Free Software for Politics 554
kevin lyda writes "The Howard Dean campaign is releasing software for web-based communities under the GNU GPL. The project apparently is based on drupal. See here for more info, and here for the software. Regardless if you're for Dean, against Dean, or you're not an American, it's great to see an American politician on the national level using and promoting free software. I wonder if RMS thought he'd see a U.S. presidential candidate releasing stuff under the GPL when he founded GNU 20 years ago!"
I am impressed (Score:5, Insightful)
It does beg the question--will a Dean presidency be geek friendly? Will it turn back the DMCA and scale back software patents? I'd like to know more, but I'm optimistic for the first time in a long time.
Re:More canidates should do this (Score:5, Insightful)
We know that faster-than-light travel is contrary to our current best effort at producing a consistent body of laws to describe nature, but those laws are based on observations accurate within certain parameters and realms. But we certainly can't say what's really dictated by some magical immutable laws of physics.
Wait a sec.... (Score:5, Insightful)
It'll be interesting to see if any competing campaigns take it up and use it for their communities.
Impressive: (Score:5, Insightful)
O.K., so Dean is smart. This is one of the most impressive grass roots campaigns I have ever seen and he has my vote. Assuming Dean is elected President, given his background, perhaps we could have some open source solutions to the health care crisis to enable physicians and hospitals to reduce costs associated with all of the electronic medical records problems that are cropping up.
The ideal pair? Dean and Clark. A thinker and an individual who gets things done. What a concept!
Nice and all... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I am impressed (Score:2, Insightful)
Ignoring the misuse of the phrase "beg[ging] the question" for the moment...
A related question is whether Dean will roll back the high tax rates that disproportionately confiscate the earnings of geeks, who have a median income significantly higher than the national average.
Just because Dean's campaign promotes GPL'ed software doesn't mean he's going to fight for your interests: at most this is just pandering to the web-connected crowd, but is more likely just someone's pet project that got blown out of proportion.
Re:I am impressed (Score:1, Insightful)
It does beg the question--will a Dean presidency be geek friendly?
We'll never know.
Well he's a democrat (Score:1, Insightful)
So he'll probably raise taxes on the wealthier to help the poor, undoing the tax cut that Bush passed that gave massive tax breaks to the very wealthy. After seeing a report recently that said that almost 10% of Americans live on less than $8000 a year, it is hard for me to whine about my high taxes.
I'd much rather have a president who knew what the GPL was and raised my taxes than a president who didn't know the difference between a computer and a calculator, but cut taxes blindly.
Re:The Great Thing About This (Score:3, Insightful)
Dean has done well so far by tapping online resources and communities. But remember that we haven't even started picking convention delegates yet. Once the primaries and caucuses start, Dean will have to find a way to get to all the voters and caucusers who aren't internet geeks. Maybe he can leverage his existing following into some kind of alternate campaign machine. But it's more likely that he'll just start spending money like any other candidate.
Misguided (Score:1, Insightful)
What about important issues like:
freedom of speech
privacy rights
abortion
Who cares what technology the politician supports? What about their moral character?
Re:I am impressed (Score:2, Insightful)
Anyway, Dean's first responsibility viz. taxes would be to roll back the tax cuts that have failed to revive the economy and, likely, will wind up hurting it by keeping the budget in deficit and adversely influencing interest rates. A healthy economy helps all of us, including geeks.
I would also beg to differ (heh) about the median income of geeks. It has been dropping over the past few years as many of our jobs are run by fewer people working longer hours, plus a general downturn in technology spending and investment. It is not taxes that have done this to us, but poor economic policy and predatory investment schemes.
Re:Well he's a democrat (Score:2, Insightful)
You're always free to donate that difference to the charity of your choice, or even to the government if you wish. Don't make that choice for me. I do not happen to agree with you, and don't appreciate you putting your hand in my wallet.
Besides, you are incredibly naive if you think wealth transfer schemes are effective at helping the poor. What they actually do is help some poor, make many more dependent on handouts, and feed the ravenous maw of an enormous, cancerous bureaucracy that dedicates the majority of its resources not to actually helping those in need, but to ensuring its own continued existence.
Private charity is always more efficient than government social programs; private charity lets people feel good about giving instead of resentful that their pocket is being robbed every Friday; private charity enables people to choose methods of giving that are most to their liking.
But, most of all, private charity lets people make their own choices about whether they actually need that extra money at the moment or not, because they are clearly the most informed people about their own needs.
