Yea, we can always trust the NYT not to sit on a story for a year or more just because they consulted the government and were asked to not report it. I mean, that whole thing with the NYT and the warrantless wiretapping? Just our imaginations. Meanwhile, in the real world, NYT as gatekeeper makes it their responsibility to report things of importance to the public. That doesn't need to include reporting actually classified documents. It's often enough to see those documents or simply talk to a person intimately familiar with them and use that as a basis for a story. The documents being printed then is only important to prove the case if the government calls the reporter and their source liars. In the end, it might be wise to proactively disclose some of the reports for this reason.
Whatever the case, things like 30 civilians bombed by the military by accident are something newsworthy. And given how much Americans are insulated by all the death of war with all the advancements in technology and technique to keep soldiers alive and "the enemy" dead, it's really important to make sure that "the enemy" is actually the enemy. I can't believe reporters at the NYT could not see that very real disconnect that needed to be reported on precisely when fighting a "war on terror" has a lot of "collateral damage", which should be its own sort of terror that should be on the soul of Americans.
No, he's being very transparent about how government works. What better sign of how government will ignore petitions than to setup an official web site to collect them just to ignore them? As for "by the people, for the people", you're just not one of "the people" [that matter] unless you have money and political connections--or can be used for political gain.
Considering the lead Microsoft had in the mobile phone market, they were there in 2002 (before Blackberry, I believe), but somehow they never made it work. I'm not sure exactly why. It's actually surprising, not that they failed, but how big their failure actually is.
They knew it was important, they tried to get the market, had a huge lead, and they failed. It's a little more than 'inadequate.'
To me, it's not really surprising at all. It's the same reason planned economies fail. A wholly top-down approach fails a lot of the time. The sad part, from MS's perspective, should be not realizing where they could utilize their monopoly to extend into safer arenas with clear pathways that top-down market acquisition could be achieved. But, then, MS's movement into mobile phones was presumably precipitated by fear--ie, they did get the top-down view right that smart phones would be a major player in the future*. Fear is a great way to waste money and market share.
*Then again, MS has thrown money at all sorts of ventures that may, in the future, be a major player. And only later, when the technology developed, was the market realized and by then MS had missed the boat. Meanwhile, its repeated attempts to leverage its "gems"--Windows and/or Office--have generally failed. Perhaps that's the real reason I'm not surprised that MS has yet another failure. Of course, most ventures in business are failures. It's just that most ventures that fail big close because they don't have tons of money behind them. Oh, and this applies just as much to Google, Apple, etc.
That's because the added information in the 3rd dimension is useful, but in a movie or a picture, I don't need to see what's behind the tree. I don't care.
Actually, I think you've gotten it backwards. Imagine a murder mystery in 3D. People on the left side of the theater can see behind one person's back and "know" who the killer is much earlier than people in the center or right. Yet, people on the right side of the theater can see behind yet another person's back and "know" who the killer is much earlier than people in the center or left. Meanwhile, the people in the center may be just well left clueless if the end of the movie is left ambiguous.
You see, the point of a movie is that if you're supposed to "see what's behind the tree", then the movie is supposed to show you. If it's too subtle about it, people will miss it and it's a bad movie. If it's too heavy handed, people will be treated as idiots and it's a bad movie. Well, by bad, I mean in direction as a movie--everything else about it could be great.
In other words, even if the tools to build 3D were easy and widely available for the web, the vast majority of the web is 2D dimension content where people aren't supposed to have things hidden from them. That doesn't mean the content isn't crap or biased or whatever--the figurative 3D tree on a news site would be very interesting, though. In short, the point isn't that people don't care who's standing behind the curtain. It's that they're there to consume figuratively 2D information.
Now, 3D games are a whole other business and that's a booming because games are often about a certain about of occlusion to/from others and mystery.
Um, no. He never mentioned the GOP or Republicans. It's just that the GOP/Republicans espouse trickle-down economics, which you correctly correlated to what was being discussed. Hence, you presumed he was talking about the GOP because he was refuting GOP talking points. That Democrats also behave under trickle-down economics means that the GP's post is spot on without having to name names because it's behavior being discussed, not political posturing.
Besides, as much as Democrats aren't "good guys", at least they seem more willing to waste money on health care than bombs. Then, again, I wish Democrats were more like the tax-and-spend Democrats of old, since that'd seem to be the biggest problem we have today; tying spending to taxes would inherently limit government influence and cutting taxes alone obviously is no means of cutting spending in any reasonable span of time, so the whole rhetoric along those lines is mostly crazy.
Kernel code is like lots of other code: a lot of it is executed rarely and not performance critical. There's setup code, occasional permissions checking, etc.
A lot of it is executed rarely because at least half the code is drivers and one usually doesn't have but one sound card, one (or two) network card, etc vs the hundreds of sound card drivers, hundreds of network card drivers, etc. Further, a major point of the kernel is that it, by design, isn't supposed to be executed a lot because most CPU time should be devoted to user space programs. So, to that end, you could say it's not "performance critical". But, that's more in line with the point that precisely because kernels are generally developed so well, they rarely have "performance critical" code. Once you start throwing scripting into it, I think that goes out the window.
In addition, this is not to replace plain C modules (although it may be useful for prototyping), it's for complex and dynamic configurability.
To this, I could see some benefit. But, honestly, I'd feel it safe and saner if it were a language that was reducible to a FSA. The point that "Dangerous code can be disabled at the byte-code level (prevention of endless loop DoS etc)" in the slide really only works in that context, anyways. In any case, Lua is nothing of the sort.
Right now, there are two ways of handling that. One is to invent complex configuration files and data structures, sometimes even little interpreters. The kernel is full of those. They are error prone, complicated, and require a lot of effort to maintain.
Which is an argument for making a good, universal FSA language. It won't remove the being error prone or complicated because that's the nature of the beast and papering over it with a Turing complete language is no sort of answer. But having them all share the same language makes sense from a maintenance standpoint. For example, the BPF was repurposed for syscall filtering--a little admission that I'm not sure entirely where BPF stands language wise although I don't think it's turing complete--which could probably be refactored into a more general filtering language which could be refactored into an even more generic FSA language which could likely be used to refactor a lot of other code.
The other is to put complex decision making into user-space, but that involves context switches and other overhead. It also means lots of special-purpose and redundant code, and lots of documentation and complexity. The kernel uses both of those strategies extensively, one reason why it's so big.
