I am no audiophile, but I have never found a set of Japanese speakers (of even moderately high quality) that were any good. They're (the Japanese) whole approach to speakers just doesn't seem to work to my ears/cultural programming. I don't believe that I am totally alone on this front.
Corporations exist to make money for the capital that is invested within them. If you think that they are making extraordinary profits (technical term not superelative) then take your surplus capital and give it to them so you too can share in this wonderful idea.
Look, efficiency of capital is increased by finding ways to generate the maximum output for each given unit of capital. In the long run this leads to a lower cost of all outputs since capital will continue to be shifted to places where the other inputs are cheapest. In it's simplest form this is viewed as a substitution relationship between labour and capital since all other inputs are essentially (but for their own inputs of capital and labour) constant for any given product. Whilst it is true that the practice is somewhat lest elegant than this theory, the undeniable truth of the western world is that the isms of capital have delivered historically unprecedented levels of prosperity. I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to think about the cost of that prosperity, but the reality is undeniable.
It is certainly true that many who have flirted with outsourcing have been or are being burnt by the reality, but manufacturing proves that moving production to where labour is cheap is a way to increase the efficiency of capital. I choose not to enter into the arguments about the working conditions of such imported labour, certainly because I don't care, but most importantly because every body in the west has proven they don't care by continuing to purchase the goods produced by this cheaper labour and even those that apparently do care can only do so becuase significant parts of their "ethical" purchases are subsidised by the existence of these cheap pools of labour to produce all the other inputs that goes into sustaining their lifestyle.
There is no need for any rationalisation of why capital is moving to areas with cheaper labour. If anything, the fastest way to get the jobs _back_ to the country of demand is to quickly drive the cost of labour up in those cheaper places by consuming all their surplus labour as quickly as possible. For make no mistake, that is what the casue is, those places, China, India etc have a surplus of labour. If that is ever to change it can only be by consuming labour. So quit whining and take advantage of the situation and by doing so, enjoy the ability to put more of your labour into leisure (ie non productive) activities (and by you, I don't mean the specific poster, but a generic reader)
The scope of the article is really limited to the use of spreadsheets in financial planning (forecasting). For which the criticisms of the author and the material he cites are pretty valid. Indeed we all have our pet hates when it comes to how the tool is used (you have no idea how much of the financial world is ruled by this spreadsheet or the other driving trading decisions!) however, the tabular representation of data is not inherently broken and it behooves the computer scientists amongst us to ask why this form has usurped the database for the representation of simple datasets and all to frequently complex ones.
No, this is the curse of English. It can still be _free_ (as in speech), I really sometimes wish that software libre, had been the term of choice. Oh well. Anyway, there is no one, not even RMS, who suggests that software costs no money to write. But it is a different coup de poisson to infer that therefore it must be protected as property. If you can write software that gives you competitive advantage then make it a secret (secrets are good). If the cost of developing the software is less than the benefit you derive within a reasonable ROI timeframe then it makes sense to write it, if not then that capital is better spend elsewhere.
But if you have to sell it to make that ROI, then you have to get the investment up front and that then becomes a risk analysis question for those on whom you would confer the competitive advantage in return for their investment. However once you give it to someone, you cannot get that genie back into the bottle.
Note that this scenario is just for the "competitive advantage" case where software will bless those who have it at the expense of those who don't, ie where once everyone has it the beneficiary is the client of the software users since (theoretically) the price of the products should go down. In other cases, the economics of free software are even easier to see.
Actually its the ones that are _catching_ to CEO's that will power the next generation!!! I can't really seeing CEO's doing too much of the catching, it may be how they got where they are but it aint what they're gonna do once they get there.
Perhaps it is just semantics, and my use of the term "goods" is the problem, but property does not need to be physical in order to be real. If it is just goods to which you are ascribing the must be physical dogma then fair enough but property does not need to be a physical thing.
I don't believe in intellectual property either, so that is not my objection. But you can create property in, for example, an easement or a right of way. Each of which can be transferred, but has no physical manifestation itself.
