Obviously you have never used a Kindle. Amazon is a small part of what can be put on a Kindle. Now for people that do not understand "the Internet" it may be their only choice, but the same goes for an iPod - if you do not know anything about downloading files all you can do is buy from iTunes. As iTunes has 1 or 2 percent of the music download market, clearly some people are using it because they don't know any better.
As may be your problem with the Kindle.
You may not be aware of things like Manybooks.net, but this is a web site (yes, you have to use a browser) that you can access on the Kindle itself, using the free networking built into the device, to download books for free. I see no connection with Amazon here at all, other than Amazon seems to be paying for the network connection when it is through a cell modem.
This isn't some deep dark secret that only uber-hackers know about. It is right there out in the open, except silly people that believe a lot of anti-Kindle propaganda can't seem to understand.
You misunderstand I think. The goal of many pirates is to overwhelm the distribution of legitimate, revenue-producing suppliers with pirated goods. This has pretty much happened with music - nobody is paying for recorded music and the value of a song has dropped from $3-4 in the album days to $0 today. Why is it there are online services providing free, user-selectable music? Because the songs have no value anymore.
Check WalMart and see how much the CD section has shrunk in the last couple of years.
We are moving down that road with movies. Instead of paying $20 for a DVD you can now watch 100 movies on Netflix all month long for $8. This means the cost (or value) of the movie isn't really much more than $0.08 instead of $20. Between Netflix and piracy, all we are waiting for is the last bit to go away and we will see movies have $0 value. When that day comes, you can give your neighborhood pirate a hearty thanks because in large measure it is the easy availability of pirated movies pushing the revenue in that direction.
Ebooks are going to be going that way soon as well. You can now find poor copies of newly released books downloadable within days. Better quality content is coming, just as it did with music and movies. The revenue from ebooks will be destroyed just as certainly as it was for other digital items.
It certainly means that if you today earn a living in any sort of creative endeavor you better start looking for a new job. Music, movies, books, software - if it is distributed in a digital form it better either be customized to a specific (very rich) customer or kept locked away in a vault. Because otherwise the pirates are coming for your revenue too, and you will be on the street selling pencils or some other non-digital item. There will be no money in digital items at all soon.
DRM on the Kindle works very well and insures that 99% of the people purchasing books from Amazon are not able to share them with all of their friends. Or all of the planet through the magic of the Internet. When was the last time you saw a ebook on a pirate web site that was in AZW format?
Now, is it possible to defeat the DRM on Kindle files? Sure it is, but it is outside of the knowledge of 99% of the Kindle users. The remaining 1% that are able to follow directions and do it could be utterly destroying Amazon's ebook revenue stream making ebooks free for everyone - but for some reason they are not doing this. One problem is that it is very difficult to purchase things from Amazon without actually paying for them, so each book is going to cost someone money. And I believe all of the DRM-breaking strategies for Kindle require the breaking to be done using the account of the original purchaser. So again, the DRM is extremely effective in limiting the redistribution of ebooks.
That is what counts. It doesn't have to be perfect. If the DRM breaking gets simpler and more automated who knows what might happen? Would Amazon change the algorithm and push updates to all existing Kindle devices - a move that would cost tens of millions of dollars today? Maybe. If Amazon's library suddenly became freely available, as it might without DRM, it might not destroy Amazon but publishers would certainly take a different approach to ebooks.
This is NOT corruption. This is enterprising people supplementing their low, low public salaries.
What? Do you not believe this is being done nationwide? Let's make it clear, if you pay people a pittance they will find ways to supplement their income. Waiters sell credit card numbers. DMV staff sell whole identity sets. IRS people probably sell tax information. If it isn't nailed down or otherwise secured and someone who feels they are underpaid is handling it, it is being sold.
This has nothing to do with corruption. This has everything to do with the perception of people that they have to do more to get money. Somehow.
Also, it may not have occurred to people that this is something all that bad. Where is the 30 page document they have to sign (and initial every page) that spells out exactly how they are the "guardians of private information" and must not disclose this to anyone. And, better yet, spells out the penalties for disclosing information. No such document? Well, maybe it isn't illegal at all then - at least in their minds. Most of the people that are doing things you might consider "evil" or "wrong" have never really considered what they are doing to be all that wrong in the first place. Perhaps not something they want to wear a sign saying they did, but nevertheless not really all that wrong.
Read Revelations. You do not need to provide your SSN to buy something, but any sort of chip and pin system would indeed involve "having a number to buy stuff". I forget the exact phrasing in Revelations, but if you stop your average bible-thumper on the street he can clarify it for you.
That isn't to say that the introduction of the SSN wasn't met with "Mark of the Beast"!!! There are still people that refuse to even have an SSN because of what it implies to them.
In the US at least, and I suspect in UK as well, if one party objects to a Rabbinical court the whole matter can be tossed over to the secular courts. The only "binding" part of such courts is that both parties agree to be bound by its decisions, which outside of the parties agreeing has no authority whatsoever.
So, a woman that objected to a divorce might be able to fight it pretty easily. Of course, the result would be that she would be ostracised from her community but she would be essentially rejecting her community anyway. There have been situations such as this in New York in the Hasidic community there and such cases are pretty easy to find. Often, once the parties figure out that they have a choice between accepting a Rabbinical decision or leaving the community it is pretty clear what is going to happen. They choose community and religion over their personal feelings in the matter.
A huge difference in Islamic countries and I believe currently in Australia and Germany is that a Sharia court is granted authority over members of the Islamic faith and whether or not the parties agree the court has primary authority over "their" people. In matters that can be decided by such courts - which are still limited - this removes the option of disagreeing with the decisions of a religious court from people.
When we have people that can consistently behave better than a 4 year old, then maybe the government isn't going to have to treat the citizens as 4 year olds. Right now, there are enough acting like 4 year olds (or worse) that what is needed is a lot more treatment of citizens as 4 year olds. Much of what is illegal activity today is little more than "testing the boundaries" which is expected behavior for a 4 year old. The problem for the people living in the same neighborhood is that much of these boundaries are imaginary and there is no enforcement whatsoever. So the nice citizens are left to push further and further until they find out that yes, there are indeed consequences for murder but only if you get caught.
This would probably entail less jail time and more things like putting people in "time out". You don't put a 4 year old in jail for 10 years - 15 minutes makes the point. But it does require a lot more enforcement before things get out of hand.
Sadly, we seem to be recruiting police from the ranks of people that view it as being the only job they can have where they can exert power and control over others. Nope, they would never make Sergent in the Army but they can be a police officer and bash heads every now and then. This isn't the sort that we need and there needs to be testing to weed this sort of applicant out. Clearly, in the name of eliminating racial profiling and other barriers this sort of testing isn't being done.
It is a myth that legalization will bring the prices down.
Today, California has laws that make marijuana pretty much legal there. It is not taxed currently. But, the prices at a "dispensary" are about the same as the street prices in Chicago. Assuming the government finally gets around to taxing the sale of marijuana, the prices for the legal weed in California will be higher than the illegal stuff smuggled in from Mexico.