Generally speaking, context switches aren't a big deal in most OSs/kernels today. Yes, certainly having context switches means an extra overhead and stuffing some code or even all code in the kernel would certainly speed it up. And certainly if a lot more code moved into user space would be measurably slower. But kernel design today seems to try to have a balance between the two, especially with considerations of stability and security. The fact is, lots of code is special-purpose because it's for specific hardware. And code being redundant is more a function of maintaining multiple trees--which admittedly having a single kernel allows a lot of unity--but there's no reason that out-of-kernel-space means out-of-the-kernel-source if the code is still rather kernel specific.
After all, the whole point is precisely that a lot of potential kernel code is "executed rarely and not performance critical" yet remaining outside kernel memory gives the system greater protection and hence speeds up development and generally makes the code easier to maintain. Documentation is a wholly separate beast, in any case, and that's more a point of maintainers or distributors demanding good documentation before code is accepted.
Putting Lua+LuaJIT in the kernel is likely faster than either of th
No, I'd say it's the fact of marketing that's a huge problem. Specifically, the word of mouth is that one wants to use "[MS] Office [365/13]" when most the time it's "[MS] Word" and very sparingly "[MS] Excel" that people want to use and even then, really, "[MS] Word [97]" (and "[MS] Excel [97]") would do the trick just fine for most people. Of course, OpenOffice far surpasses those meager requirements, but word of mouth doesn't talk about that. And most people don't really have to consider the real cost for MS Office (except businesses, but then they'll probably settle on MS Office anyways because "no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft").
In short, unless public perception changes that MS Office is *the* office/word processing software and instead that OpenOffice and MS Office are both office/word processing software of their own equal standing... But, I don't see that happening as too few people really experience the cost of MS Office in a tangible sense.
lol.. WIPO is the strongest organization to make the case and get results. It is also in the UN so in this case it is synonymous.
Which circles again back to the point of pandering to one's own self-interest over one's principles. Yea, sometimes principles don't "get results".
You are making a mountain out of a mole hill and it isn't anything near what you are insisting. His legal team most likely filed the complaint as they are listed on the complaint and they are following ICANN procedure.
Good to know his legal team just does whatever it likes without consulting Ron Paul. I guess if his legal team had a good case for suing some orphans, they'd just jump on it. And even if one believes they would, it would certainly be within Ron Paul's power to stop his legal team and to chastise them for doing things he does not wish to happen. As for "following ICANN procedure", I don't see why he wouldn't just try suing Verisign for trademark infringement to obtain control over ronpaul.com instead of some obtuse procedure that's really irrelevant since it's Verisign, not ICANN, who maintains the.com servers.
Regardless of what you think they can do, regardless of what you think they should do, his legal team is going to do what they think is best and Ron Paul or anyone else would be very stupid to ignore legal advice.
Again, with the orphans. Just because you have grounds to sue, doesn't mean you should. Just because you can use the federal court system, doesn't mean you should. If you believe that something is wrong, you shouldn't follow through; you shouldn't just blindly follow whatever legal advice your lawyer gives you.
It doesn't mean what you think it means, it doesn't really even matter outside of him pissing his fans off for taking the domain from them.
Given he's retiring, you're right. It's the perfect time to ring clear his true colors because he's not up for reelection. Of course, I'm sure there's plenty of people who were voting in Ron Paul because he was an (R) or because of all the nice earmarks he swung their way, so even then, it probably didn't matter a lot. I guess one could even say it doesn't matter much for libertarianism because clearly Ron Paul seeking to dethrone himself doesn't inherently tarnish the name even if he's one of the most well-known spokesmen for the cause--which is quite a blow for the Libertarian Party.
In many ways, you're right, it's a mountain out of a mole hill. It's just money. It's just bits in a record in a computer somewhere. It's just one person who says one thing and does another. It happens all the time. No one really gets hurt. Nothing really important changes.
I guess, in the end, that may be the real truth of it. Ron Paul is no mountain. He's more of a mole hill.
Actually, he is going through WIPO for their Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy which was added to the UN in 1974. The reason he is using WIPO is because it deals with what is called intellectual property and has been used in several high profile cases.
So, he wants to go through the World Intellectual Property Organization? Sounds like an outside organization to me. And before you say something about the US being bound under the WIPO because of US treaties or something similar--the same could be said about the UN--, the general point stands that Ron Paul and like-minded individuals precisely wish to undo such treaties and such intertwining international interests. Besides, as you note, the WIPO is part of the UN (it is after 1974) and that is presumably because the UN is a header organization for a lot of sub-organization which all function as international intertwining agents.
There might be other avenues. But this is the logical one.
Funny. Last I checked,.com is controlled by Verisign and Verisign is wholly bound by US law as the.com servers are in US territory--again hence the whole ICE/UN(WIPO) concerns and many people wanting more UN (or other body) control. To say it's the "logical" avenue only works if one presumes that one considers that the US is and should be subordinate to the wishes of the WIPO (and considering how the US seems willing to ignore the WTO, a similar organization, over gambling...). Nah, it's only logical if one considers it acceptable to pander to the WIPO when it's convenient, damn one's prior espoused convictions or belief that there's another way.
Just because the function of ridding domains of squatters is at the UN does not mean the rest of the UN's operations or conduct is legit.
Except that (a) Ron Paul standards for a lack of outward interference from organizations like the UN and (b) there are options (ICE comes to mind) for trying to deal with domain name disputes that wouldn't require such outward interference. So, your analogy would be better served to, say, heavily criticize FBI involvement in internal State affairs and then calling up the FBI instead of the LA cops to deal with something within their purview of power.
No, this really just smells like kowtowing to the UN because somehow Ron Paul thinks it looks better than mixing it in with ICE given just how much people have hostility about ICE precisely because it seems to usurp UN granted powers and be generally arbitrary--which seems to be the core platform of why so many Republicans don't want outward interference. Well, one can't really have it both ways and so Ron Paul really should make up his mind and not try playing both fields.
Don't worry, Ron Paul is just demonstrate that he's a true Republican. Sure, he takes principled stands..until money is involved and he can get/save money. Of course, such was clear when your idea to make a smaller government is to join that government and do nothing effective for decades to actually shrink government. Maybe joining was some sort of a protest? Well, RMS protests against proprietary software and as much as people give him slack, they still see how it tries very hard to live by his code. But the simple truth is, a true sign of character is holding to your principles precisely when it's hardest to do so. But, that doesn't give one carte blanche to ignore them on one of the most unimportant things one can imagine, his vanity plate for the internet.
So, I salute you, Ron Paul, for showing just how much you care about your facade.
