Bad science is one thing, poor communication is another. My post wasn't griping about the studies as much as it was about the reporting that was done on them. How much can you dilute your words before you're not really saying anything? Is it really worth reporting if it only suggests a possibility of a correlation, without even stating how that possibility is valid?
I would have no problem with the article if it read more like this:
"Study finds that adolescents and young adults who illegally download copyrighted material are more likely to consider other illegal activity as well." Notice how much cleaner that is? It actually makes a statement. Throwing in suggests every time you're about to make a definitive statement merely weakens the statement. The only reasoning to do this that I can think of is because you want to be able to defend yourself later by saying, "Well, the data only suggested that..."
If you can't make a definitive statement towards a view then you're merely trying to incite the reader or persuade the less intelligent. You're certainly not making an argument. Being too worried about leaving yourself a route of deniability makes for bad journalism. At least, that's what my observations suggest.
They have a defense, though. Read it again, there isn't a single absolute statement made to correlate the two. Everything suggests that these factors correlate. This is the weakest worded article I've read in quite some time. It's apparently meant as flamebait and to sway the weak-minded.
Sadly, it appears that it's just plagarism and karma whoring. It would be great social commentary if there were a least some form of attribution. I should be noted that he did the same thing in response to the last duped story.
It seems to depend on a CPU fan. Hardly "silent". Your just eliminating one fan from a multi-fan system. How would it work on a fanless CPU setup?
Simple: It wouldn't. That's okay, though, you'd just pick a different solution to the problem. Just because it doesn't allow you to go fanless doesn't mean that eliminating the one fan wouldn't lessen the noise coming from the system. If I'm building a quiet rig and my options were this and a CPU fan or having a card with a fan and a CPU fan, I'd take this.
No, you missed the sarcasm. I don't quite know how, by the end it was laid on so thick that it oozed into the next post. Break it down to just one sentence and you can see:
Nobody in the entire world looked at each browser and made a sound, logical choice to use the one that best met their needs.
How, if not by sarcasm, could a ration person make such a statement? It's either +4 sarcastic or +4 insane, obviously sarcastic won out.
Perhaps you're one of the few decent administrators that runs an all MS network. The FUD is slung both ways, in large part because no one wants to blame the administration. Everyone wants to think that the OS is the end of line when it comes to reliability and productivity. Obviously you have to figure in hardware, third-party software, and, most importantly, administration.
*nix usually gets a better reputation because corporations haven't had much opportunity to hire the off-the-street administrator with a degree in law and a certificate saying they can setup a server. That's changing and, as such, you'll start to hear more and more stories about *nix migrations gone bad and the like.
Of course, the major difference is that MS is just now learning to try and lock down their machines by default and force the user to unlock what they want to use. This makes the bad Windows admin have a higher likelihood of failure because they start with a bad setup and have try to fix things, instead of starting with good setup and trying to make things work with it.
The p.s. comment at the bottom of your post was more on target. With work-for-hire laws it's up to the employee to get a contract saying that they own their work, not the company to get a contract saying that they own it.
If it were me, I would get a contract specifically stating that creating software is not part of my job description and that any software that I create is my own property and the company has no rights to it beyond those I grant. Then I would pick the appropriate creative commons license and use it to grant the company rights to use what I create.
A lawyer shouldn't be needed so long as the employment contract is clearly worded. As for the license, well, lawyer's have already been involved in CC so there's little worry there. Also, in that case everything is very plain English, which seems like a win for everyone.
Seriously though, since I do tend to agree with you about having a poor congressional class, imagine the damage they could do if there were a provision that no piece of legislation could be reintroduced? The first thing they would do is introduce legislation accepting gay marriage constitutional, then shoot it down. Basically anything they want to block would be introduced during times when the opponents think they can squash it.
Obviously our system works best on the assumption that good things will eventually get through and bad things will continually get denied, even if that's not really the case. That's why we have the judicial branch as a last resort.
