Ask the ex-Sov about the productivity of the collective farmers versus the privatization efforts; about the quota systems and the quality of products in the last third of any given month; the availability of consumer products; and the inequity between the Party members, with their own form of scrip and Party-only stores complete with *imported* goods, and the commoners.
Oh, and about the shoe that Nikita used to pound on the podium during his "we will bury you speech" -- in what country was it made? Hint: not the USSR.
It would have been nice to invite Locke and Hobbes to this discussion. Locke makes a strong case for individual property rights, while Hobbes notes the necessity of at least some form of government to mitigate the worst aspects of humanity...
The scope of the Universe is *very* large, and it's very old. That's a lot of dice throws.
Besides, it's not completely random, judging from the fact that physicists are capable of modelling the behavior of a pretty decent part of reality. So, basically, the dice are quite loaded in many regards.
My understanding is that the PRC currently allows several religions to exist, at least in name (read: it typically won't, oh, burn their churches, raid congregations, and so forth -- of the sanctioned ones), and that they are no longer officially atheist.
As for agnosticism, the major tenet of it being an effective refusal to have faith in either existence or nonexistence (namely, refusal to commit) to any form of higher power does mesh very well with science, because it inherently supports questions. Questioning is at the heart of science.
Hasssssssssstur! Haastur! HASTUR! Get over here. Somebody wants to know who y'all are. Oh, and rein in the Shoggoths, too.
Seriously, 'tho, they're fairly nasty, evil, icky, powerful beings from the "Cthulhu Mythos" set of stories by H.P. Lovecraft, 'tho other authors (A. Derleth, possibly C.L. Moore? and so forth) were seriously influenced and to some degree developed further the work.
* It's not forced removal from the classrooms; it's removal from an exam. If they use the time to focus on something else, like basic cellular biology, biochemistry, genetics or what not -- that's still productive and does not necessarily require acceptance of evolution theory. Gel electrophoresis, dissection, details of the metabolism, and so forth will not suddenly collapse because students might not be taught about macro-evolution -- and they're certainly worthy of the label "biology". There is a LOT they can cover and test *very* objectively with questions and answers that are far more difficult to dispute.
Specific questions about, say, Mendelian genetics and the H-W (Hardy-Weinberg? It's been quite a few years...) rules about dominance/recessive proportions in ideal populations lend themselves easily to the difficult-to-dispute due to their very nature as abstract approximations and mathematical constructs; asking, say, about the ancestral relationships between assorted dinos (e.g. therapods) and birds is more difficult in that respect.
* Evolution theory is unlike high school physics, in that the latter tends to be highly mathematical -- and a lot of it (mostly mechanics and E&M, most likely) can be tested in controlled experiments. Evolution theory, by nature of its scale, is far more difficult to test.
History is a closer example, in that its telling varies (often dramatically) with the teller, and that there is far more than can be taught. So interesting, valid stuff like the US Marine presence in Russia following the Bolshevik Revolution, or the role of CIA assets during the Cuban Missile Crisis, tends to get minimized or omitted -- and in many cases, the rest of history does not collapse, either.
Sure, it's religiously motivated, and it's discouraging (as a show of force), but that doesn't mean it's going to lead to rabidly Creationist students who reject all of modern bio.
There are bacteria that consume oil derivatives, right? I wonder if there's something that would eat the plastic in these drives. Heh.
That would restore meanings to a "bug"...
That might provide an interesting, if silly and slow, way to destroy one's data if being raided: smear it with a colony already growing on agar, and figure that they probably won't autoclave the disk...
Bad example, in at least one aspect -- they're a deliberate hybridization of European honey bees and African honey bees, hence the occasional phrase Africanized killer bees. The reason? The more docile European honey bees produce less; the obvious hope was to get docile bees that produced more. Unfortunately, they also got the more aggressive behavior.
That wouldn't have been so bad if they hadn't escaped from confinement, or if we had predators that would cheerfully start munching on 'em, or something else that would balance them out w/o decimating the rest of our Apis mellifera friends.
