveillance, allow everyone to have full access to all public camera footage, in real time. Open it all up to public scrutiny, and you're bound to have a thousand times as many eyes watching, plus you get the added benefit of knowing that since everyone is watching everyone else, corruption is less likely to occur in the system. This scenario also prevents any future totalitarian government from usurping the system for its own ends, because the system will be in the hands of everyone, not just a privileged few. How many current politicians do you think would support such a system? I'd wager not many, precisely because then THEY would be put in the spotlight.
Any politician who supports surveillance camera technology should be mandated to be under surveillance themselves, at all times, and I say this from a perspective of running for politics this year myself (www.neteffect.org.au). And no, I don't advocate surveillance cameras, because I think the right to privacy and anonymity outweighs any benefit in cutting down crime.
The argument that it's ok because you have nothing to hide doesn't wash, simply because if you truly believed that, you'd have no objection to 24/7 surveillance in your home and everywhere else.
After all, if you were watched 24/7, and you were then murdered, we'd be 100% certain of having the perpetrator on camera, right? So surely it's a benefit to watch you all the time?
What if you were old and frail and slipped in the shower? Be nice to have some remote "camera angel" to watch over you and alert the medics, right?
How about a camera in your bedroom? After all, lots of people die in their sleep. Why not mandate an infrared camera which can sense your heartbeat as well, so if you had a heart attack, you'd have instant medical dispatch to your home, increasing your survival chances markedly.
Oh, you don't like the idea of having your every move on camera? You cherish your privacy after all?
Now you begin to understand why the surveillance society is a BAD thing. Pre-crime is closer than you think.
Which is WHY it's so important to do this as an open source project - that way no government can stop it, except by violent repression, and most people by now understand that repression always ends up with the repressor being either tried, evicted or killed, even if it sometimes takes many years.
If only people would realise their collective power, the world would be a better place. Imagine an entire nation, or even multiple nations, going on strike until the government agrees to their demands. Imagine a WORLD STRIKE against the occupation of Iraq, for example. No one works until their governments pull the troops out. Hit the power brokers where it hurts - the economic bottom line. Forget terrorist bombings - they serve only to piss off the people you should be enlisting the help of. Instead, just down tools at a national level until governments realise they are there to SERVE, not RULE. It IS possible, which is precisely why repressive governments try their utmost to prevent people communicating openly with each other and gathering together.
The internet can assist by providing a global staging point for such events that no one can stop. I only hope we can implement our secure online voting system such that it can be readily adapted for such uses. The whole world stands to benefit.
www.neteffect.org.au
You'd think that, right? :)
No, the reason I don't make it clickable is that we have 8GB bandwidth per month, and making it clickable makes it that much easier to click on it just for clicking's sake. By not making it clickable I'm in a sense making a tiny barrier to entry that means only interested parties will take the minute amount of time needed to copy and paste the URL into their browser.
If you wish to you can mirror the site and provide a clickable link, which would save our bandwidth as much as possible.
I've begun a political party here in Australia:
www.neteffect.org.au
with the intent of using the internet to allow members to vote on policy formation etc.
I want to do this using open source software, whether we build it ourselves or not. Surely there exists a group of programmers out there who together can craft such a system?
I think it could be one of the most important examples of how open source benefits the greater good if we could pull it off, and the flow on effects could be enormous since it would be open for anyone to use across the globe. I'm more than willing to make our political party site the home of it if you are interested.
Come on Slashdot, if we as a group of geeks can't solve this problem, what hope is there that anyone else will?
You are welcome to post in our forum about such a system, and download our Constitution which lays out the rules we plan for online voting, so please have a look at what we're hoping to accomplish and see if it can indeed be done successfully.
I've started a political party which is currently looking for 500 members to get ourselves on the Federal ballot this upcoming election:
www.neteffect.org.au
If you want to have a representative in parliament who actually understands how this type of behaviour is a bad thing, and do something about it, then I recommend you visit our site and read through what we have to offer.