I too believe that IP is a fiction and a mistake, but it is not it's ethereal nature that is the source of the problem. There are many deficiencies in IP that mean it cannot be property, but just one, and it is fatal as far as I am concerned, is the lack of "exclusivity". That is, if you transfer an instance of a piece of IP to someone and that someone passes on a copy of it to a third party, you still have the original hence you have suffered no loss, similarly you cannot "exclude" the person to whom you gave the IP from that transfer (without recourse to a remedy in IP law) since it is simply enjoying one of the amenities of the thing you have given them (this is an oversimplification but the complexities make the argument more involved, not different). The same is not true of, say, a right of way that is attached to your house as part of it's property, if you are barred from enjoying the right of way you lose the amenity, exclusion is possible, therefore it meets that test for real property.
You have hit a very important nail squarely on the head. But the problem is well understood in economic terms. The term "price sensitive" is used to describe this phenomena in general, but the specific twist that the digital age brings is the delivery of a lot of goods that are ordinarily priced at some level at a price of zero. At a price of zero, people will download and listen to bucketloads of stuff some crap some wonderful but charge them even a penny for such a thing and they will do without. It even goes so far as many people are reluctant to even set up the billing relationship to allow them to pay for the small amount that they actually want and they would rather do without, or just move their leisure time (and remember it is mostly leisure related) to a different channel.
It is much more important to look at household subsitute expenditure than record sales for the source of the industries problem. Only such a diverse analysis including year on year sales and the percentage of sector expenditure will show the true position. I imagine that average household leisure expenditure is increasing and that the recording industries share of that sector is decreasing, not because their product is crap, but because their product has been substituted with cable, video games, DVD and even SMS.
The fact that the recording industry (and I don't mean the music creation industry but I mean the distribution companies) serves no purpose anymore and has been made irrelevant by the ability for artists to distribute their own work, is a small fact (ha!) that they haven't realised yet, or perhaps they have realised it and are fight tooth and nail in their death throws to hold on to a market for as long as possible. But they will die. Unfortunately a company like ClearChannel might be their successor, which may not be a better thing particularly if they take the next step and tie up all the smaller venues at which musicians can give performances as well.
Imagine standing ten paces away from a cliff top and tossing a coin. Heads you take one pace towards the edge and tails you take one pace away. Eventually you will die. Its just a question of time. Playing "to win" against a casino is exactly the same you will lose it's just a question of time. In fact, for the casino it's all about turnover. They design the games to ensure that they get their X%, for any given game, different casino, different X. But generally speaking it is all about turnover their margin on games is between 18 and 22% (MGM Mirage Annual Report 2002) and not the theoretical 0.5 - 3% of the mathematics of the game. Casino gambling, lotteries etc is just a tax on people that cant do maths.
And TV is even more important, quite apart from the increased value intrinsic to the medium, sound and moving pictures, but it can be a shared experience. Allowing people to watch the same program, share that social experience and then add value to it by discussion or even just observing each others reaction to the same events. I would rather have children watch one hour of "Life on Earth" than read 10 volumes of drivel like "Harry Potter" (which seems to be the "saviour" of our nonreading younger generation according to some).
don't assume that just because i don't like proportional representation and that i think that the kind of coalitions you end up with in europe are absurd that i am American. Because I am not. You're proportional representation gives you the ability to get card carrying right wingers into your parliament even though nobody would vote for them to run government if that was the dhoice you were given. Civil society is the place for the discourse that these polititions promote, not the legislative house.
I agree with your analysis about the "two party" system. However, I am not a huge fan of the hybrid system. I am not a huge fan of partisan politics and so the proportional system (hybrid or otherwise) is a bit of an anathema to me. To me democracy is about rights and duties and to earn the rights you must perform the duties, participating in the process is one of the duties. This idea is really founded in a federalist structure where by you participate in your local community who inturn send a representative to the area congress, inturn to the city congress etc. The people that respond with the "too much government already" issue presuppose that this policy making channel must be duplicated by the executive arm which is not necessaruly true. In America, the local responsibility of judges and school boards etc to the local community is a good thing (despite the revisionist attitude of some such communities) the plurality of communities is exactly what I want to promote. Don't like creationist teaching move to an area where the dominant view is evolution and you have no problem (I know this is flawed, but you get the idea).