I'm certainly not a fan, since I think the look is a step backwards and Metro is retarded for the start menu, but I don't hate it. Get a start menu replacer and it works quite well.
"Warning: Smoking Adobe/Microsoft/Apple/etc products has been shown that it may increase the chances of cancer and hallucinations about said software being good."
Of course it solves the problem...for Adobe. Just like ActiveX warnings solved the problem for MS or UAC solved the problem for MS. Instead of fundamentally fixing a broken system by removing or mitigating all the attack issues, the onus is put on the user to make the correct choice up front by giving very vague information on just precisely might happen without any possibility to mitigate or revert what actually happens. Hence not even a genius could make the correct choice because there's often too little information on what it means to allow something to proceed and to little ability to stop bad things from happening once you allow a harmless looking program (Internet Explorer or "Internet Explorer" want to do system wide changes!) to start.
It's one to say that a user deserves a system format if they ignorantly type in their password for "rm -rf/". It's quite another when "MS Word wants to run a flash object in a low-security context" results in a system format because flash and Windows are flawed. But, *shrug*. Keep CYOA Adobe.
But Flash remains a remarkably viable platform with mature development tools for animation, video and games. Amanita Design comes vividly to mind with games like Samorost, Machinarium, and Botanicula.
In the same way ActiveX remains a remarkably viable platform with mature development tools. Ie, precisely because it's a very large attack vector and it's used both in local and network modes, it's a massive headache for most people who would prefer their games and their internet do-dads to be separate. That way the internet version can be locked down massively with frequent updates and a push for the idea that throwing away any state is just fine while the local games version can be years out of date and very loose on the system with state data being very important. But, again and again that just hasn't worked out--Java is another good example of that.
Animation in adds and badly designed websites don't go away simply because their developers have migrated to HTML5.
No kidding. And by the same token, audio/video tag blocking needs to be a standard feature of web browsers *now* instead of waiting for the massive abuses that will occur when it's more commonly used. That will hopefully (1) heavily discourage developers making badly designed HTML5 sites that depend on that crap and (2) at least allow people to forceablly block the crap even if it breaks sites just like blocking flash can do now.
So, Flash is merely a symptom of the disease and not the disease itself. And you're right, Flash has provided plenty of stuff of value. Still, Flash and all Flash-like solutions (even javascript+html5) are crap. I guess Java and ActiveX have turned me all jaded--though at least they were fast.
PS - Personally, I especially hate flash a lot because of its absurd system requirements to play even the simplest of games--with a 2GHz cpu and 1GB RAM seemingly a minimal spec for a simple 2d platformer. I don't see HTML5+javascript being in the future particularly better on this front. But, then, it'd seem obvious that HTML5+javascript is't a platform for games. By the same token, flash isn't a platform for games. Twisting a platform for badly drawn animations into a video + gaming platform? Impressive, sure. But I just don't honestly get how most people can stand flash from a use perspective.:/
What part of "don't do written/verbal diarrhea on the internet" and "if you do so anyways, don't use your real name" is all about fear? I mean, part of me is happy about Facebook because it sort of proves the idea that if enough people engage in that sort of written diarrhea dumping every little bit of their life that it becomes such an annoying and boring waste that only a small handful of people (or maybe no one) will bother to follow, hence proving the idea that "the truth will set your free" and "information wants to be free" can be fulfilled.
And then I look at how much (a) Facebook and others are profiting off of this using data mining and such and how nefariously it could all be used and (b) just how much it really isn't being ignored. Facebook started off as a sort of college social club with almost high school-like mentality. Its net result has been to include a lot more people back into that high school-like mentality--where probably through nothing else but isolation that sort of thing ended in high school and so social circles ended up being a lot smaller and of much more limited scope. Of course, perhaps I'd feel a whole lot better if "high school-like mentality" was a positive thing.
As I recall, at the time in Sept 2007 theinterbank lending market was severely depressed, effectively meaning that banks wanted to wait out the ax dropping on other banks (ie, the next Leiman Brothers) before lending out money to other banks. But, interbank lending is the primary means of allowing banks to overcome short-term shortfalls in money supplies--as they pay out in cash for payroll just to have it redeposited by the same person or someone else a few days later. Something like a bank run on one bank without an ability to borrow money for the next day? Yea, that'll ruin an otherwise healthy bank. Meanwhile, sure, the unhealthy banks would fail along the way, but there'd be most (all?) of the collateral damage the GP mentioned.
So, while it's a conjecture on whether a bank run would happen (IIRC, it did on WaMu) or that it would spread out in a fashion the FDIC couldn't handle (IIRC, the FDIC was at least strained after all the bank failures that *did* happen so I don't exactly expect they'd be able to contain a domino effect alone), it seemed important at the time to bandage the problem and fix the problems behind the scene instead of trying to "endure the pain" when that pain would translate into potentially millions of people suddenly have substantial and instantaneous economic troubles of their own instead of a multi-year but painful transition--and no matter how you look at it, it's a multi-year transition when millions of peoples are suddenly or semi-suddenly effected by something.
As for not getting wasted in the future? Well, I wholeheartedly agree with that sentiment. But it's the process of good regulation to catch/stop "Too Big to Fail" and not wait and just let massive failure and economic hardship to occur as if that magically would prevent it from happening again--helpful hint, that ten years of seeming prosperity at a bank with the CEO receiving hundreds of millions of dollars and shareholders seeing years of record profits/dividends just to see their bank fail and at least the latter to lose most of it doesn't do a lot to prevent the pattern from happening again. Most "investors" are blinded by greed and not involved enough to make good decisions--blame 401ks and mutual plans marketed on high returns. And most "investment banks" shouldn't exist, but that's not something you can suddenly fix--reinstating Glass-Steagall would help.
But since actually fixing problems isn't what most politicians nor voters are about.... I mean, even during the crisis the whole "don't get wasted in the future" only came in the form of "punish the banks" which misses the point. There's nothing to stop us from fixing the actual problems right now. And punishment is just a matter of due process that should already exist. If those parts aren't there, then all that is really showing is a visceral anger.*
*Off-topic, I know, but it always reminds me of GWB's visit to the WTC site on 9/14/2001 and how all you could hear was the calls for vengence. And look what it lead to. And ask yourself was the problem fundamentally solved. I don't think so.:~(
At Harvard, I would have expected "Introduction to Congress" to be taught by an former member of Congress, but it's just an ordinary instructor.