I'd much rather have a president who knew what the GPL was and raised my taxes than a president who didn't know the difference between a computer and a calculator, but cut taxes blindly.
I'd much rather have a president who obeyed his oath to protect and defend the Constitution, and stopped enforcing unconstitutional laws providing for confiscation and redistribution of my wealth to those who didn't earn it.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Dean really needs to appear in Interviews on /. (Score:1, Insightful)
If he comes out against DRM/RIAA etc, his opponents will nail him as anti-business.
If he comes out *for* DRM/RIAA, you guys will nail him as here and generate plenty of juicy quotes for his opponents to use.
Re:Well he's a democrat (Score:2, Insightful)
If there was any evidence that decreased tax rates increased charitable donations, your scheme might work. As it is, they don't. Our society has chosen to provide a safety net for people who are down on their luck. You might not want to participate in funding that, but that's a decision not made from behind the veil of ignorance, so it's irrelevent.
The graduated income tax and the social welfare system are both constitutional, having been attacked numerous times and reaffarimed without comment by the Supreme Court just as many.
Re:Impressive: (Score:1, Insightful)
Except Dean HATES Clark. Clark is the 'Clinton Candidate' there to make sure Dean does not win. If Dean gets the nomination it means that McAuliffe and the Clintons lose control of the DNC. Clark is in the race to prevent that from occurring, and to save a spot for Hillary. If it looks like a Dem will get the WH in '04 then she will enter the race. Otherwise she would have to wait until 2012 to run for Pres.
Re:I am impressed (Score:2, Insightful)
At the same time a single-payer system saves the present, it destroys the future: a single-payer can dictate prices to providers, reducing profit margins to the point where no research can be done. I'm not willing to give up the chance to find a cure for cancer or heart disease just so people who didn't earn it can get free health care on my back. You'd be stupid to support this as well.
Besides, why should I support paying more for less? I have good health care. I don't want to step down to GuvmintCare, and would fight tooth and nail to keep that from happening.
If you're feeling so giving, why don't you buy health care for your starving friends? Too expensive? That's right: good health care is expensive! Imagine that! But instead of volunteering your own money dollar-for-dollar to pay for it, you're volunteering $0.05 of your own money and $0.95 of someone else's money. How noble of you!
The only reason you're willing to raise taxes to pay for all this crap is that you know you wouldn't be hit that hard by it, owing to the injustice of the progressive income tax system. If you had to pay 38% of your weekly paycheck in federal tax (in addition to 15% for FICO, plus ~5% in state tax, not to mention sales taxes, wealth/property taxes, etc.) and truly understood the downsides of government funding, I guarantee you'd be much less likely to support it.
And I certainly would not be happy to see yet more checks go out to people that are too small to actually make any difference in their lives, aside from maybe helping them make a single car payment, just to have a purely symbpolic tax cut to helps someones aproval rating while the deficit goes up again.
(1) Pay people more for doing nothing.
(2) ??
(3) Profit!
Re:Obligatory invention joke (Score:2, Insightful)
http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh120302.shtml
Re:Well he's a democrat (Score:1, Insightful)
So you disapprove of President Bush's asking for $87 billion of MY money to support his war in Iraq, correct?
Besides, you are incredibly naive if you think wealth transfer schemes are effective at helping the poor.
I'm not in favor of any wealth transfer schemes. But I do have a problem when the wealthy pay a smaller percentage in taxes than the lower and middle classes. [If you want to dispute that, use all taxes in your calculations not just income]
Private charity is always more efficient than government social programs;
The use of the word 'always' indicates to me that you haven't spent much time thinking about this issue and are simply spouting off nonsense you heard on talk radio.
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
Almost but not quite as irrelevant as the brand of Web server the candidate runs. I still think that Bush is going to really regret doing that stupid Top Gun stunt next November. It isn;t the uniform, its the way you wear it.
I see one big issue for the Open Source Community in the next election and it is not promoting open source. The big issue is PATENTS and Dean is at least listening to the right people here - Larry Lessig.
We don't want much here, we just want the USPTO to actually apply in practice the principles that it claims to apply.
Novel should mean novel, do something on the Internet that has been done for 20 years is not novel.
