Terrorism is a phenomena that is internal to countries. Terrorists regard themselves as freedom fighters. terrorism occurs where people have been suppressed by a regime, and want their freedom back. They are not well armed, or have large numbers of forces at their disposal, so they rely on tactics to pressurise the population of a country to invoke change. Generally only small numbers of people are killed by terrorism, but the technique invokes fear, which in turn prompts for change.
What is happening in America is not terrorism. It bears none of the characteristic traits. It is something else. Terrorism is probably something that will emerge in America in the next few years as/if the government becomes more suppressive. People seeking their liberty back will unite and work together to return liberty to USA. The current legislation being put in place is a strategy to counter the ability of people to unite and rise up against a government.
If I was American or British right now, I would be very concerned.
Oops my mistake. My comment was meant for the parent post written by ShieldW0lf (601553)
Democracy requires participation. When it was developed in ancient Greece, the populations were magnitudes smaller. People could vote on issues, which meant that people could participate in guiding the future of their communities. Democracy today is a shadow of the concept. Today we elect one official to represent all of our votes on one foul swoop for the next 4 years. It has become a sad shell of the concept. Fortunately with technology we could re-implement democracy as it was intended. ShielW0lf's comments, on which I meant to comment outlined a good starting point for the debate required in order to develop a successful system that could fulfil the requirement of re constituting democratic societies.
Please mod the parent up. This is the only responsible way forward for democracy. Democracy as we know it is cracking at the seams. the current democratic systems' flaws become more apparent daily in democracies around the world. Laws are getting passed that are not in the public's interests with very little anyone can do about it. Yes I know one can legally challenge these laws, but the costs and task at hand are insurmountable for the average man on the street.
Participatory governance is the one true way forward for democracy to survive as it was intended. The way the Parent Poster describes it is the way to implement it. The current system of voting once every four years and hoping for the best is a farce and open to abuse, as has become apparent on a global scale, especially with corporate interests involved in funding/paying off/bribing politicians.
Regardless of what you may believe, rape always increases in a war zone. It is common practice for soldiers to rape the women in invaded territories. Wars are not pretty. Having been involved in one myself, I can assure you that the most inhumane deeds are perpetrated and justified by the invading forces.
Do not for one moment think that the US forces are squeaky clean good guys. When the US forces entered Fajullah in Iraq, they killed everything that moved, including women, children and old people (I have personally seen the footage shot by Al-Jazeera). The US forces have no respect for the laws of war or any international treaties regarding war. If this is how the US forces behave, I certainly dread the day Robots are deployed in a war, because there will be absolutely no moral reasoning in the AI.
More likely, the number of people will remain the same -- we'll just be able to take on more assholes at once...
What the fuck is USA doing in Iraq in the first place? Iraq is a sovereign country that was invaded for their natural resources. Of course the people living there are going to be upset, and possibly even rebel against the invaders. Do you justify the American actions by calling the Arabs who live there assholes? Does that make you feel better when you hear how the American soldiers have killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians?
I have the privilege of not being directly influenced by your governments propaganda and corporate media machine. I can tell you that your soldiers are not patriots defending America. They are hired guns, mercenaries being used to further corporate interests in Iraq, paid for by your future tax dollars because the war was funded by debt to pay other corporates who manufacture the armaments used by your soldiers. I really have deep sympathy for the average American for the times that are ahead.
But when I read comments like yours, I see that some Americans deserve what is ahead. How would you like to have your child's legs blown off by a foreign soldiers hand grenade, or your wife or daughter raped by an invading force. You do not have the vaguest notion of the humiliation that the average Iraqi has had to suffer because of assholes like you.
You may or may not know this, but if you earn wages, you are not legally obligated to pay income tax. There is NO law in USA that obligates you to pay income tax on wages.
Mod Parent Up.
My son started on a few games aimed at children at the age of 2. By the time he was 4 he was playing Age Of Empires. He's been playing strategy games ever since.
He's 7 at the moment and has a pretty good fundamental grasp of many principals, of history, commerce, strategy, mythology and many other things. how many 7 year olds' can tell you about ancient Hittite, Babylonian or Chinese civilisations? Or about Mythology of many cultures, or as the parent commented about animals and their environments from Zoo Tycoon?
He also knows his boundaries. He does not like first person shooters because they scare him a bit. He plays the odd MAME game, and enjoys the Wii, but his first love is PC based gaming.
Fundamentally he is a well adapted child. I'm sure that his early introduction to computers will stand him in good stead for his life ahead.