I am not American but the experience in the US, Canada, Australia (me originally) and the UK (me at the moment) suggest that the systems I am advocating do seem to promote the two party bastardisation of democracy that we all have today... HOWEVER, and it is a very big however, I believe these corruptions are the result of other issues rather than an inherent flaw. The US experience is somewhat different, but in some ways not. Essentially the two parties do tend to float towards the centre and the politics of the economy is now so important that the distinctions between left and right become more cultural than political, even a socialist government cannot get away with the economic profligacy of the early to mid 20th century, moving the left towards the centre. As a result it is very hard for the right of politics to distinguish itself from the left, particularly in countries like Australia and the UK where universal healthcare, education and unemployment benefits are almost unassailable rights, which makes the right of politics more central.
My real culprit for the bastardisation of democracy is the "career" politician. Unfortunately we pay them too well and, as such there is a strong incentive to remain a politician rather than to be a good one. I think that limiting terms is an excellent idea. But the best solution is to make the electorate realisation that "participation" in politics is a duty and it really consists of more than ticking a box every three or four years.
The balancing factor in the UK and Australia (to a slightly lesser degree) is the professional public service, effectively the executive arm of government, and the idea of ministerial responibility. Unfortunately these two principles are being eroded, ministerial responsibility a long time ago but the independence of the public service only really in the last 15 and definitely since the arrival of "New Labour" in the UK when they politicised almost every aspect of government to the extent that it is just a disgrace.
I agree with your Referenda idea. I think that citizen initiated referenda are a great idea. The logistical difficulties of these ideas are real, but I think it is a question of when not if, they get onto the public agenda. I would like to see those kind of participatry ideals enshrined formally in constitutional documents. But enough on the soap box.
Well the software that is installed on the machine is signed off by scrutineers from all parties involved in that polling station (electorate). How do they sign it off, well there are a number of ways I can think of. For example, the electoral commission (or who whatever the organising authority is in your jusrisdiction) PGP signs the binary(s) and then publishes their public key and then each parties scrutineer does the same when the kiosk arrives at their station would be one way.
Really, if you really wanted to have the "secure" solution there is only one way, get everyone in a room and then shuffle about until the right candidate is elected right in front of your face. Paper ballots are just as easy to screw up.
What you have to realise is that there are two fundamentally different forms of election (and some systems of government use a hybrid of them both). The "representative" based election where a group of people nominate the candidate to represent them and the "proportional" election where the elected candidates are selected from a pool based on the proportion of total votes received by the party with which they are affiliated. In the case of "representative" elections, the overall result is decided by a very small number of electors since the vast majority of electors live in seats that are considered "safe". The proof of this is when a "landslide" result occurs. Basically when one looks at % of the vote, a landslide victory where there is a dominant party with a huge majority of seats, the actual vote % is much closer to 50-50 than the actual representation in government.
This is the reason why many advocate the "proportional" system. I dislike "proportional" voting in the primary legislative forum because I think that it is very important to have a connection with _my_ representative in the legislative house. People who think that the representative method discriminates against smaller parties fail to recognise that there are means by which you can devise elections that protect the vote for smaller parties, without disproportionately representing them in the house. Which leads to the absurd coalitions that you get in many continental European democracies. Methods like two preferential voting where one continues to eliminate the least successful candidate and reallocate their votes according to the preference of the electors until one candidate gets 51% of the vote.
However these methods are complex to count, an electronic system would actually reduce the risk of error and improve the accuracy and therefore reduce the stress on the scrutineers.
So, do presume that paper ballots are either secure, efficient or best.
Junk snail mail is not spam. Spam exists, precisely because the marginal cost of one more recipient is zero (or indistinguishable from zero). Whilst it is true that junk mail still exists it is considerably less of an issue than spam, not the least of which is because (a) the centralised server [insert your postal service of choice] will respect a "no junk mail" sign and (b) the services offered in the junk have to have legit contact details within jurisdiction for the cost to be even remotely effective, hence they can be drawn to account for unethical action.