I seriously doubt that prices are going to fall that much. And the illegal importers are always going to have a leg up on the legal growers, if for no other reason than simple math - cheaper labor cost.
Sure, we can give is try. I'm all for it. But the result is likely to be a new appreciation of how deep the river of "addictive personality" goes in the US. I'm betting it is pretty deep, which likely means legalization will make it easier for a lot of people that don't think they have a problem begin to have a big problem. It's like casinos. Have a casino without an ATM machine and you have one level of gambling addition. Put in an ATM machine and there isn't just a small jump in the number of people deciding they have a problem - or finding out they have a problem after they lose their job, house and spouse. Previous cultures marginalized these people so well that they pretty much sank into oblivion. Here in the US today we don't seem to be able to do that anywhere near as effectively.
Netflix is also somewhat dependent on their customer's ISP to pass the service through. With current and future consolidations this may no longer be something that is all that helpful for cable companies to effectively "sponsor". Which they are currently.
There is a serious change coming as well. Netflix streaming works fine in the US in early-adopter mode. There is plenty of bandwidth to go around when 10 people in a neighborhood are watching some sort of streaming video content at around 5-6Mb/sec. However, most neighborhoods are served by a node with around 1000 homes connected to it. The node might have as much as a 3Gb/sec feed. Divide 3Gb/sec by 1000 and you get around 3Mb/sec possible if nearly all of the homes are streaming. Goodby streaming HD content, it's been nice.
Can the cable systems upgrade to supply HD streaming to every house? Maybe. Cox in Phoenix is moving to 500 homes at 3Gb/sec feeds to their nodes, but it is taking them a long time to get there. They also have it pretty easy in Phoenix, whereas say in Chicago it would probably be a lot tougher to do.
The important note for Netflix is that if everyone in a neighborhood tried to watch Netflix streaming, everyone would be looking at huge delays and lots of "buffering". It gets worse if a small number of homes are trying to watch two streams. Netflix got a reprieve when they increased the price but they are competing with Hulu, Crackle and every other streaming content provider.
The last time the cable companies substantially changed the infrastructure they went from analog to digital distribution and needed to increase the number of nodes a lot. It took around 15 years for this to happen nationwide. I wouldn't expect much less than 10 years for the next big upgrade. Netflix, Hulu and the rest are a brief fad and cannot survive mass adoption.
I think most people believe as Michael Moore has written - the rich people owe us, so take it all.
If you put Bill Gates and Larry Ellison together and took 100% of their net worth it would be a good start. Add in Warren Buffet. And Jimmy Buffet too, as he must be rich. Just take all the money from the rich people, pay off the debt and distribute what is left over to ordinary people.
Right. Except Bill Gates would see this coming months in advance and just up and leave his big house. From Costa Rica or Grand Cayman he would watch as the country imploded as the campaign against the "rich" kept pushing lower and lower until anyone that actually owned a house and a car was considered "rich". He could sit on his new (probably larger) back deck with Larry, Warren and a bunch of other people laughing about it.
The lynching party against the rich is just getting started. Remember, the definition of "rich" is pretty flexible and the mobs are always going to be in the majority. Start with the 1% and then pick up the top 2%. By the time you get down to the top 5% things are looking pretty bleak.
The fact that this wouldn't actually work is not going to deter the mobs in the slightest. It is coming to a neighborhood near you soon.
The problem is that for most people under 30 the Internet has always been a source of free stuff. If it is out there, there is no way for the ISP, the government or their parents to prevent them from accessing it. The result of the last 15-20 years is a level of expectation that is pervasive.
Today if I want to watch a TV show I can (a) go to an "official" web site where I can view some recent episodes - but possibly not the one I want, or I can download the whole season from somewhere "unofficial" and get the episode I want. The "unofficial" source has an added benefit in that someone took the time to strip out all the advertising. The reasons it works this way is based partly on the revenue model for the show production company - they are paid by big advertisers and not by viewers, and also it is a function of how television shows are distributed. I'm sure if someone wanted to put together a TV show and distribute it in a way where individual users were charged for it they could do it, but it would cost 10x what the current distribution model does to operate. It wouldn't be efficient. So it is extremely unlikely that it is going to happen, ever.
So you have the idea that "it should just be free" as well as a distribution model that strives for efficiency and dealing with only a few customers rather than millions of them.
The other side of this is today it would be difficult to find web hosting in the US that would allow their customer to distribute pirated digital goods. However, such hosting arrangements are common outside the US - many countries view it as a coup that they can violate US law with impunity through such arrangements. So when someone comes calling to get the material removed the answer is "ha ha ha". One possible response to this is to simply block the web sites that offer such materals.
Of course, I think a much better approach would be to have an international agreement that says no party will support or tolerate piracy and will enforce local laws and international treaties on copyright. Violation of the agreement or non-signatories simply are cut off from the Internet. Period. No traffic. They can chat amongst themselves all they want but they only way they get to participate in the Internet at large is by respecting established international treaties that they have agreed to. But apparently buy-in for that level of enforcement isn't going to happen. So therefore the US is left with two options - watch the revenue model for all digital goods disappear as it has for music or take some sort of unilateral action like this.
Music has already fallen to this. Most "music stores" have closed and even WalMart keeps shinking the space they have for CDs. Most of the people I know have given up on buying music or even downloading it. There are far too many free services and free distributions to ever pay for it again. This happened partly because it was becoming clear that most young people switched from buying to pirating a while back and there simply wasn't any real revenue in it anymore. There is still a little, but it is clearly the last ditch effort to squeeze out what is left.
Movies and e-books are next up. Software is a struggle today except for platforms where piracy is difficult, like iPhone/iPad.
I do not believe most Slashdotters understand how much their current employment is tied to a revenue stream for IP and digital goods having value today. Certainly in the US we would be looking at 50% unemployment.
Somehow, you misunderstand the function of television marketing. They DO NOT want to sell you access to the show. They want you to watch ads with the show. Important, expensive ads that are relevent to your geographic area and relate to things you want to buy - and can buy. If you are outside of the marketing area there are no ads like this for you.
Sure, they might be able to set up a deal with advertisers in Netherlands, Spain, Brazil or whereever it is you happen to be. But there is no concentration of customers there so the advertisers aren't going to pay much - if anything at all - to run ads in those areas. So no ads and it makes no sense to offer the show for free (no ads) in these areas.
Absolutely, they do not want to "sell" you access to the show in any way whatsoever. They want to have 10 really good customers - advertisers - not 100 million customers that they have to deal with 100 million separate payments from. 10 really big checks every month does it for them.
So your choices are to pirate or do without. You will never have access in any way you would consider reasonable.
The important thing with Amazon customer service is to never, ever say the "D" word. Whatever happens, you didn't drop it.
Yes, there may be a huge shatter mark in the glass and they will understand when they get it, but customer service will pretty much just replace them as long as you didn't drop it. I have even seen one get replaced after the year warranty was up.