How do you make Capitalism kinder, when one of the fundamental instruments of capitalism, the corporation has the status of a natural person. Not only that, but when the required behaviour of the corporation i.e. to act in the shareholders best interests is taken into account, creates a psychotic entity who will stop at nothing to achieve its primary objective.
Corporations today willingly break the law if it makes financial sense, and if they can profit more than fines imposed. If individuals acted like this we would be thrown in jail, but corporations cannot be because they are not really natural people.
So in all honestly, how do you create a kinder capitalism while the corporation still exists?
There is a certain threshold, past which you do not expect professionals to make mistakes, like surgeons, advocates, astronauts, fighter pilots etc. In certain professions, there is very little margin for error. Being President of a country is one of these professions. Your current president runs the country like he is playing amateur baseball in public, but his cowboy public persona of is simply a front for hiding the shrewd fascist intentions of your current government. He is no fool, and he makes no mistakes, and he does not care if you like him of not. The legislation has been put in place will not easily be reversed, because there are enough democrats as well who would also like to have the ability to scrutinise and log every move you ever make, to have the right incarcerate you without trial to make sure that you conform to their plans without dissent.
Having lived under a fascist regime in South Africa, I can assure you that having a society of sociopaths surrounding you is no fun, and very difficult to get rid of once in power. Ironically it was the terrorist ANC that ultimately brought the Fascists to their knees, the very enemy (terrorists) that the USA government is spending so much money to ensure will not topple them once they have enacted the legislation that they have now put in place. The real eye opener is, that these 'terrorists' were also South Africans, living among us. the irony is, that they ultimately turned out to be the friends who freed us from our tyrrany. If you let your current regime achieve their objectives, you will be faced with the same future.
Well one could always swing this around. If they demand the right to read your mail, then you could always deem it to be content and charge the government a subscription, or even better, a pay-per-view rate.
Assuming that they are going to read everything, set a price on what you deem to be fair value on your content, and send them a bill, and don't forget to sue them when they don't pay.
Make your rates available to the public, and charge US$ 1000 per page if you deem you content to be worth that amount. Assume that the government is going to read everything you publish electronically, and charge them US$ 1000 per page for their electronic copy of your document.
It is your right as a content generator to charge for your work. (Control public access by requiring members of the public to quote a document reference to access/buy specific pages or documents.) The government cannot expect you to work for free. that is communism, and last time I checked, USA was still technically a democracy.
Multiply this effect by a million, and the Government of the day will have a legal crisis on its hands. Or sit back and do nothing and watch your civil liberties erode.
Having owned a small dealership for a while, I can tell you that the manufacturers require faulty goods in warranty to be returned for swap-out. If the component is under warranty, then you don't get it back. Out of warranty, we always used to give the client back the old components. They belong to the client. Our service was to replace them, not to claim ownership of them.
Sorry. My point was extremely badly made. What I wanted to say was: Content providers have an interest that conflicts with the ISP's. Content Providers want to deliver content in the form that they have designed, because that design is the template that the use to sell their advertising space. If the ISP's start to tamper with their content (as has been demonstrated)they effect they value of the Content Providers end product (read possible lawsuites in the making). However to combat this, they can easily turn on an encrypted content stream using HTTPS:// which will foil this irritating attempt by ISP's to hijack content.
If the record companies were really interested in providing us with a better audio quality, then audio DVD's would be the next logical step instead of this arcane business plan. An audio DVD could give the user a very high quality digital recording because of the space available on the DVD format. In truth however, the record companies are not interested in providing us with a product of this quality, but are looking for another means to sell their catalogs, again.
You are working on the assumption that the person being scanned will be reactive to the images. Like the polygraph, this process could easily be fooled by thinking pleasant thoughts throughout the scanning. For any process of this type to work the person being scanned has to be interacting, i.e. creating thoughts through their own free will. Without this happening, the scanning process becomes useless. Like many operatives today, subversive elements will quickly be trained to fool these devices, and so the only people (once again) that will be benefitting will be the manufacturers of such devices.
They won't, and for valid and well justified reasons. Point taken. You can stand there and call bullshit until you are blue in the face, but this does not change what I have experienced, or what countless others have experienced. The fact that these experiences can only be described as a non-predictable, and subjective generally means that they cant be measured
My only further comment on the subject in this forum will be that these experiences generally happen during the course of every day life, and they are generally linked in some form to improving the survival of the individual, his family, or some group to which he belongs.
Common everyday examples include for example knowing who is on the phone when it rings, or thinking about a person before the phone rings, and when it does, they are on the other end. Or having a strong feeling about somebody, and then finding out that they have suffered in some way. How do you replicate/duplicate real life (in a laboratory) to form a viable experimentation platform for the examples above? The answer is, that we dont know how to do this at the moment, because we have reached a limit on what science can currently achieve/measure in this field. Morever, just because science cannot validate what I have experienced, does not negate the fact that I have (and hopefully will continue to) these experiences.