Prior review get rid of the secrecy in the process, all applications to be subject to a one year protest period, same as the Europeans do
You have to invent it there are a ridiculous number of speculative patents filled where the inventor has actually invented nothing. Typical cases are in the genetics field where the first person to sequience a gene often files a patent that claims the use of the gene to solve every imaginable ailment before the 'inventor' knows anything about what the gene does
Anyone care to claim a bigger priority? This is a platform that everyone can agree on from Redmond WA to Cambridge MA.
Faulty Logic (Score:3, Insightful)
The system works properly if everyone votes for whom they feel is the best candidate. Curbed voting like this puts less qualified, but more well known, candidates in office (probably why Bush is in office in the first place).
While I get where you're going, you're essentially contributing to the demise of independants or third parties. You're saying "It's no use, so don't bother."
You have to have some faith in democracy, even though it doesn't always work right.
Re:Holy shit (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually this is not excluded by Einstein, just that we have no idea how to do it. The key is the concept of space which is actually mutuable. There are ways that we already know about that can warp space in absolutely infintesimal ways. Could there be a way to do it on a large scale? Possibly. There are serious scientists who consider such problems.
Faster than light travel is certainly a much longer shot than fussion, we know that fussion is possible and the sun provides an existence proof. But faster than light is probably a much easier shot than building a missile defense system that can't be circumvented by the opposition. None of the proposals made so far work and none is capable even in theory of counteracting existing countermeasures such as the UK Chevalene warhead design that is so old it was recently withdrawn from service as obsolete.
What we are seeing here is an example of a classical smear attack. I strongly suspect that the original question was asked for the sole purpose of being able to trash Clark as a loony with an out of context quote. Karl Rove and his smear-team did the exact same thing with Gore last time round, they took a bunch of out of context quotes from Gore's ecology book and used them to claim that Gore was some sort of nut. In fact the prediction Gore made about the possible rise of the hydrogen economy and the decline of the internal combustion engine is far from fruitcake, thats why the Whitehouse included $100 million for H2 power research in the last budget.
Re:Well he's a democrat (Score:3, Insightful)
But, most of all, private charity lets people make their own choices about whether they actually need that extra money at the moment or not, because they are clearly the most informed people about their own needs.
It doesn't let all people make that choice.
Only those people with lots of money get to make that choice.
If you lived a month as a poor person you'd notice that your "choices" and your "opportunities" are rather more limited than what you've enjoyed to this point in your own life.
Many wealthy people will choose to keep their money rather than give it away. If the proposed changes in the estate tax laws are instituted you can guarantee that a signficantly larger number of wealthy people will exercise their free choice to give money to their own offspring rather than some charity. Count on it.
I prefer equal opportunity for everyone, so that anyone exercising the same hard work and intelligence gets the same pay off. But if you're not lucky enough to be born to the right parents then your "choices" and your "opportunities" are a lot different.
Yes, I earn my money. But it was in a society that provided me with a tax-sponsored public education system and government-guaranteed student loans (which, yes, I did pay back) that would not have existed but for taxes raised by the government.
Yes, wealth transfer schemes like welfare can breed a sick culture of dependence. If there's a good way to cut down on welfare fraud without instituting a bureaucracy, then you ought to let your elected representatives know the solution.
But if you eliminate welfare altogether, you'll start to see more beggars on the street dying from hunger and lack of medical attention. We can live just like they do in Brazil, which has private charities and gangs of five year old abandoned children running around the slums scavenging food.
I am one taxpayer that has benefitted substantially from the recent Bush tax cut and it disgusts me that such a tax cut is instituted at the same time that we're compounding the federal deficit at a record rate.
While the rest of the masses two decades in the future try to pay off the interest on that federal debt, the rich folks like you and me can simply sit back and collect interest on our T-bills. After all, we deserve it.
Clark IS a loony (Score:1, Insightful)
Clark will do himself in. Most of his statements are outright lies: he is living in a fantasy world. He is like Howard Dean: an incredibly mean liar who wants to make things worse, but unlike Dean he has no political experience, and he comes across as the latest Perot (or worse yet: Admiral Stockdale, Perot's very similar clueless running mate who also had military experience).
As for Gore, it was Gore who claimed that he himself invented the Internet. He didn't need Rove's help for this and other nutty claims (Love Canal, listening to not-yet-written union songs as a child, and all the rest of Gore's Zeligry).
"thats why the Whitehouse included $100 million for H2 power research in the last budget. "
This is just another $100 spent on corporate welfare. Don't you have a problem with this? This is one of those mistakes the Bush administration should not be making.
Re:Nice and all... (Score:3, Insightful)