You forget that the "Shared Source Initiative" is a whole different ballgame than either the GPL or BSD/WTFPL/Public Domain. Though I haven't read the actual contract, I'm guessing you will probably be able to look at the source, but you're forbidden to post it online, or even discuss it online with anybody, with any "unauthorized" people who haven't clicked "accept". Moreover any modifications you do have to be kept secret, or you can only tell about them to MS.. or some stuff along those lines. That reminds me it's funny how the linux kernel stuff can be openly discussed and viewed online, and modifications shared, even before clicking "accept" on the GPL. That the stuff going on will fall under the GPL is merely understood, I guess now with the shared source initiative any contributions will automatically become MS intellectual property will go as understood - i.e. you'll be able to pay for your own work - ching ching, the best way to make profit, have people buy the stuff they create! Have Van Gogh pay for his own paintings, even though he's already starving, now he'll be starving++.
I don't think you can directly photograph a single photon, what you'd need is a medium with process that senses the photon passing by, and changes state accordingly, something similar to how the bubble chamber photographs charged particles - you don't actually capture the particle, but you look at the myriad of photons emitted by the bubbles formed in the superheated liquid. The story above too photographs a medium - plasma - and it's state. That's how you get to see single particles.
Hopefully MS will wake up and stop forcefeeding people their "dotnet visionary strategy initiative" bullshit, because it's patented. Sometimes you just don't care about pedantry, sometimes you just want to get stuff done fast and easy. Dotnet isn't the way. I look at the same webcode in dotnet, asp, php, perl, etc, and of all the perl code is the shortest but also too cryptic - it doesn't feel human to me, because I don't know perl - but other than that php is the least complicated "human readable" way to accomplish something. I don't really know php either, I just look at it, read it and yay! I can tell what it's doing easily just by knowing English and some basics in programming. To me the more complicated a piece of code is, the harder it is to later come back to it and reunderstand what the heck it's doing and add features or fix bugs. I'm willing to sacrifice humanity if I get something in exchange, such as super performance, as in C, but not where you neither get performance nore ease of use. What good is a pedantic programming language if I wear out mentally even before I get to the "hello world" part. For instance I only had to read the first line of any dotnet code to just toss it and forget about it. Using dotnet or java is like an insult to my intelligence. I don't want to read through miles of "using system.console.subsystem.graphics.pointer.mouse.us bmouse.usbmouse(1).pointer.appearance="default" ", go bother someone else with proper pedantry like that, I don't want to have to specify things that I don't care about, it's nice to have it as an option to specify it, but don't force me to do stupid superfluous shit and wear me out mentally just by having to read miles and miles of characters. On the other hand perl errs on the other side of the balance, too few characters, but I guess for people who are used to perl and feel like fish in water reading it, perl must me something wonderful, but I don't know how anybody loves the oververbose programming languages, perhaps other than some purists who get off on programming as an art for the sake of programming, instead of having to get something done very quickly and very efficiently, and then later be able to come back and tweak it, without it being too mysterious to explain even to nonprogrammers to see what's going on. I guess the worse and more obfuscated a language is, the more job security you have, and the bigger the artificially divide between "professional" programmers, and everyday people. After all how are you gonna have a software economy if anyone can roll their own code, instead of having to hire an "expert", who knows to to dig through the artificially created complexity.
You say that as if it were an option. As far as volunteering goes, my grandpa was one of the last ones to "volunteerly" hand his land over to the commies. They took him away one day, and according to my parents, he came back with white hair after a week. He never said what happened, but he did end up volunteering too. After that the family was on a gulag blacklist, with lots of visits to confiscate anything they had, and they pretty much had to starve with 6 kids for quite a while, until they finally "learned" the hard way that taking up loans and paying interest is a very good idea. Now I understand and see things in a much different light. Yeah, work hard, fly right, and you can then you and your family can enjoy the fruits of your labors, all over and over again.
As far as the UK is concerned, the weather would actually get warmer there, same with Russia Siberia Scandinavia and Canada. The countries really in for it are places like Egypt, Mexico, Brazil, Spain, India, US, China, Japan, etc. Yet Russia was a prominent signer of the Kyoto treaty, Putin mentioning that for his country global warming would actually be beneficial, but still signed it, for probably complicated reasons, including having to care about the rest of the world too other than self somewhere among those reasons, hopefully.
