I would argue that someone who holds a press card, could well be less of a journalists (or at least less of a good journalist) than many bloggers. The bloggers continually get hard issues, like whether or not it's a good idea to invade Iraq right, while the press pass traditional press, with all their access completely dropped that ball, and many others, all to maintain their access. Fox News "journalists" who tend to hold press cards, and have plenty of access, don't even try to be objective. Many bloggers at least try, and many succeed - they are the real journalists, and the real fourth estate.
I'm glad to hear that things are going well for you. I wonder how everyone else feels about living in smaller places. Statistically, more people are making less each decade, not more, in the U.S. at least. It seems that based solely on that, people will be glad to take what they can afford - even if it's smaller.
It isn't the technology front slipping, it's public investment that's slipping. While the United States continues to harp on the benefits of the (cleverly, and inaccurately termed) "free market", its being left out of the benefits of effective national investment. This includes industry specific unprofitable scientific investment - like exploring space, or medical research (like keeping up with biology with antibiotics - pharmaceutical companies don't do that research), but also includes investment in information infrastructure, bridges and equal access universal healthcare - all of which are higher quality, and cheaper overall with government investment and effective oversight (just ask Canada - who despite all the rhetoric, ranks higher than the US in terms of quality of care, and ranks lower than the US in terms of cost per capita, all while covering everyone).
There are a great many civic benefits to national public sector investment, in addition, there are enormous new opportunities for business to exploit created by that investment. These are the benefits the US is missing out on. The slipping technology front is just one symptom.
That, to the best of my knowledge, is pretty much what they did in Vermont with "Civil Unions". There is still the rights issue, where the state denies same sex couples the same rights (religious and legal) as their fellow opposite sex citizens.
Oh sure, jump all the way back to the beginning of the conversation.;-P
Ok, Ok, here goes:
It is an institution with different implications in different cultures. Its purposes, functions and forms may differ from society to society but it is present everywhere as an institution. Seeing as how "its purposes, functions and forms differ from society to society" and "different implications in different cultures", how can you say, "Marriage is culturally universal". That's clearly not what it said on that page.
None of this makes the main thrust of my position any less valid. It's an institution that the government has no business micromanaging. If they want to offer some kind of legal benefits to couples, then that's what they should do, and do it mindfully, and fairly.
I still maintain that in the U.S. marriage is largely a religious institution (taken the "form" of religion) and that the attempts to limit access to same sex couples come from proponents of that form (to enforce their "implications" - and their religious ideals as they relate to "permissible mates"). That's obviously a problem for anyone who's a member of a church where same sex marriage is endorsed.
All of those issues you raise have already been established by the laws surrounding the same problems with standard 1 man and 1 woman marriages. There are no extra burdens applied to same sex couple marriages.
I think the parent meant that it's not for the government to decide who can marry who. It's none of their business. They either offer some benefits to everyone, with a fair set of rules, or they offer those benefits to no one. It's that simple.
Maybe you have some other source to back up your assertion that your "facts" are solid, but you didn't provide any. Am I to just take your word on that?
Do you mean to suggest that marriage works the same in every kind of society? I think you need to check your facts on that and get back to me if you do. Marriage is as diverse as the people who practice it.
Also, as far as governments are concerned, it's a legal contract, complete with many legal benefits (power of attorney for example) not a social one, which is why you can only have one spouse for example, even though multiple spouses (sometimes many husbands, sometimes many wives) occur in many different social religious systems.
Regardless, the only real reason there is opposition to gay marriage, that it violates the religious beliefs of those who oppose it. And that's just not good enough.
Finally, the government can get out of my personal social decisions as well as my religious decisions (religion is a social practice, BTW - see sociology 101). It has no place in either.
Your use of gay marriage is a problem here. The issue with gay marriage is that at it's core, it's legislating a religious institution. Marriage is defined by religion, a very clear violation of several points in the constitution. It is therefor most certainly a federal civil religious rights issue. After all, gay people have the right to be free from religious persecution too - and their churches say gay marriage is fine and dandy.
The fix is simple though, once you understand the problem. Just get rid of state/federal endorsed marriage - or more simply, call the legal agreement something else. A Certificate of "Civil Union" would violate no religious belief.