A better example of natural selection might be the classic case of moths in Industrial Revolution-era England, where the distribution between moths of the same species but with different color schemes varied in with pollution levels, in a sensible way (dark moths are harder to see on soot-covered trees, and get munched less, and vice-versa). It's not speciation, 'tho.
If you accept the premise that your senses may be faulty, then quite possibly yes -- it can be impossible to "prove" anything at all, beyond that you are a... "thing" which seems to be thinking.
Logically, there could be an incredibly malevolent, omnipotent/omniscient being manipulating your every thought. Unless you reject the possibility that something is omnipotence (and that rejection itself requires belief), it's probably impossible. Whether it is or not has been debated for (at least) centuries.
Show me proof that gravity exists everywhere in the Universe.
Show me proof that the universe exists at all, and that your senses can be trusted. Yes, I've read "Meditations", and no, I don't buy into the ontological argument.
Show me proof that yesterday happened, and that it's not all a grand joke by a higher power.
Go study history. Examine, in particular, the Bolshevik/Communist revolutions in the former USSR, China and 'Nam. Consider the Finland vs. USSR conflict in WWII. Consider the Warsaw ghetto. Study the mujahedin vs. the Soviet Red Army. Heck, the US colonists versus England, etc, or the siege of Leningrad -- all situations in which a seriously out-armed group held off a superior enemy force for longer than expected, and sometimes even defeated them outright. He who has the biggest weapons does *not* instantly win, particularly if you're trying not to spread radioactive dust over your own state.
Then, think about whether you'd be willing to drive a tank through a known armed hostile population in an urban environment, where you can't visually identify whether somebody is for or against you, and for all you know the locals might have prepared a barricade of scrapped vehicles to pen you in, or rigged explosives to bury you in rubble.
I believe the difference is between multi-computer cluster (e.g. a room full of old machines connected w/ Fast Ethernet, and all w/ local storage) and a single machine with, say, 2K CPUs all sharing the same basic resources and probably communicating through some specialized bus.
The former can be done with a horde of, say, 486s; the latter is nicely represented by, perhaps, a T3E. The former's a lot cheaper, but it's not really a single mondo computer with one large pool of memory and really fast inter-processor connections...
Heh. I believe there are companies that'll even allow you to specify a desired partitioning scheme.:-) Mostly Linux-oriented businesses, though, not yet anybody on the scale of Dell or Compaq...
Pre-installation, w/ good on-paper documentation + original CDs, critical hardware known to work on all included OSes (and anything that doesn't -- note this...)...
I'm not sure what sort of default config Dell would use, 'tho. Some might want a Win9X-ish setup complete with a desktop environment system ('specially for employees not versed with *nix and for whom *nix is not really part of their job description), while that would make others retch... eh.
Perhaps a graphical *wrapper*. There is, however, a lot to be said for CLI utilities in that they can be scripted/automated a LOT easier, and don't need the overhead of X to run... some things generally are not easily done in GUI environments.
(Example task: given a Linux/DOS/Win9X installation and having just added a new, faster drive -- you've made the new drive the master, and the other the slave. Hunt down every ASCII-text.ini and.cfg file on all FATxx filesystems, and replace 'C:' with 'D:'. For a GUI to easily facilitate something this complex, the designer would most likely have to be either prescient, or completely insane. OTOH, this could be done with Perl, except possibly for the part about checking filesystem type (not sure how at the moment), and that could be faked by checking fstab.)
'specially for something like compiling. With a decently generic Makefile that provides dependency generation and sound default rules and targets, one can cut down project-fiddling time a lot.
I have absolutely no objection to anybody writing, say, a Tk or XForms wrapper 'round, oh, 'make' or even 'gcc' (although the latter would strike me as... weird: it's harder to automate a GUI invocation, and gcc is something that might be invoked with similar but different args dozens to hundreds of times in a row...).
Something like password file editing, or *basic* file management (again, CLI's easier to automate for the "weird" tasks, like removing all files named 'core' from a filesystem), or even fdisk could use a wrapper. But again, these should be wrappers.