A lot of trouble starving to death as it happened in Niger and not having the means to put together a boat to come bother us here before the front doors of our mansions? As long as they stir trouble somewhere else and not in my backyard or frontyard, it's like it ain't even happening eh?
I been thinking about setting up my own, homebuilt solar panel factory, and then I can save a lot of money by not having to buy the overpriced panels from these guys, just like they save money by not having to buy overpriced equipment from industry experts such as Applied Materials.
There is gonna be more legislation forbidding workarounds to DRM, including using a microphone or camera and unknowiningly recording copyrighted material will carry full punishment. Safest thing to do is to never click copy and never record anything, because after copyright is fully instituted, da man will take over all recording rights too, unless you pay a fee, to get a recording license just like a drivers license, and pass a written exam. After all recording stuff is just as dangerous as driving, if not more!
Bush is a puppet, like the rest of the politicians, because he dances according to how da man whistles the tune, because da man got the money. All politicians are slaves to money because that's what's needed to run campaigns and get elected, money is their string the puppetmaster pulls and controls. What's new - money talks, dog barks, caravan walks, politicians are crooked and corrupt, and the Earth takes trips around the Sun - it's just how things are.
Whenever I feel like I'm in that situation with my pants down bent over with da man behind me, keep it tight, no matter how painful. Then da man sends his agents to try to convince me that everyone is better off if I keep it lose, because if I keep it tight it hurts me, and da man too, and who do I think I am to be special when everyone else keeps it loose and lives on just fine, telling me hey, this is just how it is, this is what we live with, and we got over it. And I say no, I never get over it and keep it tight, make it hurt, make it hurt bad for both of us, because the whole point is not to get pounded in the first place, and no matter how detailed and long the explanation, or how many lessons I get put through, I'll always keep it tight for da man, make it hurt, and the only way it's gonna stop hurting if da man stops pounding me, but that's something hard because it's in da man's nature to keep doing everyone, otherwise he wouldn't be called da man.
Those were different days, my friend. Back in those days there were no 2millimeterx 2millimeter megapixel cameras on every tree in every forest connected to gps signals and sattelites that send that data each microsecond directly to his or her majesty the British Crown. Back then all you had were message carriers riding on horseback that took 2 weeks to deliver a piece of paper, so people had at least 2 weeks to do something and then another 2 weeks til the order came back from England telling the officers what to do. So, we got technology today, lots of it, and you can see it cropping up around you like mushroom on a forest floor after a spring rain. Fuck technology?
One of the things that chemical weapons do best is damage DNA which then propagates through the population. It's the modern means of racism and extermination of races other than your own, you don't actually have to kill everyone if you keep up the nuissance and small damages over and over. It's insteresting to see just where exactly wars start to happen these days, and where are the mass-plague-like outbreaks - who da man has an axe to grind with and would like to see gone and wiped off the Earth's surface. Nuclear weapons are less targeted therefore safer from the racism standpoint because they just do random damage, and some mutations can actually be good (what doesn't kill you makes you stronger) as opposed to more predictable changes from specially formulated chemicals and biotech agents. Though one of the side effects of of even the chemical and biological agents is that their effects too cannot be accurately predicted, hence the need for even better biotechnology and better understanding of dna and how the human body functions, so people can more effectively combat "other kinds of people" in this "global competition." You think racism is nonexistent? There are way too many people "proud" of their heritage, origins, and they examine other people based on their origins too, and they preferentially treat and favor people of the same origin as themselves, or at least care very much to know about who is of the same origin, which is the very starting point for any racism, that sometimes fires back too. Sometimes it's just best not to know where you come from, even if it's hard to overlook differences in appearance and culture/language, and "knowing" you're different just by staring out of your head through your eyes at each other, but then there are those who get very involved in the difference seeking and take it to a level of science.
That's one of the first amendments that's going to be "canceled" or "mistranslated" when the Constitution is rewritten in Spanish and Spanish becomes the official language of the US and the World. Esperanto just doesn't cut it, English is too nonphonetically spelled (spelling bees are possible) and while Spanish has genders for even house and table and chair, it's the leastest worstest of all the choices, because it's already spread to most of South America anyway, plus it's a romance language with most of Europe and the rest of the Americas/Australia easily adapting, and it's easier on the tongues of most Asians and Africans too, plus computer speech recognition might be easier, though I can think of even better languages for speech recognition. So to shoot two birds with one stone, when the Constitution is translated, watch out for the "untranslatable" or "improperly translatable" material.