You talk to a[n] [ex-]Congressman to learn how to be elected. You talk to a lobbyist to see how Congress works. You talk to a citizen to learn how Congress doesn't.
"The story also notes that the Post relied on software from Symantec, the same security software that failed to detect intrusions at The New York Times for many months."
Golly, it's almost as if relying upon detection after the fact or at entry point is no real protection. Oh, but you say, defense in depth! Well, defense in depth is great. But, intrusion detection of the sort is like tissue paper when you might get thousands of attacks daily. The only real defense is actually having software that isn't exploitable. And that means having (a) open software you can analyze, (b) developers/vendors of that software who will quickly address problems, (c) open disclosure so you don't have to wait months to find out you might already be being hacked--giving you the option to simply stop using software if it's hackable--, (d) multiple servers running multiple software stacks so you have something to switch to for (c), and (e) having a strong push for possible problems so you don't have to rely upon (b) because (b) is just a bad hack to the truth that no software is perfect--as that's a broken record if it's said all the time, as it's meant to explain the *occasional* security bug.
Oh, and I think this also highlights the whole point that treating security as a joke shows the joke's on you. The real thing to worry about is just how bad the US Government's security score is. If you at all believe that government is generally worse than private industry--not something I particularly believe given just how bad private industry is--, then the US as a whole is fucked at least as far as any concerns for keeping US Government held data private from the Chinese or other hackers. All things considered, it makes one wonder if the data China has--not necessarily even their government--would put Wikileaks to shame.
It is amazing what software companies can escape with, things that in other engineering fields would totally blast them companies with lawsuits. Can you imagine a civil engineer gradually patching structural inconsistencies in a bridge as they show up? Yikes!
I have a simple solution to that: stop calling people "software engineers". Start calling them "software fun-gineers" or something similar. Either that or start holding "software engineers" accountable in a fashion that they'll force companies to at least attempt to build structurally sound "bridges" instead of relying upon the patch-it-later approach. I mean, I still cringe when I heard the announcement of MS's whole "Patch Tuesday". Yes, me and others may bitch about just how bad MS software was in the past, but one can recall that sendmail used to be a steaming pile of vulnerabilities and eventually there was enough patches to change that. That MS effectively acknowledged that the situation wasn't going to get better so they may as well institutionalize their stucco patching regiment? *sigh*
PS - Yea, I realize there are some places where there are actually software engineers. But clearly too few people who graduate as Software Engineer are qualified for that and too many companies over-demand on those qualifications when they want nothing of the sort.
From the article, "Apple has come under fire in recent years for its suppliers' labor and safety practices after the publication of a 2006 report highlighting poor conditions, followed by another in the New York Times in early 2012. The latter prompted Apple to become the first technology company to join the Fair Labor Association (FLA) in order to check its own reports against independent audits. The FLA's audits began in February of 2012, followed a month later by a report that revealed more than 50 violations of FLA standards and Chinese law, largely related to the way overtime was handled among employees. But as of August, the FLA reported back to say that Apple and Foxconn (in particular) were indeed improving factory conditions and were actually ahead of schedule in implementing the recommendations from the FLA."
So, yea, on the one hand it appears Apple did search out such issues. But the fact is they didn't really act much on them until after the NYT story and finally try to get a more independent analysis--since apparently Apple was being scammed by its suppliers*--and work through the problems. Now, I have no idea if all of this was Apple with intent to do good and being duped or Apple looking for other issues and basically looking the other way until pressed upon the point--I'd tend to believe it's more towards the latter, without much intent to hide anything outright but certainly not real gumption to find potential social problems and fix them. Meanwhile, I don't think most other companies would behave much differently. But, then, that's precisely why there's a need to push companies to a higher standard, in part by exposing what they allow or indirectly support.
*This is no different than just about any regulatory-like behavior from a superior organization or supervisor, that people don't tend to go out of their way to highlight the problems that appear and try to look better than usually when they know an inspection is coming. If it's as bad as self-reporting, then it's really something to be expected since most companies aren't going to mention anything bad they don't feel they have to. In short, unless there's some reason to believe Apple's really went out of their way to avoid being scammed in these ways, I'd just assume that shucking off the responsibility and effort to an independent group would be better all around, especially given how much "anything bad they don't feel they have to" mention there is compared to what Apple really does want to know.
Yet you like many others rant about the power of politicians, when in reality the politicians are being systematically disempowered into being nothing but empty puppets and it is those corporations and corporate executives with the power who are running the show, whilst blaming everything upon the politicians they own.
Funny, that's exactly not what I said. Politicians, being power mad children, have *us* the voters to be their parents. Ie, we the people are to blame for the situation we're in right now and the general solution involves being more involved regularly in a substantive way and at the primary level and general election level to vote in legislators that will not simply kowtow to corporate interests under the guise of economic freedom or backing job creation. And if you honestly believe that working within the system is not a mechanism that will alleviate the long-term problem that has enshrined itself in America, then I'd gladly point out that said *guns* are precisely the means and necessity to restore a new union. Personally, I'm not where near advocating any sort of coup. But certainly bitching about corporations isn't a solution in itself unless it follows through that you are communicating those specific points to specific politicians are exactly where they're going wrong and what needs to be addressed. Of course, the fact is too few people actually care about making sure their own representatives are doing things for the good of the country if it means potentially losing their own job, so all the bitching is simply cheap talk.
PS - Thanks for going on a rant about Libertarianism. How's that relate to things, again? Perhaps you're think about Fascism and how much Republicans and Democrats are Fascists?
Apple gets a lot of flak for 'letting it happen', but Apple is the only company I know of that is actively trying to do something about it.
Yea, it's almost as if you just listed cause and effect.
If this is happening to Apple, you KNOW it's happening to everyone else. And I have yet to hear a single report of Samsung doing a similar thing to what Apple is doing now.
So, now that Apple has shown that enough criticism can and will lead to action to stop (or at least curtail) child labor, Apple and the media can level a lot of flack at Samsung and others pointing at how Apple is addressing the problem. The first step, of course, is finding examples and not just throwing out "you KNOW it's happening to everyone else" because it's much harder to rally around a point without an actual example. That's a large reason why Apple was burned so much, as a combination of (a) their high profile luxury goods lead to investigation on the point and (b) clearly the factories in China hiring the underage labor being very bad at covering their tracks.