I've found copious references to some "Emergency War Power[s?] Act", 1917 and 1933, but
* *no* bill text * not from remotely trustworthy sites. That is, even providing the obvious negative search terms ("alien", "conspiracy", "militia", "jewish", "clinton") which block a LOT of the neo-Nazi / alien enthusiast / conspiracy theorist / radical anti-fed / radical Clinton hater sites, one *still* finds that most of the sites rave and ramble incoherently.
It's possible that Congress specifically authorized the President to do so, though, using the 'necessary and proper' clause and apparently escaping Supreme Court challenge.
Did you read the order? It calls for investigation of the existing tools and their applicabilities, and does not criminalize existing behavior.
If they find that current laws do not apply, then perhaps they do need additional regs; after all, there's little reason that a fellow on a street corner sellin' crack should be more liable than some Hotmail user doing the same, eh?
...but it DOES serve as basically a "heads up". That is, should the 'net be used as a medium for criminal activity, such as selling controlled substances, the Feds will at least have taken a brief look at what they can do to investigate it.
After all, many law enforcement bodies right now don't have that much experience when dealing with investigations of this nature. It's fitting that they figure out what they're allowed to do, and whether or not criminals can evade the normal police tactics simply by going online. The obvious solution is to study it before something big bites them in public.
To do otherwise would be to stick their heads in the sand -- what they DON'T want to happen is, say, a (pre-arrest) Escobar-wannabe buying up "drugs.com" and marketing mail-order cocaine, and DEA agents scratching their heads about how to stop that.
Aye. Back when purchasing my current box (a Dimension R450) -- I did remember to request, specifically, a hardware-based modem, but didn't ask about the sound card (given that I didn't really care. Heck, I used to play _Doom_ on my (silent) P90...). Turns out that at the time, Dell was using Aureal Vortex-based cards (TB Montego) which are OSS-only.
Everything else, 'tho, including the TNT-based video card and the requested IDE tape drive, worked fine in Linux. That's spiffy.
This adds nicely to leverage w/ the hardware companies...
'coz most nations consider it a *bad* idea to anger a not-exactly-pacifist nation of over 1 billion people that'll cheerfully cut off trade relations if one even thinks about officially recognizing the ROC? That's one heck of a market to lose for a matter of principle.
Some of this you can get directly from the FEC (www.fec.gov).
The "League of Women Voters" (www.lwv.org) has a pretty good list of links to sites such as Common Cause (www.commoncause.org); that one may help you a lot.
* Apathy. Try to get people to care about, say, Hun Sen and his government. Or, the technical details of SDI or THAAD. Or the justification for a nuclear-strike-capable submarine fleet. Or agricultural subsidies. This ties in neatly with the next issue. Individuals do contribute more $ to campaigns than businesses, but it's easier to contribute $ than time and attention.
While only funding things that the masses appear to care about might be a dream for some, it'd be a nightmare for most.
* Education. Most of us aren't clued enough for many of the decisions. I probably shouldn't, say, be determining the details of transportation infrastructure funding, because I don't have the background in it. Representatives that are in specific committees have the chance to put in that time... There are good reasons why the Senate is based upon 2-per-state and *long* 6-year terms, and a lot of that is meant to avoid any potential tyranny of the masses.
* Scalability: it doesn't. You can't motivate the masses with the same speed, and some processes (such as foreign policy) require response time... so if you set short deadlines, you'd mostly get the self-selected types first: the most 'activist' on any side of a particular part. Many of these people are not going to be the thoughtful, contemplative types. This could be extremely dangerous...
* Coherence, or lack of it. Sometimes, you really need a coherent strategy. That rarely comes from groups of millions of people -- or do you think that Kasparov has a better chance against a single grandmaster than the votes of a teeming mass of people?
* In reality, the current system works reasonably well. You can write your representatives and encourage allies to do so as well; you can make thy voice known in a myriad of ways... and many of us can run for office.
