It always baffles me why everybody is so focused on developing completely new and revolutionary physics. The greatest progress has been made in refining the Standard Model, rather than replacing it. And it always amuses me when people exhibit surprise when the Standard Model holds up. There cannot be such complexity in the universe if the fundamentals are constantly in disarray.
Perhaps it's because Einstein was their role model, and nobody in the next hundred years is going to quite make the dent in physics as Einstein did even though everyone is going to try. Nobody remembers that there was 300 years between Newton and Einstein, and that people 300 years ago were just as smart and just as capable as people today, only with fewer opportunities for the unprivileged individual and slower methods of communication between intellectuals.
Unfortunately, wild theories and postulations are not going to get where people want to go. Einstein's revolution was sparked by a moment of insight. It's not something that can be forced out with extra hours pounding square pegs into round holes. It can be prepared for by building a solid foundation. But that amounts to keeping the rain barrels outside and ready to collect in a desert.
Forget the exotic theories (especially the untestable ones). Leave the speculation to the metaphysicists. Stick with the basics. Trying to initiate the next revolution in physics would be as futile as dancing for rain.
Great. Now if only the big studios will make the switch.
Indie developers have been using OpenGL for ages. Windows will continue to be the gaming platform of choice so long as Call of Duty and Madden continue to push the version of DirectX necessary.
It's not surprising move though. I believe Microsoft started this with XP (DirectX 9c?), and have been doing it since. There were no negative repercussions then, and I honestly doubt there will be with DirectX 11.1.
Of course, if Windows 8 utterly tanks, as it probably will in the desktop and enterprise market segments, the point is moot. Microsoft will go straight to Windows 9 and DirectX 12 (and pull the same sort of thing there).
Above a certain price, people who value their own money will lose interest. Sadly, in the end, it'll just end up coming out of mommy and daddy's retirement savings or some kid's college fund.
Except Samsung's biggest customer might be themselves. While Apple's contract is large parts-wise, it doesn't account for much of their income, much less the profit.
I don't see Apple jumping fabs anytime soon, not if they want to keep their price to performance point. There are cheaper foundries that are slightly older and make slower and needier chips, and there are more expensive foundries that make faster chips.
Perhaps if Apple wasn't forced to compete on speed and battery life, they'd be able to switch foundries by keeping their processor generation the same for one iteration. But with Android products pushing their hardware along, it's not a realistic plan, at least not until the cheapest ARM processors have reached the point x86 processors are at (i.e. good enough).
Like I said elsewhere, they might actually have had plans to switch suppliers all along. It'd be stupid of them to sue Samsung, of all the Android manufacturers. But I suspect these plans fell through, or got delayed. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if some other foundry came to Apple and promised them the ability to switch by a certain date for a certain price, prior to Apple initiating their lawsuits, and said foundry ultimately was unable to make that date or the price point or both.
They don't have to drop their price significantly. Just price the iPhone parts in a way that forces Apple to increase the price of the iPhone (or decrease their profit margin).
Then, it's a matter pointing out that their product does exactly what Apple's product does. Oh wait, Apple already did that part for them.
I have to imagine that Apple had plans to switch suppliers. The plans may have been delayed or may have fallen through though.
I'm certain if they were switching suppliers, everybody wants a cut of the luxury tax Apple charges their customers. And since nobody can quite get manufacturing costs for this one part down like Samsung, perhaps Samsung's price increase ended up being the cheapest anyway. I heard Apple already is in the proces sof moving away from Samsung's LCD panels.
Suing Samsung wasn't a good long-term strategy, but it was more of a stop-gap measure to slow down Android's progress and rate of adoption. It worked, to some extent, in that they managed to postpone the release of some of Samsung's newest flagship products. But it also didn't quite work, because it legitimized Samsung's comparisons (Just like the iPhone, but without the silly restrictions!), and put Samsung's name in the spotlight.
On the other hand, it seems Apple's SOL without Samsung's parts, whatever they might be.
It would be delicious irony if Samsung charged Apple more because of the increasing legal overhead Samsung needs to take into account when pricing their goods.
DNS is the weakest link of his service. If you can't find it, you can't use it. In fact, it's the weakest link of every website. Take out the DNS entry, and the site practically goes dark for the masses.
And while the NZ government might not raid his home anymore, they can easily take away any of the domain names he owns by "losing" his registration.
He might as well buy his own gTLD and see how long that'll last.