Unfortunately not that much has changed since Newtons times with regards to the mainstreams acceptance of the possibility of the existance of scientific principals outside the mainstream understanding.
Scientists exploring these areas are the new Heretics and are regarded as outcasts from the Scientific community.
The fact is many people have had ESP experiences that cannot be explained, and are simply ignored my the scietific community.
We may well have latent senses that have become dulled with our modern lifestyles, and it may well be true that we are looking for scientific answers to these questions in the wrong places, and that at some point in the future one of these 'Heretics' will discover a way to scientifically validate the ESP experience. But until then they will have to continue their research, in secret, like Newton and Da Vinci did, to escape the scorn and wrath of mainstream scientists.
The fact that so many people have had this type of experience, myself included (and probably many readers on slashdot) would prefer to shut the fuck up about it, because of the possible backlash, is glaring evidence that there is something beyond our current understanding. As an athiest, I expect to be able to find a rational and logical answer for this phenomena, but with mainstream science calling bullshit, even opening a forum on the subject proves to be taboo.
Actually HIV itself is not fatal. A lot of FUD is spread about HIV AIDS, and they are generally lumped together, in such a way that the general public thinks that they are one and the same thing.
The truth is that HIV is a virus, that can be contracted in several ways including sex. And AIDS is a syndrom that can be contracted in several ways including lupis, and when there is too much HIV virus in your bloodstream.
The HIV virus can be controlled, and it is possbile to go from having full blown AIDS to no AIDS, while still having HIV
You can also have the HIV virus while it remains virtually undetectable, and in this state, if you have unprotected sex with someone whose immune system is healthy, they will probably not contract the virus.
A real world example is a friend of mine, who has been infected with the HIV virus for at least 10 years. He recently got re-married, and has since had a child with his new wife. Neither his wife or his new daughter have the HIV virus.
These facts are why we often hear about cures for AIDS, because thery do exist (because strengthening the immune system is not all that hard to do). But they are generally translated (and manipulated by the pharmaceutical companies and the mass media) as a cure for HIV becuase HIV and AIDS are generally lumped together in the same sentance, and a medical cure for HIV has not been made public yet.
Well, I've been pondering about this for longer than I've been reading Slashdot (which is about 8 years now). But if you want to draw some comparisons, well, there are probably some features used by Slashdot, which could prove useful. Using a moderated forum,to table topics of discussion may well prove to be a salient method of documenting an issue on hand, and the relevant feedback.
As I mentioned in other replies, I havent really thrashed the finer details of the system out, and like any complex system the specification would take a while to design, and I'm sure there would be several evolutions of it before it was ready for use in a real world situation.
The inevitable clowns always appear when public forums are available as a platform, and generally humour is a good thing. If we were to use a moderation system, then this would obviously need to cater for this
The main purpose of the moderation would be to gauge the subject on hand, and possibly, a certain level of moderation would possibly promote the subject to a different level of consideration. Feedback on the subject many well highlight the requirement that the authors go back to the drawing board, or new ideas may well help to improve the idea on hand
At a certain point however, (if they reached it) these items would be tabled for a vote e.g. in your example 'Rural Initiative Acquisition Amendment' vote yes or no. To reach this point however, everybody who has chosen to, may voice their opinion. It may be helpful as well, that moderators do not see who they are moderating to remove bias.
But you can well imagine how much more valuable a system like this may be. One of the benefits of Reading Slashdot for instance, are the comments fed back from, in some cases world experts, who are part of the Slashdot Community (just as much as OMG Ponies! is), and it makes for an extremely rich and rewarding reading experience, far beyond the knowledge value of the original article
As I mentioned earlier, I havent really thrashed this out at all, so thanks for your comment. Replying, helps me to examine a few more details not previously considered.:-)
One of the attributes of Participatory Governance would be that if you chose not to participate, that would be respected, and you would not have to vote or participate in anything. But, unlike democracy today, if an issue went pear-shaped, you would not be able to abdicate your responsibility to some elected official. Abdicating responsibility is a key flaw in the current democratic system. Another key flaw is control. The concept of democracy relies in the principal of civil service i.e your elected representative is in your service. But this concept within modern democracy has been perverted. We refer to government as our rulers, i.e those that govern us - instead of those that provide good governance for our society. This highlights a key flaw in our democratic process.
