1. No money from lobbyists or PACs
While we like to think of politicians as corrupt, money-grubbing jerks who'll take money from any lobbyist in order to stay in office, the truth is that most politicians already believe in certain causes and will gladly take money from their allies in those causes. The NRA is not likely to change the mind of an anti-gun senator with promises of money. That senator is likely getting money from an anti-gun group already, since that group's aims match his own. Perhaps this would be less true of corporate lobbying, but transparency could help alleviate this by letting voters see who a politicians allies are. If a politician were known to be taking Archer-Daniels money, and that politician then voted for more ethanol subsidies, I might be less likely to vote for him next time. Long story short, I don't think there is much quid-pro-quo going on, it's more an aligning of interests between pols and PACs. This is not to mention the potential freedom of speech issues of banning lobbying. After all, everyone has the right to petition the government.
2. Vote to end earmarks
This is kind of like laws against profanity - "I know it when I hear it". One man's earmark is another's worthy cause. It would be ideal if we could prevent earmarks, but defining exactly what an earmark is in such a way as to make it difficult or impossible to pass another earmark without also impacting useful legislation is practically impossible. English is a rich language that lets you say one thing and mean another in some cases, and politicians are especially adept at using the language to get what they want. Transparency is the best choice here as well, since the only sure way for "obvious" earmarks to be stopped is if the people are aware that they have been attached to unrelated bills or perverted the intentions of related bills.
3. Support publicly-financed campaigns
To me, this is the worst of all the pledges. Why should we have political welfare for people running for office? Do we really want our tax dollars spent so that some candidates can have an election allegedly free of special interests? Remember, he who controls the gold makes the rules, so public financing could be perverted into an institution that funds only "worthy" candidates, with "worthy" defined by whomever is currently in power. Even with the currently limited system for Presidential candidates, the candidates have to raise a certain amount of money and be subject to other restrictions that they find onerous. This is one reason why many of the present candidates did not accept public funding - it got in the way of raising the real sums they needed to win.
4. Support reform to increase Congressional transparency
This is one pledge I can get behind, but the devil is in the implementation. Every donation to every candidate would need to be disclosed, preferably on the web, and there would need to be dire consequences if anyone was caught trying to hide a donation or the source of a donation. Every bill, including amendments and votes, would need to be available as well. All meetings would need to be open, meaning that the press (at the least) is invited and minutes are taken and made available on-line (with reasonable exceptions for things like national security issues and maybe a few others - of course, this can be perverted as well). There are numerous documents that the government has erroneously (or illegally, if it was to CYA) classified as secret which would need to be declassified, and better oversight for what can be classified should be put into place (perhaps this is a bit beyond the scope of Congress itself). Some of these things already exist, to some degree.
I can remember back in '89 or '90 the FBI rented billboards along the highway between UAH and Redstone Arsenal/Marshall Spaceflight Center which read something like "Report all suspicious activity to the FBI and Army Intelligence immediately" and gave a telephone number to call in such an event.
UAH had many students from China and India. I remember hearing rumors that a Chinese student had tried to sneak into the rail gun lab at Marshall, but I don't know if that really happened.
I did witness a Chinese student physically break into the Computer Science department late one night; he was promptly arrested due to the actions of the network administrator. The network admin had seen the student acting suspiciously earlier that evening and confronted him and told him to leave, which he did. The admin thought the student would come back, so he warned me to keep an eye open and he himself stayed around. Sure enough, the admin saw the student come back and called the police. I remember walking from the lab to the soda machine and seeing out of the corner of my eye a hand disappearing into the CS office and the door silently being shut. I went to find the network admin and met him following the police up the stairs. The admin later told me that he believed the student was trying to alter his grades to keep from being sent back to China. Truly an unusually exciting evening at the lab.
From what I understand, 3M still does basic research. Perhaps this is because a number of their products historically have been serendipitous, accidental discoveries.
I love reading my local newspaper. It lets me read the important news with more depth than the TV news has, and I can read it while having lunch or riding in a car.