I expect that the definition of professional in their survey was very broad. Quite apart from code monkeys, about whose status we can argue significantly, the vast majority of people working in IT do not garner what I consider to be professional status. They are working in menial jobs, the 21st century equivalent of being a clerk.
Most of the people I know, who I consider to be IT professionals, higher degree educated people whose services are sought out by their clients are remarkably happy and have an excellent quality of life.
Copyright infringement is a civil offense, not criminal in all but a handful of cases
And this is one of the most disturbing trends that I see in the West at the moment. The (re)criminalisation of civil wrongs. It has been a long time since we abolished imprisonment for debt, but it seems that we are now accepting imprisonment for copyright infringement (where infringement means performing a copy that results in no financial loss to the copyright holder). This will lead (has led) us into a very dark place
Yeah, ok so they have 53 billion in the coffers. How much of that would be needed to prop up the share price in the event that all thos options on the balance sheet went out of the money as the stock tanked on the news of a huge loss in market. Say the EU. Er, all of it and then some.
Now that is funny. But does invading two countries really make you conclude that Bush wants to invade the world, making it into one country, like Hitler?
Whoa there big fella. You have a huge number of vehicles at your disposal to work against this process before resorting to sledgehammers, even before resorting to civil disobedience. And no, smashing the machines is not civil disobedience, it is vandalism. CD would be more like refusing to cast your vote electornically and refusing to leave the polling station until your paper ballot is accepted. You will probably be arrested, but you'll get your day in court.
I more or less disagree with you about electronic voting, it should be a "good thing" (tm) but I certainly think that the system being increasingly put in place in the US is a joke. The functionality of the diebold boxes sounds apallingly limited (IMHO), this is before even considering the security issues. Technology should be an _enabling_ factor not a stifling one and the account in the original article certainly sound stifling to me.
I'm Australian and in Aus, voting is compulsory. Elections are normally on a Saturday and one normally votes near ones home at a polling station within the electorate for which you are selecting the candidate. This brings two benefits and one cost. First voter fraud is vastly reduced every body has to show up to vote and so the chances of someone stealing your vote is limited since you will be there at some point during the day. The second benefit is that we don't have "voter turnout" issues, everyone turns out, you can show up and choose to cast an informal (invalid) vote, but you must show up and at least take a ballot (I don't think you are required to submit it, but I cannot be sure). But this is also the root of the cost, we have the "donkey vote" people who show up, get their name ticked off, don't really care about the politics and so grab a ballot and just tick 1,2,3 down the paper without regard to the candidate they are selecting. All in all this is a small price to pay and compulsory voting (for all it's other flaws) does create the opportunity for all people to participate. Electronic voting in this context would just streamline the process enourmously and make the results available for more quickly. The scrutineers would still have their role, but it should be easier all round.
Never ask the sales person how good their product is, all you'll get is whatever they can spout off the top of their head as the newest sales line.
So true. This is the problem with the advertising industry as a whole. The people telling you how effective the advertising is are the same people selling you the advertising. People, wake up! Believing them is not a good idea. It never ceases to amaze me how intelligent business people are hoodwinked by the advertising charletans. Even before the click through debacle. Now that we have seen how that littel beauty worked, surely this kind of crap cannot be taken seriously?
There was a show on the BBC (perhaps "Science Shack", but at least the same presenter, Adam Hart-Davies... a little more research [google is your friend] shows it was Science Shack, programme 2, http://www3.open.ac.uk/media/image-bank/programmes.asp) in which they went through a few techniques to make yourself invisible. The image from the program in the link above is the "mirrored suit", which when you are in a forest actually kinda works. However, they did actually make a car with an industrial strength active display on one side and cameras on the other side to capture what was behind the vehicle and show it on the screen. Really cool. It worked. As a stationary vehicle it was almost impossible to see (they had "experts" to try and spot it in the forest). However as it moved the vehicle was easier to spot. All in all a really cool attempt to show how such technology does (and does not) work.
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I am no audiophile, but I have never found a set of Japanese speakers (of even moderately high quality) that were any good. They're (the Japanese) whole approach to speakers just doesn't seem to work to my ears/cultural programming. I don't believe that I am totally alone on this front.