Eh. At the very least, it's possible to verify with a decent degree of likelihood that
a) Dan Rather is, actually, a live human being named Dan Rather, and not, say, an organization, a corpse, or a dalmation.
b) Dan Rather has been the same Dan Rather that's been a news reporter or anchor for the past don't-remember-how-many-years. His statements and misstatements can be tracked reasonably well, since it's unlikely he shapeshifts and assumes the identity of, say, Ted Koppel.
c) Judging from the past, it's possible to stalk Dan Rather while muttering strange quotes from songs, and thus verify a lot about who he is.
Ditto for regular print journalists -- they accumulate histories, and we can derive their biases from such. For instance, in the case of Mr. Rather, we may rest assured that he is generally relatively less antagonistic towards his subjects than, say, Sam Donaldson when the latter spots a mailman, er, questionable guest. (Sorry; just had the odd vision of him sinking his teeth into the leg of a flustered press secretary...:) )
We know that certain journalists may be biased towards the left (such as, in general, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) or the right (the Tribune-Review). That, and if we take the time, we may track down who people are and what they stand for... plus, it takes some resources to publish on the web. Print publications also do tend to oust reporters caught spinning blatant untruths (such as the _Boston Globe_ and those of its staff who apparently feel that their own ideals and biases trump the truth... and the blatantly anti-military _CNN_ team who "reported" as unambiguous suggestions that the military gassed defectors in... 'Nam, I think it was supposed to be).
On the other hand, one could probably (to over-use an example) enter a false PGP public key for an unfortunate Mr. Rather into keyservers with an address "dan_rather@cbs.com", and publish bogus messages under his name. More so, any homey can, without taking somebody else's name, invent a resume full of pretentious credentials; write diatribes for the net; and even supplement it with touched-up photos, out-of-context data from primary sources, and so forth -- and some schmoes will believe that.
There's a lot of credulity regarding the 'net. Witness the relative success of e-mail chains (hoaxes of *all* kinds for instance)...
Slashdot Mirror
Ask the ex-Sov about the productivity of the collective farmers versus the privatization efforts; about the quota systems and the quality of products in the last third of any given month; the availability of consumer products; and the inequity between the Party members, with their own form of scrip and Party-only stores complete with *imported* goods, and the commoners.
Oh, and about the shoe that Nikita used to pound on the podium during his "we will bury you speech" -- in what country was it made? Hint: not the USSR.
It would have been nice to invite Locke and Hobbes to this discussion. Locke makes a strong case for individual property rights, while Hobbes notes the necessity of at least some form of government to mitigate the worst aspects of humanity...
The scope of the Universe is *very* large, and it's very old. That's a lot of dice throws.
Besides, it's not completely random, judging from the fact that physicists are capable of modelling the behavior of a pretty decent part of reality. So, basically, the dice are quite loaded in many regards.
My understanding is that the PRC currently allows several religions to exist, at least in name (read: it typically won't, oh, burn their churches, raid congregations, and so forth -- of the sanctioned ones), and that they are no longer officially atheist.
As for agnosticism, the major tenet of it being an effective refusal to have faith in either existence or nonexistence (namely, refusal to commit) to any form of higher power does mesh very well with science, because it inherently supports questions. Questioning is at the heart of science.
Hasssssssssstur! Haastur! HASTUR! Get over here. Somebody wants to know who y'all are. Oh, and rein in the Shoggoths, too.
Seriously, 'tho, they're fairly nasty, evil, icky, powerful beings from the "Cthulhu Mythos" set of stories by H.P. Lovecraft, 'tho other authors (A. Derleth, possibly C.L. Moore? and so forth) were seriously influenced and to some degree developed further the work.
And, er, these guys you would not want to meet.
'ulimit'. I believe it's been supported for quite a while.
* It's not forced removal from the classrooms; it's removal from an exam. If they use the time to focus on something else, like basic cellular biology, biochemistry, genetics or what not -- that's still productive and does not necessarily require acceptance of evolution theory. Gel electrophoresis, dissection, details of the metabolism, and so forth will not suddenly collapse because students might not be taught about macro-evolution -- and they're certainly worthy of the label "biology". There is a LOT they can cover and test *very* objectively with questions and answers that are far more difficult to dispute.