My local newspper has a cover price of 50 cents daily. Recently, I discovered that the blank paper alone costs 45 cents per issue. The remaining nickel and the advertising pays for all of the other costs at the newspaper.
While I don't mind reading the news online, I still prefer the printed word. I've long thought that the newspaper could reduce expenses if only there was a product similar to a bunch of e-ink sheets bound in book or tabloid form that could be updated once a day. It could use the same layout as the print edition. While there would be some upfront cost involved in buying the bound sheets, probably paid by the subscriber, the product would pay for itself eventually in lower costs for both the newspaper and the subscriber. Ideally, you wouldn't be limited to using it just for your newspaper - you could download books and magazines as well. Frankly, I would prefer something like this rather than the old palm-style ebooks. Inventors, get busy!
Though I agree about the loss of privacy, there may be benefits to the technology as well, depending upon implementation.
What if the sensors also transmitted back to your car? The sensors could be programmed to tell your car what the current speed limit for that stretch of road is (and they could be updated with new limits during road construction, etc.). If you had a display showing the current speed limit, you could make sure that you didn't exceed it. Especially useful for those areas where the limit signs are few and far between (assuming the sensors are ubiquitous).
Along similar lines, perhaps the sensors could transmit back information about average traffic speeds for the next few miles, letting you know ahead of time that there's congestion ahead.
The sensors would have to have information about their current lattitude and longitude (or an ID that can be looked up by the tracking software, I suppose) for tracking purposes. They could transmit that to your car as well, decreasing the need for a GPS if you have the proper equipment to interpret the sensors' signal. With that kind of information, you could track yourself and have all the benefits of GPS, at least on the road.
If some of the sensors also had the proper equipment, they could check passing cars for abnormal levels of noise or pollution. While that info could result in getting a "smogcheck required" notification or something like that, if the sensors transmitted a warning to you that your vehicle seemed to be running poorly, you might be able to take it in for service sooner. It might help you get repairs before they become costly, and improve your performance and gas mileage.
I've read about other road sensors that light up as cars pass them and stay lit for a short time, which could be handy if there's a car in front of you just hidden around the next curve or over the next hill. I could see the possibility of combining that application with the readers. If the lights and the readers are both supposed to be ubiquitous, then combining them in a single package would save money.
1) The game rules don't necessarily reflect reality so much as the developer's concept of how things should work. Things that work in reality may not work in the game. Taxation is a good example. In reality, as the tax rate increases, people use more resources trying to comply at the lowest possible cost and so the amount of tax revenue doesn't grow as fast as one would like. In many games this is handled simplistically, with a higher rate giving you coorespondingly higher revenue. If there are any negative consequences, it is usually something like increased unrest rather than decreased production.
Similarly, reducing the tax rate in the real world tends to increase tax revenue because there is less incentive to hide your income in tax shelters, and the reduced cost of compliance, along with the reduced tax rate, tends to stimulate economic activity. In most games, this merely results in a decreased revenue.
2) Games which lets the player have incredible control over the country he runs distorts the reality behind politics and governments. In many games there is little real difference between how dictatorships and democracies are run. Some games may increase unrest in the democratic countries when the citizens are calculated to disagree with the present policy (or something like that), but otherwise the underlying assumption is that the head of state has complete control of the country. This is especially bad in games where the player decides what industry should be producing, and games where the player actually trades goods to other countries rather than, say, making high-level trade agreements with those countries.
I'm not saying that these games have no value in teaching history, but their simplistic rules (compared to reality), their political bias and the player's ability to control every aspect of the country would definitely need to be considered by the instructor.
"...IP addresses, or for how long. He emphasized that such addresses are not tied to geography."
While the addresses are not tied to geography, generally speaking you can tell which IP's are from inside the US and which are from outside. This is supposed to be a system used by deaf Americans, right? Just block all foreign IP addresses. It won't stop all of the false calls, but it will stop a lot of them.
That seems the only solution, unless you come up with some kind of authentication.
Of course, as the article states, the phone companies don't really have an incentive to stop the calls since they are paid either way. This may be one time that legislation is required.