Just gotta add more representatives. The number is currently pegged, and the distribution is done via relative population increases and decreases.
As the number of representatives increase, the better the individual is represented in the house, and the lesser the gap between the voters in the smaller states and the larger states.
They didn't think to put the Bill of Rights into the constitution because to them, it was an obvious matter that people had these inalienable rights.
Even the wording of the Bill of Rights reflects this: "Congress shall make no law..."
The Bill of Rights is not intended to grant people any rights, it only prevents the government from taking them away.
It doesn't matter though. As you say, the constitution was always just a piece of paper. Read up on Andrew Jackson. In fact, I'd wager that the checks and balances are working better now than before. People are at least respecting its words, rather than doing whatever they liked.
He further damaged political discourse, further legitimized the fringe, ultra-right-wing of the party, and did nothing to discourage the hate-filled name calling to which you refer. Childish name-calling serves no purpose and denigrating the president just further polarizes the country, but lies are lies and we shouldn't be afraid to call Obama out on them and hold his administration accountable when they will inevitably start oozing from the White House.
I think you are putting too much of the blame on Romney himself. Sure, he's an ass. He's out of touch. He'll say what he thinks the people listening would like to hear him say. But that's true of most, if not all politicians.
You have to look at the context. Of all the Republican candidates, he's one of the very few who didn't start spewing outright lies. He didn't question Obama's religious faith. He didn't bring up the legitimacy of Obama's birth. He ran on a platform of issues, on who would be the better president and leader, which is more than what every other candidate did, except possibly for Herman Cain (who, for very obvious reasons, was forcibly removed from the primaries).
Sure, he's an etch-a-sketch. He doesn't understand the common person. He's a bully and a douche. But he doesn't play the way Cheney and Rove do. He doesn't insinuate or create faux controversies. There may have been mud slinging, but it was mostly mud and not crap. All in all, it wasn't nearly as horrible a race that challenged the integrity of the process as the previous two were. His choice of VP was almost laughable, but that's a different thing altogether.
That Romney is the best the Republicans can do is telling of the Republican party in two ways. Firstly, it's filled to the brim with looneys, and the decent, halfway intelligent individual is very difficult to come by. Moderates within the party are becoming extinct.
Second, the constituents are the cause of this shift. The spate of defections by moderate Republicans to the Democrats over the last six to eight or so years is more than telling. The party's base has shifted to the extreme. Even Romney had to roll over for the far right in order to win the primary, and then he had to roll back over towards the center to have a shot at the general election.
In the end, it's the constituents who want to hear that Obama is a muslim, and not born here, and a commie, and all that other stuff. They want the other side to be demonized, to be made inhuman, so that picking their preferred candidate will be a no-brainer. They want their beliefs validated. And that's the most worrying thing of it all.
In a developed country, that has had democracy for more than two hundred years
That doesn't mean what you think it means. See, you think it means the voting process has been perfected. It is as efficient and as accurate as possible. The most popular candidate is always chosen.
In reality, it means there's the most bureaucracy around the affair. There's the most BS to get through before even being able to vote. Everything, from the polling place to the counting machines to the very process has been buried beneath so much bureaucracy and red tape nothing ends up happening. The votes that get counted are the ones that slipped through, or the ones from people with enough time or clout they can ram it through by force.
If you want to see how things are done right, don't look this way. Look this way if you want to see how money gets wasted while things are done half-assed.
Would a corporation do better? No. What needs to happen is a culture shift. And nobody'd like that.
In the age of information, there is one thing people continue to forget: information relies on trust. And like sociology tells us, trust as a commodity is only easy to trade on a small scale. Trust is very hard to acquire in large populations.
There are two fundamental flaws with the internet. The first is that it was originally designed and built on a small scale. Trust was not an issue. This is apparent everywhere, at every layer. Every piece of information received is inherently considered true. Validation is limited only to determining the accuracy of the reproduction.
When trust became a problem, people attempted to address this issue via a glorified whitelist. Certificates were meant to address both concerns of the accuracy of the information, and the validity of the origin. Trust in the contents of the whitelist was implicit. It worked on small scales, but on large scales, it fails.
The whitelist was used because of the second fundamental problem: statelessness. Trust relies on the continual accuracy throughout many interactions. It cannot be calculated or created out of materials, but is acquired over time. The more times the information is accurate from a particular source, the greater the trust in the information. Time requires state. It requires having both a before, and an after.