But, yea, *boohoo* "everyone picks on Apple" *boohoo*. I don't have sympathy for Apple at all. I do have sympathy for the underage workers and their plight. And I don't have a clue what to say about the journalists, as for all I know they've done the due diligence at trying to undercover any underage workers for lots of companies and Apple's supply chain just happens to stand out in a bad way. If you have some actual reports of other company supply chains that should be noted for such issues, please give links to the stories. Similarly, if you have some actual proof that journalists are shirking their responsibility and focusing on Apple near exclusively, I'd like to hear it. It won't sway me from feeling Apple gets what they deserve--as clearly it's motivated them to make the sort of changes people wanted--but it would point at other companies who should make such changes too--and not just from the truthiness of it.
Politicians are like power mad children. And children most often have a good enough idea of right and wrong and how they're just trying to get by on a technicality--and obviously, there are exceptions and ambiguity to the point. Supposedly part of voting is to get politicians into power that well represent their constituents--well, job well done at being representative of their constituents, anyways. The other part is to be the carrot and stick to get them to do the right thing, but given how locked a lot of districts are on one party, that'd require a lot more fighting and involvement at the primaries level. So, overall, we might well be fucked given how low even general election turn out is.
In any case, the point of guns and votes and locks are to keep honest people honest. Yea, most people aren't so honest to do the right thing if there weren't a stick around to punish them. While I find that truth a little sad, I think it rather counters your point. It also explains why obviously there's a severe limit to the effectiveness of ever increasing prison sentences for crimes. People who know they'll be likely caught are unlikely to commit a crime, even with a rather light sentence; with a rather harsh sentence, people who know they'll be unlikely caught are likely to commit a crime. It also explains why entrapment is illegal.
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Yea, we can always trust the NYT not to sit on a story for a year or more just because they consulted the government and were asked to not report it. I mean, that whole thing with the NYT and the warrantless wiretapping? Just our imaginations. Meanwhile, in the real world, NYT as gatekeeper makes it their responsibility to report things of importance to the public. That doesn't need to include reporting actually classified documents. It's often enough to see those documents or simply talk to a person intimately familiar with them and use that as a basis for a story. The documents being printed then is only important to prove the case if the government calls the reporter and their source liars. In the end, it might be wise to proactively disclose some of the reports for this reason.
Whatever the case, things like 30 civilians bombed by the military by accident are something newsworthy. And given how much Americans are insulated by all the death of war with all the advancements in technology and technique to keep soldiers alive and "the enemy" dead, it's really important to make sure that "the enemy" is actually the enemy. I can't believe reporters at the NYT could not see that very real disconnect that needed to be reported on precisely when fighting a "war on terror" has a lot of "collateral damage", which should be its own sort of terror that should be on the soul of Americans.
No, he's being very transparent about how government works. What better sign of how government will ignore petitions than to setup an official web site to collect them just to ignore them? As for "by the people, for the people", you're just not one of "the people" [that matter] unless you have money and political connections--or can be used for political gain.
To me, it's not really surprising at all. It's the same reason planned economies fail. A wholly top-down approach fails a lot of the time. The sad part, from MS's perspective, should be not realizing where they could utilize their monopoly to extend into safer arenas with clear pathways that top-down market acquisition could be achieved. But, then, MS's movement into mobile phones was presumably precipitated by fear--ie, they did get the top-down view right that smart phones would be a major player in the future*. Fear is a great way to waste money and market share.
*Then again, MS has thrown money at all sorts of ventures that may, in the future, be a major player. And only later, when the technology developed, was the market realized and by then MS had missed the boat. Meanwhile, its repeated attempts to leverage its "gems"--Windows and/or Office--have generally failed. Perhaps that's the real reason I'm not surprised that MS has yet another failure. Of course, most ventures in business are failures. It's just that most ventures that fail big close because they don't have tons of money behind them. Oh, and this applies just as much to Google, Apple, etc.
Actually, I think you've gotten it backwards. Imagine a murder mystery in 3D. People on the left side of the theater can see behind one person's back and "know" who the killer is much earlier than people in the center or right. Yet, people on the right side of the theater can see behind yet another person's back and "know" who the killer is much earlier than people in the center or left. Meanwhile, the people in the center may be just well left clueless if the end of the movie is left ambiguous.
You see, the point of a movie is that if you're supposed to "see what's behind the tree", then the movie is supposed to show you. If it's too subtle about it, people will miss it and it's a bad movie. If it's too heavy handed, people will be treated as idiots and it's a bad movie. Well, by bad, I mean in direction as a movie--everything else about it could be great.
In other words, even if the tools to build 3D were easy and widely available for the web, the vast majority of the web is 2D dimension content where people aren't supposed to have things hidden from them. That doesn't mean the content isn't crap or biased or whatever--the figurative 3D tree on a news site would be very interesting, though. In short, the point isn't that people don't care who's standing behind the curtain. It's that they're there to consume figuratively 2D information.
Now, 3D games are a whole other business and that's a booming because games are often about a certain about of occlusion to/from others and mystery.
Um, no. He never mentioned the GOP or Republicans. It's just that the GOP/Republicans espouse trickle-down economics, which you correctly correlated to what was being discussed. Hence, you presumed he was talking about the GOP because he was refuting GOP talking points. That Democrats also behave under trickle-down economics means that the GP's post is spot on without having to name names because it's behavior being discussed, not political posturing.
Besides, as much as Democrats aren't "good guys", at least they seem more willing to waste money on health care than bombs. Then, again, I wish Democrats were more like the tax-and-spend Democrats of old, since that'd seem to be the biggest problem we have today; tying spending to taxes would inherently limit government influence and cutting taxes alone obviously is no means of cutting spending in any reasonable span of time, so the whole rhetoric along those lines is mostly crazy.
A lot of it is executed rarely because at least half the code is drivers and one usually doesn't have but one sound card, one (or two) network card, etc vs the hundreds of sound card drivers, hundreds of network card drivers, etc. Further, a major point of the kernel is that it, by design, isn't supposed to be executed a lot because most CPU time should be devoted to user space programs. So, to that end, you could say it's not "performance critical". But, that's more in line with the point that precisely because kernels are generally developed so well, they rarely have "performance critical" code. Once you start throwing scripting into it, I think that goes out the window.
To this, I could see some benefit. But, honestly, I'd feel it safe and saner if it were a language that was reducible to a FSA. The point that "Dangerous code can be disabled at the byte-code level (prevention of endless loop DoS etc)" in the slide really only works in that context, anyways. In any case, Lua is nothing of the sort.