Do you really believe that telephone monopolies, electricity monopolies, etc. were handed out by the government? You need to check your facts my friend. These were monopolies first, and regulated second. I seem to have lost a whole point by point response to this (I could swear I hit the submit button..), but without government regulation (the solution you seem to be suggesting is to remove all government oversight, since they are the problem) what would prevent monopolies from forming, then abusing the power they have because of their monopolies?
I actually think the partisanship is well divided. On one side you have free market anarchists, who believe that unregulated capitalism (which is laissez-faire, cleverly rebranded as the "free market" - which is anything but free for the majority of the people in it - they're only free if they can afford it) will somehow lead to more competition which will bring down prices (despite all evidence to the contrary - evidence including the rising prices from Verizon and AT&T, which can be quantified). I suppose it could lead to lower prices, after those companies loot and plunder the rest of us, and after the company(s) and the entire economy eventually implode, forcing them to change - a process that would be more rapid with no regulation (or bad regulation - think China), but who wants all that volatility.
On the other side, you have a belief that regulation is needed to create "fair market" with rules that foster fairer competition, to create more access to opportunity for smaller competitors - including the ones who are actually capable of real innovation, to keep the money moving around in the economy, rather then getting siphoned off by the crooks at the top, who are making out like bandits in the "free market".
In this case, Verizon and AT&T are the price controlling few companies (who's prices are going up, not down) and the Nextells and TimeWarners are the smaller companies that if allowed to enter into the market (which can only happen through regulation, without that, Verizon and AT&T will simply lock them out) will actually bring some new - real - competition to that market, and will actually be able to exploit some of the opportunities that their new thinking, and new technology can create.
If that is allowed to happen, more companies, and business people, will be able to take advantage of more opportunities created by a much cheaper essential utility. And that's good for everyone's economy, not just for the bandits at the top.
It could also mean that this particular game (or RTS games in general) has rules that favor the more aggressive player. I myself fell into the cautious or defensive category when I played games like WarCraft III, and I always lost to my more aggressive friends, until I got more aggressive (attack earlier, build less defensive units, more offensive units, take the initiative).
It doesn't necessarily mean there's anything wrong with defensive or regular AIs in general, as much as it shows that in these particular games (or just AoM) aggressive AIs (and possibly players) do better.
Actually, it's an issue of cowardice. We spend hundreds of billions of dollars on a war, with no boundaries, and no victory scenario, to fight against crazy wackos - paying some 200 of us for every one of them, all because we feel vulnerable, and feel like we need to be more secure, but not to actually achieve security, from poor, technology averse desert nomads - who honestly, would not have been able to attack even once, had we been paying even a little attention.
IBM, being little more than a legal contract, most certainly has no social conscience. However, the people running it, who make decisions to support the projects you listed, very clearly do, and they deserve kudos for it.
Interestingly, I've noticed much faster internet downloads after having switched to Ubuntu from Windows XP. I didn't expect to see a difference in performance in that way (if anything, I was willing to sacrifice some performance - like I do with games on my silly ATI card). I have been very pleasantly surprised with some other performance related advantages in Ubuntu as well. When my harddrive is completely full in Ubuntu, I can still use it (it actually doesn't slow down very much, if at all). In Windows XP, the whole system slows down little by little after the hard drive is more than half full, becoming almost unusable when it fills completely (I usually do a hard reset and get into Ubuntu to delete some files, rather than wait for XP to do whatever it must be doing with the swap file).
I think it's just convenient to have version parody. It'd be nice if they could come up with a better name though. Maybe HTML 5 XML or something. It's just HTML 5 with a well formed XML syntax, instead of an HTML syntax. Interestingly, they now say HTML is it's own thing. It doesn't necessarily have to follow SGML rules anymore (well HTML hasn't been valid SGML for a while now I guess).
Page authors could use XHTML 5 (XHTML is allowed under the HTML 5 spec, which they call XHTML 5), and include an xsl style sheet that would convert these new tags to something useful in the older browsers which do not support the new tags (convert to
). That way, there is no need for users to upgrade. There are lots of other strategies for dealing with older browsers too. The answer doesn't always have to be "require users to upgrade".
This is very interesting. Like the Java clones before it, this project (swfdec), and gnash show how popular closed source projects have their own way of encouraging something similar to the dreaded "forking" that corporations fear so much. What's interesting about Java is that opening the source seems to have reversed that trend, and we now see some attempts to unify the many Java code bases.