"Retailers would have also been responsible for clearly displaying signs explaining the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) ratings system."
Aren't they pretty self-explanatory already?
"In fact, the video game industry's own representative admitted she would not allow her child to play the games that the legislation targeted." (Leland Yee)
That shows that a *parent* already is deciding what to let her kids play. Isn't it supposed to be the parent who has the power to decide? If so, then what useful purpose does the legislation serve? If the legislature is hoping that lazy parents will somehow be "empowered" by the legislation, I think they'll be disappointed by the results. Then again, I suppose they can continue to use parental laziness to justify further legislation.
Even with a range of 1 km, a lot of sensors will have to be installed to get total coverage. I suppose they could just confine themselves to the highways (at least at first), but IIRC the majority of accidents occur on surface streets.
Then again, perhaps they could team up with private companies to install this and WiFi into street lamps, kinda like this plan in the UK. That might get things rolling a bit faster.
Since VAT is collected at every stage of the manufacturing process of a product (every time "value" is added to it), it is frequently used to conceal the actual amount of sales-like tax ultimately being paid by the end user.
Then again, all the taxes paid by business now are already a hidden tax for the end-user as he must ultimately pay a portion of the company's taxes anyway as part of the product's price. Insistuting a VAT, though, wouldn't change that but add to it.
Under this scheme more tax would indeed be collected. Unfortunately, having another layer of bureaucracy will inevitably lead to more taxpayer money being wasted.
It's like adding a section of leaky pipe to an already leaky pipe.
Will the increase in collections make up for the increased inefficiency and graft?
Then there's the fact that some states, like California, have higher sales taxes to make up for the fact that property taxes can't be raised quickly. One size sales tax may not fit all.
Of course, California also engages in various shell games with their property taxes, collecting them from the local governments and then trickling them back in an arcane way. That is responsible not only for some of the high sales taxes here but also for much of the abuse of emminent domain laws here (take someone's land for a fraction of what it's worth and practically give that to developers to build a new shopping mall, etc., in order to collect more sales tax locally). A lot of changes would have to be made at the state and local level if the Feds started collecting all the sales tax (though change isn't necessarily bad...).
In general I believe privatization is a good trend in government. This may be one of those rare instances where it's not necessarily a good idea, however, unless some safeguards are put in place to prevent (or at least discourage) the misuse of the patent office.
The thing that gives me pause when it comes to privatizing the patent office is that this is an organization that is devoted to granting temporary monopolies to companies so that those companies can recoup the money spent on developing the technology. Monopoly powers should not be granted lightly.
Of course, the current patent office is abusing this power, or at least enabling others to abuse this power. Perhaps privatization isn't a bad thing after all!
Increasing salary can be a good way to get and retain people, but it's not a panacea.
The important thing, if we want to retain quality employees at the patent office, is to find a way to tie salary to performance - perhaps those examiners who have the fewest patents overturned should be paid more, or something like that.
Making salary dependent on performance may help eliminate the deadwood as well, as those who are incompetent will have trouble getting pay raises and may eventually be encouraged to find more appropriate work elsewhere. If we simply raised every examiner's salary the same amount, the message would be that no one really cares how well (or poorly) you do your job.
"work and have risen through the ranks, and young examiners, either fresh out of law school or still working on their degrees, who stay perhaps five years before moving on to the more lucrative private sector."
While I would hope that higher salaries would attract better employees, I seriously doubt that the government ever could (or should) compete with the range of salaries that these lawyers can earn in the private sector, especially if you factor in the occasional large jury award.
I think it's more important to attract more of the people who enjoy that kind of work and less of those who are using this as a stepping-stone. Increasing the salary is not very likely to accomplish this, unless the increase is for those who work there more than just five years.
Actually, the president of Shell once said that the largest known reserves were below the Gulf of Mexico. Of course, he may have been referring to the largest known profitable reserves.
I use Sylpheed and love it. In particular I love the fact that it can thread email messages (though other clients like Mozilla can also). The only thing I hate about it is the address book.
