China can muster more troops than the US? I don't think so. Sure they have ~4x the population. However China had a strict 1 child per family rule in place for many years (this has been relaxed a little, but only in recent years). For every young person (meaning 20 years old, prime soldier age) in China their are typically 6 others - 2 parents, 4 grandparents. There may be some great-grandparents (though most of them would have had more than one child), but there are also some dead parents/grandparents, so this balances.
The 1 child policy has encouraged the Chinese to have more male children (males are valued more by the people there for stupid reasons), so I assume they can still raise more troops than the US, but it isn't as one sided as you might think. Smart generals can negate this advantage. (Both sides have smart generals though, so I don't know who gets this advantage)
The war with Iraq has so far been the best case I can think of for a war. (though when you have a major power go against a tiny power in a traditional war that is no surprise)
In truth, both the US and China are well aware that war between the two would be long and costly of many lives. There is no other way, the US will not give up easily. I'd be surprised if the Chinese did.
In the end everyone is dead. So far living to 100 is rare, and there are no verified cases of anyone living to 150. (Your religion may list some who have in the past, and other rumors exists). It is unlikely that medical science will make your immortal in your lifetime. You can freeze your body, but why would the next generation unfreeze your body and restore you to life - if they even can?
So you need to keep perspective. Find the right religion, and serve it correctly (assuming one exists), and can end up with a better hearafter. Otherwise you are stuck (depending on the answer to the religious question how you are stuck varies). So use the time you have wisely. Work enough to live, but don't let work rule your life. Find what is more important, and live that.
Even if you know the exact decrypted form of the data from sector 1 (which in a typical algorithm is the least secure block), you are still looking at more energy than is in this corner of the galaxy to get the key. Encryption is designed so that knowing the plain text and the encrypted text gives you know clue of the key.
That is why the RC5 challenges tell you right out the first part of each encrypted sequence is "The secret message is:" (Or some tiny variation of the above).
While 20 years ago Smith and Wesson was a topic of argument, most (but not all) of their former defenders feel betrayed. Most gun nuts, no matter what their preferred and hated brands are feel Smith and Wesson must die!
You better bet that RMS announced software patents were a good idea, it wouldn't just be the BSD camp that hates GNU, it would be most of slashdot.
If you do not have that bumper sticker, and lock the breaks when someone is too close, you can argue when sued that you "had nothing against the person behind you, but you thought you saw a kid about to run in front of you. You realized a moment latter that it was just a shadow".
If you have that bumper sticker though, the guy behind you (if his lawyer is smart) will argue that you plan on locking your breaks anytime someone gets "too close" (and the lawyer will point out that too close was not defined). This clearly shows you intend to cause harm (locking your breaks could kill the person behind you), and you would be liable.
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. If you need specifics see a lawyer.
About 5 minutes after I posted that I realized that the subject was too harsh. Sorry about that.
I too am working from memory. It has been 8 years since I studied this. I did a little research myself.
While the constants are large, a multi-gigahertz computer has no problem dealing with 2000 didits numbers. And as computing power goes up, we can deal with large number faster than you can factor them. So for practical purposes I can find 2 primes with 200 didgets relatively fast on a modern computer. However you cannot factor the product of them with any great speed.
We don't generate new public keys very often. Maybe yearly, and it only takes a short time. Generally getting a good seed to the random number generator, and entering a new passphase will take longer. For practical purposes there are plenty of prime numbers.
Sun makes the Java install process on FreeBSD so complex that I've given up. Therefore any Java program instantly cannot run on my computers. So far I haven't seen any loss either. Java is mostly used for long running server processes (where JVM start up time is irrelevant and the JIT compiler can speed things to just as fast as C++), so I don't need it anyway.
I find that cross platform C++ is not hard if your code is properly modular. Libraries like QT or wxWidgets take care of most issues these days anyway.
I have no problem. DRM only works for Microsoft Windows, and sometimes Apple Mac. So far nothing targets linux, so I think as a FreeBSD user I won't have a problem for years.
Though I keep writing my congressmen about each attempt to make DRM law.
(the CPU on the controller is optimized for XOR operations, thus faster and more efficient than the VIA CPU)
Maybe. Most of the RAID cards I have seen have standard x86 CPUs though. If you do your research and buy a RAID controller based on how much power it uses (I have no clue where to get these numbers) you would be correct. Otherwise the VIA CPU is efficient, and may be better.
