I got a new box on Slashdot this afternoon, thanking me for my 'positive contributions' and letting me turn off advertising because of them. Wait, there's advertising on the Internet now? When did that start?

So, what is your position on property ownership?
1.) Personal Property
I think, you work for it, it's yours. I help defend what you worked for from those who would take it unfairly, you do the same for me.
2.) Real Property
Natural resources should not be owned. If you are working an area, I'll ask if I can help and what the terms are before I help myself. If you claim an area you aren't working, I won't respect that unless you and I have made a personal deal to that regard. If someone tries to drive you from their land, I'll try to help you stop them, if you are willing to do the same for me.
3.) Intellectual Property
I'll always say where I got my ideas from. I'd like it if I could get some recognition for my good ideas.

Cooperation versus competition?
I think cooperation is almost always in an individual's self interest. Competition, of the form where some people have to 'lose' in order for others to win, is usually not in an individual's self interest, if it can be avoided.

Taking care of others?
I think desperate, frightened, hurt, or angry humans are the most dangerous thing on the planet. Making sure no one feels that way unnecessarily is in everyone's best interest. I resent people getting a free ride on the work some of us try to do making sure people aren't a danger due to desperation.

The free market?
A really good idea, in theory. However, a hybrid system where competition is balanced with cooperation is better for everyone. The benefits of such cooperation should be limited to other cooperators, and not extended to the ruthless and selfish.

That's a start.

I just love trolling libertarians. They are so easy to work up into a frothing rage. Like flat-earthers and creationists, they have to shut off all logical parts of their minds in order to go on believing their patently untrue and counter-factual ideology. This makes them easy pickings for trolls. Now, unlike most trolls, I actually believe what I'm writing. But that's beside the point. The point is, watching stupid people get angry is fun.

From this comment by gringofrijolero, I got the idea to do a whole 'wiki-dickory-sock' song, I figure 8-10 verses would do. So, first verse, taking gringofrijolero's verse and making it more Wikipedia specific:

Wiki-Dickery-Sock
Rules lawyers ran out the clock
We all got bored
"Yeah, you're the lord."
Wiki-Dickery-Sock

Then the verse I came up with:

Wiki-Dickery-Sock
Deletionists erased 'River_Ock'
The river's not notable,
Its water's not potable,"
Wiki-Dickery-Sock

Now to expand on the examples I came up with in the thread:

Wiki-Dickery-Sock
The vandals defaced 'Iraq.'
They said it was good
When Saddam got wood
Wiki-Dickery-Sock

Hmm, the original rhyme does end with the same nonsense line it begins with, but Andrew Dice Clay uses the last line for the punchline to good comedic effect, perhaps I should here.

Wiki-Dickery-Sock
The vandals defaced 'Iraq.'
They said it was good
When Saddam got wood
So we banned their whole IP block.

But then there is the difficulty in coming up with twice as many relevant and funny '-ock' rhymes. Cock and block only go so far.

Wiki-Dickery-Sock
Deletionists erased 'River_Ock'
The river's not notable,
Its water's not potable,
Put it on the chopping block!

Wiki-Dickery-Sock
Rules lawyers ran out the clock
We all got bored
"Yeah, you're the lord."
(of making us sleepy, you cock)

Thought for latter 'Trekkies aren't quite as logical as Spock.' Work it in somehow. 'Puppet masters brought out every sock' will make a good last line somewhere.

In an article in Infoworld, apparently Google's supposed openness has ended, as it has banned an application from its Android Market. "WiFi Tether for Root Users, an application developed by Seth Lemons and a partner, has been banned from the market for violating the developer distribution agreement. The application lets users connect their G1 Android phones via Wi-Fi to their laptops and then access the Internet from the laptop using the phone's cellular connection." Apparently this functionality violates T-Mobile's terms of service. The Android Market was apparently very open, the only requirement being to submit a $25 fee to be included, as opposed to the more stringent requirements for Apple's store.

The BBC World Service Saturday summary of their daily radio program The Strand has a section about a book (presumably in Portugese) from Brazil, by Monteiro Lobato called "The Black President," it's the story of how a white woman and a black man are fighting it out for election as President of the United States, and the black man wins, then follows his presidency. Oh sure, a fictionalized story about the current election and the contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama? Not really, since the book was written in 1926. As surprisingly prescient as the book was, the idea of race equality was so far fetched that in 1927 the author could not get a publisher interested in releasing an English translation in the United States; it was feared the book would have caused riots. How far we have come in 80 years. The article about the book comes about half-way (35 minutes) into the show, which you can get to listen to by the link for the show in this article.