I agree with other posters who have said that a more effective, though still radical, change would be to limit the scope of legislation to be topical. Such a law could not only limit the scope of congress to impart such legislation, but force the judicial branch to invalidate any non-topical addendum to the law should such an addendum be challenged.
That's the way the system works. For dumb things and good things. Imagine if we didn't allow legislation to be reintroduced. We wouldn't have half the civil rights we do now. Sure, it may force dumb things to die, but it would also mean that one especially poor congressional class could permanently ruin our country.
Slashdot stories about iPods link directly to Apple's website. Yet nobody thinks those are slashvertisements.... What's the difference between a cool link and a slashvertisement?
Exactly.
They linked directly to the website because the press release is there. If they waited until a review is found then linked to that everyone would be harping about how they saw it at xyz site two days ago and links to the press release would get karma whores +5 informative (it probably will anyway).
Personally, I think the grandparent would've been better served to post some other cliche really quick. Instead of, "It's a slashvertisement!" they posted
"but will it run..." or "I for one welcome our new tiny pc overlords." They would've contributed just as much to the topic.
I would want one (if I earned $150k+).
Who, with enough disposable income, wouldn't want one of these? It'd completely emasculate the executive next to you who wears his RIM like a badge of honor.
Just wondering why MS would test-run in France instead of some fixed part of the US.
Perhaps the blocks of IPs assigned to a particular country shift less than those assigned to a particular region? I would imagine that they want to insure some sort of consistency when someone views the website from their neighbors house. That's tough to do if you try to show ads to an IP range assigned to the Pacific North West but people use AOL and show IPs assigned to Virginia.
That may have little to do with it, but my guess is as good as yours.
If I have a one-of-a-kind car and you go and create and sell replicas of it without permission, it certainly does take something away from me since it reduces the value of my car.
Please tell that to Carroll Shelby. His name is platinum in the auto industry, he isn't a poor man, and I can't recall hearing him complain about the replica industry.
Not everything needs to be physical to be stolen, see "identity theft" for a really nasty example.
Identity theft is a term. They aren't stealing your identity from you unless they wipe your memory. They may be misusing your identity or maybe even posing as you, but you are still you. It's true that you can steal the intangible: download a file off a server you wrongfully gained access to and then delete it, for example.
I'm not arguing that the file sharers were right, but they weren't stealing.
Beyond that it was, in some ways, a bit like the Boston Tea Party. Prices were being wrongfully fixed in a way that was intolerable, it's harder to organize a boycott than it is a free-for-all. What the RIAA is feeling now is that they benefit more from the free-for-all than they do a boycott. For instance, I'm now boycotting them when I was part of the initial free for all. I limited myself to singles and impossible to find tracks, but I also was an avid purchaser of music, including many CDs containing tracks I had previously downloaded. Now I boycott p2p and RIAA purchases. I also don't even listen to music on the radio anymore, I ditched it for talk radio.
In some cases "pirating" increases the value of content. That's the case with It's a Wonderful Life. For the music that I downloaded, it was certainly true. I wouldn't have spent money on those artists without that download. I've spent hundreds just on music that was recommended to me and shared illegally that I ended up liking.
Sort of, but it's more organizational than anything else. It still behaves as separate messages in the folder organized by thread. In GMail the thread is in the folder, and then the thread is organized by message. This means that with one page I can see an entire conversation or just the unread part without having to select each message.
Again, this feature of GMail is not revolutionary, but by removing the option they've forced us to use it long enough to realize that it makes sense. It's all logical and very fluid. Outlook has most of the features in GMail (all, if you accept small difference like the conversation sort), but it does nothing to change how you deal with things.
My point wasn't the GMail was the first to bring all of the functionality, but it shouldn't be shunned for having a lack of options when it's an experiment not just in functionality but with email work-flow. Sure I probably could have made Outlook 2k work similar to the way that GMail does, but it involves me changing the default attitude of the program. That's something I have to consciously do. It's something I would've never though of doing until after I'd interacted with GMail because I, like (I would go on a limb to say) most users, always just treated emails a single messages.