Which is an argument for making a good, universal FSA language. It won't remove the being error prone or complicated because that's the nature of the beast and papering over it with a Turing complete language is no sort of answer. But having them all share the same language makes sense from a maintenance standpoint. For example, the BPF was repurposed for syscall filtering--a little admission that I'm not sure entirely where BPF stands language wise although I don't think it's turing complete--which could probably be refactored into a more general filtering language which could be refactored into an even more generic FSA language which could likely be used to refactor a lot of other code.
Generally speaking, context switches aren't a big deal in most OSs/kernels today. Yes, certainly having context switches means an extra overhead and stuffing some code or even all code in the kernel would certainly speed it up. And certainly if a lot more code moved into user space would be measurably slower. But kernel design today seems to try to have a balance between the two, especially with considerations of stability and security. The fact is, lots of code is special-purpose because it's for specific hardware. And code being redundant is more a function of maintaining multiple trees--which admittedly having a single kernel allows a lot of unity--but there's no reason that out-of-kernel-space means out-of-the-kernel-source if the code is still rather kernel specific.
After all, the whole point is precisely that a lot of potential kernel code is "executed rarely and not performance critical" yet remaining outside kernel memory gives the system greater protection and hence speeds up development and generally makes the code easier to maintain. Documentation is a wholly separate beast, in any case, and that's more a point of maintainers or distributors demanding good documentation before code is accepted.
No, I'd say it's the fact of marketing that's a huge problem. Specifically, the word of mouth is that one wants to use "[MS] Office [365/13]" when most the time it's "[MS] Word" and very sparingly "[MS] Excel" that people want to use and even then, really, "[MS] Word [97]" (and "[MS] Excel [97]") would do the trick just fine for most people. Of course, OpenOffice far surpasses those meager requirements, but word of mouth doesn't talk about that. And most people don't really have to consider the real cost for MS Office (except businesses, but then they'll probably settle on MS Office anyways because "no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft").
In short, unless public perception changes that MS Office is *the* office/word processing software and instead that OpenOffice and MS Office are both office/word processing software of their own equal standing... But, I don't see that happening as too few people really experience the cost of MS Office in a tangible sense.
Which circles again back to the point of pandering to one's own self-interest over one's principles. Yea, sometimes principles don't "get results".
Good to know his legal team just does whatever it likes without consulting Ron Paul. I guess if his legal team had a good case for suing some orphans, they'd just jump on it. And even if one believes they would, it would certainly be within Ron Paul's power to stop his legal team and to chastise them for doing things he does not wish to happen. As for "following ICANN procedure", I don't see why he wouldn't just try suing Verisign for trademark infringement to obtain control over ronpaul.com instead of some obtuse procedure that's really irrelevant since it's Verisign, not ICANN, who maintains the .com servers.
Again, with the orphans. Just because you have grounds to sue, doesn't mean you should. Just because you can use the federal court system, doesn't mean you should. If you believe that something is wrong, you shouldn't follow through; you shouldn't just blindly follow whatever legal advice your lawyer gives you.
Given he's retiring, you're right. It's the perfect time to ring clear his true colors because he's not up for reelection. Of course, I'm sure there's plenty of people who were voting in Ron Paul because he was an (R) or because of all the nice earmarks he swung their way, so even then, it probably didn't matter a lot. I guess one could even say it doesn't matter much for libertarianism because clearly Ron Paul seeking to dethrone himself doesn't inherently tarnish the name even if he's one of the most well-known spokesmen for the cause--which is quite a blow for the Libertarian Party.
In many ways, you're right, it's a mountain out of a mole hill. It's just money. It's just bits in a record in a computer somewhere. It's just one person who says one thing and does another. It happens all the time. No one really gets hurt. Nothing really important changes.
I guess, in the end, that may be the real truth of it. Ron Paul is no mountain. He's more of a mole hill.
So, he wants to go through the World Intellectual Property Organization? Sounds like an outside organization to me. And before you say something about the US being bound under the WIPO because of US treaties or something similar--the same could be said about the UN--, the general point stands that Ron Paul and like-minded individuals precisely wish to undo such treaties and such intertwining international interests. Besides, as you note, the WIPO is part of the UN (it is after 1974) and that is presumably because the UN is a header organization for a lot of sub-organization which all function as international intertwining agents.
Funny. Last I checked, .com is controlled by Verisign and Verisign is wholly bound by US law as the .com servers are in US territory--again hence the whole ICE/UN(WIPO) concerns and many people wanting more UN (or other body) control. To say it's the "logical" avenue only works if one presumes that one considers that the US is and should be subordinate to the wishes of the WIPO (and considering how the US seems willing to ignore the WTO, a similar organization, over gambling...). Nah, it's only logical if one considers it acceptable to pander to the WIPO when it's convenient, damn one's prior espoused convictions or belief that there's another way.
Except that (a) Ron Paul standards for a lack of outward interference from organizations like the UN and (b) there are options (ICE comes to mind) for trying to deal with domain name disputes that wouldn't require such outward interference. So, your analogy would be better served to, say, heavily criticize FBI involvement in internal State affairs and then calling up the FBI instead of the LA cops to deal with something within their purview of power.
No, this really just smells like kowtowing to the UN because somehow Ron Paul thinks it looks better than mixing it in with ICE given just how much people have hostility about ICE precisely because it seems to usurp UN granted powers and be generally arbitrary--which seems to be the core platform of why so many Republicans don't want outward interference. Well, one can't really have it both ways and so Ron Paul really should make up his mind and not try playing both fields.
Don't worry, Ron Paul is just demonstrate that he's a true Republican. Sure, he takes principled stands..until money is involved and he can get/save money. Of course, such was clear when your idea to make a smaller government is to join that government and do nothing effective for decades to actually shrink government. Maybe joining was some sort of a protest? Well, RMS protests against proprietary software and as much as people give him slack, they still see how it tries very hard to live by his code. But the simple truth is, a true sign of character is holding to your principles precisely when it's hardest to do so. But, that doesn't give one carte blanche to ignore them on one of the most unimportant things one can imagine, his vanity plate for the internet.
So, I salute you, Ron Paul, for showing just how much you care about your facade.
So..um..why not just use Windows 7?
"Warning: Smoking Adobe/Microsoft/Apple/etc products has been shown that it may increase the chances of cancer and hallucinations about said software being good."
Sounds about right.
Of course it solves the problem...for Adobe. Just like ActiveX warnings solved the problem for MS or UAC solved the problem for MS. Instead of fundamentally fixing a broken system by removing or mitigating all the attack issues, the onus is put on the user to make the correct choice up front by giving very vague information on just precisely might happen without any possibility to mitigate or revert what actually happens. Hence not even a genius could make the correct choice because there's often too little information on what it means to allow something to proceed and to little ability to stop bad things from happening once you allow a harmless looking program (Internet Explorer or "Internet Explorer" want to do system wide changes!) to start.