So I'm sick, and instead of sleeping like a normal person I'm roaming the web because apparently that's in some way intelligent or something.

And I run across this poll by the economist, and I'd never seen this exact poll before, but I've seen about a thousand like it...It's basically a contrast of the American groupthink vs the European groupthink. In this case, it's the Brits.

First section is "Religion" and the third question is:

"Which explains the origin of the Earth?"
~30% of Americans and ~65% of the Brits said "Evolution"
~40% of Americans and ~10% of the Brits said "The Bible"
~20% of Americans and ~18% of the Brits said "Intelligent Design"

Now, to me there is only one right answer to that question: The fucking Bible.

Evolution is ..."the changes seen in the inherited traits of a population from one generation to the next. These changes are relatively minor from one generation to the next, but accumulate with each subsequent generation and can eventually cause substantial changes in the organisms." It's go no fucking thing what-so-ever to do with the origin of Earth or life on Earth.

Intelligent Design is too stupid and intellectually bankrupt to even rate a place on the list, so that leaves only the Bible, which, imho, is wrong, but the question doesn't say anything about accuracy so it remains the only thing on the list that correctly answers the question.

So, on the one hand, we have a bunch of people who think the sky fairy made everything. On the other hand, we have a bunch of people who think Evolution has something to do with the origin of fucking life!

Part of me hopes that the 10% or so who actually knew that the poll was horseshit hung up, or answered "Evolution" as a short-hand way of saying "Whatever scientific theory of abiogenesis has the most evidence behind it today." But in the end, the only thing the poll really says is that the cult of the jewish sheepfarmers is less popular in Britain than the cult of the toaster oven...And that 20% of both population groups believe whatever you tell 'em.

I guess I should take comfort in the fact that at least they're more secular over there, but all it really does is drive home the fact that, of any group of humans, the vast majority are completely ignorant at any given time, and that science can be just as irrationally religious as any religion.

So yesterday this article pops up, a piece of article trolling not-so-subtly designed to appeal to people like yours truly (wordy ego-driven serial karma-whores). So I bang out a reasonably obvious reply. Fine, mission accomplished.

Then along comes some AC who decides that I need some kind of affirmational literary blowjob which basically throws my trite and whorish soul into sharp relief, provoking a fit of cleansing-through-self-loathing which is immediately moderated to +5 insightful, and adorned with yet still more affirmation.

Truly, I am the king of whores. I don't do it on purpose, I just can't seem to stfu. I used to write a column in my college newspaper; at least those led to free beer and sex.

I post on the politics section of my blog a method I've discovered (or invented, take your pick) to provide verifiable, auditable, fraud-resistant, reliable secret elections that can be done simply and cheaply, without fragile complicated electronics, that you can get election results in most cases in the polling place as fast as 30 seconds after the end of the election, without even having to break the seals on the ballot boxes. You can also use automated equipment to count the votes. My method will even work in places with no electricity. I have not seen anyone else propose anything as easy or as basically inexpensive as this, that produces fast, reliable results in most cases. I summarize how it works below.

All you need are some transparent boxes with seals (padlocks or cable ties that have to be cut to be opened), some tokens - these can be coins or anything with a consistent weight - a cover to conceal the contents of the boxes so the voters can't see how others have voted, a booth so the voter can't be seen as to their vote, and (optionally) a scale.

You need one transparent box for each choice for each ballot question, for each voting booth. So if you have an election of 3 offices each with 4 candidates, and 2 ballot propositions or bond issues, we'd need 5 boxes for each office (one box for "write in"), and a "yes" or "no" box for each ballot proposition. So we need 19 boxes for each voting booth, and for each voter we need 5 tokens. Tokens might be different for any specific office or proposition to keep them from voting twice on any office or they only get one token at a time for each office or ballot proposition.

The voter selects which choice they want for each office or ballot question, and puts their token in the box for their choice, either a particular candidate or a yes/no proposition. At the end of the election, the boxes are removed, and you don't have to open them, or even break the seals to count the ballots, you just weigh the boxes! As each token and each box weighs the same, you know exactly how many votes they got without even needing to open the box. As the box is transparent, you can see the vote tokens so you know they haven't stuck other things in the box. Since each vote is a token, you can break the seal on the box and count them if you want. Since there's no electronics, there's nothing to break down or need repair. You can even get rid of the scale and just count the tokens, but by weighing the boxes, you can get an immediate total as soon as the election is over, as little as the 30 seconds it would take to move the box from the voting booth to the scale. And if you use coins or similar types of tokens, you can use ordinary coin-counting equipment for that size token to do automated counting.