By the way one of the questions on taking a US Citizenship test is: have you ever advocated overthrowing a government? No, but what does the 2nd amendment say? Governments and just power entities in general are paranoid of being overthrown, and they are like elephants, record and archive everything and never forget, and even that's not enough, there is need for even more cameras and data on everyone, just in case - so don't be touting or throwing around this option as something of a matter of fact, because it's at least 10x as hard or messy as you imagine, plus who wants bloodshed when you can just do a million man march on a capital and set up tents and not go home til the tanks show up and run your tents over? Tear gas? Rubber bullets? Ouch.. Water cannons? Yipee what fun! Wet t-shirt contest! If you can get change, or "social progress" without bloodshed but instead with "sex, drugs and rock and roll", with people holding hands and dancing in a circle, girls with flowers in their hair, wearing peace sign t-shirts and necklaces, singing "imagine all the people living life in peace, wheooh-hoo-oo-oooh, you may say I'm a dreamer, but i'm not the only one, I hope some day you'll join us and the wo-o-o-orld will be as one." See, music is the weapon of the future, it only claims a few martyrs instead of masses of people dying or getting wounded. So let's arm ourselves up by secretly creating songs that have the power to move masses, in case we have to use it as a last resort.
Also, when you have a rotten system, the fight is not between the "two opponent" parties, that's like believing in a puppet show where the puppets fight, while not seeing the puppet master. The issue is whether you, the spectator have any say in the way things go. It doesn't matter how many puppet-parties are showcased, pretending to be on your side or against you while dancing up on that stage, what counts is YOUR vote, the public's vote, if that registers at all, or does the puppet master through all his puppets lie about YOUR vote because he wants to stay the puppet master.
You would have teams of people willing to participate in such an event. There are plenty of activists today, who are willing to go to prison, let alone let their bosses see how they voted, mostly because they don't even have a boss because they don't have a job or something. They could vote their conscience and verify that the voting machine did get the results. All it would take is "some people" to be open about their votes, while the general population would stay anonymous. It's like in factory production QC checking - most of the boxes on a production line get shipped, but every 1000th or so gets pulled by QC, the box opened and the contents destroyed, for tensile test, or mechanical impact test, or whatever. Similarly most of the votes would stay anonymous, but anonimity-destroying quality control by spot-checking would be possible. Something for something. If we believe in this democracy thing, I for one would welcome our machine vote-counting overlords and would like to point out that I'd be willing to be one of the nonanonymous voters. But the bigger issue here is whether a full-blown democracy is "where people think they know what they want and get it good and hard too"(oscar wilde) is preferable over this makebelieve democracy run by da man, where da man actually cares that things run well, cuz it's his game, his toy, while the rest of the population is dazzled into believing things are really up to them, therefore happier, than when they believe nothing is up to them and they just get commanded around.
You forget one thing - trusting the officials to report what the machines actually output. That's the easiets way to lie, have the counters count up then lie about the results. When those in charge are rotten how can you trust them in not getting reelected? Only honest administrations have a chance not to get reelected, while dishonest ones practically guarantee their own reelections, so in the end dishonest ones win out in the long run. There needs to be a way to see votes realtime and directly from the machine without an arbitrator/mediator "official" meddling with the whole thing between the public and the vote counting machine. Even then, how can you trust anything. But at least it would let the public "conspire" up against a single voting machine, show up in large numbers all at one time, then record the realtime results coming out of that single voting machine through an internet site. Then "da man" would have a hard time rigging all the voting machines because he wouldn't know which ones are gonna get tested. Testing is the only way, and you need individual voting machine result access realtime to properly do it.
Deny equal education if you don't got the cash? You mean all educations are equal? How about the old adage - separate but equal, separated by financial fences.