It's time that we Aussies had a REAL "younger generation" to represent our views instead of a 42 year old "young-un"; someone who knows what a frag is, someone who cares about our online rights and someone who understands the pickle we're in regarding current copyright/patent laws.
Oh, and someone (me of course) who's a regular Slashdot poster....
At the very least have a look at our policies and forum - I think you'll find that we're very much aiming to be a real force for change in Australia.
Same way as Slashdot does - by having only logged in users be able to moderate, and then only if they've built up a Google trust metric - karma, if you will. No bot should be able to vote a page up.
Yes, there is a huge backlash against GM crops in Europe and Africa (and other places too). It's NOT, however, due to the technology itself, but rather it's a backlash against the companies concerned making the modded seeds sterile, thus forcing farmers into subsistence and reliance on a single source of seeds forever (the ultimate genetic customer lock-in), or worse yet, having those seeds spread to normal crops, rendering THEM sterile. That's why countries refused shipments of American excess grain unless they were milled down - they didn't want their citizens planting the sterile seeds and condemning themselves to a barren wasteland when those seeds don't germinate.
You are right that open source software can just as easily be used for evil as proprietary software.
The fundamental difference though, is that open source, public domain software is given to the community at large to do with what they will without the authors being able to control its use, whereas proprietary software is knowingly sold to people/entities whose track record on human rights is usually pretty well known before the sale is made.
Lots of posts in this thread seem to be focusing on Google's diminishing value with the sheer size of results, and link farms etc, serving only to reduce its effectiveness, thus leaving room for other players to seize a niche and perhaps the whole search engine game in the future.
I think the best way to make Google better is to introduce a peer moderation system, much like we have here, only centered around the search results pages you get. That way, the link farms will be modded into oblivion while good search results begin to filter upwards with "positive" karma, so to speak.
If you implemented such a system you would have to prevent the same link farm/commercial players from distorting results, but again this could be done much like slashdot by modding the moderators. After all, millions of people use Google every day, and the ratio of those people to the commercial players is heavily weighted in the people's favour.
Google, in the spirit of copyleft, I am giving you this idea for free, to use as you see fit.
Thanks for pointing out the proper company name. I perhaps should have written my sentence differently, as I meant to say:
:)
I personally use a great freeware antivirus program called AntiVir from a German company (www.free-av.com).
Ain't semantics great?
The notion that ordinary users should pay to have virus protection seems rather antiquated in this age of mass mailing worms etc that have more effect on businesses than homes.
I personally use a great freeware antivirus program from a German company called AntiVir (www.free-av.com), which gives it away for personal use but requires commercial use to have a licence (as a nice aside, it is WAY more efficient that the bloated Norton apps). This makes sense, as it's businesses that keep telling us they're losing millions of dollars when a virus hits them, whereas home users might be inconvenienced for a little while but not seriously affected in most instances.
How about having the government recommend some free antivirus programs, or even require companies to sponsor antivirus companies, since it's in their interests to do so?
This may sound funny at first, but let me explain. Most males I know surf for pr0n. Most of those also use IE to surf for pr0n. They don't have filters in place. They get hundreds of popups. They get spyware loaded onto their computers thanks to crappy ActiveX controls and hundreds of IE bugs. They have to browse one page at a time. In short, browsing for pr0n with IE sucks.
So here's the hook - you tell all your male friends (and any females you know who surf for it as well) that there's this cool new browser that makes surfing for pr0n more efficient. You don't have to elaborate until they ask why (and they will, trust me!). Then you explain to them that they won't get those nasty popups anymore, they won't get dodgy pr0n spyware installed, they can block out all those crappy flashing penis enlargement ads, and they can use cool extensions (such as Magpie and X to name two) to mass download a whole gallery in a few mouse clicks and erase their tracks afterwards.
Result - you'll have 90% browser domination in about one month.
You read it here first.
"....but some of the enforcement powers in PATRIOT have also made a difference in our ability to avert another attack on the scale of what we saw in 2001."