The stateless nature of the internet makes it impossible to be fully trusted. Even if the internet had state, it is difficult to enough to devise an algorithm that will accurately calculate the trustworthiness of a piece of information. Trust is a judgment call. It is a product of emotion, not of logic. Without state, it is an impossibility.
And it worked, this time at least. Even if they didn't stop Android outright, they were able to slow down its momentum for a short while. It's not a complete victory, but it's enough of one. The real question is, is it going to work again the next time. I hope not. More of these, and they could really kill Android's momentum and ultimately kill Android.
About a decade ago, I heard at least $1 million in donations was necessary to make a serious bid for congress. With inflation and all, that number cannot be lower today.
It's even possible to arrange a boycott, or a protest outside a studio, or any number of other private or popular actions in protest of a decision you don't like,
But real life doesn't really work like that. When you have plenty of time on your hands, you sure can go protesting. But when you have a job (or need one), you're too busy putting food on your table. And when you have kids, you're too busy dealing with them. Protesting takes time and energy, which some people may have in sufficient abundance, but most constructive members of society do not.
Boycotting works sometimes. Primarily, it works when there are choices. For example, many here (myself include) have an active boycott against Sony. I even discourage others from buying Sony. I also know people who've stopped purchasing gas from BP stations as a form of protest. But it doesn't work then there are no choices, or when the additional effort from the boycott is more than trivial, or when the information necessary to do the boycott is not available (How do you know the components of your camera isn't made by Sony? How do you know the plastic fork you're using is not made from oil refined at a BP plant? In fact, if there were no regulations, you couldn't even be sure what your alternatives are or even who you're boycotting.) Besides which, nobody's going to jump through hoops or put their lives on hold for what, ideology?
So yes, for the most part, it's either put up or shut up. Because you individually lack any power to take on a large corporation by yourself. And if you're the only one affected, nobody else cares enough to stand with you, at least not if they're not getting something out of it.
Be glad this is television, and the worst that can happen is a loss of some popularity numbers. Just look at the recent outbreak of meningitis. The lack of strong regulatory controls for such situations means people die. Yeah, the free market will put that company out of business. But you or your loved one will still be dead. The free market isn't going to fix that minor detail.
Libertarianism and marxist communism are opposite extremes of the same spectrum. Most people already recognize one is not practical. I cannot for the life of me understand how they haven't realized that the other isn't practical either for the same reasons.
Some of us are still using 32-bit netbooks or laptops, which have 1GB to 2GB of memory. Some of us don't have these so-called "modern" computers because we find our slightly older ones are sufficient for our purposes, and are not interested in casually spending money on things we don't really need.
Not to mention some of us know what the median U.S. household income is, and know what that actually means (that fancy ultrabook that costs $2000 in New York City still costs $2000 in Atlanta).
I like when people trot out the old "I've got a computer from two years ago that has no problems running this program, and cost next to nothing for me when I got it, so you should have one too" argument when it comes to resource hogs. It really shows how detached from reality they actually are.
I'd rather the work they claim is infringed upon loses copyright and is put into public domain. Sure, they can issue thousands of fraudulent notices if they hold the copyright to thousands of works. But three notices regarding the same copyrighted work, and the copyright gets taken away.
The problem is, while the spotlight is on the national stage, real change happens from the bottom up. That means running for, and voting 3rd party at the city, county, or even state level.
For example, if you're interested in digital freedom, and curtailing "IP" laws, participate in and/or donate to your local Pirate Party (and many states do have such an organization). That's just one of the many numerous smaller political parties out there that might better represent your views.
If you're wondering what the immediate effects of doing such a thing are, since "IP" is a federal thing, the answer is that there are no immediate effects. But the extra help and/or money increases exposure. And like small businesses with an interesting product, getting the word out is the most important part. Only once people start hearing about it is the brand image important.
Sound too much like a business? It's because parties really are run like businesses, except as they don't make a profit, they're non-profit. But if you think non-profits aren't run like businesses internally, you've got another thing coming.
Slashdot Mirror
Theist: Check and mate.
Physicist: Yes, please!
(With apologies to Austin Powers)
It always baffles me why everybody is so focused on developing completely new and revolutionary physics. The greatest progress has been made in refining the Standard Model, rather than replacing it. And it always amuses me when people exhibit surprise when the Standard Model holds up. There cannot be such complexity in the universe if the fundamentals are constantly in disarray.
