If this change means that I won't be able to replace my motherboard more than once, then I won't purchase Vista, because in my XP Home machine alone I had to do it 3 times, and I don't think this rate will change. It's then a matter of waiting for the retail version to be deployed so that I can discover what Microsoft understands by a "system switch". If they understand it to actually mean two motherboards only, then I'll send an e-mail to them explaining why I won't upgrade, and keep my XP as is through my next two or three motherboards.
The most funny thing in all of this is that I was thinking on upgrading to Vista Ultimate the day it was released. Now I'm going to wait for at least six more months. Sigh...
Google made massive contributions to the George Soros party (those guys we call democrats) in the last elections. It's obviously an interested party (oops!).
Nice! Slashdot is now entering the field of discriminating against conservative news sources by tagging them as such. Good idea, folks! After all, we know that liberalism is 99% of time correct, while conservatism is 99% of the time wrong. Our teachers in high-school and college, who made it sure we learnt such an obvious fact of nature, wouldn't lie to us, nor would MTV, or the NYT, would they?
This can be used in favor as the basis for an "anti-copyright as it is today" movement, instead of an "anti-all-copyright". If the law was changed so that copyright wasn't transferable by contract in any way (not even by "exclusivity clauses", which would be legally void), that would bring about many of the benefits sought after by the "anti-all-copyright" people, while at the same time pleasing those who believe that "new ideas" must be protected. For instance, all artists would own their musics, not the labels (much less the RIAA), all directors would own their movies, not the studios (much less the MPAA), all the programmers would own their code, not their employees (much less the BSA), all the scientists would own their own discoveries, not the multinational labs, and so on and so forth. The whole legal landscape would change for the better no matter what, because artists, directors, programmers and scientists have very different priorities in regards to the businessmen for whom they work.
Hmm... someone should develop this idea further. It might get a lot of popular support.
This one I play not only in Windows, but whenever I can get a clone. I've even installed a Solitaire addon in my World of Warcraft, for those long flight times.
2) Street Fighter II
This or any other fighter game similar to it, including almost all NeoGeo hits.
3) World of Warcraft
This is my main game so far, but I think of it as a comfort game when I'm bored and go to a capital city to trade in the AH or just chat.
4) Pangya
This golf MMO is nice for some fast games. You choose something between 3 and 18 holes, from 2 alternating to 20 simultaneous players, and have 15 to 30 minutes of fun.
5) Chrono Trigger
Now and then I simply HAVE TO replay this RPG.
6) Anything randomly choosen in a SNES or Arcade emulator.
Some years ago I purchased a cheap 20" TV box from a big online store, and I was informed it would arrive in some days. That would be it were not for the fact that I received a 10% discount coupon from an affiliate of the store. I though: "Nice! Since the TV wasn't sent yet, I'll try to apply this coupon to it." But an attendee told me the policy of the site didn't allow for discount codes to be applied to finished sales. So he advised me to cancel the previous purchase and purchase the TV again, this time applying the discount. I did so, and used the discount amount to include two books in the order.
Some days later a truck stops in front of my house with my TV. My aunt, who was there, signed the invoice, got the box inside the house, and proceeded to install my new TV, so that it was in place by the time I arrived coming from work. And what I found when I arrived was that my the books hadn't come.
I called the store to complain about the lack of the books, and was amazed to discover that my TV wasn't delivered. What they actually sent was the first TV, the one I cancelled. And that was because I cancelled it in the same day it had entered "delivery status" and began to be sent from one place to another in the chain that would end in it getting to my house. I asked them to get it back and send me my actual TV with the books, and by the next day they came to gat it back.
Then, some two days later, my actual TV with my two books arrived. And everything seemed correct. But that's not the end of the history, oh, no!
Although the first TV had been cancelled, and returned, it was still billed from my credit card. I called the store again to cancel that amount, explaining the whole situation, and it got cancelled, okay. But then, for some reason, the billing of the second TV was ALSO cancelled. And thing got even stranger: the amount of the monthly parts of the payment of both TVs kept appearing in my credit card statement, together with their refund, for some months. No one to whom I talked about this had a clue on what was going on. And then, as if by magic, these strange payments and refunds simply stopped.