Most of wine should not be in the kernel. However (parts of?) wine server would be better off in the kernel. One major performance problem that wine has is everytime you need to use something in the wine server, you need two context switches. For some programs this doesn't happen often, but for others it makes wine half the speed of Microsoft Windows.
If wine server was in the kernel there would be no context switch.
Note that I'm not arguing that moving wine to the kernel is the best solution to this problem. Only that it is one.
You have no clue what you are talking about. Mathematicians have studied primes. They already know that primes are relatively dense. Between 1 and n there are approximately n/ln(n) primes. That is there are plenty of them, even in the very large numbers. Even at 1000 digit numbers you are only looking at a few hundred tries before you find a useful prime.
Note that I said useful prime. There are numbers that are not prime that will work for RSA encryption (newton primes). A token effort is made to eliminate them, but only because some think they might be less secure than normal primes - there is no known way to exploit a RSA if it contains a newton prime, that doesn't work for regular primes.
This is a real concern when you have several hundred windmills near (relatively) each other.
The wind shifts all the time. Prevailing winds are only prevailling, if you have two windmills you can count on times where one is exactly downstream of the previous.
I was directly attack the assertion that his windmills scale easily. They do not scale to hundreds like he is contending. When you have 2 or even 4 windmills my concerns are trivial. If you have hundreds they are very important to engineer around.
Well you would have to be a retard to start a business, and deal with all the hassle that Bill Gates does. I know I personally would have retired long before I got as much money as he has.
Seriously though, it is often easier to look at a situation from the outside.
There is a lot of luck involved in any success story. If Whats-his-name hadn't decided to go fly his airplane instead of meeting with IBM executives, Microsoft would still be a tiny Basic vendor. I was still in Jr high at the time, so the bad luck of not being old enough prevents me from getting into his place. Now there may or may not be an opportunity waiting now that I should jump on. However no other company has gone as far as microsoft since, so that suggests that I couldn't have even if I tried. (Maybe... though I should note that I didn't expect Amazon.com to still be in business today, so part of it is that my predictions were wrong)
This isn't to say Bill Gates hasn't created some of his own luck - he clearly did. However some of it were things that cannot be repeated.
Returning cards that don't work costs you money? I don't get your logic. Buy the cards, try them. If they don't work return them for your money back. I've done it before.
In fact my typical hardware plan is to find out what linux supports, and then buy something else, just to open the box and return it. I want to cost companies money by allowing hardware without linux support on their shelves. They will get the message if every linux user made this their plan for hardware purchases.
I know it is hard to deal with the loss of your own (or friends) jobs. However step back a little. The money already spent is a sunk cost, we cannot get it back, so it does not enter into calculations. We have to look at the benefits of continuing. Sometimes the situation changes and it isn't worth spending more money on something 90% done.
As a hypothetical example, if you were building a bridge to an island, and the water level raises, enough to put the island underwater, would you continue to build the bridge because you are almost done? I know that I would leave it going nowhere, or even tear it down, even though it was almost done.
Now I cannot evaluate the science of those projects.
Actually a waterwheel can be just as efficient as a standard prop on a boat. However the design to do this is more complex, as you need to get all the blades vertical in the water for the full path. It has been done, but it is a mechanical monster that breaks too often to be practical. A prop is simple.
To make this clear: when the blades of your waterwheel enter the water they are somewhat pushing down on the water, which waste energy. Then as they come out they are somewhat lifting the water. When the blade is straight up and down it is just as efficient as a prop for moving the boat.
Your points are true only on a small scale, they fail on anything large.
All windmills slow the wind. If you add a second windmill, and the wind is blowing such that it would go from one to the next (in absence of any windmills/trees/buildings), the second windmill will see slower wind than the first, and thus generate less power.
All windmills create turbulence zones around them, mostly downwind. This too decreases the efficiency of the windmills downwind.
The only solutions to these problems is to space your windmills farther apart, or live with reduced efficiency.
As an aside, the above effects are why normal windmills have 3 blades, and not many - after every blade passes they need to wait for the slow wind to get out of the way to generate maximum power. (1 or 2 blade windmills would be better yet, but there are other technical details that make them less impractical in the real world) I suspect that you would get more power from your homebuilt generators if you got rid of a few of your blades - but of course you would need to experiment to see.
The last problem with scaling is you cannot just go up forever. There are substantial differences in windspeed and direction with altitude. Direction is mostly something airplanes worry about (and it doesn't matter to vertical axis turbines anyway). Speed is a different matter - wind near the ground is always slower than wind farther up. So if your turbine is tall enough, say 30 meters and near the ground, you lose energy because the wind higher up is acting as a fan to push the wind lower down. You can move the whole system up, but then you lose the advantage of the generators being near ground.