Perhaps it's because Einstein was their role model, and nobody in the next hundred years is going to quite make the dent in physics as Einstein did even though everyone is going to try. Nobody remembers that there was 300 years between Newton and Einstein, and that people 300 years ago were just as smart and just as capable as people today, only with fewer opportunities for the unprivileged individual and slower methods of communication between intellectuals.
Unfortunately, wild theories and postulations are not going to get where people want to go. Einstein's revolution was sparked by a moment of insight. It's not something that can be forced out with extra hours pounding square pegs into round holes. It can be prepared for by building a solid foundation. But that amounts to keeping the rain barrels outside and ready to collect in a desert.
Forget the exotic theories (especially the untestable ones). Leave the speculation to the metaphysicists. Stick with the basics. Trying to initiate the next revolution in physics would be as futile as dancing for rain.
Great. Now if only the big studios will make the switch.
Indie developers have been using OpenGL for ages. Windows will continue to be the gaming platform of choice so long as Call of Duty and Madden continue to push the version of DirectX necessary.
It's not surprising move though. I believe Microsoft started this with XP (DirectX 9c?), and have been doing it since. There were no negative repercussions then, and I honestly doubt there will be with DirectX 11.1.
Of course, if Windows 8 utterly tanks, as it probably will in the desktop and enterprise market segments, the point is moot. Microsoft will go straight to Windows 9 and DirectX 12 (and pull the same sort of thing there).
Above a certain price, people who value their own money will lose interest. Sadly, in the end, it'll just end up coming out of mommy and daddy's retirement savings or some kid's college fund.
Except Samsung's biggest customer might be themselves. While Apple's contract is large parts-wise, it doesn't account for much of their income, much less the profit.
I don't see Apple jumping fabs anytime soon, not if they want to keep their price to performance point. There are cheaper foundries that are slightly older and make slower and needier chips, and there are more expensive foundries that make faster chips.
Perhaps if Apple wasn't forced to compete on speed and battery life, they'd be able to switch foundries by keeping their processor generation the same for one iteration. But with Android products pushing their hardware along, it's not a realistic plan, at least not until the cheapest ARM processors have reached the point x86 processors are at (i.e. good enough).
Like I said elsewhere, they might actually have had plans to switch suppliers all along. It'd be stupid of them to sue Samsung, of all the Android manufacturers. But I suspect these plans fell through, or got delayed. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if some other foundry came to Apple and promised them the ability to switch by a certain date for a certain price, prior to Apple initiating their lawsuits, and said foundry ultimately was unable to make that date or the price point or both.
They don't have to drop their price significantly. Just price the iPhone parts in a way that forces Apple to increase the price of the iPhone (or decrease their profit margin).
Then, it's a matter pointing out that their product does exactly what Apple's product does. Oh wait, Apple already did that part for them.
I have to imagine that Apple had plans to switch suppliers. The plans may have been delayed or may have fallen through though.
I'm certain if they were switching suppliers, everybody wants a cut of the luxury tax Apple charges their customers. And since nobody can quite get manufacturing costs for this one part down like Samsung, perhaps Samsung's price increase ended up being the cheapest anyway. I heard Apple already is in the proces sof moving away from Samsung's LCD panels.
Suing Samsung wasn't a good long-term strategy, but it was more of a stop-gap measure to slow down Android's progress and rate of adoption. It worked, to some extent, in that they managed to postpone the release of some of Samsung's newest flagship products. But it also didn't quite work, because it legitimized Samsung's comparisons (Just like the iPhone, but without the silly restrictions!), and put Samsung's name in the spotlight.
On the other hand, it seems Apple's SOL without Samsung's parts, whatever they might be.
It would be delicious irony if Samsung charged Apple more because of the increasing legal overhead Samsung needs to take into account when pricing their goods.
DNS is the weakest link of his service. If you can't find it, you can't use it. In fact, it's the weakest link of every website. Take out the DNS entry, and the site practically goes dark for the masses.
And while the NZ government might not raid his home anymore, they can easily take away any of the domain names he owns by "losing" his registration.
He might as well buy his own gTLD and see how long that'll last.
They're also in danger of a vertical monopoly.
They already bought up the companies that make the components. The walled garden gives them control over the other end of the product.
(Pixar, in case no one was keeping track, has a record of successful moviemaking completely untouchable by any other studio).
Until Jobs died and Disney completed its takeover. Seen Brave yet?