We could put a probe into the Alpha Centauri system within 50 years without question. Sure, launch in 10 years and it takes 40 years to get there. It might be pretty large but it could be assembled in orbit and launched from there.
The only possible justification at this point for not sending such a probe is a rather weak argument that (a) we wouldn't learn anything by doing it and (b) in 46 years we will have advanced sufficiently that we can make it at lightspeed. I question both of these arguments.
You can see the reason for moving off Earth quite easily. Lots of people believe that the idea of a growing economy is a false promise because the Earth is a closed system and will run out of... well, everything... eventually. So the "answer" to these people is to contract everything down into a "sustainable" way of life for as many humans as possible. Sure, they will be living in mud huts, but hey, it will be sustainable and as long as there is no growth it will be able to continue forever.
Or at least until the Sun burns out.
The other view of life is that there is growth or there is stagnation and death. To cut off humans from any possible future of exploration and any sort of challange so we all get to just exist within our sustainable bubble is indeed stagnation and death. After a hundred years or so of that I doubt you would recognize what was living there as human.
The answer, obviously, is that long before resources on Earth are used up we need to be gathering energy and raw materials from elsewhere. We need to be moving people off planet for a number of reasons but just for starters the two biggest reasons are "just in case" and because humans are motivated to explore and overcome challanges. "Just in case" should be pretty clear - today a big rock could wipe out all life on Earth easily, possibly with warning time measured in months.
The idea that humans are motivated by exploration should be clear to anyone that has ever read anything about life before 1970. Why did people cross the ice bridge from Siberia to Alaska? Why did people on Polynesian islands get into absurdly small boats and travel to other islands? You can't say they did it for the money as you can for Columbus or other Spanish explorers.
People are motivated to explore and trying to keep humanity bottled up on Earth is a huge mistake. However, if we allow the short-sighted and fearful to control the future of humankind we will be locked up on Earth in a life that can only be described as stagnation and death.
Oh, and in case you were interested, how you make the Earth "sustainable" starts with a big population reduction. You can't have sustainable with 7 billion people - it is going to have to be a lot less than a billion. Maybe 250 million or so. If you aren't going to get this reduction through war, you might get it from propaganda. Convince people that because of global warming, pollution and running out of resources that we need to cut back, reduce, reuse and not have children. What does it take to convince people that the "responsible" thing to do is not have children? Well, we are already a good way along that road.
HIPPA basically means that the medical staff has to get a form signed that says it is OK for them to release your information, thereby giving them a pass as to whatever happens from then on. I am sure that everyone is in compliance with getting the proper forms signed allowing release of information to anyone. You misunderstand if you think HIPPA is about keeping medical information out of the hands of others - it is all about having the proper forms signed allowing medical information to be given out. Once they have the forms, it is all OK.
Of course the paralegal will get fired for this slipup. They were probably trying to do something constructive for the school - but did it with the wrong paper. In some ways, I cannot imagine what the "right" paper from a law firm might be.
The world has evolved to the point where crime is considered to be just a cost of doing business. There are criminals and there are victims, and that is pretty much the way of it. The police aren't terribly interested in non-violent crime, especially when it is something that can easily and cheaply be replaced. There is way, way too much violent crime for them to spend a lot of effort on stolen stuff.
Also, this is a significant way for people to gain access to things they otherwise would not be able to afford. Once someone figures out there are few real consequences to stealing there are a lot of opportunities out there. Grab something and the chances are the original owner (or shopkeeper) is just going to (a) write off the loss on their income taxes and (b) get reimbursed by the insurance company.
The one aspect of tracking down a thief is that sometimes they are very protective of their lifestyle. You aren't going to be able to convince the police that you have successfully tracked down "your" thief and there is little proof from standing around looking that a particular item is in fact yours. You want to risk being branded as a thief by trying to read the serial number off some hard-to-see spot on someone else's scooter? Should you successfully find your former scooter are you ready to confront the new owner mano-a-mano? Consider they may be armed - are you going to be? And if armed, are you ready and willing to use deadly force to recover your scooter if the new owner is ready and willing to use deadly force to prevent you from taking it? If not, it is best to forget about recovery.
Insurance is the new way to deal with such involuntary wealth transfers, at least for affluent people. If you are poor, you wouldn't be buying good stuff anyway. If you think you can't afford the insurance but can afford the scooter, you might want to consider what lengths you are willing to go to over your property.
You certainly can launch liquid fueled rockets at a moment's notice. That is what the Titan missle was - hypergolic liquid fuel sitting in the silo. There was only one accident involving a wrench (really big wrench, by the way). One of the tanks leaked until the weight of the missle collapsed the other tank and the fuel mixed - BOOM!. It threw the warhead around three miles from the silo I believe.
I think the Soviet SS20 was also liquid fueled but it is not clear to me if they sat them around fully fueled. Titan was. I think most of the other US missles were solid fueled. But the Titan was an incredible marvel that required a huge amount of maintenance.
But it does prove you CAN have a liquid fueled missle sitting around waiting to launch on about 1 minute's notice. The question is if you really want to.
Big problem is that neither of these is true today. A bomb on a ship could easily take out any harbor-centric city and would be undetected until it went off. Assuming the ship was some random contract freight carrier there could be no attribution. And there is nothing the US could do about it.
90% of the "advances" in nuclear weapons since around 1955 have been making them smaller, lighter and more controllable. Dial-a-yield type devices are really tricky. Making a 500kt bomb that is the size of a small bus isn't hard and the knowledge is readily obtainable. Once you have the nuclear material, it is actually harder to keep it from going off - you have to keep it in smaller bunches in containers. Just a big pile on the floor would be very nasty indeed.
I don't think the US has a real shortage of the sort of enemy that would really, really like to see a bomb go off in LA, New York, Washington DC, Seattle, or other oceanic harbor. But they don't have access to enough nuclear material. Yet. I think North Korea knows better than to sell enriched uranium or plutonium to anyone - it might be traced back to them and there would be consequences. Pakistan knows all too well about consequences. I don't think we've made the right impression in Iran yet, though. In truth, they are certainly willing to write off a big chunk of their civilian population and they might just be immune to "consequences".
Trust me, if someone ran and ad for a one-way trip to a lunar colony with the assurances that the colony isn't going to be shut down and people left stranded there there would absolutely be volunteers.
Nobody knows for certain what living for years (decades?) on the Moon would do but a lot of really smart people think it would lead to significantly longer lives. How about the attraction of seeing your great-great-great grandchildren?
The Moon is beginning to look like there is water ice there in large quantities. This means all the oxygen you would ever want. That means it is a rough, hard frontier existance for the first million people that go there but after that first million or so you have a completely functioning colony that could (in a pinch) be quite self-sufficient. Look at the numbers of people that moved West in the 1800s in the USA. A lot of them didn't make it and a lot of them died pretty young from the hazards of a new frontier. But people were lined up to go and St. Joe Missouri was a boom town for people moving west. Even though a lot of them knew the odds were against them living very long.