Outside of things to do for fraud prevention and a few fixes to cover write-ins, you could run a whole precinct on a bunch of plastic boxes with cable ties, a few thousand coins (one for each person registered to vote, for each ballot question or candidate), a scale, some labels (to mark which box is which candidate or response for a ballot issue) some blankets (to cover the boxes to keep the existing vote secret) and some partitions for the booth (to keep the voter secret) if you had to.

Since I thought it up, I call it the "Robinson Method."

I give more details including fraud prevention points and some types of elections where this won't work on my blog, but the idea seems so simple, easy and cheap to do, that I'm wondering what I've missed, if anything.

--
Paul Robinson - My home page
"The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that no one learns the lessons that history teaches us."

I post on the politics section of my blog a method I've discovered (or invented, take your pick) to provide verifiable, auditable, fraud-resistant, reliable secret elections that can be done simply and cheaply, without fragile complicated electronics, that you can get election results in most cases in the polling place as fast as 30 seconds after the end of the election, without even having to break the seals on the ballot boxes. You can also use automated equipment to count the votes. My method will even work in places with no electricity. I have not seen anyone else propose anything as easy or as basically inexpensive as this, that produces fast, reliable results in most cases. I summarize how it works below.

All you need are some transparent boxes with seals (padlocks or cable ties that have to be cut to be opened), some tokens - these can be coins or anything with a consistent weight - a cover to conceal the contents of the boxes so the voters can't see how others have voted, a booth so the voter can't be seen as to their vote, and (optionally) a scale.

You need one transparent box for each choice for each ballot question, for each voting booth. So if you have an election of 3 offices each with 4 candidates, and 2 ballot propositions or bond issues, we'd need 5 boxes for each office (one box for "write in"), and a "yes" or "no" box for each ballot proposition. So we need 19 boxes for each voting booth, and for each voter we need 5 tokens. Tokens might be different for any specific office or proposition to keep them from voting twice on any office or they only get one token at a time for each office or ballot proposition.

The voter selects which choice they want for each office or ballot question, and puts their token in the box for their choice, either a particular candidate or a yes/no proposition. At the end of the election, the boxes are removed, and you don't have to open them, or even break the seals to count the ballots, you just weigh the boxes! As each token and each box weighs the same, you know exactly how many votes they got without even needing to open the box. As the box is transparent, you can see the vote tokens so you know they haven't stuck other things in the box. Since each vote is a token, you can break the seal on the box and count them if you want. Since there's no electronics, there's nothing to break down or need repair. You can even get rid of the scale and just count the tokens, but by weighing the boxes, you can get an immediate total as soon as the election is over, as little as the 30 seconds it would take to move the box from the voting booth to the scale. And if you use coins or similar types of tokens, you can use ordinary coin-counting equipment for that size token to do automated counting.

Outside of things to do for fraud prevention and a few fixes to cover write-ins, you could run a whole precinct on a bunch of plastic boxes with cable ties, a few thousand coins (one for each person registered to vote, for each ballot question or candidate), a scale, some labels (to mark which box is which candidate or response for a ballot issue) some blankets (to cover the boxes to keep the existing vote secret) and some partitions for the booth (to keep the voter secret) if you had to.

Since I thought it up, I call it the "Robinson Method."

I give more details including fraud prevention points and some types of elections where this won't work on my blog, but the idea seems so simple, easy and cheap to do, that I'm wondering what I've missed, if anything.

--
Paul Robinson - My home page
"The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that no one learns the lessons that history teaches us."

The Internet radio feed of the BBC World Service reported that a woman in Japan has been jailed after allegedly "murdering" her virtual husband whom she married on line. I found details which can be read in The Register at this article in which she was apparently upset at the man and allegedly decided to delete his "beloved" on-line character in the game Maple Story. She faces a fine of up to $5,000 and 5 years in jail for computer fraud. This may be the first time in recorded history - short of something involving a séance - where the victim of a "murder" could give live testimony at trial.

I seriously believe that someone is trying to sabotage Slashdot by making it decreasingly pleasant.