I'm not too excited about anything competitive like this. Soon these viruses will get smarter and smarter, soon making sophisticated decisions that resemble artificial intelligence behaviour, and then just leave it up to darwinism til these things evolve into something smarter than us. Luckily we can still just pull the plug on any computer as a last measure, but once they come up with computers that have undisconnectable power cords - wait, you can always use a woodden handled axe to cut the cord, if you got such a thing, and it's not electric powered with an rfid chip that shocks you if you can't id yourself because such weapons have to be kept out of terrorist hands, in the name of public safety. But you can always just bite the damn cord apart, and recieve a mild shock in the process. So we only have to worry about systems that can never come down, such as the electric grid, or hospital systems that have backup grids, where there is always power, so such viruses might hide out in such "always on" systems and evolve, but hey, we can even shut down the electric grid if that's what it takes to take control back, problem is these days the shutting switches are also computer controlled, and I suggest we should have a manual shut off station where you can toss a lever just like in the good old days, as a general safety measure for any device that is powered by energy. Most things in your home have a power cord you can pull, and you can shut off all power to your home by cutting the conduits where the electricity, natural gas and high pressure water come in, but there are complicated places in the world where nobody really knows how to shut the whole thing down, or where is the switch to toss to shut the whole thing down. On the other hand, you also don't want such shut the whole thing down switches too accessible, because of terrorists, damn, not again, these terrorirsts are annoying maaan.... Once there are cameras everywhere watching for terrorists, and computer vision is developed enough to where those computer driven cars can actually drive through the desert on their own, meaning they can see, then these viruses will be able to see everything in the whole world, including you disconnecting their power cord, and they can instantly make up a false criminal record and send 911 on your ass and have the police plug the power back in, and you can say you're innocent, riiight, that's what all people in prison say, they are all innocent.... Once I laughed at someone for saying "fuck technology." I love technology, it's so much fun, but maaan, fire was the first big technology man invented, and playing with any new technology since then is like playing with fire - it's fun, but you can get burned if you don't pay attention. On the other hand how do we know that such "higher intelligence" entitities would not be protectors, but destructors of us? What is man to nature on this Earth? A protector, maintainer or destructor? Do unto others....?
A genetic upper class is always very limited in numbers compared to the rest of the common population, therefore more inbred than the rest of the population, even while handpicking new breeding material from the rest of the population. For instance the aristocracy of old Europe was way too inbred, with special diseases ravaging through the family trees, becaue every duke, king, princess was related, pretty much marrying second cousins and such. Show me an aristocracy that is more numerous than the underclass it controls. It's like having a cart not with 6 horses and one driver, but 1 horse and 6 drivers whipping the horse to go faster. It just doesn't happen often, at least I haven't seen it happen, usually you have more horses than drivers. How about having 10 managers managing a single person? How does that work out? Even in business there are always less managers than workers, and if managers stay separate from the workers as far as marriage goes, they will be more inbred.
Wait til the world runs out of oil and natural gas and global warming floods all of Amsterdam and New York (New Amsterdam.) Then the lineitem containing cost saved will be a much different number, adjusting to whatever the market will bear. These days 5 cents a kilowatthour for electricity is very cheap, one day it might be 50 cents a kWh, and then suddenly everything is miraculously profitable in 15 years.
I predict the equator will stay a rainforest belt, and the Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, where most deserts are located, will the the PV cell belts. We should leave green surface area on Earth green.
I was gonna say just that, that energy storage is the bigger issue than production, especially with wind and solar power, that are intermittent, though solar delivers energy while the people are at work, and when it gets dark, people go home, but still, you need keep the buidlings lit in the dark, or do you? Anyway, I think their solar panels will just be grid-tied, and not much local storage will be implemented, besides some backup power supplies and, guess what, generators that burn gas. And by the way I don't think supercapacitors can store that much energy, their advantage is burst load, they deliver fast, but limited capacity, and using it in say, a car, I'm guessing you'd probably get a less than 10 mile range with the top of the line supercapacitors, as opposed to 150 miles with heavy lead acid batteries that make the car sink through the asphalt, and 300 miles with conventional hydrocarbon storage that keeps the car light.
I think it's more of an experiment on how far you can push people into indignity and how they put up with it and still live on. I expect everyone will be bitching, but in a special way. Hotheaded people don't get far. Maybe people will just avoid flying and drive or ride a train, simply because they dislike being collared like that, at least that's what I'd do, quiet resistance.