I don't care how dangerous it is, people would absolutely go. The chance to "make a difference" to "have their lives count for something". All that is needed is for there to be someplace for them to get a start and they will dig out their own homes and workshops.
- "get everything insured". I suspect that if they advertised "free one-way trip to moon colony" and assured people that they colony would be their for the rest of their lives that they would get plenty of volunteers. No insurance needed. Yup, some people are going to die there, no question about that. But would you take the risk? Maybe not, but I assure you there are plenty of people that would. I am sure you could skip the insurance.
- "send the stuff back, burn up a lot of fuel". Sorry, but Lunar-to-Earth transitions are extremely simple. You can practically throw a rock from the moon and have it land on Earth. The escape velocity from the moon is 2.4km/s or 144KPH or about 90MPH. That means a professional baseball pitcher could, in theory, throw a 90MPH pitch from the Moon and have it land on Earth. It is because of this fact that getting stuff from the Moon to Earth orbit is far less expensive than bringing it up from the 11.2km/s Earth gravity well.
- "keep it cold". You do know that in space there is zero conduction of thermal energy, right? So as long as you keep the Sun from shining on an object it is going to tend to approach absolute zero. OK, approach is a pretty general term here but one of the biggest power consumers on satellites is the heater to keep things at a functional temperature. The shuttle would orbit with the black belly facing outward - towards the Sun - to keep things warmer. There was also a thermal radiator in one of the cargo bay doors so they could control the amount of heating that was going on. Unlike previous manned missions where again a huge power consumer was the heater for the crew.
No, this would actually work very well. Probably the biggest thing is setting things up to make use of the resources that would be available. Today, when a satellite uses up its fuel it is discarded because it is cheaper to send up another $100+ million satellite than it is to try to refuel it from Earth. Having fuel and reaction mass from the Moon in orbit would change the economics of that significantly.
Short term, the only way you are going to effect meaningful change to US elections is with a bunch of people with guns.
Long term, you can think about trying to work through the system like the LaRouche candidates are doing. Who knows, they might eventually make it. But it is going to take them decades as it would take any "populist" set of candidates to do so.
No, the answer is likely guns. Simply blocking the polling places and actively making sure that people who are planning to vote for the "wrong" candidate don't make it inside. The US population are for the most part sheep so any strategy that interferes with their ability to continue their lives unaffected is going to work. Unfortunately, the way the population is structured you can never have a majority of people really behind a "cause". Obama won because the Republicans couldn't field a candidate that was interesting enough and there was no third-party candidate to push the majority below 50%. Not being George Bush helped a lot too. Obama is unlikely to win again but it is possible because once more the Republican candidates are a lukewarm bunch with little going for them - other than not being Obama.
So the question is if an "occupy" style group decided to make sure that Obama won in 2012 by whatever means necessary to achieve that goal would they succeed? Well, the police, mayors and state officials would probably take days to figure out a strategy - long after the voting had ended. Would the federal government force a re-do of the election? Probably not as it would be hugely unpopular to do so even in the face of massive voter interference. So it would probably work and only really need a few thousand people in key cities. You see, the last few elections are very telling in that we are talking about less than a million votes making the difference between the two (or three) candidates.
Once you start down that road you can then get whatever reforms you want, assuming the elected candidate is really loyal to who put him in office. Obama may not be the right guy, but he seems to understand who got him in in 2008 well enough, and it wasn't the "progressives" or "liberals" or anyone other than people that financed the bulk of his campaign. Wall Street money did it and he has shown himself to be remarkably loyal to them. Perhaps he would be equally loyal to a group that ensured a second term and a hand-picked set of Senators to go along with it. Probably take back the House as well.
The problem with any other voting mechanism is that it doesn't provide an instant, clear-cut winner.
Probably the best referent for a US election is a horse race. The media is full of horse racing terminology when referring to elections, and it has been this way for well over a hundred and fifty years and probably before that as well. Well, in a horse race you have a winner and that winner can be observed by everyone right there on the spot. There isn't any need for complicated gyrations to determine who the winner is.
And of course there are losers. Everyone except the winner is a loser. Period. That sort of lets out any sort of proportional representation, doesn't it?
Unless you can figure out a way to change this horse race mindset, there will be no changes made to the US election system that make it easier for third parties or proportional representation. Of course we could abandon the voting by state and the electoral college and just elect the President based on nationwide popular vote. Except that is likely to make things worse - a lot worse - pretty quickly.
Look, I would really like it if the government made it so that there were no poor people. Or hungry people. Or people that couldn't afford homes.
It would be nice as well if we all had a government-assured income so that in spite of an economic contraction that just means fewer workers are needed now and the unemployment is permanent that everyone would have enough money, housing and food. And entertainment.
The problem is that unless you buy into something like Social Credit there simply isn't any way to do that. There will always be people with more than other have and there will always be people that have too little. Part of the problem today is population growth in the wrong places. Part of the problem is that we have had essentially a stagnant economy for the last 30-40 years and the only times there has been any real growth has been because of wars. Cleaning up after WWII made for a lot of rich people but it also made for a lot of jobs for common laborers. We haven't had a big economy-changing war for a long time and it clearly shows. Not that war is the most efficient way to do this, but it does work.
The decision today is who is better at deciding what to spend money on - people or the government. We could easily tax everyone at 95% of their assets until they had nothing left as long as the government then took over control of housing, food, clothing and everything else. Why would you need money or assets when everything is taken care of for you by the government. The problem is, they tried that elsewhere and it didn't work - people still got richer, poor people still suffered without as much as they needed and things where very inefficient.
Big problem today is that if you make things hard enough for those with assets - rich people, large corporations, etc. they will simply pick up and move somewhere that isn't that hard. Sure it is nice to have a mostly-functioning government but if you have enough assets it is easy to have your own security and your own rules. At some point you end up with your own army - tell me that Monsanto couldn't operate out of a corner of Somalia if they wanted to. Plenty of places would grant mega-corporations soverign rights (police, defense, courts, etc.) in exchange for enough money.
So do we figure out a way to make things work or just try to recreate the Soviet Union? Or Jonestown? Mostly, I think people these days are pushing really hard for Jonestown without understanding what they are likely to end up with.
Does anyone have the slightest idea of how many semi-trucks are traveling the roads today? If you are out on any of the Interstate roads in the evening you will pretty much seen an unending line of trucks as far as you can see. That is thousands of trucks moving across the roads at any given moment in time. Over the course of 24 hours it is likely to be over 500,000 trucks having been driven that day.
So what? Well, considering the trucks together are going to average out at around 40,000 pounds each - 20 tons - even a conservative figure of 1000 trucks is 20,000 tons in motion. A million trucks would be twenty million tons of mass moving across the surface of the Earth. Easily within a single day we have ten million tons in motion.
What do you think this is doing to the Earth's rotation? How does it affect the balance of teutonic plates having say 50,000 trucks moving from California to Arizona from 10PM to 4AM?