Some months after that, in what I think was a cleanup of messed up database records, my account at the store got deleted for good. I called them to complain, but they couldn't recover it. So, I created a new one and still shop there now and then.
And as a result of badly written databases interacting with badly written software to make an insane delivery logistics somehow work, I ended up with a free TV and two free books.
Except that it costs millions if not billions to research and bring a drug to market, so nobody would do it because as soon as they spent all that, a dozen other companies start duplicating their work for a minute manufacturing cost eliminating any possibility of ever recouping the investment.
When there's demand, the offer appears. And there surely is a demand for new drugs. Don't worry about that, research would still be made and new drugs developed.
Now, if somehow drug research costs drop to near-zero, perhaps because there is no legal requirement for safety testing, every few years another thalidomide hits the market. When we're lucky, it's a drug that shows its terrible effects right away. For the drugs that take years for the effects to develop, society is potentially crippled decades later. Of course, since there's no laws about honesty in advertising, the companies making said drugs can just keep denying it. Every citizen is required to be an expert in pharmacology to interpret for themselves the volumes of contradictory data, some coming from real scientists (presuming they exist) and other false data being released by the drug companies to deny any blame. Not to mention all the competing companies releasing false research about competitor's drugs.
You describe a situation where there's a demand for pharmacological experts. So there will arise an offer of pharmacological experts. This leads to a demand for a system of identifying the better and dismissing the worst experts. Have you already seen magazines of product and service reviews? That's how this is solved: people would have a lot of interest in buying these magazines. And how to discriminate between good and bad magazines? Because the good ones wouldn't want to lose their reputation by allowing bad reviews to pass through, thus losing their readers.
We may or may not be able to get this information reliably across the country though, because since there is no regulation of broadcasting, whoever can build the most powerful transmitter owns the airwaves.
There's already technology that allows multiple signals to share the same frequency. And even it there wasn't, this situation would promptly create a demand for such a solution. When there's demand...
Wrong. You'd have way more power than that. Who would prevent you from purchasing a gun, for example?
The more widespread weapons are, the less violence there is. You don't act dumb when 20 people around you can shot you dead before you're able to say "Shit!". Businessmen that acted unfairly would have a lot to be afraid from, don't worry about that.
c) If the prices asked are so incredible high, please explain me how the exploiter will avoid nine other companies opening in the same area to provide the same service looking for their share of the cake.
In regards to "c", please note that answering "they'll form a cartel" doesn' work. The first company will still have to bear the burden of seeing his profits drop tenfold, since there are a total of 10 businesses now sharing the same amount of customers. And there's also the problem of those other 300 companies opening due to that enormously giant revenue they see there...
In a perfect free-market society, the remedies one needs would cost less, because they wouldn't be patented, being thus manufactured by lots of companies. All goods, including houses and terrains, would cost less, because there would be far less taxes on them, and there would be no additional annual taxes either. Houses would cost way less to build, because the company who makes them would be able to contract extremely cheap labour to build them (persons who would love to receive these low wages, because this is more than the perfect nothing they now receive). Environmental laws, by not existing, would mean the technology used to build the houses, from materials to transportation, would cost less too. And there wouldn't be any laws making more difficult for new house-building companies to enter the market.
As a result, there would be a lot more houses available, driving their prices even further down. And as a secondary result, the monthly house-renting prices would be a lot lower too. All those people who can't currently afford renting a house would afford them, including the cheap-laborers mentioned above.
But how long do you think this could fool everybody, specially when the voting machines can be audited and the whole voting process is controlled by an independent power branch?
We're talking about Brazil, remember? There's no real opposition, only an "opposition" that signed the "governability pact". The auditors can be buyed, and there's no guarantee that the independent government branch is actually independent. On the contrary, everything points to it being very little independent.
And the why is simple: because there's no accountability. If the electronic voting was simply a speed up process, with a 100% paper-trail of votes for manual counting if required by a judicial mandate, for example, then I wouldn't have anything against it. But a purely electronic voting without any physical evidence of the actual votes is extremely dangerous, and by this sole reason shouldn't be allowed to exist.
Lenin, after the Communist Revolution in Russia, strenghtened the property system in his NEP policy. Why? Because that way he would be able to get tons of money from international capitalists. When he gathered enough to make the revolution completion possible, then he eliminated private property.