Don't forget that a key element in WAPTOC is that the parent should not have to actively monitor their children in any way. Their children should be able to go to places that without such heavy-handed regulation may not be "safe" - like the internet - without their parents having to sit with them or take any precaution to insure they don't encounter the questionable things. That's why they're trying to crack down on cable television and declare the VChip a failure, parents have to exert effort to use the VChip so the answer is obviously to force their views of what is acceptable onto the rest of society.
I find ABC Family's content to be obscenely stupid, maybe I should lead the charge to get it declared pornographic. I mean, won't anyone please think of the children who are watching that crap?
Sorry, the italic emphisis on the "I" doesn't show as well as I wanted it to, I should've used bold.
The article itself says that they're not the first people to do it, I knew they weren't. However, as AC has already pointed out, I don't know of any Windows or Linux clients that do that, and I don't have access to a Mac. I'm not saying they don't exist. To be fair, I got sick of using standalone email clients a couple years ago. I use too many computers during the day so it's annoying downloading new messages on the lot of them or having xyz in an offline file on one while abc is in an offline file on another.
Read the comment. I don't pretend to know if they have those things. I asked if they did and pretty much assumed they didn't. I open anyone to tell me what they do and don't provide. Every criticism I offer is "does it have" or "if not then boo." All of my observations about GMail are from personal experience. I took special care not to directly compare the two as though I have prior knowledge. If you know, please tell me if I was specifically wrong and how.
I'm fond of GMail as well, and I know some people who swear by it. I also know people who just don't care for it. This leads me to understand what Mr. Mossberg's complaints are, but to also know that he is missing the point. I haven't used Yahoo!'s new interface, but I can imagine that I would have some issues with it.
The point that was missed is that Google's GMail project was meant to test new ideas. Is it really a new idea to try to mimic Outlook's tired functionality within a web browser? Certainly not, Microsoft already did a superb job of that with OWA. GMail follows Google's UI philosophy to a tee and is nothing more or less than I would suspect from them. They are keeping thing simple by limiting options. That may emasculate some users, because they want to think that they're superior to everyone else and know the right way to setup an interface, but it's a good way to test some of the alternative ways of thinking that Google wanted to explore.
For instance, I had never really taken the time to think of keeping threads of email as a single object. The first place that I saw it was in GMail. After seeing that I really despise having to use Outlook at work with it's cluttered mess of folders. I had also heard of the concept of search folders and labels before, but seeing it in action I realized how much better it is to see, interact with, and think of each message as a single object with multiple attributes that link it to other objects. If I'm looking for an email that was recently sent to me with an image attached I can just click on the "Attachments" label that I created and see all of the messages with attachments.
It's time to put aside that gushing and look at why I understand his complaints. It's difficult for people who just think of email as email to objectify it to realize that GMail's interface is logical. I converted my wife, who almost immediately converted 20 or so of her friends, and she had some issues setting up filters for use with labels. Some of her friends just didn't get it and switched back to whatever they used before. Not the least, I understand the concept of not throwing away data when you have so much storage, but do I really want to have that thrown in my face every time I delete something that I don't want being there? I also wish that GMail would trim the original text of large threads, check the original document of a 100-message thread sometime.
Then again, this is Google so it is a beta project. I could also refute each of my points with someone else's opinion that they like things the other way. Nothing changes that GMail is extremely successful at changing the way it's faithful users think about their email.
Yahoo!'s interface sounds interesting, but I'm interested in knowing if it has what GMail does. Does it have good keyboard shortcut support? Does it treat email messages as one object if I try to organize it in two different ways? I know it doesn't have threaded viewing of messages (yet) but does it hide previous emails and quoted text and/or highlight quoted text in such a way that I can easily discern quoted from new (for those who like to reply to one paragraph at a time)? If not then shame on Yahoo! for not incorporating features that save me time and are well done by Google. For that matter, if they don't have keyboard shortcuts then shame on them for not incorporating an indispensable part of standard UI.