There are more things than you think that are affecting the geologic stability of the world.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously you have never used a Kindle. Amazon is a small part of what can be put on a Kindle. Now for people that do not understand "the Internet" it may be their only choice, but the same goes for an iPod - if you do not know anything about downloading files all you can do is buy from iTunes. As iTunes has 1 or 2 percent of the music download market, clearly some people are using it because they don't know any better.
As may be your problem with the Kindle.
You may not be aware of things like Manybooks.net, but this is a web site (yes, you have to use a browser) that you can access on the Kindle itself, using the free networking built into the device, to download books for free. I see no connection with Amazon here at all, other than Amazon seems to be paying for the network connection when it is through a cell modem.
This isn't some deep dark secret that only uber-hackers know about. It is right there out in the open, except silly people that believe a lot of anti-Kindle propaganda can't seem to understand.
You misunderstand I think. The goal of many pirates is to overwhelm the distribution of legitimate, revenue-producing suppliers with pirated goods. This has pretty much happened with music - nobody is paying for recorded music and the value of a song has dropped from $3-4 in the album days to $0 today. Why is it there are online services providing free, user-selectable music? Because the songs have no value anymore.
Check WalMart and see how much the CD section has shrunk in the last couple of years.
We are moving down that road with movies. Instead of paying $20 for a DVD you can now watch 100 movies on Netflix all month long for $8. This means the cost (or value) of the movie isn't really much more than $0.08 instead of $20. Between Netflix and piracy, all we are waiting for is the last bit to go away and we will see movies have $0 value. When that day comes, you can give your neighborhood pirate a hearty thanks because in large measure it is the easy availability of pirated movies pushing the revenue in that direction.
Ebooks are going to be going that way soon as well. You can now find poor copies of newly released books downloadable within days. Better quality content is coming, just as it did with music and movies. The revenue from ebooks will be destroyed just as certainly as it was for other digital items.
It certainly means that if you today earn a living in any sort of creative endeavor you better start looking for a new job. Music, movies, books, software - if it is distributed in a digital form it better either be customized to a specific (very rich) customer or kept locked away in a vault. Because otherwise the pirates are coming for your revenue too, and you will be on the street selling pencils or some other non-digital item. There will be no money in digital items at all soon.
DRM on the Kindle works very well and insures that 99% of the people purchasing books from Amazon are not able to share them with all of their friends. Or all of the planet through the magic of the Internet. When was the last time you saw a ebook on a pirate web site that was in AZW format?
Now, is it possible to defeat the DRM on Kindle files? Sure it is, but it is outside of the knowledge of 99% of the Kindle users. The remaining 1% that are able to follow directions and do it could be utterly destroying Amazon's ebook revenue stream making ebooks free for everyone - but for some reason they are not doing this. One problem is that it is very difficult to purchase things from Amazon without actually paying for them, so each book is going to cost someone money. And I believe all of the DRM-breaking strategies for Kindle require the breaking to be done using the account of the original purchaser. So again, the DRM is extremely effective in limiting the redistribution of ebooks.
That is what counts. It doesn't have to be perfect. If the DRM breaking gets simpler and more automated who knows what might happen? Would Amazon change the algorithm and push updates to all existing Kindle devices - a move that would cost tens of millions of dollars today? Maybe. If Amazon's library suddenly became freely available, as it might without DRM, it might not destroy Amazon but publishers would certainly take a different approach to ebooks.
This is NOT corruption. This is enterprising people supplementing their low, low public salaries.
What? Do you not believe this is being done nationwide? Let's make it clear, if you pay people a pittance they will find ways to supplement their income. Waiters sell credit card numbers. DMV staff sell whole identity sets. IRS people probably sell tax information. If it isn't nailed down or otherwise secured and someone who feels they are underpaid is handling it, it is being sold.
This has nothing to do with corruption. This has everything to do with the perception of people that they have to do more to get money. Somehow.
Also, it may not have occurred to people that this is something all that bad. Where is the 30 page document they have to sign (and initial every page) that spells out exactly how they are the "guardians of private information" and must not disclose this to anyone. And, better yet, spells out the penalties for disclosing information. No such document? Well, maybe it isn't illegal at all then - at least in their minds. Most of the people that are doing things you might consider "evil" or "wrong" have never really considered what they are doing to be all that wrong in the first place. Perhaps not something they want to wear a sign saying they did, but nevertheless not really all that wrong.
Read Revelations. You do not need to provide your SSN to buy something, but any sort of chip and pin system would indeed involve "having a number to buy stuff". I forget the exact phrasing in Revelations, but if you stop your average bible-thumper on the street he can clarify it for you.
That isn't to say that the introduction of the SSN wasn't met with "Mark of the Beast"!!! There are still people that refuse to even have an SSN because of what it implies to them.
In the US at least, and I suspect in UK as well, if one party objects to a Rabbinical court the whole matter can be tossed over to the secular courts. The only "binding" part of such courts is that both parties agree to be bound by its decisions, which outside of the parties agreeing has no authority whatsoever.
So, a woman that objected to a divorce might be able to fight it pretty easily. Of course, the result would be that she would be ostracised from her community but she would be essentially rejecting her community anyway. There have been situations such as this in New York in the Hasidic community there and such cases are pretty easy to find. Often, once the parties figure out that they have a choice between accepting a Rabbinical decision or leaving the community it is pretty clear what is going to happen. They choose community and religion over their personal feelings in the matter.
A huge difference in Islamic countries and I believe currently in Australia and Germany is that a Sharia court is granted authority over members of the Islamic faith and whether or not the parties agree the court has primary authority over "their" people. In matters that can be decided by such courts - which are still limited - this removes the option of disagreeing with the decisions of a religious court from people.
When we have people that can consistently behave better than a 4 year old, then maybe the government isn't going to have to treat the citizens as 4 year olds. Right now, there are enough acting like 4 year olds (or worse) that what is needed is a lot more treatment of citizens as 4 year olds. Much of what is illegal activity today is little more than "testing the boundaries" which is expected behavior for a 4 year old. The problem for the people living in the same neighborhood is that much of these boundaries are imaginary and there is no enforcement whatsoever. So the nice citizens are left to push further and further until they find out that yes, there are indeed consequences for murder but only if you get caught.
This would probably entail less jail time and more things like putting people in "time out". You don't put a 4 year old in jail for 10 years - 15 minutes makes the point. But it does require a lot more enforcement before things get out of hand.
Sadly, we seem to be recruiting police from the ranks of people that view it as being the only job they can have where they can exert power and control over others. Nope, they would never make Sergent in the Army but they can be a police officer and bash heads every now and then. This isn't the sort that we need and there needs to be testing to weed this sort of applicant out. Clearly, in the name of eliminating racial profiling and other barriers this sort of testing isn't being done.
It is a myth that legalization will bring the prices down.
Today, California has laws that make marijuana pretty much legal there. It is not taxed currently. But, the prices at a "dispensary" are about the same as the street prices in Chicago. Assuming the government finally gets around to taxing the sale of marijuana, the prices for the legal weed in California will be higher than the illegal stuff smuggled in from Mexico.