Your argument is weak. No left party in history avoided making alliances with what they consider to be the right. The Brazilian left-wing parties are no exception. And in regards to social-democracy, don't forget that its banner is to bring socialism by way of political reforms, not of political confrontations, which necessarily means alliances with forces "in the right".
In regards to the names left and right, yes, you're correct if we think of Brazil only, because there're always two "extremes" and a "middle" no matter what the range of possibilities is. But I'm thinking in terms of the worldwide political spectrum, not the local one. The whole of the local Brazilian political spectrum is a subset of the global one, and a subset located into what, on the global scale, is commonly called "left". That's the point. Something as the British conservatism, or the the American one (which is center when compared to the former), are nowadays devoid of any formal political representation in Brazil. There's simply no conservative party in Brazil at all. And as a result, what we have of most "right-wing" here are some parties without any ideological identity, with no philosophical basis for their beliefs and actions, and with zero militancy. How "right-wing" is that? None.
Yes, I concede that having two prints isn't good. However, I might be remembering the event without much precision. AFAIK it was two prints, but it might actually have been one. I'm not sure now.
I don't see your point. This problem is nothing that proper TV-training cannot solve, as was the case with the use of the e-voting machines themselves has shown. Had these "dumb" people been trained for weeks before having an actual contact with the machine? No. There's no surprise then that they didn't manage well in actually using them.
And no, as "a Brazilian" I shouldn't "know" any of it. As "a Brazilian" what I have is a duty to speak loudly on what's wrong. Paper balots are the best thing for democracy, period. No easily-hackeable technology should be in charge of the voting itself. If you want technology, put it in assuring the manualo vote counting of the paper balots isn't tampered. Not on the voting itself.
Hmm... yes, I can see how's that. The obvious solution would then be for a single copy to be printed and put into the urn. Actually, now I'm not sure whether the proposal was for two prints, my memory can be tricking me there.
Good to know. But I know Lula has already mentioned he'd like to see a new Constitution. Since he's the same guy who tried controlling the newspaper with the "National Council on Journalism"...
And regarding parties, PFL is center, yes. A center party, having no position on anything, always aling himself with whoever can give it power. That's the case also with Maluf's PP, which is aligned with Lula's PT.
Wrong, wrong, extremely wrong! The party of the ex-Minister of Health, newly elected governor of the Sao Paulo state, Mr. Jose Serra, from which our former president, Mr. Fernando Henrique Cardoso, is also a member, is the PSDB. What "PSDB" means? It means "Brazilian Social-Democratic Party". Yes, social-democracy. Were it not enough, Mr. Serra was one of the left-wing exilees who departed Brazil on 1970's when our (this time correctly named as such) right-wing dictatorship was hardening.
It has been some 20 years since Brazil had an actual right-wing politician in power. That's why many people nowadays, unaware of what "right-wing" really means, call these soft-left politicians "right". They don't know better.
By the way, they also don't know well what "extreme right" is. They think our dictatorship of the 1960's and 1970's was of the extreme right, when it was far from it. The actual Brazilian extreme-right, the fascists of the Integralist Movement, were crushed by our right-wing dictatorship much in the same way the extreme-left was crushed. And what was this "crushing" anyway? Around 15 deaths per year (little more than one per month) for 20 years: the lightest dictatorship of the whole XX century actually.
Pay no attention to this disinformation on what PSDB is. It's soft-left, democratic left, but left nevertheless. The most "right" thing we have these days is the PFL, "Liberal Front Party". It's hardly more than center of the center, and is crashing anyway, having lost a lot of power in the 2006 election. The future of Brazil is to be fully left-winger.
Too bad for Brazilians. We'll suffer a lot and won't know why.
Some years ago, those who distrust e-voting machines managed to put into votation in the Brazilian Congress a proposed law who would require 10% (yes, only 10 percent) of the machines to come with printers. The idea was for those machines to print two copies of the vote: one for the voter, who would have confirmed his vote, and another to be put into a sealed urn by the voter (who would be able to check whether the printing was correct). If doubts arose on the results of an election, those urns could then be opened for manual counting, and if big differences were found between these 10% of printed votes and the full results, the election would be cancelled and redone (probably with paper balots).