I wonder if Adobe will figure that out, and open up Flash Player some more.
I've been trying to get into Linux ever since I got into computers in general (mid 90s), and I even bought (yes, paid hard earned cash for) Mandrake a few years ago. I have to say, while Ubuntu has been harder to really break than I remember Mandrake being. And even if you mess stuff up, it seems to recover better, and offers better solutions and hand holding, without getting the way - even in the command line.
But those are minor, and for all I know Madriva is doing similar things these day. The real difference IMO, has been the amazing ubuntuforums.org and the main wiki. There is just so much no nonsense, straight to the point explanations and tutorials in those two resources, that I've never seen from any other distro that I've tried (including Mandrake, Red Hat, Fedora, etc.). They even manage to explain the patent and copyright issues pretty clearly (in the wiki about restricted codecs and medibuntu and whatnot).
If I had to come up with a reason for why Ubuntu has become so popular, it would have to be their very good documentation, friendly community and easily accessible and widely available information on it in general, when compared to other distros.
And props to the Debian package management system - apt-get, synaptic, update-manager and the easy to use Add/Remove Applications app. For me it's the first time the GUI and command line versions of the package management system seem to all get along - meaning, you could use any one without messing up the others, and dependencies, updates and cleanups are just so easy to manage - even from the GUI.
The problem with that is that the machines will have to go through a small number of centralized hands, and then get shipped out. And look at how complicated (and costly) that would be, then compare it to hand counted paper ballots (the kind they have standardized in those European democracies). The voting process is simply too important (and too tempting a target for manipulation) to be left in the hands of the few.
That said, I'm not apposed to a small number of touch screen machines to be deployed for the impaired, as long as they print a piece of paper that must then be hand counted along with the rest of them.
Sorry to reply to myself, but isn't it hypocritical to expect a software vendor to turn over their source code, without requiring the hardware makers to turn over their specifications? It would be just as possible (and there's plenty of motivation to do it) to hide malicious vote stealing code in the hardware somewhere. Why this focus on the software only?
Source code or not, you can't look inside the machine and see what's running on it while it's running. Not ever. It doesn't matter who has access to whatever source code. It's just too easy for a very small number of people (or even just one) to tamper with these machines, and leave absolutely no meaningful trace. Anyone caught up in the source code debate has missed the problem.
I agree with you for the most part, but when it comes to rights, and the question of who is going to guarantee them, it has to be the law, and the government and not the good will of wealthier people. No one else can guarantee rights, but there are plenty who can limit them - including wealthier people. As I said, I normally don't like to express ideas in terms of black and white, and I like ideology not at all, but here I think is an exception. This has to be a nation of laws, and not of men and the power they weild.
Also, about who should pay - yes, when the government pays for public services, they are spending the tax money that others contributed, but it's not the same as a benevolent act. Taxes are compulsory (have you ever volunteered to pay a tax?), and necessary to provide these essential rights to everyone - even those who can't afford to buy their own access to those rights themselves. I rather enjoy when my government spends my tax money to open more political and economic opportunity for people at the bottom of the economic pool (the ladder could use some fixing honestly). That opportunity includes the right to vote.
Funding the institutions that provide services that guarantee certain rights using taxes is not the same as relying on private contribution - whether benevolent or not.
BTW, indemnible ink worked in Iraq, so if you really want a practical solution to voter fraud for those that don't provide an address (or haven't registerd), why not just use ink? I think the more I look into voter fraud and it's surrounding issues, the more it's clear that all forms of voting machines, and all forms of voter registration are used only to make the system more centrally controllable. It makes it easier to influence an election when you just have to modify the program running on the voter machine, or worse on the phone in vote tally machine. To be clear, no one can ever confirm what's running on a computer - not ever, whether they can look at the source code or not (how do you know what's running is was compiled from the source you are looking at - you can't look in the machine and see it running). Registration has a similar problem. It's just another hurdle put up in a central location. It's easy to toss out an entire neighborhood of registrations, if they call go to the same place. At least the hand counted way, requires a lot of people to be involved to sway results. And they'll leave all kinds of trails , including paper.