There is a definite lack of predefined fields in the address book - no place to store phone numbers or addresses, for example. It does have a feature that lets you add ad-hoc fields (user attributes) to the contact's record, but there isn't a way to make all the contacts have the same add-on fields without defining them for each individual contact. It is also capable of using vCards, but it only seems to get the name and email address out of them, ignoring all the other info.
If it wasn't for the poor address book, I'd be using it on my Windows box as well as my Linux system.
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1. No money from lobbyists or PACs
While we like to think of politicians as corrupt, money-grubbing jerks who'll take money from any lobbyist in order to stay in office, the truth is that most politicians already believe in certain causes and will gladly take money from their allies in those causes. The NRA is not likely to change the mind of an anti-gun senator with promises of money. That senator is likely getting money from an anti-gun group already, since that group's aims match his own. Perhaps this would be less true of corporate lobbying, but transparency could help alleviate this by letting voters see who a politicians allies are. If a politician were known to be taking Archer-Daniels money, and that politician then voted for more ethanol subsidies, I might be less likely to vote for him next time. Long story short, I don't think there is much quid-pro-quo going on, it's more an aligning of interests between pols and PACs. This is not to mention the potential freedom of speech issues of banning lobbying. After all, everyone has the right to petition the government.
2. Vote to end earmarks
This is kind of like laws against profanity - "I know it when I hear it". One man's earmark is another's worthy cause. It would be ideal if we could prevent earmarks, but defining exactly what an earmark is in such a way as to make it difficult or impossible to pass another earmark without also impacting useful legislation is practically impossible. English is a rich language that lets you say one thing and mean another in some cases, and politicians are especially adept at using the language to get what they want. Transparency is the best choice here as well, since the only sure way for "obvious" earmarks to be stopped is if the people are aware that they have been attached to unrelated bills or perverted the intentions of related bills.
3. Support publicly-financed campaigns
To me, this is the worst of all the pledges. Why should we have political welfare for people running for office? Do we really want our tax dollars spent so that some candidates can have an election allegedly free of special interests? Remember, he who controls the gold makes the rules, so public financing could be perverted into an institution that funds only "worthy" candidates, with "worthy" defined by whomever is currently in power. Even with the currently limited system for Presidential candidates, the candidates have to raise a certain amount of money and be subject to other restrictions that they find onerous. This is one reason why many of the present candidates did not accept public funding - it got in the way of raising the real sums they needed to win.
4. Support reform to increase Congressional transparency
This is one pledge I can get behind, but the devil is in the implementation. Every donation to every candidate would need to be disclosed, preferably on the web, and there would need to be dire consequences if anyone was caught trying to hide a donation or the source of a donation. Every bill, including amendments and votes, would need to be available as well. All meetings would need to be open, meaning that the press (at the least) is invited and minutes are taken and made available on-line (with reasonable exceptions for things like national security issues and maybe a few others - of course, this can be perverted as well). There are numerous documents that the government has erroneously (or illegally, if it was to CYA) classified as secret which would need to be declassified, and better oversight for what can be classified should be put into place (perhaps this is a bit beyond the scope of Congress itself). Some of these things already exist, to some degree.
Now maybe we can finally know if ants can be trained to sort tiny screws in space.
I can remember back in '89 or '90 the FBI rented billboards along the highway between UAH and Redstone Arsenal/Marshall Spaceflight Center which read something like "Report all suspicious activity to the FBI and Army Intelligence immediately" and gave a telephone number to call in such an event.
UAH had many students from China and India. I remember hearing rumors that a Chinese student had tried to sneak into the rail gun lab at Marshall, but I don't know if that really happened.
I did witness a Chinese student physically break into the Computer Science department late one night; he was promptly arrested due to the actions of the network administrator. The network admin had seen the student acting suspiciously earlier that evening and confronted him and told him to leave, which he did. The admin thought the student would come back, so he warned me to keep an eye open and he himself stayed around. Sure enough, the admin saw the student come back and called the police. I remember walking from the lab to the soda machine and seeing out of the corner of my eye a hand disappearing into the CS office and the door silently being shut. I went to find the network admin and met him following the police up the stairs. The admin later told me that he believed the student was trying to alter his grades to keep from being sent back to China. Truly an unusually exciting evening at the lab.