Corporation A gives individual A the maximum allowable contribution as a "bonus". Individual A then uses the contribution to further the company's political interest. Wash, rinse repeat ad nauseum. In one stroke I have dismantled you plan.
Not quite. That would be just as illegal as it is to buy a vote. When you combine that with the illegality of telling a third party who a donation is from then you have a situation where it becomes quite difficult to ensure that the money was funnelled correctly. The person who received the bonus could easily just keep the money. If the company fired them then they could charge they were fired over the non-contribution. Companies would have to really tread lightly or else they'd be caught. Also think, it wouldn't be worthwhile to some employees to get that large of an increase in bonus and be ordered to donate it, it could bump them up a whole tax bracket.
Because whether you like it or not, the businesses whose influence you are trying to stifle are integral to the US economic system. Imagine "What I can't buy votes anymore? I'll go to Guatemala, where it's not only possible, it's considered best practice"
I don't see that being so much of a problem. See, the coercion could and would still happen with the changes I proposed, but it would be a bit harder and, much more importantly, it would increase the voice of the little guy.
Not that I'm saying the system isn't broken, but your solution won't help much.
Implemented properly it would have an affect, and it should be a positive one. That's all I'd like to see. I think it would certainly have a better affect than uber-libertarian scheme proposed at the start of this thread. Imagine: Bill Gates says, "I want to donate $200 million to each representative that supports invalidating the GPL as a license," and then does so because there's no restriction on contributions anymore. Free speech for those who can afford to be heard.
It's a win if Microsoft cracks down on piracy. Microsoft can't afford to crack down on piracy so long as there are viable alternatives on the market without significantly lowering their prices. If they keep their prices as high as they currently are and crack down on piracy then they will lose a large amount of home users, especially outside of the US market. As soon as their user base, whether it's home or business, starts to slide then alternative suites will become much more legitimate to evaluate.
Basically, anything that levels the playing field at all is a significant setback for Microsoft.
For one, where do you think those contributions come from when a company makes them? It's not the executives' paychecks. It's money that would otherwise have to be distributed, either to the executives as a bonus (which may affect them negatively come tax time), the employees, or the stockholders. Right there, the executives of the company have made a decision on the backs of their employees, investors, and other executives. If any of those people have reason or desire to support another candidate/party they were not represented. That money should be distributed however the company sees fit, and then individuals can contribute as they please.
Also, what makes you think that the executives of a company would be able to contribute the same amount? First they'd be taking a hit out of their own pockets, and executives do not like spending their own money (e.g. car allowances). Second, many wouldn't be contributing solely on the premise of furthering the companies profits, by making them spend their own money they will be more likely to take social and moral issues into account. They may have to answer to their spouse or family as to why they're contributing so much personal wealth.
The concept of personal wealth could also be factored out, if done right. The maximum individual contribution should be kept in cheque. Sure, the rich and powerful would still probably have more influence, but if they can only voice their opinions using, say, 100 times the average contribution then it only takes 100 other contributors to make their voices just as loud. If you think about the distribution of wealth then you could come up with a system that allows those who want to have a louder voice, but not so loud that the voice of the people gets drowned out (as it is now).
Of course, there is also that the rearrangement of the money supply would cut off money more than just re-channel it. See, chances are that most executives that would contribute to campaigns in such a system already do, on top of the corporate contributions. These people are already probably in the upper echelons of wealth and have a louder contributing voice than the rest of us, why should we allow them to double that voice by treating their corporate entity as though it should have something to do with our political process?
Slashdot Mirror
I would have no problem with the article if it read more like this: "Study finds that adolescents and young adults who illegally download copyrighted material are more likely to consider other illegal activity as well." Notice how much cleaner that is? It actually makes a statement. Throwing in suggests every time you're about to make a definitive statement merely weakens the statement. The only reasoning to do this that I can think of is because you want to be able to defend yourself later by saying, "Well, the data only suggested that..."
If you can't make a definitive statement towards a view then you're merely trying to incite the reader or persuade the less intelligent. You're certainly not making an argument. Being too worried about leaving yourself a route of deniability makes for bad journalism. At least, that's what my observations suggest.