Specific questions about, say, Mendelian genetics and the H-W (Hardy-Weinberg? It's been quite a few years...) rules about dominance/recessive proportions in ideal populations lend themselves easily to the difficult-to-dispute due to their very nature as abstract approximations and mathematical constructs; asking, say, about the ancestral relationships between assorted dinos (e.g. therapods) and birds is more difficult in that respect.
* Evolution theory is unlike high school physics, in that the latter tends to be highly mathematical -- and a lot of it (mostly mechanics and E&M, most likely) can be tested in controlled experiments. Evolution theory, by nature of its scale, is far more difficult to test.
History is a closer example, in that its telling varies (often dramatically) with the teller, and that there is far more than can be taught. So interesting, valid stuff like the US Marine presence in Russia following the Bolshevik Revolution, or the role of CIA assets during the Cuban Missile Crisis, tends to get minimized or omitted -- and in many cases, the rest of history does not collapse, either.
Sure, it's religiously motivated, and it's discouraging (as a show of force), but that doesn't mean it's going to lead to rabidly Creationist students who reject all of modern bio.
There are bacteria that consume oil derivatives, right? I wonder if there's something that would eat the plastic in these drives. Heh.
That would restore meanings to a "bug"...
That might provide an interesting, if silly and slow, way to destroy one's data if being raided: smear it with a colony already growing on agar, and figure that they probably won't autoclave the disk...
Bad example, in at least one aspect -- they're a deliberate hybridization of European honey bees and African honey bees, hence the occasional phrase Africanized killer bees. The reason? The more docile European honey bees produce less; the obvious hope was to get docile bees that produced more. Unfortunately, they also got the more aggressive behavior.
That wouldn't have been so bad if they hadn't escaped from confinement, or if we had predators that would cheerfully start munching on 'em, or something else that would balance them out w/o decimating the rest of our Apis mellifera friends.
A better example of natural selection might be the classic case of moths in Industrial Revolution-era England, where the distribution between moths of the same species but with different color schemes varied in with pollution levels, in a sensible way (dark moths are harder to see on soot-covered trees, and get munched less, and vice-versa). It's not speciation, 'tho.
If you accept the premise that your senses may be faulty, then quite possibly yes -- it can be impossible to "prove" anything at all, beyond that you are a... "thing" which seems to be thinking.
Logically, there could be an incredibly malevolent, omnipotent/omniscient being manipulating your every thought. Unless you reject the possibility that something is omnipotence (and that rejection itself requires belief), it's probably impossible. Whether it is or not has been debated for (at least) centuries.
Show me proof that gravity exists everywhere in the Universe.
Show me proof that the universe exists at all, and that your senses can be trusted. Yes, I've read "Meditations", and no, I don't buy into the ontological argument.
Show me proof that yesterday happened, and that it's not all a grand joke by a higher power.
So, what do you _want_ to be taught?
Sure it does, if you go by the OT...
Go study history. Examine, in particular, the Bolshevik/Communist revolutions in the former USSR, China and 'Nam. Consider the Finland vs. USSR conflict in WWII. Consider the Warsaw ghetto. Study the mujahedin vs. the Soviet Red Army. Heck, the US colonists versus England, etc, or the siege of Leningrad -- all situations in which a seriously out-armed group held off a superior enemy force for longer than expected, and sometimes even defeated them outright. He who has the biggest weapons does *not* instantly win, particularly if you're trying not to spread radioactive dust over your own state.
Then, think about whether you'd be willing to drive a tank through a known armed hostile population in an urban environment, where you can't visually identify whether somebody is for or against you, and for all you know the locals might have prepared a barricade of scrapped vehicles to pen you in, or rigged explosives to bury you in rubble.
You sure aren't going to be opening that hatch.
I believe the difference is between multi-computer cluster (e.g. a room full of old machines connected w/ Fast Ethernet, and all w/ local storage) and a single machine with, say, 2K CPUs all sharing the same basic resources and probably communicating through some specialized bus.