A sound idea, don't you think? But, guess what? Yeah, the law wasn't approved. And as a result, there's absolutely no written proof at all of what or whom people actually voted for.
Also, there's a law around that forbids independent research of voting intentions to be spread in news some days before an election. I'm not sure whether this law is being enforced right now, but the official reason behind it is that such researchs "interfere" in the voting decision of the people. Now, just imagine what this means: e-voting machines registering "votes" that cannot be traced, plus voting researches disallowed days before an election. Yes, you're right: if someone that was far behind in the voting intentions got elected, it might be alleged that the people changed their mind between the last allowed research and actual election day. How can you argue against it? You can't.
This is the recipe on how you can build a dictatorship that has no appearance of being a dictatorship. You don't need to be violent. All you need is to put some clever technology into it, and you're done. Government becomes a permanent ownership of you and of your associates. After all, who said that multiple "competing" parties aren't really a single entity with lots of names, existing only for the people to believe they have choice?
In the last two presidential elections (2002 and this 2006 one), all the four presidential candidates were from left-wing parties. There's a range: from soft left-wing to extreme left-wing. But it's all left. Different parties, or single-party with four different names for you to "choose" from?
Please note that not only left-wingers are against intellectual property. A lot of libertarians and classic-liberal conservatives also oppose it on the grounds that IP violates private property. The reasonig is basically as follow:
"Thy should a 3rd party tell me how I should use the xerox machine I own, the paper I own, the powder I own, and the book I own, in the way I choose to? Why should a 3rd party forbid me to resell whatever I made with property I possessed? After all, who own these things? Me, or that shadowy 3rd party, that exists as such only because the government created and sustains pro-monopolistic, anti-private-property laws?"
The only way a right-winger can defend IP is by giving up on the private property principle and adopting utilitarianism. This is what, for example, the Ayn Rand Objectivists do. Which is the same as saying:
"Yeah, we know IP is a violation of privarte property, that it's something that can only exist because it's state-sponsored, and that this sponsorship also goes agains the doctrine of minimal government, and also that this makes us inconsistent, but IP is usefull anyway due to 'x' and 'y' and 'z', so we're for it."
Needless to say, I'm a conservative, I sympatize with libertarianism in many aspects, and I'm against IP.
Fine. Here the authoritative source: me. Because Philosophy is exactly what I'm studying at University for the last 7 years.
Want something more? Go read the guys who developed this thing: Plato and Aristotle. They offer lots of insights on the subject. Pay special attention to the distiction they made between a Sophist and a Philosopher. Oh! And don't forget that Aristotle is the guy who invented Biology, Zoology, Physics and the Political Sciences. So, his take on the subject is somewhat relevant.
Dictionaries? Yes, they're usefull. But only so far as their methodology is. Usually what dictionarists do is to research how a word is currently used in language. If a new, wrong meaning gains acceptance and diffusion, it enters the dictionary. After all, they're value free. Alas, you've already heard the expression "occult sciences", no? Well, since it's used a lot, then for a dictionarist the term "science" will include a definition that allows the "occult" variety to be part of it. Would you accept, because of this, that "occult sciences" be taught in the science curriculum of schools or, for that matter, ID?
Take care. Trying to win an argument by verbal tricks usually leads to unintended consequences.
That's not accurate. There've beens many academic studies in the last decades on the "esoteric" branches of major religions, and these studies all agree in the fact that what the mystics/saints/whatever from different religions, continents and ages described as being the results they obtained from their practices are extremely similar, if not equal. Search, for details, the works of Whitall N. Perry, Frithjof Schuon or Seyyed Hossein Nasr, among others.
If you have a set of methods, all of which say you'll obtain results "x", "y" and "z" at the moments "a", "b" and "c", and you follow them and obtain the predicted results, in a systematic and repeatable way, all of that coupled to a body of peer reviewers able to correct your mistakes, you have a science. If this science cannot be linked in a meaningfull way with other sciences, too bad. This doesn't make it any less scientific.
Furthermore, if any and all scientists must study at least 15 or 20 years to be able to understand what their peers are doing, not to mention to do usefull research himself, there's no point in saying that what they do is objective and everything else is pure subjectivity. There's a mountain of "subjective" knowledge, both theoretical and practical, that must be absorved by the individual for those things to start becoming meaningfull. Other fields of research having similar requirements don't make them any less scientific. It's precisely the contrary.