It's one to say that a user deserves a system format if they ignorantly type in their password for "rm -rf /". It's quite another when "MS Word wants to run a flash object in a low-security context" results in a system format because flash and Windows are flawed. But, *shrug*. Keep CYOA Adobe.
In the same way ActiveX remains a remarkably viable platform with mature development tools. Ie, precisely because it's a very large attack vector and it's used both in local and network modes, it's a massive headache for most people who would prefer their games and their internet do-dads to be separate. That way the internet version can be locked down massively with frequent updates and a push for the idea that throwing away any state is just fine while the local games version can be years out of date and very loose on the system with state data being very important. But, again and again that just hasn't worked out--Java is another good example of that.
No kidding. And by the same token, audio/video tag blocking needs to be a standard feature of web browsers *now* instead of waiting for the massive abuses that will occur when it's more commonly used. That will hopefully (1) heavily discourage developers making badly designed HTML5 sites that depend on that crap and (2) at least allow people to forceablly block the crap even if it breaks sites just like blocking flash can do now.
So, Flash is merely a symptom of the disease and not the disease itself. And you're right, Flash has provided plenty of stuff of value. Still, Flash and all Flash-like solutions (even javascript+html5) are crap. I guess Java and ActiveX have turned me all jaded--though at least they were fast.
PS - Personally, I especially hate flash a lot because of its absurd system requirements to play even the simplest of games--with a 2GHz cpu and 1GB RAM seemingly a minimal spec for a simple 2d platformer. I don't see HTML5+javascript being in the future particularly better on this front. But, then, it'd seem obvious that HTML5+javascript is't a platform for games. By the same token, flash isn't a platform for games. Twisting a platform for badly drawn animations into a video + gaming platform? Impressive, sure. But I just don't honestly get how most people can stand flash from a use perspective. :/
What part of "don't do written/verbal diarrhea on the internet" and "if you do so anyways, don't use your real name" is all about fear? I mean, part of me is happy about Facebook because it sort of proves the idea that if enough people engage in that sort of written diarrhea dumping every little bit of their life that it becomes such an annoying and boring waste that only a small handful of people (or maybe no one) will bother to follow, hence proving the idea that "the truth will set your free" and "information wants to be free" can be fulfilled.
And then I look at how much (a) Facebook and others are profiting off of this using data mining and such and how nefariously it could all be used and (b) just how much it really isn't being ignored. Facebook started off as a sort of college social club with almost high school-like mentality. Its net result has been to include a lot more people back into that high school-like mentality--where probably through nothing else but isolation that sort of thing ended in high school and so social circles ended up being a lot smaller and of much more limited scope. Of course, perhaps I'd feel a whole lot better if "high school-like mentality" was a positive thing.
As I recall, at the time in Sept 2007 theinterbank lending market was severely depressed, effectively meaning that banks wanted to wait out the ax dropping on other banks (ie, the next Leiman Brothers) before lending out money to other banks. But, interbank lending is the primary means of allowing banks to overcome short-term shortfalls in money supplies--as they pay out in cash for payroll just to have it redeposited by the same person or someone else a few days later. Something like a bank run on one bank without an ability to borrow money for the next day? Yea, that'll ruin an otherwise healthy bank. Meanwhile, sure, the unhealthy banks would fail along the way, but there'd be most (all?) of the collateral damage the GP mentioned.
So, while it's a conjecture on whether a bank run would happen (IIRC, it did on WaMu) or that it would spread out in a fashion the FDIC couldn't handle (IIRC, the FDIC was at least strained after all the bank failures that *did* happen so I don't exactly expect they'd be able to contain a domino effect alone), it seemed important at the time to bandage the problem and fix the problems behind the scene instead of trying to "endure the pain" when that pain would translate into potentially millions of people suddenly have substantial and instantaneous economic troubles of their own instead of a multi-year but painful transition--and no matter how you look at it, it's a multi-year transition when millions of peoples are suddenly or semi-suddenly effected by something.
As for not getting wasted in the future? Well, I wholeheartedly agree with that sentiment. But it's the process of good regulation to catch/stop "Too Big to Fail" and not wait and just let massive failure and economic hardship to occur as if that magically would prevent it from happening again--helpful hint, that ten years of seeming prosperity at a bank with the CEO receiving hundreds of millions of dollars and shareholders seeing years of record profits/dividends just to see their bank fail and at least the latter to lose most of it doesn't do a lot to prevent the pattern from happening again. Most "investors" are blinded by greed and not involved enough to make good decisions--blame 401ks and mutual plans marketed on high returns. And most "investment banks" shouldn't exist, but that's not something you can suddenly fix--reinstating Glass-Steagall would help.
But since actually fixing problems isn't what most politicians nor voters are about.... I mean, even during the crisis the whole "don't get wasted in the future" only came in the form of "punish the banks" which misses the point. There's nothing to stop us from fixing the actual problems right now. And punishment is just a matter of due process that should already exist. If those parts aren't there, then all that is really showing is a visceral anger.*
*Off-topic, I know, but it always reminds me of GWB's visit to the WTC site on 9/14/2001 and how all you could hear was the calls for vengence. And look what it lead to. And ask yourself was the problem fundamentally solved. I don't think so. :~(
You talk to a[n] [ex-]Congressman to learn how to be elected. You talk to a lobbyist to see how Congress works. You talk to a citizen to learn how Congress doesn't.
Golly, it's almost as if relying upon detection after the fact or at entry point is no real protection. Oh, but you say, defense in depth! Well, defense in depth is great. But, intrusion detection of the sort is like tissue paper when you might get thousands of attacks daily. The only real defense is actually having software that isn't exploitable. And that means having (a) open software you can analyze, (b) developers/vendors of that software who will quickly address problems, (c) open disclosure so you don't have to wait months to find out you might already be being hacked--giving you the option to simply stop using software if it's hackable--, (d) multiple servers running multiple software stacks so you have something to switch to for (c), and (e) having a strong push for possible problems so you don't have to rely upon (b) because (b) is just a bad hack to the truth that no software is perfect--as that's a broken record if it's said all the time, as it's meant to explain the *occasional* security bug.
