I would actually re-phrase it as the problem is the voters are human. By that I mean, people are easily swayed by massive and often fraudulent advertising.

If you want to run for any office, the first thing you are going to be asked is how much money do you have. The best way to fix the problem that comes to my mind is to get money out of politics: Do not allow campaign contributions, do not allow massive advertising campaigns. Big money (large corps and the less than 1%) would have a much harder time working the US government as oligarchs without the massive amounts of money legally paid for elections. Without getting money out of politics, any gain will be a short term one. A huge grass roots campaign (OWA multiplied by x) may win short term gains. But as long as money is king in our politics, there will be lobbyist working 24/7 to push any gains back, while the rest of us are trying to live our lives.

Of course, the impossible question is how to get money out of a political system controlled by money. Most if not all of the big money interests that control US politics will obviously fight tooth and nail against any such change.

+1 to this. When I was just out of college, I interviewed at a company once where everyone was very friendly, including the VP I would be working for, up until I took the test he wrote. I got everything correct on the test and the VP became seriously angry. I was very confused. In retrospect, instead of continuing a polite interest for the rest of the interview, I wish I had just gotten up and left at that point. But definitely glad they didn't offer me the job, I may have taken it and that guy would have been awful to have as a boss.

Okay, I'll bite, off the top of my head without a whole lot of though:

* Don't allow any campaign contributions from corporations, business, entities, etc.

* Only actual human beings can contribute and drastically limit the contributions from any one person ($100 or less?), including the person running for office.

* Drastically limit the max amount of campaign funds allowed to a candidate.

* Possibly don't allow any money contributions at all, but allow a relatively small amount of public funding given to candidates with enough supporting signatures.

* Require media to have a certain amount of time per candidate via small number of commercials and debates.

Have more of an actual democracy instead of an effective plutocracy were money is used to buy votes (e.g. advertising) and has very explicitly become the main driver of our elections.

The theoretic free market also relies on a balance between buyers and sellers (lenders and debtors in this case). With the current government regulation, the balance between me and -insert large national bank here- is extremely one sided. I.e., it is not balanced and I'm definitely not on the winning side. To imagine that without any government regulation, it would be more balanced and not more unfair is (IMO, WTW) naive and historically ignorant.

In fact, you could argue that unions are playing and losing the
bribery game. This is a game that is won by the guy with the biggest
bankroll. And that's not unions. And that's very likely not anyone
that's reading slashdot either (or frankly any human in thu US +/-
0.01% of the population).

I find after reading this I can only repeat my (current) favorite
sarcasm:

"it's not even wrong"

sigh.

okay, I can't help myself. I'm not particularly knowledgeable about
religions, I just don't care that much. But, even I know religions
have changed dramatically over 1800 years. Even the Roman Catholic
one (you are Roman Catholic aren't you?, or perhaps Greek Orthodox?).
Pick one, any one, just like human societies, religions change over
time. Read a book for god's sake (more than the same one over and
over again helps).

Hmm sorry, that was a bit ranty, but the brittle "this has always been
the way we've taught this" goes with "we've always been at war with
King Henry the VIII". As far as evolution standing the test of time,
evidence for evolution goes back millions (okay you got me, billions?)
of years. Although, I'm sure that as we learn more, the theory will
be changed to better fit the new facts.

But that's kind of the point.

I think the GOP just gets a worse rap than the Democrats. But it's not because their individual goals are different than the Dems. It's just that when it comes to screwing the vast majority of the American people (~99% of us), the GOP is so much better at it than the Dems ;).

You just have to change the rules.

Two men enter and the one that comes out alive, loses.

Getting people to accept more oppression gives politicians more power

Perhaps, many within the IETF understand that NATs exist to generate more address space and they also provide some firewall-like security features. Perhaps some of them might even think that when the additional address space needs are unnecessary, the use of NATs as a firewall is also unnecessary. You might even just use, I don't know, something that is explicitly a firewall and not bother NATing.

If you really want security, having a device which functions explicitly for security might be better than, "Hey, I'm doing this NAT thing because I want more address space at home instead of that stinking single static (most people dynamic, sigh) IP my ISP is giving me. But now that I have 18 quintillion IP addresses at home I can't possibly get rid of NAT and use a firewall that blocks incoming connections because, ..., Bueller?"

My googlefu may be poor. I'd like to think that since I did this a few months ago, it has become more available since then. But it could be that my searching just kind of sucked. I had two problem though. One is that of the places saying they support DNSSEC, I had a very difficult time figuring out what that meant (they'll let you enter records on there site, you can have records in your own DNS (duh), or you can actually upload your DS records to your parent in some fashion). For the most part it looked like I would have to register domains at registrars to find out.

Time (maybe even laziness) was the other issue, particularly after a few conversations with the help contacts at different places. I figured I didn't want to spend the time to go from one person who has no idea what DNSSEC is to the next, to another, to finally someone who knows what it is but tells me they don't support it. I was pretty discouraged. Godaddy was the first one I found that had online instruction about what they did (upload DS records using a web based tool) so I went with them. But I figured there must be other choices. It didn't occur to me to ask slashdot at the time. But it did when the godaddy buyout came up.

This is good to know. When I looked at dyndns a few months ago, I was unable to find away to upload DS records to my parent. In fact, this appeared to me to be a registrar that would only support DNSSEC if it managed the DNS (which would already put it ahead of most at the time). I'm hoping this is a fairly recent change and it wasn't just my failure to figure it out at the time. I was a bit disappointed too, because I really like dyndns. It seems to me to be one of the more professional registrars (more interested in being a good registrar than in trying up-sell everything).

I have no points to mod up the parent, but I would like to ask the same question.

Does any other registrar support DNSSEC?

I've looked at register.com, 1and1, and dyndns, but godaddy was the only one that supported DNSSEC (and it was even simple to configure).

I don't really like defending the police. There are many cases of abuse. But this is a bad example. The Asian-style vegetable peeler in this case was in the shape of a cleaver with a 6" blade (10" overall) at the bottom and a second peeling blade in the middle. A picture I found of it was here:

http://protectsanjose.blogspot.com/2009/09/rose-by-any-other-name.html

An 88 pound woman could severely injure and/or kill two grown men with that. IIRC, she was coming at them with it held over her head. If someone was coming at me like that, I'd consider my life at risk. Now, I don't know what happened before that. I.e., police seem to have a need to 'dominate' any situation and I could imagine that behavior making an agitated person more agitated. There may have been a way to handle the situation leading up to the shooting better (I just don't know). But once she was coming at them with that thing, I can easily understand them thinking their life was in danger.