From what I understand, 3M still does basic research. Perhaps this is because a number of their products historically have been serendipitous, accidental discoveries.
I love reading my local newspaper. It lets me read the important news with more depth than the TV news has, and I can read it while having lunch or riding in a car.
My local newspper has a cover price of 50 cents daily. Recently, I discovered that the blank paper alone costs 45 cents per issue. The remaining nickel and the advertising pays for all of the other costs at the newspaper.
While I don't mind reading the news online, I still prefer the printed word. I've long thought that the newspaper could reduce expenses if only there was a product similar to a bunch of e-ink sheets bound in book or tabloid form that could be updated once a day. It could use the same layout as the print edition. While there would be some upfront cost involved in buying the bound sheets, probably paid by the subscriber, the product would pay for itself eventually in lower costs for both the newspaper and the subscriber. Ideally, you wouldn't be limited to using it just for your newspaper - you could download books and magazines as well. Frankly, I would prefer something like this rather than the old palm-style ebooks. Inventors, get busy!
What if the sensors also transmitted back to your car? The sensors could be programmed to tell your car what the current speed limit for that stretch of road is (and they could be updated with new limits during road construction, etc.). If you had a display showing the current speed limit, you could make sure that you didn't exceed it. Especially useful for those areas where the limit signs are few and far between (assuming the sensors are ubiquitous).
Along similar lines, perhaps the sensors could transmit back information about average traffic speeds for the next few miles, letting you know ahead of time that there's congestion ahead.
The sensors would have to have information about their current lattitude and longitude (or an ID that can be looked up by the tracking software, I suppose) for tracking purposes. They could transmit that to your car as well, decreasing the need for a GPS if you have the proper equipment to interpret the sensors' signal. With that kind of information, you could track yourself and have all the benefits of GPS, at least on the road.
If some of the sensors also had the proper equipment, they could check passing cars for abnormal levels of noise or pollution. While that info could result in getting a "smogcheck required" notification or something like that, if the sensors transmitted a warning to you that your vehicle seemed to be running poorly, you might be able to take it in for service sooner. It might help you get repairs before they become costly, and improve your performance and gas mileage.
I've read about other road sensors that light up as cars pass them and stay lit for a short time, which could be handy if there's a car in front of you just hidden around the next curve or over the next hill. I could see the possibility of combining that application with the readers. If the lights and the readers are both supposed to be ubiquitous, then combining them in a single package would save money.
1) The game rules don't necessarily reflect reality so much as the developer's concept of how things should work. Things that work in reality may not work in the game. Taxation is a good example. In reality, as the tax rate increases, people use more resources trying to comply at the lowest possible cost and so the amount of tax revenue doesn't grow as fast as one would like. In many games this is handled simplistically, with a higher rate giving you coorespondingly higher revenue. If there are any negative consequences, it is usually something like increased unrest rather than decreased production.
Similarly, reducing the tax rate in the real world tends to increase tax revenue because there is less incentive to hide your income in tax shelters, and the reduced cost of compliance, along with the reduced tax rate, tends to stimulate economic activity. In most games, this merely results in a decreased revenue.
2) Games which lets the player have incredible control over the country he runs distorts the reality behind politics and governments. In many games there is little real difference between how dictatorships and democracies are run. Some games may increase unrest in the democratic countries when the citizens are calculated to disagree with the present policy (or something like that), but otherwise the underlying assumption is that the head of state has complete control of the country. This is especially bad in games where the player decides what industry should be producing, and games where the player actually trades goods to other countries rather than, say, making high-level trade agreements with those countries.
I'm not saying that these games have no value in teaching history, but their simplistic rules (compared to reality), their political bias and the player's ability to control every aspect of the country would definitely need to be considered by the instructor.
While the addresses are not tied to geography, generally speaking you can tell which IP's are from inside the US and which are from outside. This is supposed to be a system used by deaf Americans, right? Just block all foreign IP addresses. It won't stop all of the false calls, but it will stop a lot of them.