The former can be done with a horde of, say, 486s; the latter is nicely represented by, perhaps, a T3E. The former's a lot cheaper, but it's not really a single mondo computer with one large pool of memory and really fast inter-processor connections...
Heh. I believe there are companies that'll even allow you to specify a desired partitioning scheme. :-) Mostly Linux-oriented businesses, though, not yet anybody on the scale of Dell or Compaq...
Pre-installation, w/ good on-paper documentation + original CDs, critical hardware known to work on all included OSes (and anything that doesn't -- note this...)...
I'm not sure what sort of default config Dell would use, 'tho. Some might want a Win9X-ish setup complete with a desktop environment system ('specially for employees not versed with *nix and for whom *nix is not really part of their job description), while that would make others retch... eh.
Perhaps a graphical *wrapper*. There is, however, a lot to be said for CLI utilities in that they can be scripted/automated a LOT easier, and don't need the overhead of X to run... some things generally are not easily done in GUI environments.
.ini and .cfg file on all FATxx filesystems, and replace 'C:' with 'D:'. For a GUI to easily facilitate something this complex, the designer would most likely have to be either prescient, or completely insane. OTOH, this could be done with Perl, except possibly for the part about checking filesystem type (not sure how at the moment), and that could be faked by checking fstab.)
(Example task: given a Linux/DOS/Win9X installation and having just added a new, faster drive -- you've made the new drive the master, and the other the slave. Hunt down every ASCII-text
'specially for something like compiling. With a decently generic Makefile that provides dependency generation and sound default rules and targets, one can cut down project-fiddling time a lot.
I have absolutely no objection to anybody writing, say, a Tk or XForms wrapper 'round, oh, 'make' or even 'gcc' (although the latter would strike me as... weird: it's harder to automate a GUI invocation, and gcc is something that might be invoked with similar but different args dozens to hundreds of times in a row...).
Something like password file editing, or *basic* file management (again, CLI's easier to automate for the "weird" tasks, like removing all files named 'core' from a filesystem), or even fdisk could use a wrapper. But again, these should be wrappers.
I've found copious references to some "Emergency War Power[s?] Act", 1917 and 1933, but
* *no* bill text
* not from remotely trustworthy sites. That is, even providing the obvious negative search terms ("alien", "conspiracy", "militia", "jewish", "clinton") which block a LOT of the neo-Nazi / alien enthusiast / conspiracy theorist / radical anti-fed / radical Clinton hater sites, one *still* finds that most of the sites rave and ramble incoherently.
It's possible that Congress specifically authorized the President to do so, though, using the 'necessary and proper' clause and apparently escaping Supreme Court challenge.
Did you read the order? It calls for investigation of the existing tools and their applicabilities, and does not criminalize existing behavior.
If they find that current laws do not apply, then perhaps they do need additional regs; after all, there's little reason that a fellow on a street corner sellin' crack should be more liable than some Hotmail user doing the same, eh?
...but it DOES serve as basically a "heads up". That is, should the 'net be used as a medium for criminal activity, such as selling controlled substances, the Feds will at least have taken a brief look at what they can do to investigate it.
After all, many law enforcement bodies right now don't have that much experience when dealing with investigations of this nature. It's fitting that they figure out what they're allowed to do, and whether or not criminals can evade the normal police tactics simply by going online. The obvious solution is to study it before something big bites them in public.
To do otherwise would be to stick their heads in the sand -- what they DON'T want to happen is, say, a (pre-arrest) Escobar-wannabe buying up "drugs.com" and marketing mail-order cocaine, and DEA agents scratching their heads about how to stop that.
Aye. Back when purchasing my current box (a Dimension R450) -- I did remember to request, specifically, a hardware-based modem, but didn't ask about the sound card (given that I didn't really care. Heck, I used to play _Doom_ on my (silent) P90...). Turns out that at the time, Dell was using Aureal Vortex-based cards (TB Montego) which are OSS-only.
Everything else, 'tho, including the TNT-based video card and the requested IDE tape drive, worked fine in Linux. That's spiffy.