Slashdot Mirror
You forget that the "Shared Source Initiative" is a whole different ballgame than either the GPL or BSD/WTFPL/Public Domain. Though I haven't read the actual contract, I'm guessing you will probably be able to look at the source, but you're forbidden to post it online, or even discuss it online with anybody, with any "unauthorized" people who haven't clicked "accept". Moreover any modifications you do have to be kept secret, or you can only tell about them to MS.. or some stuff along those lines. That reminds me it's funny how the linux kernel stuff can be openly discussed and viewed online, and modifications shared, even before clicking "accept" on the GPL. That the stuff going on will fall under the GPL is merely understood, I guess now with the shared source initiative any contributions will automatically become MS intellectual property will go as understood - i.e. you'll be able to pay for your own work - ching ching, the best way to make profit, have people buy the stuff they create! Have Van Gogh pay for his own paintings, even though he's already starving, now he'll be starving++.
I don't think you can directly photograph a single photon, what you'd need is a medium with process that senses the photon passing by, and changes state accordingly, something similar to how the bubble chamber photographs charged particles - you don't actually capture the particle, but you look at the myriad of photons emitted by the bubbles formed in the superheated liquid. The story above too photographs a medium - plasma - and it's state. That's how you get to see single particles.
Hopefully MS will wake up and stop forcefeeding people their "dotnet visionary strategy initiative" bullshit, because it's patented. Sometimes you just don't care about pedantry, sometimes you just want to get stuff done fast and easy. Dotnet isn't the way. I look at the same webcode in dotnet, asp, php, perl, etc, and of all the perl code is the shortest but also too cryptic - it doesn't feel human to me, because I don't know perl - but other than that php is the least complicated "human readable" way to accomplish something. I don't really know php either, I just look at it, read it and yay! I can tell what it's doing easily just by knowing English and some basics in programming. To me the more complicated a piece of code is, the harder it is to later come back to it and reunderstand what the heck it's doing and add features or fix bugs. I'm willing to sacrifice humanity if I get something in exchange, such as super performance, as in C, but not where you neither get performance nore ease of use. What good is a pedantic programming language if I wear out mentally even before I get to the "hello world" part. For instance I only had to read the first line of any dotnet code to just toss it and forget about it. Using dotnet or java is like an insult to my intelligence. I don't want to read through miles of "using system.console.subsystem.graphics.pointer.mouse.us bmouse.usbmouse(1).pointer.appearance="default" ", go bother someone else with proper pedantry like that, I don't want to have to specify things that I don't care about, it's nice to have it as an option to specify it, but don't force me to do stupid superfluous shit and wear me out mentally just by having to read miles and miles of characters. On the other hand perl errs on the other side of the balance, too few characters, but I guess for people who are used to perl and feel like fish in water reading it, perl must me something wonderful, but I don't know how anybody loves the oververbose programming languages, perhaps other than some purists who get off on programming as an art for the sake of programming, instead of having to get something done very quickly and very efficiently, and then later be able to come back and tweak it, without it being too mysterious to explain even to nonprogrammers to see what's going on. I guess the worse and more obfuscated a language is, the more job security you have, and the bigger the artificially divide between "professional" programmers, and everyday people. After all how are you gonna have a software economy if anyone can roll their own code, instead of having to hire an "expert", who knows to to dig through the artificially created complexity.
You say that as if it were an option. As far as volunteering goes, my grandpa was one of the last ones to "volunteerly" hand his land over to the commies. They took him away one day, and according to my parents, he came back with white hair after a week. He never said what happened, but he did end up volunteering too. After that the family was on a gulag blacklist, with lots of visits to confiscate anything they had, and they pretty much had to starve with 6 kids for quite a while, until they finally "learned" the hard way that taking up loans and paying interest is a very good idea. Now I understand and see things in a much different light. Yeah, work hard, fly right, and you can then you and your family can enjoy the fruits of your labors, all over and over again.
As far as the UK is concerned, the weather would actually get warmer there, same with Russia Siberia Scandinavia and Canada. The countries really in for it are places like Egypt, Mexico, Brazil, Spain, India, US, China, Japan, etc. Yet Russia was a prominent signer of the Kyoto treaty, Putin mentioning that for his country global warming would actually be beneficial, but still signed it, for probably complicated reasons, including having to care about the rest of the world too other than self somewhere among those reasons, hopefully.