I seriously doubt that prices are going to fall that much. And the illegal importers are always going to have a leg up on the legal growers, if for no other reason than simple math - cheaper labor cost.
Sure, we can give is try. I'm all for it. But the result is likely to be a new appreciation of how deep the river of "addictive personality" goes in the US. I'm betting it is pretty deep, which likely means legalization will make it easier for a lot of people that don't think they have a problem begin to have a big problem. It's like casinos. Have a casino without an ATM machine and you have one level of gambling addition. Put in an ATM machine and there isn't just a small jump in the number of people deciding they have a problem - or finding out they have a problem after they lose their job, house and spouse. Previous cultures marginalized these people so well that they pretty much sank into oblivion. Here in the US today we don't seem to be able to do that anywhere near as effectively.
Netflix is also somewhat dependent on their customer's ISP to pass the service through. With current and future consolidations this may no longer be something that is all that helpful for cable companies to effectively "sponsor". Which they are currently.
There is a serious change coming as well. Netflix streaming works fine in the US in early-adopter mode. There is plenty of bandwidth to go around when 10 people in a neighborhood are watching some sort of streaming video content at around 5-6Mb/sec. However, most neighborhoods are served by a node with around 1000 homes connected to it. The node might have as much as a 3Gb/sec feed. Divide 3Gb/sec by 1000 and you get around 3Mb/sec possible if nearly all of the homes are streaming. Goodby streaming HD content, it's been nice.
Can the cable systems upgrade to supply HD streaming to every house? Maybe. Cox in Phoenix is moving to 500 homes at 3Gb/sec feeds to their nodes, but it is taking them a long time to get there. They also have it pretty easy in Phoenix, whereas say in Chicago it would probably be a lot tougher to do.
The important note for Netflix is that if everyone in a neighborhood tried to watch Netflix streaming, everyone would be looking at huge delays and lots of "buffering". It gets worse if a small number of homes are trying to watch two streams. Netflix got a reprieve when they increased the price but they are competing with Hulu, Crackle and every other streaming content provider.
The last time the cable companies substantially changed the infrastructure they went from analog to digital distribution and needed to increase the number of nodes a lot. It took around 15 years for this to happen nationwide. I wouldn't expect much less than 10 years for the next big upgrade. Netflix, Hulu and the rest are a brief fad and cannot survive mass adoption.
I think most people believe as Michael Moore has written - the rich people owe us, so take it all.
If you put Bill Gates and Larry Ellison together and took 100% of their net worth it would be a good start. Add in Warren Buffet. And Jimmy Buffet too, as he must be rich. Just take all the money from the rich people, pay off the debt and distribute what is left over to ordinary people.
Right. Except Bill Gates would see this coming months in advance and just up and leave his big house. From Costa Rica or Grand Cayman he would watch as the country imploded as the campaign against the "rich" kept pushing lower and lower until anyone that actually owned a house and a car was considered "rich". He could sit on his new (probably larger) back deck with Larry, Warren and a bunch of other people laughing about it.
The lynching party against the rich is just getting started. Remember, the definition of "rich" is pretty flexible and the mobs are always going to be in the majority. Start with the 1% and then pick up the top 2%. By the time you get down to the top 5% things are looking pretty bleak.
The fact that this wouldn't actually work is not going to deter the mobs in the slightest. It is coming to a neighborhood near you soon.
The problem is that for most people under 30 the Internet has always been a source of free stuff. If it is out there, there is no way for the ISP, the government or their parents to prevent them from accessing it. The result of the last 15-20 years is a level of expectation that is pervasive.
Today if I want to watch a TV show I can (a) go to an "official" web site where I can view some recent episodes - but possibly not the one I want, or I can download the whole season from somewhere "unofficial" and get the episode I want. The "unofficial" source has an added benefit in that someone took the time to strip out all the advertising. The reasons it works this way is based partly on the revenue model for the show production company - they are paid by big advertisers and not by viewers, and also it is a function of how television shows are distributed. I'm sure if someone wanted to put together a TV show and distribute it in a way where individual users were charged for it they could do it, but it would cost 10x what the current distribution model does to operate. It wouldn't be efficient. So it is extremely unlikely that it is going to happen, ever.
So you have the idea that "it should just be free" as well as a distribution model that strives for efficiency and dealing with only a few customers rather than millions of them.
The other side of this is today it would be difficult to find web hosting in the US that would allow their customer to distribute pirated digital goods. However, such hosting arrangements are common outside the US - many countries view it as a coup that they can violate US law with impunity through such arrangements. So when someone comes calling to get the material removed the answer is "ha ha ha". One possible response to this is to simply block the web sites that offer such materals.
Of course, I think a much better approach would be to have an international agreement that says no party will support or tolerate piracy and will enforce local laws and international treaties on copyright. Violation of the agreement or non-signatories simply are cut off from the Internet. Period. No traffic. They can chat amongst themselves all they want but they only way they get to participate in the Internet at large is by respecting established international treaties that they have agreed to. But apparently buy-in for that level of enforcement isn't going to happen. So therefore the US is left with two options - watch the revenue model for all digital goods disappear as it has for music or take some sort of unilateral action like this.
Music has already fallen to this. Most "music stores" have closed and even WalMart keeps shinking the space they have for CDs. Most of the people I know have given up on buying music or even downloading it. There are far too many free services and free distributions to ever pay for it again. This happened partly because it was becoming clear that most young people switched from buying to pirating a while back and there simply wasn't any real revenue in it anymore. There is still a little, but it is clearly the last ditch effort to squeeze out what is left.
Movies and e-books are next up. Software is a struggle today except for platforms where piracy is difficult, like iPhone/iPad.
I do not believe most Slashdotters understand how much their current employment is tied to a revenue stream for IP and digital goods having value today. Certainly in the US we would be looking at 50% unemployment.
Somehow, you misunderstand the function of television marketing. They DO NOT want to sell you access to the show. They want you to watch ads with the show. Important, expensive ads that are relevent to your geographic area and relate to things you want to buy - and can buy. If you are outside of the marketing area there are no ads like this for you.
Sure, they might be able to set up a deal with advertisers in Netherlands, Spain, Brazil or whereever it is you happen to be. But there is no concentration of customers there so the advertisers aren't going to pay much - if anything at all - to run ads in those areas. So no ads and it makes no sense to offer the show for free (no ads) in these areas.
Absolutely, they do not want to "sell" you access to the show in any way whatsoever. They want to have 10 really good customers - advertisers - not 100 million customers that they have to deal with 100 million separate payments from. 10 really big checks every month does it for them.
So your choices are to pirate or do without. You will never have access in any way you would consider reasonable.
The important thing with Amazon customer service is to never, ever say the "D" word. Whatever happens, you didn't drop it.
Yes, there may be a huge shatter mark in the glass and they will understand when they get it, but customer service will pretty much just replace them as long as you didn't drop it. I have even seen one get replaced after the year warranty was up.
Why wait for a century to launch a probe?