There's more to the contemporaneous field of religious studies than XIX century positivism. Most scientists and atheists ignore this, but that's their problem, not a problem of the religious studies.;)
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Oh! Then that means XP will have to be supported until the end of the times? Makes sense. :D
If this change means that I won't be able to replace my motherboard more than once, then I won't purchase Vista, because in my XP Home machine alone I had to do it 3 times, and I don't think this rate will change. It's then a matter of waiting for the retail version to be deployed so that I can discover what Microsoft understands by a "system switch". If they understand it to actually mean two motherboards only, then I'll send an e-mail to them explaining why I won't upgrade, and keep my XP as is through my next two or three motherboards.
The most funny thing in all of this is that I was thinking on upgrading to Vista Ultimate the day it was released. Now I'm going to wait for at least six more months. Sigh...
Google made massive contributions to the George Soros party (those guys we call democrats) in the last elections. It's obviously an interested party (oops!).
Nice! Slashdot is now entering the field of discriminating against conservative news sources by tagging them as such. Good idea, folks! After all, we know that liberalism is 99% of time correct, while conservatism is 99% of the time wrong. Our teachers in high-school and college, who made it sure we learnt such an obvious fact of nature, wouldn't lie to us, nor would MTV, or the NYT, would they?
This can be used in favor as the basis for an "anti-copyright as it is today" movement, instead of an "anti-all-copyright". If the law was changed so that copyright wasn't transferable by contract in any way (not even by "exclusivity clauses", which would be legally void), that would bring about many of the benefits sought after by the "anti-all-copyright" people, while at the same time pleasing those who believe that "new ideas" must be protected. For instance, all artists would own their musics, not the labels (much less the RIAA), all directors would own their movies, not the studios (much less the MPAA), all the programmers would own their code, not their employees (much less the BSA), all the scientists would own their own discoveries, not the multinational labs, and so on and so forth. The whole legal landscape would change for the better no matter what, because artists, directors, programmers and scientists have very different priorities in regards to the businessmen for whom they work.
Hmm... someone should develop this idea further. It might get a lot of popular support.
Let me see:
:)
1) Solitaire
This one I play not only in Windows, but whenever I can get a clone. I've even installed a Solitaire addon in my World of Warcraft, for those long flight times.
2) Street Fighter II
This or any other fighter game similar to it, including almost all NeoGeo hits.
3) World of Warcraft
This is my main game so far, but I think of it as a comfort game when I'm bored and go to a capital city to trade in the AH or just chat.
4) Pangya
This golf MMO is nice for some fast games. You choose something between 3 and 18 holes, from 2 alternating to 20 simultaneous players, and have 15 to 30 minutes of fun.
5) Chrono Trigger
Now and then I simply HAVE TO replay this RPG.
6) Anything randomly choosen in a SNES or Arcade emulator.
For when I'm REALLY bored.
Some years ago I purchased a cheap 20" TV box from a big online store, and I was informed it would arrive in some days. That would be it were not for the fact that I received a 10% discount coupon from an affiliate of the store. I though: "Nice! Since the TV wasn't sent yet, I'll try to apply this coupon to it." But an attendee told me the policy of the site didn't allow for discount codes to be applied to finished sales. So he advised me to cancel the previous purchase and purchase the TV again, this time applying the discount. I did so, and used the discount amount to include two books in the order.
Some days later a truck stops in front of my house with my TV. My aunt, who was there, signed the invoice, got the box inside the house, and proceeded to install my new TV, so that it was in place by the time I arrived coming from work. And what I found when I arrived was that my the books hadn't come.
I called the store to complain about the lack of the books, and was amazed to discover that my TV wasn't delivered. What they actually sent was the first TV, the one I cancelled. And that was because I cancelled it in the same day it had entered "delivery status" and began to be sent from one place to another in the chain that would end in it getting to my house. I asked them to get it back and send me my actual TV with the books, and by the next day they came to gat it back.
Then, some two days later, my actual TV with my two books arrived. And everything seemed correct. But that's not the end of the history, oh, no!