Simplicity is great, except that simple stuff may to be reliable. If you like tinkering with your windturbines as a hobby, this is not a problem. If you just want to use lights and such without worrying about the generation wind is not for you. The utilities can pay for complex solutions that are engineered to be reliable. They also have the ability to deal with unexpected problems. If one of your turbines breaks you are down to half power (assuming your solar input is negligible, you didn't specify so I don't know what it is), to the power company that is less than 1%.
You eliminate every variable you can, and then hope there are not any more. You also use redundancy - run several experiments, if one gets different results from the other you know to go look for why.
We won't run into problems caused by paper clips because when the experiment is running there will be no technician nearby. He might leave a paperclip, (or something else), but that effect will be constant, and the experiment is designed to eliminate constants.
Seismometers can measure footsteps, but only when they are close. So they put the things out where nobody will walk (often anyway), and place several of them in any area they are interested. When an event seems to happen on one, if there isn't anything on the others they know someone walked by so they ignore it. (seismometers are not interested in local effects that mimic people walking by, so this is safe.)
A good salesmen understands that you worked hard and finds ways to thank you. Seriously, he will get the big money, but he will make sure you get something.
Good salesmen are rare though. When/if you find them they are worth the several million $$$/year they take home in pay though. (In every company that does direct sales, there should be at least one salesmen who makes more than the CEO)
That single click thing stands as a massive red flag that KDE doesn't pay enough attention usability or it would have been changed a long time ago.
No, it is a massive red flag that nobody else pays enough attention to usability. Have you ever watched a new computer user try to double click? Preferably someone over 80? I have, they do not get double click. Even when they understand the concept (which is not intuitive at all), they are physically unable to do it fast enough while holding the mouse in one place.
Double click was forced on the world because Apple marketing insisted that their ads would be better if they could sell that you cannot push the wrong button. Apple didn't case, and doesn't care that this makes the computer harder to use, because it makes it look easier.
KDE is doing it right. KDE cares about doing things right, which is why KDE insists on keeping single click the default. (Sadly people like you arguing the wrong side are winning, too many people have learned the wrong way and are now untrainable)
If you look close at Windows you will find Microsoft is trying to go the same way. One of the more easily accessible settings in Windows 2000+ is single click activation because it is right. Unfortunately Microsoft has is stuck with the wrong convention current users are used to.
It only takes one person with a hundred million to write the check.
Maybe they will, maybe they won't. That doesn't change the point that if they do you suddenly have enough money to mount a national campaign and get your message out. If they don't you are no worse off than before.
My state (not federal, state) congressmen is resigning. There is an election scheduled latter this month for his replacement. If this law directly affects how that campaign is run.
If you live in an area where there is no election anytime soon there is no real urgency. However if there is an election you need this protection.
Your comment is false. True republicans have a simple majority in the house. That means they have more than 50% of the seats. However that doesn't not mean they control everything, some votes require more than a simple majority. This vote required a 2/3rds majority to pass, and the republicans do not have that much power. Even if all the republicans vote for it (so far I have not found any list of how the republicans voted so I'm not sure) that is not enough to get it to pass. 20 something (23? I saw the list but forgot the count) democrats voted for this, and it still wasn't enough to pass.
True, but that doesn't excuse the democrats (or republicans) from passing it. If anything it is a perfect excuse to vote against it: Well I support the idea, but I had no clue what was in it, so I didn't dare vote for it.
They however are more interested in re-election than being a leader who always does the right thing no matter what the cost.
There was opposition to the patriot act on slashdot before it passed, just based on parts we knew of.
You got it wrong. The fringe candidate we all need doesn't need money. Today we have to hope the fringe candidate is someone rich, like Forbes, because only rich people can spend enough to get heard nationally. Better home Forbes is a that person we all need because he is the only one with a chance.
Without campaign finance "reform", the candidate can be anyone. They only need to find one rich person (and there are plenty to choose from), and spend their efforts getting that rich person to donate money. One rich person can write a check for the hundred million needed and not notice the loss. (Not all the time, but for one candidate)
The two major parties don't need this. They already have the mind share that they can get hundreds of little guys to donate money. They are better of preventing the fringe candidate we all need from getting enough money to be heard.
Without money you can say anything you want, in this day and age you will not be heard by enough people to make a difference. With money you can get the message out. The major parties (both of them) do not want you to get your message out, so they try to convince you that money isn't a part of free speech.