Just gotta add more representatives. The number is currently pegged, and the distribution is done via relative population increases and decreases.
As the number of representatives increase, the better the individual is represented in the house, and the lesser the gap between the voters in the smaller states and the larger states.
It will be interesting to see what happens to the Republican party if the son of Cuban immigrants is their candidate for President.
Did you forget Herman Cain already? Or before him, Colin Powell (who refused to run for the same, very specific reason)?
Even if you renounce your citizenship, you're still supposed to pay U.S. taxes for ten years afterwards.
They didn't think to put the Bill of Rights into the constitution because to them, it was an obvious matter that people had these inalienable rights.
Even the wording of the Bill of Rights reflects this: "Congress shall make no law..."
The Bill of Rights is not intended to grant people any rights, it only prevents the government from taking them away.
It doesn't matter though. As you say, the constitution was always just a piece of paper. Read up on Andrew Jackson. In fact, I'd wager that the checks and balances are working better now than before. People are at least respecting its words, rather than doing whatever they liked.
He further damaged political discourse, further legitimized the fringe, ultra-right-wing of the party, and did nothing to discourage the hate-filled name calling to which you refer. Childish name-calling serves no purpose and denigrating the president just further polarizes the country, but lies are lies and we shouldn't be afraid to call Obama out on them and hold his administration accountable when they will inevitably start oozing from the White House.
I think you are putting too much of the blame on Romney himself. Sure, he's an ass. He's out of touch. He'll say what he thinks the people listening would like to hear him say. But that's true of most, if not all politicians.
You have to look at the context. Of all the Republican candidates, he's one of the very few who didn't start spewing outright lies. He didn't question Obama's religious faith. He didn't bring up the legitimacy of Obama's birth. He ran on a platform of issues, on who would be the better president and leader, which is more than what every other candidate did, except possibly for Herman Cain (who, for very obvious reasons, was forcibly removed from the primaries).
Sure, he's an etch-a-sketch. He doesn't understand the common person. He's a bully and a douche. But he doesn't play the way Cheney and Rove do. He doesn't insinuate or create faux controversies. There may have been mud slinging, but it was mostly mud and not crap. All in all, it wasn't nearly as horrible a race that challenged the integrity of the process as the previous two were. His choice of VP was almost laughable, but that's a different thing altogether.
That Romney is the best the Republicans can do is telling of the Republican party in two ways. Firstly, it's filled to the brim with looneys, and the decent, halfway intelligent individual is very difficult to come by. Moderates within the party are becoming extinct.
Second, the constituents are the cause of this shift. The spate of defections by moderate Republicans to the Democrats over the last six to eight or so years is more than telling. The party's base has shifted to the extreme. Even Romney had to roll over for the far right in order to win the primary, and then he had to roll back over towards the center to have a shot at the general election.
In the end, it's the constituents who want to hear that Obama is a muslim, and not born here, and a commie, and all that other stuff. They want the other side to be demonized, to be made inhuman, so that picking their preferred candidate will be a no-brainer. They want their beliefs validated. And that's the most worrying thing of it all.
In a developed country, that has had democracy for more than two hundred years
That doesn't mean what you think it means. See, you think it means the voting process has been perfected. It is as efficient and as accurate as possible. The most popular candidate is always chosen.
In reality, it means there's the most bureaucracy around the affair. There's the most BS to get through before even being able to vote. Everything, from the polling place to the counting machines to the very process has been buried beneath so much bureaucracy and red tape nothing ends up happening. The votes that get counted are the ones that slipped through, or the ones from people with enough time or clout they can ram it through by force.
If you want to see how things are done right, don't look this way. Look this way if you want to see how money gets wasted while things are done half-assed.
Would a corporation do better? No. What needs to happen is a culture shift. And nobody'd like that.
In the age of information, there is one thing people continue to forget: information relies on trust. And like sociology tells us, trust as a commodity is only easy to trade on a small scale. Trust is very hard to acquire in large populations.
There are two fundamental flaws with the internet. The first is that it was originally designed and built on a small scale. Trust was not an issue. This is apparent everywhere, at every layer. Every piece of information received is inherently considered true. Validation is limited only to determining the accuracy of the reproduction.
When trust became a problem, people attempted to address this issue via a glorified whitelist. Certificates were meant to address both concerns of the accuracy of the information, and the validity of the origin. Trust in the contents of the whitelist was implicit. It worked on small scales, but on large scales, it fails.