Although the first TV had been cancelled, and returned, it was still billed from my credit card. I called the store again to cancel that amount, explaining the whole situation, and it got cancelled, okay. But then, for some reason, the billing of the second TV was ALSO cancelled. And thing got even stranger: the amount of the monthly parts of the payment of both TVs kept appearing in my credit card statement, together with their refund, for some months. No one to whom I talked about this had a clue on what was going on. And then, as if by magic, these strange payments and refunds simply stopped.
Some months after that, in what I think was a cleanup of messed up database records, my account at the store got deleted for good. I called them to complain, but they couldn't recover it. So, I created a new one and still shop there now and then.
And as a result of badly written databases interacting with badly written software to make an insane delivery logistics somehow work, I ended up with a free TV and two free books.
You describe a situation where there's a demand for pharmacological experts. So there will arise an offer of pharmacological experts. This leads to a demand for a system of identifying the better and dismissing the worst experts. Have you already seen magazines of product and service reviews? That's how this is solved: people would have a lot of interest in buying these magazines. And how to discriminate between good and bad magazines? Because the good ones wouldn't want to lose their reputation by allowing bad reviews to pass through, thus losing their readers.
There's already technology that allows multiple signals to share the same frequency. And even it there wasn't, this situation would promptly create a demand for such a solution. When there's demand...
Well, there's not much to buy anyway, or to sell, when all humans are dead.
Wrong. You'd have way more power than that. Who would prevent you from purchasing a gun, for example?
The more widespread weapons are, the less violence there is. You don't act dumb when 20 people around you can shot you dead before you're able to say "Shit!". Businessmen that acted unfairly would have a lot to be afraid from, don't worry about that.
Three questions:
a) Name these examples, please.
b) Define "fair price".
c) If the prices asked are so incredible high, please explain me how the exploiter will avoid nine other companies opening in the same area to provide the same service looking for their share of the cake.
In regards to "c", please note that answering "they'll form a cartel" doesn' work. The first company will still have to bear the burden of seeing his profits drop tenfold, since there are a total of 10 businesses now sharing the same amount of customers. And there's also the problem of those other 300 companies opening due to that enormously giant revenue they see there...
When there is demand, the offer appears.
In a perfect free-market society, the remedies one needs would cost less, because they wouldn't be patented, being thus manufactured by lots of companies. All goods, including houses and terrains, would cost less, because there would be far less taxes on them, and there would be no additional annual taxes either. Houses would cost way less to build, because the company who makes them would be able to contract extremely cheap labour to build them (persons who would love to receive these low wages, because this is more than the perfect nothing they now receive). Environmental laws, by not existing, would mean the technology used to build the houses, from materials to transportation, would cost less too. And there wouldn't be any laws making more difficult for new house-building companies to enter the market.
As a result, there would be a lot more houses available, driving their prices even further down. And as a secondary result, the monthly house-renting prices would be a lot lower too. All those people who can't currently afford renting a house would afford them, including the cheap-laborers mentioned above.
And this includes Mr. Wilson.
And the why is simple: because there's no accountability. If the electronic voting was simply a speed up process, with a 100% paper-trail of votes for manual counting if required by a judicial mandate, for example, then I wouldn't have anything against it. But a purely electronic voting without any physical evidence of the actual votes is extremely dangerous, and by this sole reason shouldn't be allowed to exist.
Lenin, after the Communist Revolution in Russia, strenghtened the property system in his NEP policy. Why? Because that way he would be able to get tons of money from international capitalists. When he gathered enough to make the revolution completion possible, then he eliminated private property.
Your argument is weak. No left party in history avoided making alliances with what they consider to be the right. The Brazilian left-wing parties are no exception. And in regards to social-democracy, don't forget that its banner is to bring socialism by way of political reforms, not of political confrontations, which necessarily means alliances with forces "in the right".
In regards to the names left and right, yes, you're correct if we think of Brazil only, because there're always two "extremes" and a "middle" no matter what the range of possibilities is. But I'm thinking in terms of the worldwide political spectrum, not the local one. The whole of the local Brazilian political spectrum is a subset of the global one, and a subset located into what, on the global scale, is commonly called "left". That's the point. Something as the British conservatism, or the the American one (which is center when compared to the former), are nowadays devoid of any formal political representation in Brazil. There's simply no conservative party in Brazil at all. And as a result, what we have of most "right-wing" here are some parties without any ideological identity, with no philosophical basis for their beliefs and actions, and with zero militancy. How "right-wing" is that? None.