Slashdot Mirror
China can muster more troops than the US? I don't think so. Sure they have ~4x the population. However China had a strict 1 child per family rule in place for many years (this has been relaxed a little, but only in recent years). For every young person (meaning 20 years old, prime soldier age) in China their are typically 6 others - 2 parents, 4 grandparents. There may be some great-grandparents (though most of them would have had more than one child), but there are also some dead parents/grandparents, so this balances.
The 1 child policy has encouraged the Chinese to have more male children (males are valued more by the people there for stupid reasons), so I assume they can still raise more troops than the US, but it isn't as one sided as you might think. Smart generals can negate this advantage. (Both sides have smart generals though, so I don't know who gets this advantage)
The war with Iraq has so far been the best case I can think of for a war. (though when you have a major power go against a tiny power in a traditional war that is no surprise)
In truth, both the US and China are well aware that war between the two would be long and costly of many lives. There is no other way, the US will not give up easily. I'd be surprised if the Chinese did.
In the end everyone is dead. So far living to 100 is rare, and there are no verified cases of anyone living to 150. (Your religion may list some who have in the past, and other rumors exists). It is unlikely that medical science will make your immortal in your lifetime. You can freeze your body, but why would the next generation unfreeze your body and restore you to life - if they even can?
So you need to keep perspective. Find the right religion, and serve it correctly (assuming one exists), and can end up with a better hearafter. Otherwise you are stuck (depending on the answer to the religious question how you are stuck varies). So use the time you have wisely. Work enough to live, but don't let work rule your life. Find what is more important, and live that.
Even if you know the exact decrypted form of the data from sector 1 (which in a typical algorithm is the least secure block), you are still looking at more energy than is in this corner of the galaxy to get the key. Encryption is designed so that knowing the plain text and the encrypted text gives you know clue of the key.
That is why the RC5 challenges tell you right out the first part of each encrypted sequence is "The secret message is:" (Or some tiny variation of the above).
While 20 years ago Smith and Wesson was a topic of argument, most (but not all) of their former defenders feel betrayed. Most gun nuts, no matter what their preferred and hated brands are feel Smith and Wesson must die!
You better bet that RMS announced software patents were a good idea, it wouldn't just be the BSD camp that hates GNU, it would be most of slashdot.
If you do not have that bumper sticker, and lock the breaks when someone is too close, you can argue when sued that you "had nothing against the person behind you, but you thought you saw a kid about to run in front of you. You realized a moment latter that it was just a shadow".
If you have that bumper sticker though, the guy behind you (if his lawyer is smart) will argue that you plan on locking your breaks anytime someone gets "too close" (and the lawyer will point out that too close was not defined). This clearly shows you intend to cause harm (locking your breaks could kill the person behind you), and you would be liable.
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. If you need specifics see a lawyer.
About 5 minutes after I posted that I realized that the subject was too harsh. Sorry about that.
I too am working from memory. It has been 8 years since I studied this. I did a little research myself.
While the constants are large, a multi-gigahertz computer has no problem dealing with 2000 didits numbers. And as computing power goes up, we can deal with large number faster than you can factor them. So for practical purposes I can find 2 primes with 200 didgets relatively fast on a modern computer. However you cannot factor the product of them with any great speed.
We don't generate new public keys very often. Maybe yearly, and it only takes a short time. Generally getting a good seed to the random number generator, and entering a new passphase will take longer. For practical purposes there are plenty of prime numbers.
Sun makes the Java install process on FreeBSD so complex that I've given up. Therefore any Java program instantly cannot run on my computers. So far I haven't seen any loss either. Java is mostly used for long running server processes (where JVM start up time is irrelevant and the JIT compiler can speed things to just as fast as C++), so I don't need it anyway.
I find that cross platform C++ is not hard if your code is properly modular. Libraries like QT or wxWidgets take care of most issues these days anyway.
I have no problem. DRM only works for Microsoft Windows, and sometimes Apple Mac. So far nothing targets linux, so I think as a FreeBSD user I won't have a problem for years.
Though I keep writing my congressmen about each attempt to make DRM law.
(the CPU on the controller is optimized for XOR operations, thus faster and more efficient than the VIA CPU)
Maybe. Most of the RAID cards I have seen have standard x86 CPUs though. If you do your research and buy a RAID controller based on how much power it uses (I have no clue where to get these numbers) you would be correct. Otherwise the VIA CPU is efficient, and may be better.