Oh, and I think this also highlights the whole point that treating security as a joke shows the joke's on you. The real thing to worry about is just how bad the US Government's security score is. If you at all believe that government is generally worse than private industry--not something I particularly believe given just how bad private industry is--, then the US as a whole is fucked at least as far as any concerns for keeping US Government held data private from the Chinese or other hackers. All things considered, it makes one wonder if the data China has--not necessarily even their government--would put Wikileaks to shame.
It is amazing what software companies can escape with, things that in other engineering fields would totally blast them companies with lawsuits. Can you imagine a civil engineer gradually patching structural inconsistencies in a bridge as they show up? Yikes!
I have a simple solution to that: stop calling people "software engineers". Start calling them "software fun-gineers" or something similar. Either that or start holding "software engineers" accountable in a fashion that they'll force companies to at least attempt to build structurally sound "bridges" instead of relying upon the patch-it-later approach. I mean, I still cringe when I heard the announcement of MS's whole "Patch Tuesday". Yes, me and others may bitch about just how bad MS software was in the past, but one can recall that sendmail used to be a steaming pile of vulnerabilities and eventually there was enough patches to change that. That MS effectively acknowledged that the situation wasn't going to get better so they may as well institutionalize their stucco patching regiment? *sigh*
PS - Yea, I realize there are some places where there are actually software engineers. But clearly too few people who graduate as Software Engineer are qualified for that and too many companies over-demand on those qualifications when they want nothing of the sort.
From the article, "Apple has come under fire in recent years for its suppliers' labor and safety practices after the publication of a 2006 report highlighting poor conditions, followed by another in the New York Times in early 2012. The latter prompted Apple to become the first technology company to join the Fair Labor Association (FLA) in order to check its own reports against independent audits. The FLA's audits began in February of 2012, followed a month later by a report that revealed more than 50 violations of FLA standards and Chinese law, largely related to the way overtime was handled among employees. But as of August, the FLA reported back to say that Apple and Foxconn (in particular) were indeed improving factory conditions and were actually ahead of schedule in implementing the recommendations from the FLA."
So, yea, on the one hand it appears Apple did search out such issues. But the fact is they didn't really act much on them until after the NYT story and finally try to get a more independent analysis--since apparently Apple was being scammed by its suppliers*--and work through the problems. Now, I have no idea if all of this was Apple with intent to do good and being duped or Apple looking for other issues and basically looking the other way until pressed upon the point--I'd tend to believe it's more towards the latter, without much intent to hide anything outright but certainly not real gumption to find potential social problems and fix them. Meanwhile, I don't think most other companies would behave much differently. But, then, that's precisely why there's a need to push companies to a higher standard, in part by exposing what they allow or indirectly support.
*This is no different than just about any regulatory-like behavior from a superior organization or supervisor, that people don't tend to go out of their way to highlight the problems that appear and try to look better than usually when they know an inspection is coming. If it's as bad as self-reporting, then it's really something to be expected since most companies aren't going to mention anything bad they don't feel they have to. In short, unless there's some reason to believe Apple's really went out of their way to avoid being scammed in these ways, I'd just assume that shucking off the responsibility and effort to an independent group would be better all around, especially given how much "anything bad they don't feel they have to" mention there is compared to what Apple really does want to know.
Funny. I thought that *was* the real meaning of 9/11. It didn't take any longer than 10/11 for that to hold.
Funny, that's exactly not what I said. Politicians, being power mad children, have *us* the voters to be their parents. Ie, we the people are to blame for the situation we're in right now and the general solution involves being more involved regularly in a substantive way and at the primary level and general election level to vote in legislators that will not simply kowtow to corporate interests under the guise of economic freedom or backing job creation. And if you honestly believe that working within the system is not a mechanism that will alleviate the long-term problem that has enshrined itself in America, then I'd gladly point out that said *guns* are precisely the means and necessity to restore a new union. Personally, I'm not where near advocating any sort of coup. But certainly bitching about corporations isn't a solution in itself unless it follows through that you are communicating those specific points to specific politicians are exactly where they're going wrong and what needs to be addressed. Of course, the fact is too few people actually care about making sure their own representatives are doing things for the good of the country if it means potentially losing their own job, so all the bitching is simply cheap talk.
PS - Thanks for going on a rant about Libertarianism. How's that relate to things, again? Perhaps you're think about Fascism and how much Republicans and Democrats are Fascists?
Yea, it's almost as if you just listed cause and effect.
So, now that Apple has shown that enough criticism can and will lead to action to stop (or at least curtail) child labor, Apple and the media can level a lot of flack at Samsung and others pointing at how Apple is addressing the problem. The first step, of course, is finding examples and not just throwing out "you KNOW it's happening to everyone else" because it's much harder to rally around a point without an actual example. That's a large reason why Apple was burned so much, as a combination of (a) their high profile luxury goods lead to investigation on the point and (b) clearly the factories in China hiring the underage labor being very bad at covering their tracks.
But, yea, *boohoo* "everyone picks on Apple" *boohoo*. I don't have sympathy for Apple at all. I do have sympathy for the underage workers and their plight. And I don't have a clue what to say about the journalists, as for all I know they've done the due diligence at trying to undercover any underage workers for lots of companies and Apple's supply chain just happens to stand out in a bad way. If you have some actual reports of other company supply chains that should be noted for such issues, please give links to the stories. Similarly, if you have some actual proof that journalists are shirking their responsibility and focusing on Apple near exclusively, I'd like to hear it. It won't sway me from feeling Apple gets what they deserve--as clearly it's motivated them to make the sort of changes people wanted--but it would point at other companies who should make such changes too--and not just from the truthiness of it.
Politicians are like power mad children. And children most often have a good enough idea of right and wrong and how they're just trying to get by on a technicality--and obviously, there are exceptions and ambiguity to the point. Supposedly part of voting is to get politicians into power that well represent their constituents--well, job well done at being representative of their constituents, anyways. The other part is to be the carrot and stick to get them to do the right thing, but given how locked a lot of districts are on one party, that'd require a lot more fighting and involvement at the primaries level. So, overall, we might well be fucked given how low even general election turn out is.
In any case, the point of guns and votes and locks are to keep honest people honest. Yea, most people aren't so honest to do the right thing if there weren't a stick around to punish them. While I find that truth a little sad, I think it rather counters your point. It also explains why obviously there's a severe limit to the effectiveness of ever increasing prison sentences for crimes. People who know they'll be likely caught are unlikely to commit a crime, even with a rather light sentence; with a rather harsh sentence, people who know they'll be unlikely caught are likely to commit a crime. It also explains why entrapment is illegal.