Corporations exist to make money for the capital that is invested within them. If you think that they are making extraordinary profits (technical term not superelative) then take your surplus capital and give it to them so you too can share in this wonderful idea.
Look, efficiency of capital is increased by finding ways to generate the maximum output for each given unit of capital. In the long run this leads to a lower cost of all outputs since capital will continue to be shifted to places where the other inputs are cheapest. In it's simplest form this is viewed as a substitution relationship between labour and capital since all other inputs are essentially (but for their own inputs of capital and labour) constant for any given product. Whilst it is true that the practice is somewhat lest elegant than this theory, the undeniable truth of the western world is that the isms of capital have delivered historically unprecedented levels of prosperity. I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to think about the cost of that prosperity, but the reality is undeniable.
It is certainly true that many who have flirted with outsourcing have been or are being burnt by the reality, but manufacturing proves that moving production to where labour is cheap is a way to increase the efficiency of capital. I choose not to enter into the arguments about the working conditions of such imported labour, certainly because I don't care, but most importantly because every body in the west has proven they don't care by continuing to purchase the goods produced by this cheaper labour and even those that apparently do care can only do so becuase significant parts of their "ethical" purchases are subsidised by the existence of these cheap pools of labour to produce all the other inputs that goes into sustaining their lifestyle.
There is no need for any rationalisation of why capital is moving to areas with cheaper labour. If anything, the fastest way to get the jobs _back_ to the country of demand is to quickly drive the cost of labour up in those cheaper places by consuming all their surplus labour as quickly as possible. For make no mistake, that is what the casue is, those places, China, India etc have a surplus of labour. If that is ever to change it can only be by consuming labour. So quit whining and take advantage of the situation and by doing so, enjoy the ability to put more of your labour into leisure (ie non productive) activities (and by you, I don't mean the specific poster, but a generic reader)
The scope of the article is really limited to the use of spreadsheets in financial planning (forecasting). For which the criticisms of the author and the material he cites are pretty valid. Indeed we all have our pet hates when it comes to how the tool is used (you have no idea how much of the financial world is ruled by this spreadsheet or the other driving trading decisions!) however, the tabular representation of data is not inherently broken and it behooves the computer scientists amongst us to ask why this form has usurped the database for the representation of simple datasets and all to frequently complex ones.
No, this is the curse of English. It can still be _free_ (as in speech), I really sometimes wish that software libre, had been the term of choice. Oh well. Anyway, there is no one, not even RMS, who suggests that software costs no money to write. But it is a different coup de poisson to infer that therefore it must be protected as property. If you can write software that gives you competitive advantage then make it a secret (secrets are good). If the cost of developing the software is less than the benefit you derive within a reasonable ROI timeframe then it makes sense to write it, if not then that capital is better spend elsewhere.
But if you have to sell it to make that ROI, then you have to get the investment up front and that then becomes a risk analysis question for those on whom you would confer the competitive advantage in return for their investment. However once you give it to someone, you cannot get that genie back into the bottle.
Note that this scenario is just for the "competitive advantage" case where software will bless those who have it at the expense of those who don't, ie where once everyone has it the beneficiary is the client of the software users since (theoretically) the price of the products should go down. In other cases, the economics of free software are even easier to see.
Actually its the ones that are _catching_ to CEO's that will power the next generation!!! I can't really seeing CEO's doing too much of the catching, it may be how they got where they are but it aint what they're gonna do once they get there.
Perhaps it is just semantics, and my use of the term "goods" is the problem, but property does not need to be physical in order to be real. If it is just goods to which you are ascribing the must be physical dogma then fair enough but property does not need to be a physical thing.
I don't believe in intellectual property either, so that is not my objection. But you can create property in, for example, an easement or a right of way. Each of which can be transferred, but has no physical manifestation itself.