A lot of trouble starving to death as it happened in Niger and not having the means to put together a boat to come bother us here before the front doors of our mansions? As long as they stir trouble somewhere else and not in my backyard or frontyard, it's like it ain't even happening eh?
I been thinking about setting up my own, homebuilt solar panel factory, and then I can save a lot of money by not having to buy the overpriced panels from these guys, just like they save money by not having to buy overpriced equipment from industry experts such as Applied Materials.
I think functional things are some of the most beautiful things in the world. Beauty is always in the eyes of the beerholder.
There is gonna be more legislation forbidding workarounds to DRM, including using a microphone or camera and unknowiningly recording copyrighted material will carry full punishment. Safest thing to do is to never click copy and never record anything, because after copyright is fully instituted, da man will take over all recording rights too, unless you pay a fee, to get a recording license just like a drivers license, and pass a written exam. After all recording stuff is just as dangerous as driving, if not more!
Bush is a puppet, like the rest of the politicians, because he dances according to how da man whistles the tune, because da man got the money. All politicians are slaves to money because that's what's needed to run campaigns and get elected, money is their string the puppetmaster pulls and controls. What's new - money talks, dog barks, caravan walks, politicians are crooked and corrupt, and the Earth takes trips around the Sun - it's just how things are.
Whenever I feel like I'm in that situation with my pants down bent over with da man behind me, keep it tight, no matter how painful. Then da man sends his agents to try to convince me that everyone is better off if I keep it lose, because if I keep it tight it hurts me, and da man too, and who do I think I am to be special when everyone else keeps it loose and lives on just fine, telling me hey, this is just how it is, this is what we live with, and we got over it. And I say no, I never get over it and keep it tight, make it hurt, make it hurt bad for both of us, because the whole point is not to get pounded in the first place, and no matter how detailed and long the explanation, or how many lessons I get put through, I'll always keep it tight for da man, make it hurt, and the only way it's gonna stop hurting if da man stops pounding me, but that's something hard because it's in da man's nature to keep doing everyone, otherwise he wouldn't be called da man.
Those were different days, my friend. Back in those days there were no 2millimeterx 2millimeter megapixel cameras on every tree in every forest connected to gps signals and sattelites that send that data each microsecond directly to his or her majesty the British Crown. Back then all you had were message carriers riding on horseback that took 2 weeks to deliver a piece of paper, so people had at least 2 weeks to do something and then another 2 weeks til the order came back from England telling the officers what to do. So, we got technology today, lots of it, and you can see it cropping up around you like mushroom on a forest floor after a spring rain. Fuck technology?
One of the things that chemical weapons do best is damage DNA which then propagates through the population. It's the modern means of racism and extermination of races other than your own, you don't actually have to kill everyone if you keep up the nuissance and small damages over and over. It's insteresting to see just where exactly wars start to happen these days, and where are the mass-plague-like outbreaks - who da man has an axe to grind with and would like to see gone and wiped off the Earth's surface. Nuclear weapons are less targeted therefore safer from the racism standpoint because they just do random damage, and some mutations can actually be good (what doesn't kill you makes you stronger) as opposed to more predictable changes from specially formulated chemicals and biotech agents. Though one of the side effects of of even the chemical and biological agents is that their effects too cannot be accurately predicted, hence the need for even better biotechnology and better understanding of dna and how the human body functions, so people can more effectively combat "other kinds of people" in this "global competition." You think racism is nonexistent? There are way too many people "proud" of their heritage, origins, and they examine other people based on their origins too, and they preferentially treat and favor people of the same origin as themselves, or at least care very much to know about who is of the same origin, which is the very starting point for any racism, that sometimes fires back too. Sometimes it's just best not to know where you come from, even if it's hard to overlook differences in appearance and culture/language, and "knowing" you're different just by staring out of your head through your eyes at each other, but then there are those who get very involved in the difference seeking and take it to a level of science.
That's one of the first amendments that's going to be "canceled" or "mistranslated" when the Constitution is rewritten in Spanish and Spanish becomes the official language of the US and the World. Esperanto just doesn't cut it, English is too nonphonetically spelled (spelling bees are possible) and while Spanish has genders for even house and table and chair, it's the leastest worstest of all the choices, because it's already spread to most of South America anyway, plus it's a romance language with most of Europe and the rest of the Americas/Australia easily adapting, and it's easier on the tongues of most Asians and Africans too, plus computer speech recognition might be easier, though I can think of even better languages for speech recognition. So to shoot two birds with one stone, when the Constitution is translated, watch out for the "untranslatable" or "improperly translatable" material.