Slashdot Mirror
I would argue that someone who holds a press card, could well be less of a journalists (or at least less of a good journalist) than many bloggers. The bloggers continually get hard issues, like whether or not it's a good idea to invade Iraq right, while the press pass traditional press, with all their access completely dropped that ball, and many others, all to maintain their access. Fox News "journalists" who tend to hold press cards, and have plenty of access, don't even try to be objective. Many bloggers at least try, and many succeed - they are the real journalists, and the real fourth estate.
I'm glad to hear that things are going well for you. I wonder how everyone else feels about living in smaller places. Statistically, more people are making less each decade, not more, in the U.S. at least. It seems that based solely on that, people will be glad to take what they can afford - even if it's smaller.
It isn't the technology front slipping, it's public investment that's slipping. While the United States continues to harp on the benefits of the (cleverly, and inaccurately termed) "free market", its being left out of the benefits of effective national investment. This includes industry specific unprofitable scientific investment - like exploring space, or medical research (like keeping up with biology with antibiotics - pharmaceutical companies don't do that research), but also includes investment in information infrastructure, bridges and equal access universal healthcare - all of which are higher quality, and cheaper overall with government investment and effective oversight (just ask Canada - who despite all the rhetoric, ranks higher than the US in terms of quality of care, and ranks lower than the US in terms of cost per capita, all while covering everyone).
There are a great many civic benefits to national public sector investment, in addition, there are enormous new opportunities for business to exploit created by that investment. These are the benefits the US is missing out on. The slipping technology front is just one symptom.
Not quite. Read my other response. He mischaracterized what it said on that site.
That, to the best of my knowledge, is pretty much what they did in Vermont with "Civil Unions". There is still the rights issue, where the state denies same sex couples the same rights (religious and legal) as their fellow opposite sex citizens.
Ok, Ok, here goes: It is an institution with different implications in different cultures. Its purposes, functions and forms may differ from society to society but it is present everywhere as an institution. Seeing as how "its purposes, functions and forms differ from society to society" and "different implications in different cultures", how can you say, "Marriage is culturally universal". That's clearly not what it said on that page.
None of this makes the main thrust of my position any less valid. It's an institution that the government has no business micromanaging. If they want to offer some kind of legal benefits to couples, then that's what they should do, and do it mindfully, and fairly.
I still maintain that in the U.S. marriage is largely a religious institution (taken the "form" of religion) and that the attempts to limit access to same sex couples come from proponents of that form (to enforce their "implications" - and their religious ideals as they relate to "permissible mates"). That's obviously a problem for anyone who's a member of a church where same sex marriage is endorsed.
Here's the direct link to the quoted page: http://www.sociologyguide.com/marriage-family-kinship/Marriage.php
All of those issues you raise have already been established by the laws surrounding the same problems with standard 1 man and 1 woman marriages. There are no extra burdens applied to same sex couple marriages.
I think the parent meant that it's not for the government to decide who can marry who. It's none of their business. They either offer some benefits to everyone, with a fair set of rules, or they offer those benefits to no one. It's that simple.
Well on this page, they mention a number of different kinds of marriage, including Monogamy and Polygyny:
http://www.sociologyguide.com/marriage-family-kinship/Types-of-marriages.php
Maybe you have some other source to back up your assertion that your "facts" are solid, but you didn't provide any. Am I to just take your word on that?
Do you mean to suggest that marriage works the same in every kind of society? I think you need to check your facts on that and get back to me if you do. Marriage is as diverse as the people who practice it.
Also, as far as governments are concerned, it's a legal contract, complete with many legal benefits (power of attorney for example) not a social one, which is why you can only have one spouse for example, even though multiple spouses (sometimes many husbands, sometimes many wives) occur in many different social religious systems.
Regardless, the only real reason there is opposition to gay marriage, that it violates the religious beliefs of those who oppose it. And that's just not good enough.
Finally, the government can get out of my personal social decisions as well as my religious decisions (religion is a social practice, BTW - see sociology 101). It has no place in either.
Your use of gay marriage is a problem here. The issue with gay marriage is that at it's core, it's legislating a religious institution. Marriage is defined by religion, a very clear violation of several points in the constitution. It is therefor most certainly a federal civil religious rights issue. After all, gay people have the right to be free from religious persecution too - and their churches say gay marriage is fine and dandy.
The fix is simple though, once you understand the problem. Just get rid of state/federal endorsed marriage - or more simply, call the legal agreement something else. A Certificate of "Civil Union" would violate no religious belief.
Wow. Just wow.