We could put a probe into the Alpha Centauri system within 50 years without question. Sure, launch in 10 years and it takes 40 years to get there. It might be pretty large but it could be assembled in orbit and launched from there.
The only possible justification at this point for not sending such a probe is a rather weak argument that (a) we wouldn't learn anything by doing it and (b) in 46 years we will have advanced sufficiently that we can make it at lightspeed. I question both of these arguments.
You can see the reason for moving off Earth quite easily. Lots of people believe that the idea of a growing economy is a false promise because the Earth is a closed system and will run out of ... well, everything ... eventually. So the "answer" to these people is to contract everything down into a "sustainable" way of life for as many humans as possible. Sure, they will be living in mud huts, but hey, it will be sustainable and as long as there is no growth it will be able to continue forever.
Or at least until the Sun burns out.
The other view of life is that there is growth or there is stagnation and death. To cut off humans from any possible future of exploration and any sort of challange so we all get to just exist within our sustainable bubble is indeed stagnation and death. After a hundred years or so of that I doubt you would recognize what was living there as human.
The answer, obviously, is that long before resources on Earth are used up we need to be gathering energy and raw materials from elsewhere. We need to be moving people off planet for a number of reasons but just for starters the two biggest reasons are "just in case" and because humans are motivated to explore and overcome challanges. "Just in case" should be pretty clear - today a big rock could wipe out all life on Earth easily, possibly with warning time measured in months.
The idea that humans are motivated by exploration should be clear to anyone that has ever read anything about life before 1970. Why did people cross the ice bridge from Siberia to Alaska? Why did people on Polynesian islands get into absurdly small boats and travel to other islands? You can't say they did it for the money as you can for Columbus or other Spanish explorers.
People are motivated to explore and trying to keep humanity bottled up on Earth is a huge mistake. However, if we allow the short-sighted and fearful to control the future of humankind we will be locked up on Earth in a life that can only be described as stagnation and death.
Oh, and in case you were interested, how you make the Earth "sustainable" starts with a big population reduction. You can't have sustainable with 7 billion people - it is going to have to be a lot less than a billion. Maybe 250 million or so. If you aren't going to get this reduction through war, you might get it from propaganda. Convince people that because of global warming, pollution and running out of resources that we need to cut back, reduce, reuse and not have children. What does it take to convince people that the "responsible" thing to do is not have children? Well, we are already a good way along that road.
HIPPA basically means that the medical staff has to get a form signed that says it is OK for them to release your information, thereby giving them a pass as to whatever happens from then on. I am sure that everyone is in compliance with getting the proper forms signed allowing release of information to anyone. You misunderstand if you think HIPPA is about keeping medical information out of the hands of others - it is all about having the proper forms signed allowing medical information to be given out. Once they have the forms, it is all OK.
Of course the paralegal will get fired for this slipup. They were probably trying to do something constructive for the school - but did it with the wrong paper. In some ways, I cannot imagine what the "right" paper from a law firm might be.
The world has evolved to the point where crime is considered to be just a cost of doing business. There are criminals and there are victims, and that is pretty much the way of it. The police aren't terribly interested in non-violent crime, especially when it is something that can easily and cheaply be replaced. There is way, way too much violent crime for them to spend a lot of effort on stolen stuff.
Also, this is a significant way for people to gain access to things they otherwise would not be able to afford. Once someone figures out there are few real consequences to stealing there are a lot of opportunities out there. Grab something and the chances are the original owner (or shopkeeper) is just going to (a) write off the loss on their income taxes and (b) get reimbursed by the insurance company.
The one aspect of tracking down a thief is that sometimes they are very protective of their lifestyle. You aren't going to be able to convince the police that you have successfully tracked down "your" thief and there is little proof from standing around looking that a particular item is in fact yours. You want to risk being branded as a thief by trying to read the serial number off some hard-to-see spot on someone else's scooter? Should you successfully find your former scooter are you ready to confront the new owner mano-a-mano? Consider they may be armed - are you going to be? And if armed, are you ready and willing to use deadly force to recover your scooter if the new owner is ready and willing to use deadly force to prevent you from taking it? If not, it is best to forget about recovery.
Insurance is the new way to deal with such involuntary wealth transfers, at least for affluent people. If you are poor, you wouldn't be buying good stuff anyway. If you think you can't afford the insurance but can afford the scooter, you might want to consider what lengths you are willing to go to over your property.
You certainly can launch liquid fueled rockets at a moment's notice. That is what the Titan missle was - hypergolic liquid fuel sitting in the silo. There was only one accident involving a wrench (really big wrench, by the way). One of the tanks leaked until the weight of the missle collapsed the other tank and the fuel mixed - BOOM!. It threw the warhead around three miles from the silo I believe.
I think the Soviet SS20 was also liquid fueled but it is not clear to me if they sat them around fully fueled. Titan was. I think most of the other US missles were solid fueled. But the Titan was an incredible marvel that required a huge amount of maintenance.
But it does prove you CAN have a liquid fueled missle sitting around waiting to launch on about 1 minute's notice. The question is if you really want to.
Big problem is that neither of these is true today. A bomb on a ship could easily take out any harbor-centric city and would be undetected until it went off. Assuming the ship was some random contract freight carrier there could be no attribution. And there is nothing the US could do about it.
90% of the "advances" in nuclear weapons since around 1955 have been making them smaller, lighter and more controllable. Dial-a-yield type devices are really tricky. Making a 500kt bomb that is the size of a small bus isn't hard and the knowledge is readily obtainable. Once you have the nuclear material, it is actually harder to keep it from going off - you have to keep it in smaller bunches in containers. Just a big pile on the floor would be very nasty indeed.
I don't think the US has a real shortage of the sort of enemy that would really, really like to see a bomb go off in LA, New York, Washington DC, Seattle, or other oceanic harbor. But they don't have access to enough nuclear material. Yet. I think North Korea knows better than to sell enriched uranium or plutonium to anyone - it might be traced back to them and there would be consequences. Pakistan knows all too well about consequences. I don't think we've made the right impression in Iran yet, though. In truth, they are certainly willing to write off a big chunk of their civilian population and they might just be immune to "consequences".
Trust me, if someone ran and ad for a one-way trip to a lunar colony with the assurances that the colony isn't going to be shut down and people left stranded there there would absolutely be volunteers.
Nobody knows for certain what living for years (decades?) on the Moon would do but a lot of really smart people think it would lead to significantly longer lives. How about the attraction of seeing your great-great-great grandchildren?
The Moon is beginning to look like there is water ice there in large quantities. This means all the oxygen you would ever want. That means it is a rough, hard frontier existance for the first million people that go there but after that first million or so you have a completely functioning colony that could (in a pinch) be quite self-sufficient. Look at the numbers of people that moved West in the 1800s in the USA. A lot of them didn't make it and a lot of them died pretty young from the hazards of a new frontier. But people were lined up to go and St. Joe Missouri was a boom town for people moving west. Even though a lot of them knew the odds were against them living very long.