By the way one of the questions on taking a US Citizenship test is: have you ever advocated overthrowing a government? No, but what does the 2nd amendment say? Governments and just power entities in general are paranoid of being overthrown, and they are like elephants, record and archive everything and never forget, and even that's not enough, there is need for even more cameras and data on everyone, just in case - so don't be touting or throwing around this option as something of a matter of fact, because it's at least 10x as hard or messy as you imagine, plus who wants bloodshed when you can just do a million man march on a capital and set up tents and not go home til the tanks show up and run your tents over? Tear gas? Rubber bullets? Ouch.. Water cannons? Yipee what fun! Wet t-shirt contest! If you can get change, or "social progress" without bloodshed but instead with "sex, drugs and rock and roll", with people holding hands and dancing in a circle, girls with flowers in their hair, wearing peace sign t-shirts and necklaces, singing "imagine all the people living life in peace, wheooh-hoo-oo-oooh, you may say I'm a dreamer, but i'm not the only one, I hope some day you'll join us and the wo-o-o-orld will be as one." See, music is the weapon of the future, it only claims a few martyrs instead of masses of people dying or getting wounded. So let's arm ourselves up by secretly creating songs that have the power to move masses, in case we have to use it as a last resort.
Messing wit da man's money is a bigger crime than killin each other.
Also, when you have a rotten system, the fight is not between the "two opponent" parties, that's like believing in a puppet show where the puppets fight, while not seeing the puppet master. The issue is whether you, the spectator have any say in the way things go. It doesn't matter how many puppet-parties are showcased, pretending to be on your side or against you while dancing up on that stage, what counts is YOUR vote, the public's vote, if that registers at all, or does the puppet master through all his puppets lie about YOUR vote because he wants to stay the puppet master.
You would have teams of people willing to participate in such an event. There are plenty of activists today, who are willing to go to prison, let alone let their bosses see how they voted, mostly because they don't even have a boss because they don't have a job or something. They could vote their conscience and verify that the voting machine did get the results. All it would take is "some people" to be open about their votes, while the general population would stay anonymous. It's like in factory production QC checking - most of the boxes on a production line get shipped, but every 1000th or so gets pulled by QC, the box opened and the contents destroyed, for tensile test, or mechanical impact test, or whatever. Similarly most of the votes would stay anonymous, but anonimity-destroying quality control by spot-checking would be possible. Something for something. If we believe in this democracy thing, I for one would welcome our machine vote-counting overlords and would like to point out that I'd be willing to be one of the nonanonymous voters. But the bigger issue here is whether a full-blown democracy is "where people think they know what they want and get it good and hard too"(oscar wilde) is preferable over this makebelieve democracy run by da man, where da man actually cares that things run well, cuz it's his game, his toy, while the rest of the population is dazzled into believing things are really up to them, therefore happier, than when they believe nothing is up to them and they just get commanded around.
You forget one thing - trusting the officials to report what the machines actually output. That's the easiets way to lie, have the counters count up then lie about the results. When those in charge are rotten how can you trust them in not getting reelected? Only honest administrations have a chance not to get reelected, while dishonest ones practically guarantee their own reelections, so in the end dishonest ones win out in the long run. There needs to be a way to see votes realtime and directly from the machine without an arbitrator/mediator "official" meddling with the whole thing between the public and the vote counting machine. Even then, how can you trust anything. But at least it would let the public "conspire" up against a single voting machine, show up in large numbers all at one time, then record the realtime results coming out of that single voting machine through an internet site. Then "da man" would have a hard time rigging all the voting machines because he wouldn't know which ones are gonna get tested. Testing is the only way, and you need individual voting machine result access realtime to properly do it.
Deny equal education if you don't got the cash? You mean all educations are equal? How about the old adage - separate but equal, separated by financial fences.