The ballot system is totally obselete. For example in my country on occasion, we have held referendums to solicit public opinion. Using the traditional ballot based system proves to be a hugely costly exercise, to simply measure one key demographic. Now consider attempting Participatory Governance using this process. It proves impossible. However with an electronic voting system, a key demographic like this could be measured in a matter of hours, for a relativley paltry cost. With an electronic voting system it becomes possible to really make decisions based on the Participation of the citizens of a country. Take for example: would America have voted to invade Iraq without the evidence of weapons of mass destruction? At this juncture in time, all we can do is sit back and watch the war on TV, but with Participatory Governance in place, your vote/s will have counted, and you may have helped to have prevented the death of hundreds of thousands of people. Is that not real charity?
Being charitable includes performing actions that are beneficial. We have been conditioned to think that being charitable means donating money. Doing this may ease our personal conscience slightly, simply because at least we are doing something within an inflexible and biased system. Underlying this however, most people are unhappy with the state of affairs in the world, and dont really know how to do anything about it. Helplessness is a disease that is pervading our society, while we are being ruthlessly exploited by people in positions of power. You can make a difference, and (without trying to be corny) each one of us can really contribute towards making the world a better place.
Well, I agree that one of the major issues that would need to be addressed initially (and probably continuously) would be the possibility for abuse. I will use your example to see if I can address any concerns...
Well lets condsider this. Firstly there would have to be a strong constitution, and bill of rights to form the basis to underlie Participatory Governance.
Next would be: How will issues get raised and tabled. Everybody should be able to raise issues, but the question of how they get addressed will be one of the major parts of the system functioning well. A vote, for example by Joe Bloggs to put all Hobos to death, would not get very far in the tabling process. The governance systems today assume responsibility for making most decisions, and generally acting on behlaf of the public. In todays political systems, Joe Blogg's little rant would get little, if any attention.
What would be differnet however would be the level of accountability. They system would need to be totally transparent. Firstly, all of Joe Blogg's submissions, would be public knowledge, and secondly all of his votes would be public knowledge. This level of public record would need to be a requirement to ensure transparency, to minimise fraud, and to up the level of personal acountability for personal actions and decisions.
It would also ensure a new level of maturity enters the process. Currently the only accountability you have as a voter is to vote an official into office - and even then this vote is not public knowledge. From then on, it is the public officers duty to make descisions on your behalf. Yes I know, that one can currently approach an official with your issues, but generally, if it is not in their political interest, the issue will be quashed.
I am sure that initially when people get their voice, there will be a lot of petty issues being raised, and this is good. But this will settle down, as people become more responsible and accountable for their level of participation, and begin to be acklowledged for their contributions.
On the issue of selling votes, I'm not really sure how to address this. There will always be clearer thinkers, and/or leaders in various fields. and I, as a voter may be partisan to a certain leaders ideas. For instance, in my field IT, I generally have a good respect for ideas presented by Mark Shuttleworth, so I would probably be partisan to vote with/for his ideas, which could be tracked statistically. Partisan votes could also occur, for example, where owners, controllers of large organisations encourage employees to vote for their ideas. As you can imagine, with votes being public knowledge, this would certainly require a strongly legislated process that would contitutionally protect voters/citizens rights. (And this may include recording, and making available the knowledge about who has accessed your public records
Situations based on the new system will present themelves. For example it would be possible for an employer to screen potential employees based on their public record of participation and ideas. But having said that, It may also begin to de-sensitise people on issues when it begins to become apparent that although we share different ideas, we actually have a lot more in common generally than we have differences as human beings, and that a lot of issues have been politisized for personal gain.
I think that the weighting system would need to be carefully developed. Positive scoring could alo be achieved by contribution to society, or/and by land ownership. It would be fair to offer someone who has made more of a contribution to society more say, but financial worth should not be the primary valuator. I also think their should be a ceiling on the
amount of possible voting points. Issues also need to be weighted and defined.
As I said in my parent post, this was just an idea that I've mulled over fro the last 10 years or so. It is not anything that I've really entered into discussion about. I can see many pitfalls to (e.g. In my country we have a rail system that is going to waste. A huge road transport industry has developed, while we have an incredible rail infrastructure that went to waste due to mismanagement and lack of innovation. Players in this field wuold mainly be road transporters who would have a lot to lose if the railway system was re-invigorated. So it would be unlikely that they would vote in favour of the railway system, even though it may be of the best interest for the country. So mechanisms would need to be developed to handle this kind of situation.
As a systems developer however, I know that good systems take a lot of design and good input before they can be designed and implmented. There are ways to address issues, and I certainly do not have all of the answers.
Having said that, maybe I should set up a forum to see if these issues can be raised and addressed effectivley.