Do you really believe that telephone monopolies, electricity monopolies, etc. were handed out by the government? You need to check your facts my friend. These were monopolies first, and regulated second. I seem to have lost a whole point by point response to this (I could swear I hit the submit button..), but without government regulation (the solution you seem to be suggesting is to remove all government oversight, since they are the problem) what would prevent monopolies from forming, then abusing the power they have because of their monopolies?
I actually think the partisanship is well divided. On one side you have free market anarchists, who believe that unregulated capitalism (which is laissez-faire, cleverly rebranded as the "free market" - which is anything but free for the majority of the people in it - they're only free if they can afford it) will somehow lead to more competition which will bring down prices (despite all evidence to the contrary - evidence including the rising prices from Verizon and AT&T, which can be quantified). I suppose it could lead to lower prices, after those companies loot and plunder the rest of us, and after the company(s) and the entire economy eventually implode, forcing them to change - a process that would be more rapid with no regulation (or bad regulation - think China), but who wants all that volatility.
On the other side, you have a belief that regulation is needed to create "fair market" with rules that foster fairer competition, to create more access to opportunity for smaller competitors - including the ones who are actually capable of real innovation, to keep the money moving around in the economy, rather then getting siphoned off by the crooks at the top, who are making out like bandits in the "free market".
In this case, Verizon and AT&T are the price controlling few companies (who's prices are going up, not down) and the Nextells and TimeWarners are the smaller companies that if allowed to enter into the market (which can only happen through regulation, without that, Verizon and AT&T will simply lock them out) will actually bring some new - real - competition to that market, and will actually be able to exploit some of the opportunities that their new thinking, and new technology can create.
If that is allowed to happen, more companies, and business people, will be able to take advantage of more opportunities created by a much cheaper essential utility. And that's good for everyone's economy, not just for the bandits at the top.
It could also mean that this particular game (or RTS games in general) has rules that favor the more aggressive player. I myself fell into the cautious or defensive category when I played games like WarCraft III, and I always lost to my more aggressive friends, until I got more aggressive (attack earlier, build less defensive units, more offensive units, take the initiative).
It doesn't necessarily mean there's anything wrong with defensive or regular AIs in general, as much as it shows that in these particular games (or just AoM) aggressive AIs (and possibly players) do better.
The human trials should be interesting.
Actually, it's an issue of cowardice. We spend hundreds of billions of dollars on a war, with no boundaries, and no victory scenario, to fight against crazy wackos - paying some 200 of us for every one of them, all because we feel vulnerable, and feel like we need to be more secure, but not to actually achieve security, from poor, technology averse desert nomads - who honestly, would not have been able to attack even once, had we been paying even a little attention.
Yeah, it's cowardice, and little more.
IBM, being little more than a legal contract, most certainly has no social conscience. However, the people running it, who make decisions to support the projects you listed, very clearly do, and they deserve kudos for it.
So kudos to the people at IBM.
Interestingly, I've noticed much faster internet downloads after having switched to Ubuntu from Windows XP. I didn't expect to see a difference in performance in that way (if anything, I was willing to sacrifice some performance - like I do with games on my silly ATI card). I have been very pleasantly surprised with some other performance related advantages in Ubuntu as well. When my harddrive is completely full in Ubuntu, I can still use it (it actually doesn't slow down very much, if at all). In Windows XP, the whole system slows down little by little after the hard drive is more than half full, becoming almost unusable when it fills completely (I usually do a hard reset and get into Ubuntu to delete some files, rather than wait for XP to do whatever it must be doing with the swap file).
I think it's just convenient to have version parody. It'd be nice if they could come up with a better name though. Maybe HTML 5 XML or something. It's just HTML 5 with a well formed XML syntax, instead of an HTML syntax. Interestingly, they now say HTML is it's own thing. It doesn't necessarily have to follow SGML rules anymore (well HTML hasn't been valid SGML for a while now I guess).
Page authors could use XHTML 5 (XHTML is allowed under the HTML 5 spec, which they call XHTML 5), and include an xsl style sheet that would convert these new tags to something useful in the older browsers which do not support the new tags (convert to ). That way, there is no need for users to upgrade. There are lots of other strategies for dealing with older browsers too. The answer doesn't always have to be "require users to upgrade".