I too believe that IP is a fiction and a mistake, but it is not it's ethereal nature that is the source of the problem. There are many deficiencies in IP that mean it cannot be property, but just one, and it is fatal as far as I am concerned, is the lack of "exclusivity". That is, if you transfer an instance of a piece of IP to someone and that someone passes on a copy of it to a third party, you still have the original hence you have suffered no loss, similarly you cannot "exclude" the person to whom you gave the IP from that transfer (without recourse to a remedy in IP law) since it is simply enjoying one of the amenities of the thing you have given them (this is an oversimplification but the complexities make the argument more involved, not different). The same is not true of, say, a right of way that is attached to your house as part of it's property, if you are barred from enjoying the right of way you lose the amenity, exclusion is possible, therefore it meets that test for real property.
You have hit a very important nail squarely on the head. But the problem is well understood in economic terms. The term "price sensitive" is used to describe this phenomena in general, but the specific twist that the digital age brings is the delivery of a lot of goods that are ordinarily priced at some level at a price of zero. At a price of zero, people will download and listen to bucketloads of stuff some crap some wonderful but charge them even a penny for such a thing and they will do without. It even goes so far as many people are reluctant to even set up the billing relationship to allow them to pay for the small amount that they actually want and they would rather do without, or just move their leisure time (and remember it is mostly leisure related) to a different channel.
It is much more important to look at household subsitute expenditure than record sales for the source of the industries problem. Only such a diverse analysis including year on year sales and the percentage of sector expenditure will show the true position. I imagine that average household leisure expenditure is increasing and that the recording industries share of that sector is decreasing, not because their product is crap, but because their product has been substituted with cable, video games, DVD and even SMS.
The fact that the recording industry (and I don't mean the music creation industry but I mean the distribution companies) serves no purpose anymore and has been made irrelevant by the ability for artists to distribute their own work, is a small fact (ha!) that they haven't realised yet, or perhaps they have realised it and are fight tooth and nail in their death throws to hold on to a market for as long as possible. But they will die. Unfortunately a company like ClearChannel might be their successor, which may not be a better thing particularly if they take the next step and tie up all the smaller venues at which musicians can give performances as well.
Imagine standing ten paces away from a cliff top and tossing a coin. Heads you take one pace towards the edge and tails you take one pace away. Eventually you will die. Its just a question of time. Playing "to win" against a casino is exactly the same you will lose it's just a question of time. In fact, for the casino it's all about turnover. They design the games to ensure that they get their X%, for any given game, different casino, different X. But generally speaking it is all about turnover their margin on games is between 18 and 22% (MGM Mirage Annual Report 2002) and not the theoretical 0.5 - 3% of the mathematics of the game. Casino gambling, lotteries etc is just a tax on people that cant do maths.
The only place you will find zero inflation is the cemetary.
And TV is even more important, quite apart from the increased value intrinsic to the medium, sound and moving pictures, but it can be a shared experience. Allowing people to watch the same program, share that social experience and then add value to it by discussion or even just observing each others reaction to the same events. I would rather have children watch one hour of "Life on Earth" than read 10 volumes of drivel like "Harry Potter" (which seems to be the "saviour" of our nonreading younger generation according to some).
don't assume that just because i don't like proportional representation and that i think that the kind of coalitions you end up with in europe are absurd that i am American. Because I am not. You're proportional representation gives you the ability to get card carrying right wingers into your parliament even though nobody would vote for them to run government if that was the dhoice you were given. Civil society is the place for the discourse that these polititions promote, not the legislative house.
I agree with your analysis about the "two party" system. However, I am not a huge fan of the hybrid system. I am not a huge fan of partisan politics and so the proportional system (hybrid or otherwise) is a bit of an anathema to me. To me democracy is about rights and duties and to earn the rights you must perform the duties, participating in the process is one of the duties. This idea is really founded in a federalist structure where by you participate in your local community who inturn send a representative to the area congress, inturn to the city congress etc. The people that respond with the "too much government already" issue presuppose that this policy making channel must be duplicated by the executive arm which is not necessaruly true. In America, the local responsibility of judges and school boards etc to the local community is a good thing (despite the revisionist attitude of some such communities) the plurality of communities is exactly what I want to promote. Don't like creationist teaching move to an area where the dominant view is evolution and you have no problem (I know this is flawed, but you get the idea).