Slashdot Mirror
Terrorism is a phenomena that is internal to countries. Terrorists regard themselves as freedom fighters. terrorism occurs where people have been suppressed by a regime, and want their freedom back. They are not well armed, or have large numbers of forces at their disposal, so they rely on tactics to pressurise the population of a country to invoke change. Generally only small numbers of people are killed by terrorism, but the technique invokes fear, which in turn prompts for change.
What is happening in America is not terrorism. It bears none of the characteristic traits. It is something else. Terrorism is probably something that will emerge in America in the next few years as/if the government becomes more suppressive. People seeking their liberty back will unite and work together to return liberty to USA. The current legislation being put in place is a strategy to counter the ability of people to unite and rise up against a government.
If I was American or British right now, I would be very concerned.
Oops my mistake. My comment was meant for the parent post written by ShieldW0lf (601553)
Democracy requires participation. When it was developed in ancient Greece, the populations were magnitudes smaller. People could vote on issues, which meant that people could participate in guiding the future of their communities. Democracy today is a shadow of the concept. Today we elect one official to represent all of our votes on one foul swoop for the next 4 years. It has become a sad shell of the concept. Fortunately with technology we could re-implement democracy as it was intended. ShielW0lf's comments, on which I meant to comment outlined a good starting point for the debate required in order to develop a successful system that could fulfil the requirement of re constituting democratic societies.
Please mod the parent up. This is the only responsible way forward for democracy. Democracy as we know it is cracking at the seams. the current democratic systems' flaws become more apparent daily in democracies around the world. Laws are getting passed that are not in the public's interests with very little anyone can do about it. Yes I know one can legally challenge these laws, but the costs and task at hand are insurmountable for the average man on the street.
Participatory governance is the one true way forward for democracy to survive as it was intended. The way the Parent Poster describes it is the way to implement it. The current system of voting once every four years and hoping for the best is a farce and open to abuse, as has become apparent on a global scale, especially with corporate interests involved in funding/paying off/bribing politicians.
Regardless of what you may believe, rape always increases in a war zone. It is common practice for soldiers to rape the women in invaded territories. Wars are not pretty. Having been involved in one myself, I can assure you that the most inhumane deeds are perpetrated and justified by the invading forces.
Do not for one moment think that the US forces are squeaky clean good guys. When the US forces entered Fajullah in Iraq, they killed everything that moved, including women, children and old people (I have personally seen the footage shot by Al-Jazeera). The US forces have no respect for the laws of war or any international treaties regarding war. If this is how the US forces behave, I certainly dread the day Robots are deployed in a war, because there will be absolutely no moral reasoning in the AI.
What the fuck is USA doing in Iraq in the first place? Iraq is a sovereign country that was invaded for their natural resources. Of course the people living there are going to be upset, and possibly even rebel against the invaders. Do you justify the American actions by calling the Arabs who live there assholes? Does that make you feel better when you hear how the American soldiers have killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians?
I have the privilege of not being directly influenced by your governments propaganda and corporate media machine. I can tell you that your soldiers are not patriots defending America. They are hired guns, mercenaries being used to further corporate interests in Iraq, paid for by your future tax dollars because the war was funded by debt to pay other corporates who manufacture the armaments used by your soldiers. I really have deep sympathy for the average American for the times that are ahead.
But when I read comments like yours, I see that some Americans deserve what is ahead. How would you like to have your child's legs blown off by a foreign soldiers hand grenade, or your wife or daughter raped by an invading force. You do not have the vaguest notion of the humiliation that the average Iraqi has had to suffer because of assholes like you.
You may or may not know this, but if you earn wages, you are not legally obligated to pay income tax. There is NO law in USA that obligates you to pay income tax on wages.
Mod Parent Up.
My son started on a few games aimed at children at the age of 2. By the time he was 4 he was playing Age Of Empires. He's been playing strategy games ever since.
He's 7 at the moment and has a pretty good fundamental grasp of many principals, of history, commerce, strategy, mythology and many other things. how many 7 year olds' can tell you about ancient Hittite, Babylonian or Chinese civilisations? Or about Mythology of many cultures, or as the parent commented about animals and their environments from Zoo Tycoon?
He also knows his boundaries. He does not like first person shooters because they scare him a bit. He plays the odd MAME game, and enjoys the Wii, but his first love is PC based gaming.
Fundamentally he is a well adapted child. I'm sure that his early introduction to computers will stand him in good stead for his life ahead.
How do you make Capitalism kinder, when one of the fundamental instruments of capitalism, the corporation has the status of a natural person. Not only that, but when the required behaviour of the corporation i.e. to act in the shareholders best interests is taken into account, creates a psychotic entity who will stop at nothing to achieve its primary objective.