Exhibit A: the new-and-busted discussion system. I actually like it more than the old way for reading comments, but for writing comments it's almost maliciously bad. The new system's preview button is much slower than the old way, and the mandatory waiting time between posting comments is a lot longer than it used to be. The net result is that whenever you're eventually allowed to click the "Submit" button, if your comment doesn't go through immediately, you're stuck staring at a pink error message until the countdown is finished. The only thing keeping this tolerable is that you can middle-click on "Reply to This" to open the old-style comment form in a new window, but I don't know if this workaround is going to be left in place long-term.

Exhibit B: Idle. This is truly the worst interface I've ever seen on Slashdot, from the painful color scheme to the tiny fonts to the difference between the markup used in comments between Idle and the rest of Slashdot. For example, the <quote> tags are treated like <p> in Idle, so there's no visible difference between text you're quoting and your own words. I don't even mind the content so much because it can be an amusing diversion, but wow, the implementation is just terrible.

No, I contend that the new changes are deliberately designed to drive away readership. I don't think that the Slashdot admins are incompetent, so I'm convinced that this is on purpose.

All I want for Christmas

I have posted a really comprehensive entry on my blog explaining how we got into the mess that requires that banks need a huge bailout to cover their blunders. It's fairly easy to read and you might consider it a bit humorous. Some quotes:

• Recent reports of the $700,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bailout of the U.S. banking system compels me to write a little about how finance works in the U.S.
• The occurrence of severe local depressions caused the "Federal Reserve Act" (1913) to establish a national bank so that now, the Federal government had the power to change what would be local depressions into national ones.
• If you ever saw the bank run as shown in Its A Wonderful Life you'll know that a bank doesn't have the deposits in the vault, they've loaned out their depositors money. Before deposit insurance, if too many depositors show up, the bank closes its doors, and the banker tries to run out of town before the angry depositors lynch him.
• Upton Sinclair's 1907 book The Jungle tells of a scam that mortgage brokers used on unsuspecting immigrants. (That it doesn't look much different from the scams mortgage brokers use today shows how little imagination mortgage brokers have.)
• Originally, you had to have a good job and good credit to get credit cards; if you didnt, your friendly neighborhood ghetto department store sold you junk and financed you at rates that, until now, were basically just south of usury. Today you can get over-the-phone loans from companies that advertise on TV at interest rates that would embarrass a loan shark, [who could never be anywhere near that greedy].
• The joke [in the 1980s over the S&L crisis] was if you wanted to rob a bank, you were better off looting it, because armed robbery was a crime but using your friends to loot a bank was likely to not be prosecuted.
• Those with money had a field day screwing around with the bankruptcy laws to make them less favorable to the debtor and more favorable to the guy who was owed money. Those of us who didnt have the money to pay lobbyists to protect us got screwed.
• Lets you and I open a bank with $1,000 between us. If theres a 5% reserve, we have to deposit $50 with the Federal Reserve and can loan out $950. Thats how you might do it, but Im smarter than that; I figured out a way to legally loan out money we dont have, a practice that in other industries would get you 3-5 in Baltimore's Supermax prison for fraud, but perfectly legal as long as you're a bank.

Today Fannie and Freddie are being bailed out. A Sunday, no less. I can hear the chuckling all the way from Greenwich CT, and the D.C. and Dallas suburbs.

I quote the associated press, in wondering why these two titans of mortgage-backed securities have come to need help from you, the taxpayer:

"How could you look at an enormous rise in prices and not think there was a potential for them to fall?" said Christopher Thornberg, a principal with Beacon Economics in Los Angeles.

Gee, good question Yogi. How about because it's actually kind of fun to take risks when there is no actual downside?

Apparently, everybody knew the government was going to bail them out if they ever got in trouble.

Pretty good racket. How can I get in? LOL.

I can't come here and argue that we shouldn't bail them out. Only that they never should have existed in the first place.

Did they really do something the market couldn't have done for itself? And suppose they really did. Since it was apparently an open secret all along that they represented the US Treasury, why were they not simply wholly a part of the government? You know, in good times and in bad?

Ah, but if they were a government agency, then those guys in Greenwich CT, and in VA and TX would have to find a different job, rather than robbing on your tax money (both paid and prospective).

But lest you all think I'm just here to bring everyone down, I do have one good suggestion. Why don't we all write to our senators and ask them how long it will be before the people involved in both running and regulating Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will be in prison?

I mean, I assume even though they stole billions of dollars from us, rather than a car stereo, they're still thieves, right? And I think they haven't even gone into hiding yet.

I just want to try to instill some discipline lest we have an even wilder, more unruly orgy of treasury looting.