No No No! You can't say that! You should be saying this:
They have a defense, though. Read it again, there isn't a single absolute statement made to correlate the two. Everything suggests that these factors correlate. This is the weakest worded article I've read in quite some time. It's apparently meant as flamebait and to sway the weak-minded.
It is. Read his journal. He's doing this as an expose on the community and failures of moderation. Sadly, in some ways he's rather insightful.
Sadly, it appears that it's just plagarism and karma whoring. It would be great social commentary if there were a least some form of attribution. I should be noted that he did the same thing in response to the last duped story.
[insert random bitching about dupes here]
Simple: It wouldn't. That's okay, though, you'd just pick a different solution to the problem. Just because it doesn't allow you to go fanless doesn't mean that eliminating the one fan wouldn't lessen the noise coming from the system. If I'm building a quiet rig and my options were this and a CPU fan or having a card with a fan and a CPU fan, I'd take this.
In Minnesota it already sorta does.
Nobody in the entire world looked at each browser and made a sound, logical choice to use the one that best met their needs.
How, if not by sarcasm, could a ration person make such a statement? It's either +4 sarcastic or +4 insane, obviously sarcastic won out.
I was just thinking, if this has decent pick-up then it would take the porn industry by storm. Potentially clean sound without dubbing.
I know, this is slashdot. The only sex acts involve, what... Wives?
Well, now that I realize that I saw this and thought of porn before my wife I feel kinda bad... shucks.
*nix usually gets a better reputation because corporations haven't had much opportunity to hire the off-the-street administrator with a degree in law and a certificate saying they can setup a server. That's changing and, as such, you'll start to hear more and more stories about *nix migrations gone bad and the like.
Of course, the major difference is that MS is just now learning to try and lock down their machines by default and force the user to unlock what they want to use. This makes the bad Windows admin have a higher likelihood of failure because they start with a bad setup and have try to fix things, instead of starting with good setup and trying to make things work with it.
If it were me, I would get a contract specifically stating that creating software is not part of my job description and that any software that I create is my own property and the company has no rights to it beyond those I grant. Then I would pick the appropriate creative commons license and use it to grant the company rights to use what I create.
A lawyer shouldn't be needed so long as the employment contract is clearly worded. As for the license, well, lawyer's have already been involved in CC so there's little worry there. Also, in that case everything is very plain English, which seems like a win for everyone.
Seriously though, since I do tend to agree with you about having a poor congressional class, imagine the damage they could do if there were a provision that no piece of legislation could be reintroduced? The first thing they would do is introduce legislation accepting gay marriage constitutional, then shoot it down. Basically anything they want to block would be introduced during times when the opponents think they can squash it.
Obviously our system works best on the assumption that good things will eventually get through and bad things will continually get denied, even if that's not really the case. That's why we have the judicial branch as a last resort.
I agree with other posters who have said that a more effective, though still radical, change would be to limit the scope of legislation to be topical. Such a law could not only limit the scope of congress to impart such legislation, but force the judicial branch to invalidate any non-topical addendum to the law should such an addendum be challenged.
That's the way the system works. For dumb things and good things. Imagine if we didn't allow legislation to be reintroduced. We wouldn't have half the civil rights we do now. Sure, it may force dumb things to die, but it would also mean that one especially poor congressional class could permanently ruin our country.
Exactly.
They linked directly to the website because the press release is there. If they waited until a review is found then linked to that everyone would be harping about how they saw it at xyz site two days ago and links to the press release would get karma whores +5 informative (it probably will anyway).
Personally, I think the grandparent would've been better served to post some other cliche really quick. Instead of, "It's a slashvertisement!" they posted "but will it run..." or "I for one welcome our new tiny pc overlords." They would've contributed just as much to the topic.
I would want one (if I earned $150k+).
Who, with enough disposable income, wouldn't want one of these? It'd completely emasculate the executive next to you who wears his RIM like a badge of honor.