Really? How do you know? Your argument is the same as saying this rock keeps away tigers. How do I know it works? You haven't seen any tigers around lately, have you?
Your government hasn't exactly been open and said "We foiled 13 major attacks last year due to PATRIOT."
No, instead they've cloaked EVERYTHING in secrecy including how the hell they allowed 9/11 to happen in the first place, and then asked you to enhance their powers to prevent another such event.
Wake up America, and smell your freedom disappearing one PATRIOT at a time.
Something I'd love to see from a visual perspective is pictures of the lander module, taken from the lip of the crater if the rover were able to get up and over the lip. Being able to look down on it with the crater in the background would provide the first photo taken from a position HIGHER than the landing site. Most photos of landmarks and feaures usually look better taken from either below the plane or above it, so you can discern depth.
I'm sick of a lot of things happening in the world right now, a well as in my own country (Australia). One issue is that of software patents and copyright. Another (far more important) is the American government's actions both domestic and foreign.
So instead of bitching about it, I decided to DO something about it. I have taken a political stand, by becoming political: www.neteffect.org.au
I'm currently seeking enough members to be officially recognised as an Australian political party (rules require 500) so if any Australians wish to help please visit the link.
....or SXC for spreadsheets ;)
The OpenOffice.org file formats are close to being what you describe - they are XML with CSS and other properties defined, and then zipped into, SXW or SXC files. You can open an SX* file using any application that supports unzipping, and extract the individual components as you like.
Perhaps OpenOffice.org could challenge the validity of MS's patent on the basis of prior art using XML in THEIR document formats!
First off, before lots of people visit our site, could one or two of you please, PLEASE mirror our site as we have very limited bandwidth (8GB per month).
I have just put up the beginnings of an Australian political party based largely online, and one of the central tenets is to have members be able to directly influence policy creation and modification by submitting secure, anonymous-yet-verifiable votes. In the age of near ubiquitous internet access I see this as the most logical progession of true democracy.
Of course, implementing it securely so that the system is free of possible coercion by design is very difficult, and one I am not able to create. I have set up the rules for our member voting in our party's constitution (please mirror this if you can) but the technical operation doesn't exist yet. We aim to use only open source software for all our needs (and currently do) so one of the ultimate aims is not only to have this for ourselves, but to give it all away freely to anyone else who wishes to begin their own party (that includes our website setup, constitution, and anything else). In my more far out visions I see our party (called Net Effect) having not only intra-country branches, but clones of itself in OTHER countries, with the only requirement being that the ideals remain the same.
So, if anyone thinks they can assist us in writing an open source, verifiable client for cross platform e-voting (for party issues, not actual federal/state elections) please contact us via our forum which can be accessed from our website:
www.neteffect.org.au
Many thanks in advance, and again, please mirror us if you can so we don't end up killing our very limited bandwidth! Could slashdot viewers please use any mirrors that emerge if possible before using our URL? Thankyou.
I watched an article on this on the news last night, and they indeed showed aerial pictures of the Dresden firebombing, as well as D-Day, Pegasus Bridge and many other photos.
;) Seems I was right....
I commented then to my wife that if Slashdot posted it, no one would see it until next week
Incidentally it was interesting to see the Pegasus Bridge photo as I had not too recently played that level in Call of Duty!
The idea is sound in principle, but the practicalities leave something to be desired.
Whilst new aircraft such as the A380, or the Boeing 7E7 could be designed to incorporate such double doors, retrofitting older aircraft is not easy as they have pretty tight layouts down front.
I think having a camera or two would be pretty trivial to do, and would certainly enhance security when opening the door, or perhaps even having a curtain drawn across the area so that a terrorist waiting for the door to open wouldn't see it happen.
You could even put cameras throughout the aircraft so the pilots can see what's happening everywhere, plus you could also perhaps hook those to an external feed so the pilots could downlink it if necessary to ground personnel. It could also be linked to the flight data recorder (or have its own 30min loop recorder) so if there was a crash it would give you the last 30min of what happened as audio and video security tape (or digital which is more likely).