I'm not too excited about anything competitive like this. Soon these viruses will get smarter and smarter, soon making sophisticated decisions that resemble artificial intelligence behaviour, and then just leave it up to darwinism til these things evolve into something smarter than us. Luckily we can still just pull the plug on any computer as a last measure, but once they come up with computers that have undisconnectable power cords - wait, you can always use a woodden handled axe to cut the cord, if you got such a thing, and it's not electric powered with an rfid chip that shocks you if you can't id yourself because such weapons have to be kept out of terrorist hands, in the name of public safety. But you can always just bite the damn cord apart, and recieve a mild shock in the process. So we only have to worry about systems that can never come down, such as the electric grid, or hospital systems that have backup grids, where there is always power, so such viruses might hide out in such "always on" systems and evolve, but hey, we can even shut down the electric grid if that's what it takes to take control back, problem is these days the shutting switches are also computer controlled, and I suggest we should have a manual shut off station where you can toss a lever just like in the good old days, as a general safety measure for any device that is powered by energy. Most things in your home have a power cord you can pull, and you can shut off all power to your home by cutting the conduits where the electricity, natural gas and high pressure water come in, but there are complicated places in the world where nobody really knows how to shut the whole thing down, or where is the switch to toss to shut the whole thing down. On the other hand, you also don't want such shut the whole thing down switches too accessible, because of terrorists, damn, not again, these terrorirsts are annoying maaan.... Once there are cameras everywhere watching for terrorists, and computer vision is developed enough to where those computer driven cars can actually drive through the desert on their own, meaning they can see, then these viruses will be able to see everything in the whole world, including you disconnecting their power cord, and they can instantly make up a false criminal record and send 911 on your ass and have the police plug the power back in, and you can say you're innocent, riiight, that's what all people in prison say, they are all innocent.... Once I laughed at someone for saying "fuck technology." I love technology, it's so much fun, but maaan, fire was the first big technology man invented, and playing with any new technology since then is like playing with fire - it's fun, but you can get burned if you don't pay attention. On the other hand how do we know that such "higher intelligence" entitities would not be protectors, but destructors of us? What is man to nature on this Earth? A protector, maintainer or destructor? Do unto others....?
A genetic upper class is always very limited in numbers compared to the rest of the common population, therefore more inbred than the rest of the population, even while handpicking new breeding material from the rest of the population. For instance the aristocracy of old Europe was way too inbred, with special diseases ravaging through the family trees, becaue every duke, king, princess was related, pretty much marrying second cousins and such. Show me an aristocracy that is more numerous than the underclass it controls. It's like having a cart not with 6 horses and one driver, but 1 horse and 6 drivers whipping the horse to go faster. It just doesn't happen often, at least I haven't seen it happen, usually you have more horses than drivers. How about having 10 managers managing a single person? How does that work out? Even in business there are always less managers than workers, and if managers stay separate from the workers as far as marriage goes, they will be more inbred.
Wait til the world runs out of oil and natural gas and global warming floods all of Amsterdam and New York (New Amsterdam.) Then the lineitem containing cost saved will be a much different number, adjusting to whatever the market will bear. These days 5 cents a kilowatthour for electricity is very cheap, one day it might be 50 cents a kWh, and then suddenly everything is miraculously profitable in 15 years.
I predict the equator will stay a rainforest belt, and the Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, where most deserts are located, will the the PV cell belts. We should leave green surface area on Earth green.
I was gonna say just that, that energy storage is the bigger issue than production, especially with wind and solar power, that are intermittent, though solar delivers energy while the people are at work, and when it gets dark, people go home, but still, you need keep the buidlings lit in the dark, or do you? Anyway, I think their solar panels will just be grid-tied, and not much local storage will be implemented, besides some backup power supplies and, guess what, generators that burn gas. And by the way I don't think supercapacitors can store that much energy, their advantage is burst load, they deliver fast, but limited capacity, and using it in say, a car, I'm guessing you'd probably get a less than 10 mile range with the top of the line supercapacitors, as opposed to 150 miles with heavy lead acid batteries that make the car sink through the asphalt, and 300 miles with conventional hydrocarbon storage that keeps the car light.
I think it's more of an experiment on how far you can push people into indignity and how they put up with it and still live on. I expect everyone will be bitching, but in a special way. Hotheaded people don't get far. Maybe people will just avoid flying and drive or ride a train, simply because they dislike being collared like that, at least that's what I'd do, quiet resistance.