That seems the only solution, unless you come up with some kind of authentication.
Of course, as the article states, the phone companies don't really have an incentive to stop the calls since they are paid either way. This may be one time that legislation is required.
"Retailers would have also been responsible for clearly displaying signs explaining the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) ratings system."
Aren't they pretty self-explanatory already?
"In fact, the video game industry's own representative admitted she would not allow her child to play the games that the legislation targeted." (Leland Yee)
That shows that a *parent* already is deciding what to let her kids play. Isn't it supposed to be the parent who has the power to decide? If so, then what useful purpose does the legislation serve? If the legislature is hoping that lazy parents will somehow be "empowered" by the legislation, I think they'll be disappointed by the results. Then again, I suppose they can continue to use parental laziness to justify further legislation.
Then again, perhaps they could team up with private companies to install this and WiFi into street lamps, kinda like this plan in the UK. That might get things rolling a bit faster.
Since VAT is collected at every stage of the manufacturing process of a product (every time "value" is added to it), it is frequently used to conceal the actual amount of sales-like tax ultimately being paid by the end user.
Then again, all the taxes paid by business now are already a hidden tax for the end-user as he must ultimately pay a portion of the company's taxes anyway as part of the product's price. Insistuting a VAT, though, wouldn't change that but add to it.
It's like adding a section of leaky pipe to an already leaky pipe.
Will the increase in collections make up for the increased inefficiency and graft?
Then there's the fact that some states, like California, have higher sales taxes to make up for the fact that property taxes can't be raised quickly. One size sales tax may not fit all.
Of course, California also engages in various shell games with their property taxes, collecting them from the local governments and then trickling them back in an arcane way. That is responsible not only for some of the high sales taxes here but also for much of the abuse of emminent domain laws here (take someone's land for a fraction of what it's worth and practically give that to developers to build a new shopping mall, etc., in order to collect more sales tax locally). A lot of changes would have to be made at the state and local level if the Feds started collecting all the sales tax (though change isn't necessarily bad...).
NEC is ... working on a way to prevent excessive discharge of power from the cell.
So, it can be used to discharge a great amount of power, but the trick is keeping it from doing so when you don't want it to!
The thing that gives me pause when it comes to privatizing the patent office is that this is an organization that is devoted to granting temporary monopolies to companies so that those companies can recoup the money spent on developing the technology. Monopoly powers should not be granted lightly.
Of course, the current patent office is abusing this power, or at least enabling others to abuse this power. Perhaps privatization isn't a bad thing after all!
The important thing, if we want to retain quality employees at the patent office, is to find a way to tie salary to performance - perhaps those examiners who have the fewest patents overturned should be paid more, or something like that.
Making salary dependent on performance may help eliminate the deadwood as well, as those who are incompetent will have trouble getting pay raises and may eventually be encouraged to find more appropriate work elsewhere. If we simply raised every examiner's salary the same amount, the message would be that no one really cares how well (or poorly) you do your job.
While I would hope that higher salaries would attract better employees, I seriously doubt that the government ever could (or should) compete with the range of salaries that these lawyers can earn in the private sector, especially if you factor in the occasional large jury award.
I think it's more important to attract more of the people who enjoy that kind of work and less of those who are using this as a stepping-stone. Increasing the salary is not very likely to accomplish this, unless the increase is for those who work there more than just five years.
Actually, the president of Shell once said that the largest known reserves were below the Gulf of Mexico. Of course, he may have been referring to the largest known profitable reserves.
One must be very careful when you kill -9!
There is a definite lack of predefined fields in the address book - no place to store phone numbers or addresses, for example. It does have a feature that lets you add ad-hoc fields (user attributes) to the contact's record, but there isn't a way to make all the contacts have the same add-on fields without defining them for each individual contact. It is also capable of using vCards, but it only seems to get the name and email address out of them, ignoring all the other info.
If it wasn't for the poor address book, I'd be using it on my Windows box as well as my Linux system.
"53% new footage"?