I don't care how dangerous it is, people would absolutely go. The chance to "make a difference" to "have their lives count for something". All that is needed is for there to be someplace for them to get a start and they will dig out their own homes and workshops.
A couple of points about your comment:
- "get everything insured". I suspect that if they advertised "free one-way trip to moon colony" and assured people that they colony would be their for the rest of their lives that they would get plenty of volunteers. No insurance needed. Yup, some people are going to die there, no question about that. But would you take the risk? Maybe not, but I assure you there are plenty of people that would. I am sure you could skip the insurance.
- "send the stuff back, burn up a lot of fuel". Sorry, but Lunar-to-Earth transitions are extremely simple. You can practically throw a rock from the moon and have it land on Earth. The escape velocity from the moon is 2.4km/s or 144KPH or about 90MPH. That means a professional baseball pitcher could, in theory, throw a 90MPH pitch from the Moon and have it land on Earth. It is because of this fact that getting stuff from the Moon to Earth orbit is far less expensive than bringing it up from the 11.2km/s Earth gravity well.
- "keep it cold". You do know that in space there is zero conduction of thermal energy, right? So as long as you keep the Sun from shining on an object it is going to tend to approach absolute zero. OK, approach is a pretty general term here but one of the biggest power consumers on satellites is the heater to keep things at a functional temperature. The shuttle would orbit with the black belly facing outward - towards the Sun - to keep things warmer. There was also a thermal radiator in one of the cargo bay doors so they could control the amount of heating that was going on. Unlike previous manned missions where again a huge power consumer was the heater for the crew.
No, this would actually work very well. Probably the biggest thing is setting things up to make use of the resources that would be available. Today, when a satellite uses up its fuel it is discarded because it is cheaper to send up another $100+ million satellite than it is to try to refuel it from Earth. Having fuel and reaction mass from the Moon in orbit would change the economics of that significantly.
Short term, the only way you are going to effect meaningful change to US elections is with a bunch of people with guns.
Long term, you can think about trying to work through the system like the LaRouche candidates are doing. Who knows, they might eventually make it. But it is going to take them decades as it would take any "populist" set of candidates to do so.
No, the answer is likely guns. Simply blocking the polling places and actively making sure that people who are planning to vote for the "wrong" candidate don't make it inside. The US population are for the most part sheep so any strategy that interferes with their ability to continue their lives unaffected is going to work. Unfortunately, the way the population is structured you can never have a majority of people really behind a "cause". Obama won because the Republicans couldn't field a candidate that was interesting enough and there was no third-party candidate to push the majority below 50%. Not being George Bush helped a lot too. Obama is unlikely to win again but it is possible because once more the Republican candidates are a lukewarm bunch with little going for them - other than not being Obama.
So the question is if an "occupy" style group decided to make sure that Obama won in 2012 by whatever means necessary to achieve that goal would they succeed? Well, the police, mayors and state officials would probably take days to figure out a strategy - long after the voting had ended. Would the federal government force a re-do of the election? Probably not as it would be hugely unpopular to do so even in the face of massive voter interference. So it would probably work and only really need a few thousand people in key cities. You see, the last few elections are very telling in that we are talking about less than a million votes making the difference between the two (or three) candidates.
Once you start down that road you can then get whatever reforms you want, assuming the elected candidate is really loyal to who put him in office. Obama may not be the right guy, but he seems to understand who got him in in 2008 well enough, and it wasn't the "progressives" or "liberals" or anyone other than people that financed the bulk of his campaign. Wall Street money did it and he has shown himself to be remarkably loyal to them. Perhaps he would be equally loyal to a group that ensured a second term and a hand-picked set of Senators to go along with it. Probably take back the House as well.
The problem with any other voting mechanism is that it doesn't provide an instant, clear-cut winner.
Probably the best referent for a US election is a horse race. The media is full of horse racing terminology when referring to elections, and it has been this way for well over a hundred and fifty years and probably before that as well. Well, in a horse race you have a winner and that winner can be observed by everyone right there on the spot. There isn't any need for complicated gyrations to determine who the winner is.
And of course there are losers. Everyone except the winner is a loser. Period. That sort of lets out any sort of proportional representation, doesn't it?
Unless you can figure out a way to change this horse race mindset, there will be no changes made to the US election system that make it easier for third parties or proportional representation. Of course we could abandon the voting by state and the electoral college and just elect the President based on nationwide popular vote. Except that is likely to make things worse - a lot worse - pretty quickly.
Look, I would really like it if the government made it so that there were no poor people. Or hungry people. Or people that couldn't afford homes.
It would be nice as well if we all had a government-assured income so that in spite of an economic contraction that just means fewer workers are needed now and the unemployment is permanent that everyone would have enough money, housing and food. And entertainment.
The problem is that unless you buy into something like Social Credit there simply isn't any way to do that. There will always be people with more than other have and there will always be people that have too little. Part of the problem today is population growth in the wrong places. Part of the problem is that we have had essentially a stagnant economy for the last 30-40 years and the only times there has been any real growth has been because of wars. Cleaning up after WWII made for a lot of rich people but it also made for a lot of jobs for common laborers. We haven't had a big economy-changing war for a long time and it clearly shows. Not that war is the most efficient way to do this, but it does work.
The decision today is who is better at deciding what to spend money on - people or the government. We could easily tax everyone at 95% of their assets until they had nothing left as long as the government then took over control of housing, food, clothing and everything else. Why would you need money or assets when everything is taken care of for you by the government. The problem is, they tried that elsewhere and it didn't work - people still got richer, poor people still suffered without as much as they needed and things where very inefficient.
Big problem today is that if you make things hard enough for those with assets - rich people, large corporations, etc. they will simply pick up and move somewhere that isn't that hard. Sure it is nice to have a mostly-functioning government but if you have enough assets it is easy to have your own security and your own rules. At some point you end up with your own army - tell me that Monsanto couldn't operate out of a corner of Somalia if they wanted to. Plenty of places would grant mega-corporations soverign rights (police, defense, courts, etc.) in exchange for enough money.
So do we figure out a way to make things work or just try to recreate the Soviet Union? Or Jonestown? Mostly, I think people these days are pushing really hard for Jonestown without understanding what they are likely to end up with.
Does anyone have the slightest idea of how many semi-trucks are traveling the roads today? If you are out on any of the Interstate roads in the evening you will pretty much seen an unending line of trucks as far as you can see. That is thousands of trucks moving across the roads at any given moment in time. Over the course of 24 hours it is likely to be over 500,000 trucks having been driven that day.
So what? Well, considering the trucks together are going to average out at around 40,000 pounds each - 20 tons - even a conservative figure of 1000 trucks is 20,000 tons in motion. A million trucks would be twenty million tons of mass moving across the surface of the Earth. Easily within a single day we have ten million tons in motion.
What do you think this is doing to the Earth's rotation? How does it affect the balance of teutonic plates having say 50,000 trucks moving from California to Arizona from 10PM to 4AM?
There are more things than you think that are affecting the geologic stability of the world.