This adds nicely to leverage w/ the hardware companies...
Or, at a congressional aide...
"Message for you, sir!"
{keels over}
:)
'coz most nations consider it a *bad* idea to anger a not-exactly-pacifist nation of over 1 billion people that'll cheerfully cut off trade relations if one even thinks about officially recognizing the ROC? That's one heck of a market to lose for a matter of principle.
Some of this you can get directly from the FEC (www.fec.gov).
The "League of Women Voters" (www.lwv.org) has a pretty good list of links to sites such as Common Cause (www.commoncause.org); that one may help you a lot.
* Apathy.
Try to get people to care about, say, Hun Sen and his government. Or, the technical details of SDI or THAAD. Or the justification for a nuclear-strike-capable submarine fleet. Or agricultural subsidies. This ties in neatly with the next issue. Individuals do contribute more $ to campaigns than businesses, but it's easier to contribute $ than time and attention.
While only funding things that the masses appear to care about might be a dream for some, it'd be a nightmare for most.
* Education.
Most of us aren't clued enough for many of the decisions. I probably shouldn't, say, be determining the details of transportation infrastructure funding, because I don't have the background in it. Representatives that are in specific committees have the chance to put in that time... There are good reasons why the Senate is based upon 2-per-state and *long* 6-year terms, and a lot of that is meant to avoid any potential tyranny of the masses.
* Scalability: it doesn't.
You can't motivate the masses with the same speed, and some processes (such as foreign policy) require response time... so if you set short deadlines, you'd mostly get the self-selected types first: the most 'activist' on any side of a particular part. Many of these people are not going to be the thoughtful, contemplative types. This could be extremely dangerous...
* Coherence, or lack of it.
Sometimes, you really need a coherent strategy. That rarely comes from groups of millions of people -- or do you think that Kasparov has a better chance against a single grandmaster than the votes of a teeming mass of people?
* In reality, the current system works reasonably well. You can write your representatives and encourage allies to do so as well; you can make thy voice known in a myriad of ways... and many of us can run for office.
Eh. At the very least, it's possible to verify with a decent degree of likelihood that
:) )
a) Dan Rather is, actually, a live human being named Dan Rather, and not, say, an organization, a corpse, or a dalmation.
b) Dan Rather has been the same Dan Rather that's been a news reporter or anchor for the past don't-remember-how-many-years. His statements and misstatements can be tracked reasonably well, since it's unlikely he shapeshifts and assumes the identity of, say, Ted Koppel.
c) Judging from the past, it's possible to stalk Dan Rather while muttering strange quotes from songs, and thus verify a lot about who he is.
Ditto for regular print journalists -- they accumulate histories, and we can derive their biases from such. For instance, in the case of Mr. Rather, we may rest assured that he is generally relatively less antagonistic towards his subjects than, say, Sam Donaldson when the latter spots a mailman, er, questionable guest. (Sorry; just had the odd vision of him sinking his teeth into the leg of a flustered press secretary...
We know that certain journalists may be biased towards the left (such as, in general, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) or the right (the Tribune-Review). That, and if we take the time, we may track down who people are and what they stand for... plus, it takes some resources to publish on the web. Print publications also do tend to oust reporters caught spinning blatant untruths (such as the _Boston Globe_ and those of its staff who apparently feel that their own ideals and biases trump the truth... and the blatantly anti-military _CNN_ team who "reported" as unambiguous suggestions that the military gassed defectors in... 'Nam, I think it was supposed to be).
On the other hand, one could probably (to over-use an example) enter a false PGP public key for an unfortunate Mr. Rather into keyservers with an address "dan_rather@cbs.com", and publish bogus messages under his name. More so, any homey can, without taking somebody else's name, invent a resume full of pretentious credentials; write diatribes for the net; and even supplement it with touched-up photos, out-of-context data from primary sources, and so forth -- and some schmoes will believe that.
There's a lot of credulity regarding the 'net. Witness the relative success of e-mail chains (hoaxes of *all* kinds for instance)...