I am not American but the experience in the US, Canada, Australia (me originally) and the UK (me at the moment) suggest that the systems I am advocating do seem to promote the two party bastardisation of democracy that we all have today... HOWEVER, and it is a very big however, I believe these corruptions are the result of other issues rather than an inherent flaw. The US experience is somewhat different, but in some ways not. Essentially the two parties do tend to float towards the centre and the politics of the economy is now so important that the distinctions between left and right become more cultural than political, even a socialist government cannot get away with the economic profligacy of the early to mid 20th century, moving the left towards the centre. As a result it is very hard for the right of politics to distinguish itself from the left, particularly in countries like Australia and the UK where universal healthcare, education and unemployment benefits are almost unassailable rights, which makes the right of politics more central.
My real culprit for the bastardisation of democracy is the "career" politician. Unfortunately we pay them too well and, as such there is a strong incentive to remain a politician rather than to be a good one. I think that limiting terms is an excellent idea. But the best solution is to make the electorate realisation that "participation" in politics is a duty and it really consists of more than ticking a box every three or four years.
The balancing factor in the UK and Australia (to a slightly lesser degree) is the professional public service, effectively the executive arm of government, and the idea of ministerial responibility. Unfortunately these two principles are being eroded, ministerial responsibility a long time ago but the independence of the public service only really in the last 15 and definitely since the arrival of "New Labour" in the UK when they politicised almost every aspect of government to the extent that it is just a disgrace.
I agree with your Referenda idea. I think that citizen initiated referenda are a great idea. The logistical difficulties of these ideas are real, but I think it is a question of when not if, they get onto the public agenda. I would like to see those kind of participatry ideals enshrined formally in constitutional documents. But enough on the soap box.
Well the software that is installed on the machine is signed off by scrutineers from all parties involved in that polling station (electorate). How do they sign it off, well there are a number of ways I can think of. For example, the electoral commission (or who whatever the organising authority is in your jusrisdiction) PGP signs the binary(s) and then publishes their public key and then each parties scrutineer does the same when the kiosk arrives at their station would be one way.
Really, if you really wanted to have the "secure" solution there is only one way, get everyone in a room and then shuffle about until the right candidate is elected right in front of your face. Paper ballots are just as easy to screw up.
What you have to realise is that there are two fundamentally different forms of election (and some systems of government use a hybrid of them both). The "representative" based election where a group of people nominate the candidate to represent them and the "proportional" election where the elected candidates are selected from a pool based on the proportion of total votes received by the party with which they are affiliated. In the case of "representative" elections, the overall result is decided by a very small number of electors since the vast majority of electors live in seats that are considered "safe". The proof of this is when a "landslide" result occurs. Basically when one looks at % of the vote, a landslide victory where there is a dominant party with a huge majority of seats, the actual vote % is much closer to 50-50 than the actual representation in government.
This is the reason why many advocate the "proportional" system. I dislike "proportional" voting in the primary legislative forum because I think that it is very important to have a connection with _my_ representative in the legislative house. People who think that the representative method discriminates against smaller parties fail to recognise that there are means by which you can devise elections that protect the vote for smaller parties, without disproportionately representing them in the house. Which leads to the absurd coalitions that you get in many continental European democracies. Methods like two preferential voting where one continues to eliminate the least successful candidate and reallocate their votes according to the preference of the electors until one candidate gets 51% of the vote.
However these methods are complex to count, an electronic system would actually reduce the risk of error and improve the accuracy and therefore reduce the stress on the scrutineers.
So, do presume that paper ballots are either secure, efficient or best.
Paper ballots are expensive, not tamper proof and subject to other forms of non tamper based fraud, like ballot stuffing.
Junk snail mail is not spam. Spam exists, precisely because the marginal cost of one more recipient is zero (or indistinguishable from zero). Whilst it is true that junk mail still exists it is considerably less of an issue than spam, not the least of which is because (a) the centralised server [insert your postal service of choice] will respect a "no junk mail" sign and (b) the services offered in the junk have to have legit contact details within jurisdiction for the cost to be even remotely effective, hence they can be drawn to account for unethical action.
I expect that the definition of professional in their survey was very broad. Quite apart from code monkeys, about whose status we can argue significantly, the vast majority of people working in IT do not garner what I consider to be professional status. They are working in menial jobs, the 21st century equivalent of being a clerk.