Most of wine should not be in the kernel. However (parts of?) wine server would be better off in the kernel. One major performance problem that wine has is everytime you need to use something in the wine server, you need two context switches. For some programs this doesn't happen often, but for others it makes wine half the speed of Microsoft Windows.
If wine server was in the kernel there would be no context switch.
Note that I'm not arguing that moving wine to the kernel is the best solution to this problem. Only that it is one.
You have no clue what you are talking about. Mathematicians have studied primes. They already know that primes are relatively dense. Between 1 and n there are approximately n/ln(n) primes. That is there are plenty of them, even in the very large numbers. Even at 1000 digit numbers you are only looking at a few hundred tries before you find a useful prime.
Note that I said useful prime. There are numbers that are not prime that will work for RSA encryption (newton primes). A token effort is made to eliminate them, but only because some think they might be less secure than normal primes - there is no known way to exploit a RSA if it contains a newton prime, that doesn't work for regular primes.
This is a real concern when you have several hundred windmills near (relatively) each other.
The wind shifts all the time. Prevailing winds are only prevailling, if you have two windmills you can count on times where one is exactly downstream of the previous.
I was directly attack the assertion that his windmills scale easily. They do not scale to hundreds like he is contending. When you have 2 or even 4 windmills my concerns are trivial. If you have hundreds they are very important to engineer around.
Well you would have to be a retard to start a business, and deal with all the hassle that Bill Gates does. I know I personally would have retired long before I got as much money as he has.
Seriously though, it is often easier to look at a situation from the outside.
There is a lot of luck involved in any success story. If Whats-his-name hadn't decided to go fly his airplane instead of meeting with IBM executives, Microsoft would still be a tiny Basic vendor. I was still in Jr high at the time, so the bad luck of not being old enough prevents me from getting into his place. Now there may or may not be an opportunity waiting now that I should jump on. However no other company has gone as far as microsoft since, so that suggests that I couldn't have even if I tried. (Maybe... though I should note that I didn't expect Amazon.com to still be in business today, so part of it is that my predictions were wrong)
This isn't to say Bill Gates hasn't created some of his own luck - he clearly did. However some of it were things that cannot be repeated.
Returning cards that don't work costs you money? I don't get your logic. Buy the cards, try them. If they don't work return them for your money back. I've done it before.
In fact my typical hardware plan is to find out what linux supports, and then buy something else, just to open the box and return it. I want to cost companies money by allowing hardware without linux support on their shelves. They will get the message if every linux user made this their plan for hardware purchases.
I know it is hard to deal with the loss of your own (or friends) jobs. However step back a little. The money already spent is a sunk cost, we cannot get it back, so it does not enter into calculations. We have to look at the benefits of continuing. Sometimes the situation changes and it isn't worth spending more money on something 90% done.
As a hypothetical example, if you were building a bridge to an island, and the water level raises, enough to put the island underwater, would you continue to build the bridge because you are almost done? I know that I would leave it going nowhere, or even tear it down, even though it was almost done.
Now I cannot evaluate the science of those projects.
Actually a waterwheel can be just as efficient as a standard prop on a boat. However the design to do this is more complex, as you need to get all the blades vertical in the water for the full path. It has been done, but it is a mechanical monster that breaks too often to be practical. A prop is simple.
To make this clear: when the blades of your waterwheel enter the water they are somewhat pushing down on the water, which waste energy. Then as they come out they are somewhat lifting the water. When the blade is straight up and down it is just as efficient as a prop for moving the boat.
Your points are true only on a small scale, they fail on anything large.
All windmills slow the wind. If you add a second windmill, and the wind is blowing such that it would go from one to the next (in absence of any windmills/trees/buildings), the second windmill will see slower wind than the first, and thus generate less power.
All windmills create turbulence zones around them, mostly downwind. This too decreases the efficiency of the windmills downwind.
The only solutions to these problems is to space your windmills farther apart, or live with reduced efficiency.
As an aside, the above effects are why normal windmills have 3 blades, and not many - after every blade passes they need to wait for the slow wind to get out of the way to generate maximum power. (1 or 2 blade windmills would be better yet, but there are other technical details that make them less impractical in the real world) I suspect that you would get more power from your homebuilt generators if you got rid of a few of your blades - but of course you would need to experiment to see.
The last problem with scaling is you cannot just go up forever. There are substantial differences in windspeed and direction with altitude. Direction is mostly something airplanes worry about (and it doesn't matter to vertical axis turbines anyway). Speed is a different matter - wind near the ground is always slower than wind farther up. So if your turbine is tall enough, say 30 meters and near the ground, you lose energy because the wind higher up is acting as a fan to push the wind lower down. You can move the whole system up, but then you lose the advantage of the generators being near ground.