Corporations today willingly break the law if it makes financial sense, and if they can profit more than fines imposed. If individuals acted like this we would be thrown in jail, but corporations cannot be because they are not really natural people.
So in all honestly, how do you create a kinder capitalism while the corporation still exists?
Or Better yet, go back to 35mm film and manual splicing...
There is a certain threshold, past which you do not expect professionals to make mistakes, like surgeons, advocates, astronauts, fighter pilots etc. In certain professions, there is very little margin for error. Being President of a country is one of these professions. Your current president runs the country like he is playing amateur baseball in public, but his cowboy public persona of is simply a front for hiding the shrewd fascist intentions of your current government. He is no fool, and he makes no mistakes, and he does not care if you like him of not. The legislation has been put in place will not easily be reversed, because there are enough democrats as well who would also like to have the ability to scrutinise and log every move you ever make, to have the right incarcerate you without trial to make sure that you conform to their plans without dissent.
Having lived under a fascist regime in South Africa, I can assure you that having a society of sociopaths surrounding you is no fun, and very difficult to get rid of once in power. Ironically it was the terrorist ANC that ultimately brought the Fascists to their knees, the very enemy (terrorists) that the USA government is spending so much money to ensure will not topple them once they have enacted the legislation that they have now put in place. The real eye opener is, that these 'terrorists' were also South Africans, living among us. the irony is, that they ultimately turned out to be the friends who freed us from our tyrrany. If you let your current regime achieve their objectives, you will be faced with the same future.
Well one could always swing this around. If they demand the right to read your mail, then you could always deem it to be content and charge the government a subscription, or even better, a pay-per-view rate.
Assuming that they are going to read everything, set a price on what you deem to be fair value on your content, and send them a bill, and don't forget to sue them when they don't pay.
Make your rates available to the public, and charge US$ 1000 per page if you deem you content to be worth that amount. Assume that the government is going to read everything you publish electronically, and charge them US$ 1000 per page for their electronic copy of your document.
It is your right as a content generator to charge for your work. (Control public access by requiring members of the public to quote a document reference to access/buy specific pages or documents.) The government cannot expect you to work for free. that is communism, and last time I checked, USA was still technically a democracy.
Multiply this effect by a million, and the Government of the day will have a legal crisis on its hands. Or sit back and do nothing and watch your civil liberties erode.
Having owned a small dealership for a while, I can tell you that the manufacturers require faulty goods in warranty to be returned for swap-out. If the component is under warranty, then you don't get it back. Out of warranty, we always used to give the client back the old components. They belong to the client. Our service was to replace them, not to claim ownership of them.
Sorry. My point was extremely badly made. What I wanted to say was: Content providers have an interest that conflicts with the ISP's. Content Providers want to deliver content in the form that they have designed, because that design is the template that the use to sell their advertising space. If the ISP's start to tamper with their content (as has been demonstrated)they effect they value of the Content Providers end product (read possible lawsuites in the making). However to combat this, they can easily turn on an encrypted content stream using HTTPS:// which will foil this irritating attempt by ISP's to hijack content.
Have you not heard of https:/// ?
If the record companies were really interested in providing us with a better audio quality, then audio DVD's would be the next logical step instead of this arcane business plan.
An audio DVD could give the user a very high quality digital recording because of the space available on the DVD format. In truth however, the record companies are not interested in providing us with a product of this quality, but are looking for another means to sell their catalogs, again.
Microsoft earns more than US$ 1 Billion per month, so this fine is really not much of a deterrant to them.
You are working on the assumption that the person being scanned will be reactive to the images. Like the polygraph, this process could easily be fooled by thinking pleasant thoughts throughout the scanning. For any process of this type to work the person being scanned has to be interacting, i.e. creating thoughts through their own free will. Without this happening, the scanning process becomes useless. Like many operatives today, subversive elements will quickly be trained to fool these devices, and so the only people (once again) that will be benefitting will be the manufacturers of such devices.
The irony in this, is that Telkom owns 50% of our largest Celluar service provider, Vodacom, as well...
My only further comment on the subject in this forum will be that these experiences generally happen during the course of every day life, and they are generally linked in some form to improving the survival of the individual, his family, or some group to which he belongs.
Common everyday examples include for example knowing who is on the phone when it rings, or thinking about a person before the phone rings, and when it does, they are on the other end. Or having a strong feeling about somebody, and then finding out that they have suffered in some way.