The whitelist was used because of the second fundamental problem: statelessness. Trust relies on the continual accuracy throughout many interactions. It cannot be calculated or created out of materials, but is acquired over time. The more times the information is accurate from a particular source, the greater the trust in the information. Time requires state. It requires having both a before, and an after.
The stateless nature of the internet makes it impossible to be fully trusted. Even if the internet had state, it is difficult to enough to devise an algorithm that will accurately calculate the trustworthiness of a piece of information. Trust is a judgment call. It is a product of emotion, not of logic. Without state, it is an impossibility.
I prefer levers. It's too easy to push a button accidentally. Levers require effort.
And it worked, this time at least. Even if they didn't stop Android outright, they were able to slow down its momentum for a short while. It's not a complete victory, but it's enough of one. The real question is, is it going to work again the next time. I hope not. More of these, and they could really kill Android's momentum and ultimately kill Android.
About a decade ago, I heard at least $1 million in donations was necessary to make a serious bid for congress. With inflation and all, that number cannot be lower today.
It's even possible to arrange a boycott, or a protest outside a studio, or any number of other private or popular actions in protest of a decision you don't like,
But real life doesn't really work like that. When you have plenty of time on your hands, you sure can go protesting. But when you have a job (or need one), you're too busy putting food on your table. And when you have kids, you're too busy dealing with them. Protesting takes time and energy, which some people may have in sufficient abundance, but most constructive members of society do not.
Boycotting works sometimes. Primarily, it works when there are choices. For example, many here (myself include) have an active boycott against Sony. I even discourage others from buying Sony. I also know people who've stopped purchasing gas from BP stations as a form of protest. But it doesn't work then there are no choices, or when the additional effort from the boycott is more than trivial, or when the information necessary to do the boycott is not available (How do you know the components of your camera isn't made by Sony? How do you know the plastic fork you're using is not made from oil refined at a BP plant? In fact, if there were no regulations, you couldn't even be sure what your alternatives are or even who you're boycotting.) Besides which, nobody's going to jump through hoops or put their lives on hold for what, ideology?
So yes, for the most part, it's either put up or shut up. Because you individually lack any power to take on a large corporation by yourself. And if you're the only one affected, nobody else cares enough to stand with you, at least not if they're not getting something out of it.
Be glad this is television, and the worst that can happen is a loss of some popularity numbers. Just look at the recent outbreak of meningitis. The lack of strong regulatory controls for such situations means people die. Yeah, the free market will put that company out of business. But you or your loved one will still be dead. The free market isn't going to fix that minor detail.
Libertarianism and marxist communism are opposite extremes of the same spectrum. Most people already recognize one is not practical. I cannot for the life of me understand how they haven't realized that the other isn't practical either for the same reasons.
Some of us are still using 32-bit netbooks or laptops, which have 1GB to 2GB of memory. Some of us don't have these so-called "modern" computers because we find our slightly older ones are sufficient for our purposes, and are not interested in casually spending money on things we don't really need.
Not to mention some of us know what the median U.S. household income is, and know what that actually means (that fancy ultrabook that costs $2000 in New York City still costs $2000 in Atlanta).
I like when people trot out the old "I've got a computer from two years ago that has no problems running this program, and cost next to nothing for me when I got it, so you should have one too" argument when it comes to resource hogs. It really shows how detached from reality they actually are.
I'd rather the work they claim is infringed upon loses copyright and is put into public domain. Sure, they can issue thousands of fraudulent notices if they hold the copyright to thousands of works. But three notices regarding the same copyrighted work, and the copyright gets taken away.
The problem is, while the spotlight is on the national stage, real change happens from the bottom up. That means running for, and voting 3rd party at the city, county, or even state level.
For example, if you're interested in digital freedom, and curtailing "IP" laws, participate in and/or donate to your local Pirate Party (and many states do have such an organization). That's just one of the many numerous smaller political parties out there that might better represent your views.
If you're wondering what the immediate effects of doing such a thing are, since "IP" is a federal thing, the answer is that there are no immediate effects. But the extra help and/or money increases exposure. And like small businesses with an interesting product, getting the word out is the most important part. Only once people start hearing about it is the brand image important.
Sound too much like a business? It's because parties really are run like businesses, except as they don't make a profit, they're non-profit. But if you think non-profits aren't run like businesses internally, you've got another thing coming.