Perhaps the blocks of IPs assigned to a particular country shift less than those assigned to a particular region? I would imagine that they want to insure some sort of consistency when someone views the website from their neighbors house. That's tough to do if you try to show ads to an IP range assigned to the Pacific North West but people use AOL and show IPs assigned to Virginia.
That may have little to do with it, but my guess is as good as yours.
Please tell that to Carroll Shelby. His name is platinum in the auto industry, he isn't a poor man, and I can't recall hearing him complain about the replica industry.
Not everything needs to be physical to be stolen, see "identity theft" for a really nasty example.
Identity theft is a term. They aren't stealing your identity from you unless they wipe your memory. They may be misusing your identity or maybe even posing as you, but you are still you. It's true that you can steal the intangible: download a file off a server you wrongfully gained access to and then delete it, for example.
I'm not arguing that the file sharers were right, but they weren't stealing.
Beyond that it was, in some ways, a bit like the Boston Tea Party. Prices were being wrongfully fixed in a way that was intolerable, it's harder to organize a boycott than it is a free-for-all. What the RIAA is feeling now is that they benefit more from the free-for-all than they do a boycott. For instance, I'm now boycotting them when I was part of the initial free for all. I limited myself to singles and impossible to find tracks, but I also was an avid purchaser of music, including many CDs containing tracks I had previously downloaded. Now I boycott p2p and RIAA purchases. I also don't even listen to music on the radio anymore, I ditched it for talk radio.
In some cases "pirating" increases the value of content. That's the case with It's a Wonderful Life. For the music that I downloaded, it was certainly true. I wouldn't have spent money on those artists without that download. I've spent hundreds just on music that was recommended to me and shared illegally that I ended up liking.
Again, this feature of GMail is not revolutionary, but by removing the option they've forced us to use it long enough to realize that it makes sense. It's all logical and very fluid. Outlook has most of the features in GMail (all, if you accept small difference like the conversation sort), but it does nothing to change how you deal with things.
My point wasn't the GMail was the first to bring all of the functionality, but it shouldn't be shunned for having a lack of options when it's an experiment not just in functionality but with email work-flow. Sure I probably could have made Outlook 2k work similar to the way that GMail does, but it involves me changing the default attitude of the program. That's something I have to consciously do. It's something I would've never though of doing until after I'd interacted with GMail because I, like (I would go on a limb to say) most users, always just treated emails a single messages.
I find ABC Family's content to be obscenely stupid, maybe I should lead the charge to get it declared pornographic. I mean, won't anyone please think of the children who are watching that crap?
The article itself says that they're not the first people to do it, I knew they weren't. However, as AC has already pointed out, I don't know of any Windows or Linux clients that do that, and I don't have access to a Mac. I'm not saying they don't exist. To be fair, I got sick of using standalone email clients a couple years ago. I use too many computers during the day so it's annoying downloading new messages on the lot of them or having xyz in an offline file on one while abc is in an offline file on another.
Read the comment. I don't pretend to know if they have those things. I asked if they did and pretty much assumed they didn't. I open anyone to tell me what they do and don't provide. Every criticism I offer is "does it have" or "if not then boo." All of my observations about GMail are from personal experience. I took special care not to directly compare the two as though I have prior knowledge. If you know, please tell me if I was specifically wrong and how.
The point that was missed is that Google's GMail project was meant to test new ideas. Is it really a new idea to try to mimic Outlook's tired functionality within a web browser? Certainly not, Microsoft already did a superb job of that with OWA. GMail follows Google's UI philosophy to a tee and is nothing more or less than I would suspect from them. They are keeping thing simple by limiting options. That may emasculate some users, because they want to think that they're superior to everyone else and know the right way to setup an interface, but it's a good way to test some of the alternative ways of thinking that Google wanted to explore.
For instance, I had never really taken the time to think of keeping threads of email as a single object. The first place that I saw it was in GMail. After seeing that I really despise having to use Outlook at work with it's cluttered mess of folders. I had also heard of the concept of search folders and labels before, but seeing it in action I realized how much better it is to see, interact with, and think of each message as a single object with multiple attributes that link it to other objects. If I'm looking for an email that was recently sent to me with an image attached I can just click on the "Attachments" label that I created and see all of the messages with attachments.