How do you replicate/duplicate real life (in a laboratory) to form a viable experimentation platform for the examples above? The answer is, that we dont know how to do this at the moment, because we have reached a limit on what science can currently achieve/measure in this field. Morever, just because science cannot validate what I have experienced, does not negate the fact that I have (and hopefully will continue to) these experiences.
Unfortunately not that much has changed since Newtons times with regards to the mainstreams acceptance of the possibility of the existance of scientific principals outside the mainstream understanding.
Scientists exploring these areas are the new Heretics and are regarded as outcasts from the Scientific community. The fact is many people have had ESP experiences that cannot be explained, and are simply ignored my the scietific community.
We may well have latent senses that have become dulled with our modern lifestyles, and it may well be true that we are looking for scientific answers to these questions in the wrong places, and that at some point in the future one of these 'Heretics' will discover a way to scientifically validate the ESP experience. But until then they will have to continue their research, in secret, like Newton and Da Vinci did, to escape the scorn and wrath of mainstream scientists.
The fact that so many people have had this type of experience, myself included (and probably many readers on slashdot) would prefer to shut the fuck up about it, because of the possible backlash, is glaring evidence that there is something beyond our current understanding. As an athiest, I expect to be able to find a rational and logical answer for this phenomena, but with mainstream science calling bullshit, even opening a forum on the subject proves to be taboo.
Actually HIV itself is not fatal. A lot of FUD is spread about HIV AIDS, and they are generally lumped together, in such a way that the general public thinks that they are one and the same thing.
The truth is that HIV is a virus, that can be contracted in several ways including sex. And AIDS is a syndrom that can be contracted in several ways including lupis, and when there is too much HIV virus in your bloodstream.
The HIV virus can be controlled, and it is possbile to go from having full blown AIDS to no AIDS, while still having HIV
You can also have the HIV virus while it remains virtually undetectable, and in this state, if you have unprotected sex with someone whose immune system is healthy, they will probably not contract the virus.
A real world example is a friend of mine, who has been infected with the HIV virus for at least 10 years. He recently got re-married, and has since had a child with his new wife. Neither his wife or his new daughter have the HIV virus.
These facts are why we often hear about cures for AIDS, because thery do exist (because strengthening the immune system is not all that hard to do). But they are generally translated (and manipulated by the pharmaceutical companies and the mass media) as a cure for HIV becuase HIV and AIDS are generally lumped together in the same sentance, and a medical cure for HIV has not been made public yet.
Well, I've been pondering about this for longer than I've been reading Slashdot (which is about 8 years now). But if you want to draw some comparisons, well, there are probably some features used by Slashdot, which could prove useful. Using a moderated forum,to table topics of discussion may well prove to be a salient method of documenting an issue on hand, and the relevant feedback.
:-)
As I mentioned in other replies, I havent really thrashed the finer details of the system out, and like any complex system the specification would take a while to design, and I'm sure there would be several evolutions of it before it was ready for use in a real world situation.
The inevitable clowns always appear when public forums are available as a platform, and generally humour is a good thing. If we were to use a moderation system, then this would obviously need to cater for this
The main purpose of the moderation would be to gauge the subject on hand, and possibly, a certain level of moderation would possibly promote the subject to a different level of consideration. Feedback on the subject many well highlight the requirement that the authors go back to the drawing board, or new ideas may well help to improve the idea on hand
At a certain point however, (if they reached it) these items would be tabled for a vote e.g. in your example 'Rural Initiative Acquisition Amendment' vote yes or no. To reach this point however, everybody who has chosen to, may voice their opinion. It may be helpful as well, that moderators do not see who they are moderating to remove bias.
But you can well imagine how much more valuable a system like this may be. One of the benefits of Reading Slashdot for instance, are the comments fed back from, in some cases world experts, who are part of the Slashdot Community (just as much as OMG Ponies! is), and it makes for an extremely rich and rewarding reading experience, far beyond the knowledge value of the original article
As I mentioned earlier, I havent really thrashed this out at all, so thanks for your comment. Replying, helps me to examine a few more details not previously considered.
One of the attributes of Participatory Governance would be that if you chose not to participate, that would be respected, and you would not have to vote or participate in anything. But, unlike democracy today, if an issue went pear-shaped, you would not be able to abdicate your responsibility to some elected official. Abdicating responsibility is a key flaw in the current democratic system. Another key flaw is control. The concept of democracy relies in the principal of civil service i.e your elected representative is in your service. But this concept within modern democracy has been perverted. We refer to government as our rulers, i.e those that govern us - instead of those that provide good governance for our society. This highlights a key flaw in our democratic process.