This is very interesting. Like the Java clones before it, this project (swfdec), and gnash show how popular closed source projects have their own way of encouraging something similar to the dreaded "forking" that corporations fear so much. What's interesting about Java is that opening the source seems to have reversed that trend, and we now see some attempts to unify the many Java code bases.
I wonder if Adobe will figure that out, and open up Flash Player some more.
I've been trying to get into Linux ever since I got into computers in general (mid 90s), and I even bought (yes, paid hard earned cash for) Mandrake a few years ago. I have to say, while Ubuntu has been harder to really break than I remember Mandrake being. And even if you mess stuff up, it seems to recover better, and offers better solutions and hand holding, without getting the way - even in the command line.
But those are minor, and for all I know Madriva is doing similar things these day. The real difference IMO, has been the amazing ubuntuforums.org and the main wiki. There is just so much no nonsense, straight to the point explanations and tutorials in those two resources, that I've never seen from any other distro that I've tried (including Mandrake, Red Hat, Fedora, etc.). They even manage to explain the patent and copyright issues pretty clearly (in the wiki about restricted codecs and medibuntu and whatnot).
If I had to come up with a reason for why Ubuntu has become so popular, it would have to be their very good documentation, friendly community and easily accessible and widely available information on it in general, when compared to other distros.
And props to the Debian package management system - apt-get, synaptic, update-manager and the easy to use Add/Remove Applications app. For me it's the first time the GUI and command line versions of the package management system seem to all get along - meaning, you could use any one without messing up the others, and dependencies, updates and cleanups are just so easy to manage - even from the GUI.
The problem with that is that the machines will have to go through a small number of centralized hands, and then get shipped out. And look at how complicated (and costly) that would be, then compare it to hand counted paper ballots (the kind they have standardized in those European democracies). The voting process is simply too important (and too tempting a target for manipulation) to be left in the hands of the few. That said, I'm not apposed to a small number of touch screen machines to be deployed for the impaired, as long as they print a piece of paper that must then be hand counted along with the rest of them.
Sorry to reply to myself, but isn't it hypocritical to expect a software vendor to turn over their source code, without requiring the hardware makers to turn over their specifications? It would be just as possible (and there's plenty of motivation to do it) to hide malicious vote stealing code in the hardware somewhere. Why this focus on the software only?
Source code or not, you can't look inside the machine and see what's running on it while it's running. Not ever. It doesn't matter who has access to whatever source code. It's just too easy for a very small number of people (or even just one) to tamper with these machines, and leave absolutely no meaningful trace. Anyone caught up in the source code debate has missed the problem.
I agree with you for the most part, but when it comes to rights, and the question of who is going to guarantee them, it has to be the law, and the government and not the good will of wealthier people. No one else can guarantee rights, but there are plenty who can limit them - including wealthier people. As I said, I normally don't like to express ideas in terms of black and white, and I like ideology not at all, but here I think is an exception. This has to be a nation of laws, and not of men and the power they weild.
Also, about who should pay - yes, when the government pays for public services, they are spending the tax money that others contributed, but it's not the same as a benevolent act. Taxes are compulsory (have you ever volunteered to pay a tax?), and necessary to provide these essential rights to everyone - even those who can't afford to buy their own access to those rights themselves. I rather enjoy when my government spends my tax money to open more political and economic opportunity for people at the bottom of the economic pool (the ladder could use some fixing honestly). That opportunity includes the right to vote.
Funding the institutions that provide services that guarantee certain rights using taxes is not the same as relying on private contribution - whether benevolent or not.
BTW, indemnible ink worked in Iraq, so if you really want a practical solution to voter fraud for those that don't provide an address (or haven't registerd), why not just use ink? I think the more I look into voter fraud and it's surrounding issues, the more it's clear that all forms of voting machines, and all forms of voter registration are used only to make the system more centrally controllable. It makes it easier to influence an election when you just have to modify the program running on the voter machine, or worse on the phone in vote tally machine. To be clear, no one can ever confirm what's running on a computer - not ever, whether they can look at the source code or not (how do you know what's running is was compiled from the source you are looking at - you can't look in the machine and see it running). Registration has a similar problem. It's just another hurdle put up in a central location. It's easy to toss out an entire neighborhood of registrations, if they call go to the same place. At least the hand counted way, requires a lot of people to be involved to sway results. And they'll leave all kinds of trails , including paper.