It's time to put aside that gushing and look at why I understand his complaints. It's difficult for people who just think of email as email to objectify it to realize that GMail's interface is logical. I converted my wife, who almost immediately converted 20 or so of her friends, and she had some issues setting up filters for use with labels. Some of her friends just didn't get it and switched back to whatever they used before. Not the least, I understand the concept of not throwing away data when you have so much storage, but do I really want to have that thrown in my face every time I delete something that I don't want being there? I also wish that GMail would trim the original text of large threads, check the original document of a 100-message thread sometime.
Then again, this is Google so it is a beta project. I could also refute each of my points with someone else's opinion that they like things the other way. Nothing changes that GMail is extremely successful at changing the way it's faithful users think about their email.
Yahoo!'s interface sounds interesting, but I'm interested in knowing if it has what GMail does. Does it have good keyboard shortcut support? Does it treat email messages as one object if I try to organize it in two different ways? I know it doesn't have threaded viewing of messages (yet) but does it hide previous emails and quoted text and/or highlight quoted text in such a way that I can easily discern quoted from new (for those who like to reply to one paragraph at a time)? If not then shame on Yahoo! for not incorporating features that save me time and are well done by Google. For that matter, if they don't have keyboard shortcuts then shame on them for not incorporating an indispensable part of standard UI.
Not quite. That would be just as illegal as it is to buy a vote. When you combine that with the illegality of telling a third party who a donation is from then you have a situation where it becomes quite difficult to ensure that the money was funnelled correctly. The person who received the bonus could easily just keep the money. If the company fired them then they could charge they were fired over the non-contribution. Companies would have to really tread lightly or else they'd be caught. Also think, it wouldn't be worthwhile to some employees to get that large of an increase in bonus and be ordered to donate it, it could bump them up a whole tax bracket.
Because whether you like it or not, the businesses whose influence you are trying to stifle are integral to the US economic system. Imagine "What I can't buy votes anymore? I'll go to Guatemala, where it's not only possible, it's considered best practice"
I don't see that being so much of a problem. See, the coercion could and would still happen with the changes I proposed, but it would be a bit harder and, much more importantly, it would increase the voice of the little guy.
Not that I'm saying the system isn't broken, but your solution won't help much.
Implemented properly it would have an affect, and it should be a positive one. That's all I'd like to see. I think it would certainly have a better affect than uber-libertarian scheme proposed at the start of this thread. Imagine: Bill Gates says, "I want to donate $200 million to each representative that supports invalidating the GPL as a license," and then does so because there's no restriction on contributions anymore. Free speech for those who can afford to be heard.
Basically, anything that levels the playing field at all is a significant setback for Microsoft.
Also, what makes you think that the executives of a company would be able to contribute the same amount? First they'd be taking a hit out of their own pockets, and executives do not like spending their own money (e.g. car allowances). Second, many wouldn't be contributing solely on the premise of furthering the companies profits, by making them spend their own money they will be more likely to take social and moral issues into account. They may have to answer to their spouse or family as to why they're contributing so much personal wealth.
The concept of personal wealth could also be factored out, if done right. The maximum individual contribution should be kept in cheque. Sure, the rich and powerful would still probably have more influence, but if they can only voice their opinions using, say, 100 times the average contribution then it only takes 100 other contributors to make their voices just as loud. If you think about the distribution of wealth then you could come up with a system that allows those who want to have a louder voice, but not so loud that the voice of the people gets drowned out (as it is now).
Of course, there is also that the rearrangement of the money supply would cut off money more than just re-channel it. See, chances are that most executives that would contribute to campaigns in such a system already do, on top of the corporate contributions. These people are already probably in the upper echelons of wealth and have a louder contributing voice than the rest of us, why should we allow them to double that voice by treating their corporate entity as though it should have something to do with our political process?