Yes, I concede that having two prints isn't good. However, I might be remembering the event without much precision. AFAIK it was two prints, but it might actually have been one. I'm not sure now.
I don't see your point. This problem is nothing that proper TV-training cannot solve, as was the case with the use of the e-voting machines themselves has shown. Had these "dumb" people been trained for weeks before having an actual contact with the machine? No. There's no surprise then that they didn't manage well in actually using them.
And no, as "a Brazilian" I shouldn't "know" any of it. As "a Brazilian" what I have is a duty to speak loudly on what's wrong. Paper balots are the best thing for democracy, period. No easily-hackeable technology should be in charge of the voting itself. If you want technology, put it in assuring the manualo vote counting of the paper balots isn't tampered. Not on the voting itself.
Hmm... yes, I can see how's that. The obvious solution would then be for a single copy to be printed and put into the urn. Actually, now I'm not sure whether the proposal was for two prints, my memory can be tricking me there.
Good to know. But I know Lula has already mentioned he'd like to see a new Constitution. Since he's the same guy who tried controlling the newspaper with the "National Council on Journalism"...
And regarding parties, PFL is center, yes. A center party, having no position on anything, always aling himself with whoever can give it power. That's the case also with Maluf's PP, which is aligned with Lula's PT.
PRONA is a joke. But it's hardly a right-wing party either. The ideology of PRONA is based on the ideas of Lyndon LaRouche, a member of USA's Democratic Party. LaRouche cannot be called a right-winger by any stretch of imagination, except if you focus on very specific aspects of his ideology and ignore everything else. Also, see here LaRouche defending Eneas for some interesting details.
So, yes, there's no right-wing party in Brazil.
Wrong, wrong, extremely wrong! The party of the ex-Minister of Health, newly elected governor of the Sao Paulo state, Mr. Jose Serra, from which our former president, Mr. Fernando Henrique Cardoso, is also a member, is the PSDB. What "PSDB" means? It means "Brazilian Social-Democratic Party". Yes, social-democracy. Were it not enough, Mr. Serra was one of the left-wing exilees who departed Brazil on 1970's when our (this time correctly named as such) right-wing dictatorship was hardening.
It has been some 20 years since Brazil had an actual right-wing politician in power. That's why many people nowadays, unaware of what "right-wing" really means, call these soft-left politicians "right". They don't know better.
By the way, they also don't know well what "extreme right" is. They think our dictatorship of the 1960's and 1970's was of the extreme right, when it was far from it. The actual Brazilian extreme-right, the fascists of the Integralist Movement, were crushed by our right-wing dictatorship much in the same way the extreme-left was crushed. And what was this "crushing" anyway? Around 15 deaths per year (little more than one per month) for 20 years: the lightest dictatorship of the whole XX century actually.
Pay no attention to this disinformation on what PSDB is. It's soft-left, democratic left, but left nevertheless. The most "right" thing we have these days is the PFL, "Liberal Front Party". It's hardly more than center of the center, and is crashing anyway, having lost a lot of power in the 2006 election. The future of Brazil is to be fully left-winger.
Too bad for Brazilians. We'll suffer a lot and won't know why.
Some years ago, those who distrust e-voting machines managed to put into votation in the Brazilian Congress a proposed law who would require 10% (yes, only 10 percent) of the machines to come with printers. The idea was for those machines to print two copies of the vote: one for the voter, who would have confirmed his vote, and another to be put into a sealed urn by the voter (who would be able to check whether the printing was correct). If doubts arose on the results of an election, those urns could then be opened for manual counting, and if big differences were found between these 10% of printed votes and the full results, the election would be cancelled and redone (probably with paper balots).
A sound idea, don't you think? But, guess what? Yeah, the law wasn't approved. And as a result, there's absolutely no written proof at all of what or whom people actually voted for.
Also, there's a law around that forbids independent research of voting intentions to be spread in news some days before an election. I'm not sure whether this law is being enforced right now, but the official reason behind it is that such researchs "interfere" in the voting decision of the people. Now, just imagine what this means: e-voting machines registering "votes" that cannot be traced, plus voting researches disallowed days before an election. Yes, you're right: if someone that was far behind in the voting intentions got elected, it might be alleged that the people changed their mind between the last allowed research and actual election day. How can you argue against it? You can't.