Simplicity is great, except that simple stuff may to be reliable. If you like tinkering with your windturbines as a hobby, this is not a problem. If you just want to use lights and such without worrying about the generation wind is not for you. The utilities can pay for complex solutions that are engineered to be reliable. They also have the ability to deal with unexpected problems. If one of your turbines breaks you are down to half power (assuming your solar input is negligible, you didn't specify so I don't know what it is), to the power company that is less than 1%.
You eliminate every variable you can, and then hope there are not any more. You also use redundancy - run several experiments, if one gets different results from the other you know to go look for why.
We won't run into problems caused by paper clips because when the experiment is running there will be no technician nearby. He might leave a paperclip, (or something else), but that effect will be constant, and the experiment is designed to eliminate constants.
Seismometers can measure footsteps, but only when they are close. So they put the things out where nobody will walk (often anyway), and place several of them in any area they are interested. When an event seems to happen on one, if there isn't anything on the others they know someone walked by so they ignore it. (seismometers are not interested in local effects that mimic people walking by, so this is safe.)
A good salesmen understands that you worked hard and finds ways to thank you. Seriously, he will get the big money, but he will make sure you get something.
Good salesmen are rare though. When/if you find them they are worth the several million $$$/year they take home in pay though. (In every company that does direct sales, there should be at least one salesmen who makes more than the CEO)
That single click thing stands as a massive red flag that KDE doesn't pay enough attention usability or it would have been changed a long time ago.
No, it is a massive red flag that nobody else pays enough attention to usability. Have you ever watched a new computer user try to double click? Preferably someone over 80? I have, they do not get double click. Even when they understand the concept (which is not intuitive at all), they are physically unable to do it fast enough while holding the mouse in one place.
Double click was forced on the world because Apple marketing insisted that their ads would be better if they could sell that you cannot push the wrong button. Apple didn't case, and doesn't care that this makes the computer harder to use, because it makes it look easier.
KDE is doing it right. KDE cares about doing things right, which is why KDE insists on keeping single click the default. (Sadly people like you arguing the wrong side are winning, too many people have learned the wrong way and are now untrainable)
If you look close at Windows you will find Microsoft is trying to go the same way. One of the more easily accessible settings in Windows 2000+ is single click activation because it is right. Unfortunately Microsoft has is stuck with the wrong convention current users are used to.
It only takes one person with a hundred million to write the check. Maybe they will, maybe they won't. That doesn't change the point that if they do you suddenly have enough money to mount a national campaign and get your message out. If they don't you are no worse off than before.
My state (not federal, state) congressmen is resigning. There is an election scheduled latter this month for his replacement. If this law directly affects how that campaign is run.
If you live in an area where there is no election anytime soon there is no real urgency. However if there is an election you need this protection.
Your comment is false. True republicans have a simple majority in the house. That means they have more than 50% of the seats. However that doesn't not mean they control everything, some votes require more than a simple majority. This vote required a 2/3rds majority to pass, and the republicans do not have that much power. Even if all the republicans vote for it (so far I have not found any list of how the republicans voted so I'm not sure) that is not enough to get it to pass. 20 something (23? I saw the list but forgot the count) democrats voted for this, and it still wasn't enough to pass.
True, but that doesn't excuse the democrats (or republicans) from passing it. If anything it is a perfect excuse to vote against it: Well I support the idea, but I had no clue what was in it, so I didn't dare vote for it.
They however are more interested in re-election than being a leader who always does the right thing no matter what the cost.
There was opposition to the patriot act on slashdot before it passed, just based on parts we knew of.
You got it wrong. The fringe candidate we all need doesn't need money. Today we have to hope the fringe candidate is someone rich, like Forbes, because only rich people can spend enough to get heard nationally. Better home Forbes is a that person we all need because he is the only one with a chance.
Without campaign finance "reform", the candidate can be anyone. They only need to find one rich person (and there are plenty to choose from), and spend their efforts getting that rich person to donate money. One rich person can write a check for the hundred million needed and not notice the loss. (Not all the time, but for one candidate)
The two major parties don't need this. They already have the mind share that they can get hundreds of little guys to donate money. They are better of preventing the fringe candidate we all need from getting enough money to be heard.
Without money you can say anything you want, in this day and age you will not be heard by enough people to make a difference. With money you can get the message out. The major parties (both of them) do not want you to get your message out, so they try to convince you that money isn't a part of free speech.