The ballot system is totally obselete. For example in my country on occasion, we have held referendums to solicit public opinion. Using the traditional ballot based system proves to be a hugely costly exercise, to simply measure one key demographic. Now consider attempting Participatory Governance using this process. It proves impossible. However with an electronic voting system, a key demographic like this could be measured in a matter of hours, for a relativley paltry cost. With an electronic voting system it becomes possible to really make decisions based on the Participation of the citizens of a country. Take for example: would America have voted to invade Iraq without the evidence of weapons of mass destruction? At this juncture in time, all we can do is sit back and watch the war on TV, but with Participatory Governance in place, your vote/s will have counted, and you may have helped to have prevented the death of hundreds of thousands of people. Is that not real charity?
Being charitable includes performing actions that are beneficial. We have been conditioned to think that being charitable means donating money. Doing this may ease our personal conscience slightly, simply because at least we are doing something within an inflexible and biased system. Underlying this however, most people are unhappy with the state of affairs in the world, and dont really know how to do anything about it. Helplessness is a disease that is pervading our society, while we are being ruthlessly exploited by people in positions of power. You can make a difference, and (without trying to be corny) each one of us can really contribute towards making the world a better place.
Well, I agree that one of the major issues that would need to be addressed initially (and probably continuously) would be the possibility for abuse. I will use your example to see if I can address any concerns...
Well lets condsider this. Firstly there would have to be a strong constitution, and bill of rights to form the basis to underlie Participatory Governance.
Next would be: How will issues get raised and tabled. Everybody should be able to raise issues, but the question of how they get addressed will be one of the major parts of the system functioning well. A vote, for example by Joe Bloggs to put all Hobos to death, would not get very far in the tabling process. The governance systems today assume responsibility for making most decisions, and generally acting on behlaf of the public. In todays political systems, Joe Blogg's little rant would get little, if any attention.
What would be differnet however would be the level of accountability. They system would need to be totally transparent. Firstly, all of Joe Blogg's submissions, would be public knowledge, and secondly all of his votes would be public knowledge. This level of public record would need to be a requirement to ensure transparency, to minimise fraud, and to up the level of personal acountability for personal actions and decisions.
It would also ensure a new level of maturity enters the process. Currently the only accountability you have as a voter is to vote an official into office - and even then this vote is not public knowledge. From then on, it is the public officers duty to make descisions on your behalf. Yes I know, that one can currently approach an official with your issues, but generally, if it is not in their political interest, the issue will be quashed.
I am sure that initially when people get their voice, there will be a lot of petty issues being raised, and this is good. But this will settle down, as people become more responsible and accountable for their level of participation, and begin to be acklowledged for their contributions.
On the issue of selling votes, I'm not really sure how to address this. There will always be clearer thinkers, and/or leaders in various fields. and I, as a voter may be partisan to a certain leaders ideas. For instance, in my field IT, I generally have a good respect for ideas presented by Mark Shuttleworth, so I would probably be partisan to vote with/for his ideas, which could be tracked statistically. Partisan votes could also occur, for example, where owners, controllers of large organisations encourage employees to vote for their ideas. As you can imagine, with votes being public knowledge, this would certainly require a strongly legislated process that would contitutionally protect voters/citizens rights. (And this may include recording, and making available the knowledge about who has accessed your public records
Situations based on the new system will present themelves. For example it would be possible for an employer to screen potential employees based on their public record of participation and ideas. But having said that, It may also begin to de-sensitise people on issues when it begins to become apparent that although we share different ideas, we actually have a lot more in common generally than we have differences as human beings, and that a lot of issues have been politisized for personal gain.
I think that the weighting system would need to be carefully developed. Positive scoring could alo be achieved by contribution to society, or/and by land ownership. It would be fair to offer someone who has made more of a contribution to society more say, but financial worth should not be the primary valuator. I also think their should be a ceiling on the amount of possible voting points. Issues also need to be weighted and defined.
As I said in my parent post, this was just an idea that I've mulled over fro the last 10 years or so. It is not anything that I've really entered into discussion about. I can see many pitfalls to (e.g. In my country we have a rail system that is going to waste. A huge road transport industry has developed, while we have an incredible rail infrastructure that went to waste due to mismanagement and lack of innovation. Players in this field wuold mainly be road transporters who would have a lot to lose if the railway system was re-invigorated. So it would be unlikely that they would vote in favour of the railway system, even though it may be of the best interest for the country. So mechanisms would need to be developed to handle this kind of situation.
As a systems developer however, I know that good systems take a lot of design and good input before they can be designed and implmented. There are ways to address issues, and I certainly do not have all of the answers.
Having said that, maybe I should set up a forum to see if these issues can be raised and addressed effectivley.