Most of the people I know, who I consider to be IT professionals, higher degree educated people whose services are sought out by their clients are remarkably happy and have an excellent quality of life.
Copyright infringement is a civil offense, not criminal in all but a handful of cases
And this is one of the most disturbing trends that I see in the West at the moment. The (re)criminalisation of civil wrongs. It has been a long time since we abolished imprisonment for debt, but it seems that we are now accepting imprisonment for copyright infringement (where infringement means performing a copy that results in no financial loss to the copyright holder). This will lead (has led) us into a very dark place
Yeah, ok so they have 53 billion in the coffers. How much of that would be needed to prop up the share price in the event that all thos options on the balance sheet went out of the money as the stock tanked on the news of a huge loss in market. Say the EU. Er, all of it and then some.
Now that is funny. But does invading two countries really make you conclude that Bush wants to invade the world, making it into one country, like Hitler?
I call "Godwin's law"
OTOH, a brain-controlled computer would deprive my fingers of their precious exercise.
I doubt it :-)
Sorry, couldn't resist. No offence intended, just a laugh.
Yes it is just you.
Whoa there big fella. You have a huge number of vehicles at your disposal to work against this process before resorting to sledgehammers, even before resorting to civil disobedience. And no, smashing the machines is not civil disobedience, it is vandalism. CD would be more like refusing to cast your vote electornically and refusing to leave the polling station until your paper ballot is accepted. You will probably be arrested, but you'll get your day in court.
I more or less disagree with you about electronic voting, it should be a "good thing" (tm) but I certainly think that the system being increasingly put in place in the US is a joke. The functionality of the diebold boxes sounds apallingly limited (IMHO), this is before even considering the security issues. Technology should be an _enabling_ factor not a stifling one and the account in the original article certainly sound stifling to me.
I'm Australian and in Aus, voting is compulsory. Elections are normally on a Saturday and one normally votes near ones home at a polling station within the electorate for which you are selecting the candidate. This brings two benefits and one cost. First voter fraud is vastly reduced every body has to show up to vote and so the chances of someone stealing your vote is limited since you will be there at some point during the day. The second benefit is that we don't have "voter turnout" issues, everyone turns out, you can show up and choose to cast an informal (invalid) vote, but you must show up and at least take a ballot (I don't think you are required to submit it, but I cannot be sure). But this is also the root of the cost, we have the "donkey vote" people who show up, get their name ticked off, don't really care about the politics and so grab a ballot and just tick 1,2,3 down the paper without regard to the candidate they are selecting. All in all this is a small price to pay and compulsory voting (for all it's other flaws) does create the opportunity for all people to participate. Electronic voting in this context would just streamline the process enourmously and make the results available for more quickly. The scrutineers would still have their role, but it should be easier all round.
Never ask the sales person how good their product is, all you'll get is whatever they can spout off the top of their head as the newest sales line.
So true. This is the problem with the advertising industry as a whole. The people telling you how effective the advertising is are the same people selling you the advertising. People, wake up! Believing them is not a good idea. It never ceases to amaze me how intelligent business people are hoodwinked by the advertising charletans. Even before the click through debacle. Now that we have seen how that littel beauty worked, surely this kind of crap cannot be taken seriously?
There was a show on the BBC (perhaps "Science Shack", but at least the same presenter, Adam Hart-Davies... a little more research [google is your friend] shows it was Science Shack, programme 2, http://www3.open.ac.uk/media/image-bank/programmes .asp) in which they went through a few techniques to make yourself invisible. The image from the program in the link above is the "mirrored suit", which when you are in a forest actually kinda works. However, they did actually make a car with an industrial strength active display on one side and cameras on the other side to capture what was behind the vehicle and show it on the screen. Really cool. It worked. As a stationary vehicle it was almost impossible to see (they had "experts" to try and spot it in the forest). However as it moved the vehicle was easier to spot. All in all a really cool attempt to show how such technology does (and does not) work.
I have always thought of C as high level assembler, and C++ as object oriented high level assembler.
No, C++ is a high level assembler with object oriented features.