This is the recipe on how you can build a dictatorship that has no appearance of being a dictatorship. You don't need to be violent. All you need is to put some clever technology into it, and you're done. Government becomes a permanent ownership of you and of your associates. After all, who said that multiple "competing" parties aren't really a single entity with lots of names, existing only for the people to believe they have choice?
In the last two presidential elections (2002 and this 2006 one), all the four presidential candidates were from left-wing parties. There's a range: from soft left-wing to extreme left-wing. But it's all left. Different parties, or single-party with four different names for you to "choose" from?
Who knows?
Please note that not only left-wingers are against intellectual property. A lot of libertarians and classic-liberal conservatives also oppose it on the grounds that IP violates private property. The reasonig is basically as follow:
"Thy should a 3rd party tell me how I should use the xerox machine I own, the paper I own, the powder I own, and the book I own, in the way I choose to? Why should a 3rd party forbid me to resell whatever I made with property I possessed? After all, who own these things? Me, or that shadowy 3rd party, that exists as such only because the government created and sustains pro-monopolistic, anti-private-property laws?"
The only way a right-winger can defend IP is by giving up on the private property principle and adopting utilitarianism. This is what, for example, the Ayn Rand Objectivists do. Which is the same as saying:
"Yeah, we know IP is a violation of privarte property, that it's something that can only exist because it's state-sponsored, and that this sponsorship also goes agains the doctrine of minimal government, and also that this makes us inconsistent, but IP is usefull anyway due to 'x' and 'y' and 'z', so we're for it."
Needless to say, I'm a conservative, I sympatize with libertarianism in many aspects, and I'm against IP.
Fine. Here the authoritative source: me. Because Philosophy is exactly what I'm studying at University for the last 7 years.
Want something more? Go read the guys who developed this thing: Plato and Aristotle. They offer lots of insights on the subject. Pay special attention to the distiction they made between a Sophist and a Philosopher. Oh! And don't forget that Aristotle is the guy who invented Biology, Zoology, Physics and the Political Sciences. So, his take on the subject is somewhat relevant.
Dictionaries? Yes, they're usefull. But only so far as their methodology is. Usually what dictionarists do is to research how a word is currently used in language. If a new, wrong meaning gains acceptance and diffusion, it enters the dictionary. After all, they're value free. Alas, you've already heard the expression "occult sciences", no? Well, since it's used a lot, then for a dictionarist the term "science" will include a definition that allows the "occult" variety to be part of it. Would you accept, because of this, that "occult sciences" be taught in the science curriculum of schools or, for that matter, ID?
Take care. Trying to win an argument by verbal tricks usually leads to unintended consequences.
That's not accurate. There've beens many academic studies in the last decades on the "esoteric" branches of major religions, and these studies all agree in the fact that what the mystics/saints/whatever from different religions, continents and ages described as being the results they obtained from their practices are extremely similar, if not equal. Search, for details, the works of Whitall N. Perry, Frithjof Schuon or Seyyed Hossein Nasr, among others.
;)
If you have a set of methods, all of which say you'll obtain results "x", "y" and "z" at the moments "a", "b" and "c", and you follow them and obtain the predicted results, in a systematic and repeatable way, all of that coupled to a body of peer reviewers able to correct your mistakes, you have a science. If this science cannot be linked in a meaningfull way with other sciences, too bad. This doesn't make it any less scientific.
Furthermore, if any and all scientists must study at least 15 or 20 years to be able to understand what their peers are doing, not to mention to do usefull research himself, there's no point in saying that what they do is objective and everything else is pure subjectivity. There's a mountain of "subjective" knowledge, both theoretical and practical, that must be absorved by the individual for those things to start becoming meaningfull. Other fields of research having similar requirements don't make them any less scientific. It's precisely the contrary.
There's more to the contemporaneous field of religious studies than XIX century positivism. Most scientists and atheists ignore this, but that's their problem, not a problem of the religious studies.
I hope someone mod you "+Insightfull", I really do! :)
I couldn't have put it better.