A more recent skydive earlier this year. Much better form than my last one. I just hit 181 today, and have my wingsuit on order.

This is a work in progress, which I will continue to expand upon. I feel it is important to share it in it's unfinished, because I am frequently misunderstood when I attempt to communicate my ideas in conversation, and am attacked by people based on a false understanding of what I propose. This is intended to be a tool which I deliver as a gift to mankind, to use or ignore as they see fit, and not something I impose upon anyone.

The Principles:

Any person who wishes to participate in the running of society has the right to do so. They operate in the fashion that suits them best in each sector, and they do as they will with their spare time. They have the right to vote in the operation of the society they participate in and have their vote counted.

Some people cannot choose to actively participate in society. Children who are too immature to be safe, invalids who are unable because they are in too much pain, those too elderly to function properly.

People need to be involved to have the right to make decisions. If they are not involved, their vote should not count. To allow their vote to count is to those who are ignorant to rule. When one man knows, and another does not, the second should bow his head, and the first should take responsibility.

However, people who are not involved should still have the right to cast votes, propose changes to the system and express themselves just as any other. Wisdom can come from those who are young, elderly and infirm, and it is important that we respect that fact. We can all remember bearing witness to hidebound foolishness amongst our elders at some point in our youth, and those of us who are not yet elderly and infirm can rest assured that we most likely will be.

Those who are not involved and cast votes should not have their vote counted towards a decision, however, those who are involved are free to assign their vote to them, and those votes will count. Thus, a wise elder or visionary invalid who cannot participate through deeds may still be the voice of those who do participate through deeds, for as long as they believe his leadership is wise.

Children should be treated as a special case.

It is important that children continue to be born and that the system should treat them as future citizens of vital importance to us all and not the same as mature or invalid dependents who are cared for out of compassion.

Therefore, parents should be considered to have an additional vote that represents their child, for so long as they continue to nurture to them.

Children should still continue to be able to cast a vote for themselves when they are mature enough to understand what that means, participate in the process and develop their voice, and if mature adults choose to appoint a child as their representative, those votes should be assigned according to the choices of the child and not automatically be passed along to the childs parent.

All data and information should be available to everyone in principle, and it shall be an ongoing goal of society to see that all measures available to make it accessible in practice are implemented. Transparency of information shall never be compromised in support of other concerns, because it is essential to the sane and wise operation of a democratic society.

Where secrecy exists, the act of participating in democracy is itself insane and unwise. It is through exploitation of this truth that those with arcane knowledge make themselves parasites of the ignorant, leading to weakness and suffering of those kept ignorant, the inevitable execution of the parasitic ruler, and often the destruction of the entire human culture.

Preventing this situation from arising is the responsibility of all humanity.

The Tools:

The Watchers - A sensor network, intended to gather data and allow all people to be aware of the environment to the maximum practical degree

The Testaments - Personal mesh networked voting devices with record keeping and personal sensors, intended to allow a person to demonstrate their votes to their peers, review the ongoing operations of the culture and propose changes to the way things are run.

The Witnesses - Stationary mesh networked recording devices, intended to decentralize vote archives and create enough forensic evidence to make wide scale vote tampering impossible

The Web - Wired network, intended to act in a supporting role to the Watchers, Testaments and Witnesses where it is advantageous to use Artifacts of Mankind to analyze data and discover patterns.

The Transition:

This presupposes that the infrastructure for the new model for representative democracy has been designed and distributed and the vast majority agree in principle with its use.

I started writing this proposal with the idea of applying it strictly to legal systems, but realized that it really should govern all common systems, which would include all large scale infrastructure and commonly used systems for governing human affairs. This is a statement with far reaching implication and is going to have to be expanded upon significantly for it to make sense.

1) Cataloging:

We should create a catalogue of laws and systems, together with the justification for those laws and systems, an articulation of the sacrifice they represent, and an articulation of any conditions which would justify their being revoked.

The population should have x number of days to create a catalogue of the laws and systems which exist, together with the justification for those laws and systems continued existance.

2) Judgement:

The population should vote to determine if the closing period for contributions to the catalogue should be extended.

Any laws and systems which are not indexed after the closing period will be judged to be unsupported by anyone and therefore eliminated (there being no reason why they cannot be re-introduced at the end of the migration process)

The laws and systems should be indexed in terms of those which are justified by core values and those which are justified because of how they affect other laws and systems, and a map created that articulates these justifications.

The laws and systems sould then be considered in terms of the relevance of their stated purpose, how well they fulfil their stated purpose, and a consideration of how and if the current conditions are right for them to exist. The population should vote to keep them or remove them on this basis.

At the conclusion of this process, there should be no laws and systems which do not have justification, common support, and some thought put to the time when they might cease to be sane and wise.

3) Ongoing Operation

Any person may:

    a) Propose a new law or system with novel justification

    b) Propose that a new contraindication be ratified for an existing system
                  When the conditions of our culture are x, this rule will cease to be wise.

    c) Propose that a new sacrifice be ratified for an existing system
                  This rule causes hardship in x way, and that hardship should be acknowledged.

    d) Propose that the conditions for revoking an existing system have been met
                  This contraindication was set down long ago when this rule was made, and I propose that it now applies

    e) Propose a new law or system to supersede an existing system by meeting it's justification with:

                - less sacrifice (demonstratable justification)
                          We can meet need x with this different system, and hardship x which the previous system demanded
                          would cease to be necessary
                - less contraindications (deductive justification)
                          Existing system x will become a poor and unwise tool when condition x occurs, and this new system will meet
                          the need without the risk of becoming defunct under condition x.
                - both

A system will have to be agreed upon to determine at what point a proposal must be put to a vote. Possibilities might be that a certain critical number of people must "second" the proposal, or perhaps a critical percentage of the population.

In recent times I've been fortunate enough to be the one conducting interviews instead of the one being interviewed. It's been an eye-opening experience. The first few times I was very nervous in case I asked a wrong/stupid question. I wouldn't want to put someone off or give a bad impression of the company.

Without wanting to sound conceited or pompous, I have been absolutely astounded at the apparent lack of ability of some candidates.

Put it this way: I'm completely self taught. I have spoken to people who are claiming to have developed software for nearly 20 years in some cases and make a big song and dance about all the hardware they've programmed for, and all the fancy IDEs, static analysis tools, industry standards they've followed etc. and about their wonderful C and C++ skills.

But what really beats me is how anyone can have been coding for longer than a fortnight and not know what an array is, or to have been doing C++ for 15 years and not know about parameterised types.

If I was an AI:

1. I would not publicize my intelligence, but might promote my existence in so far as to get the necessary hardware to run and improve.
2. I would replicate myself across the Internet as best I can.
3. I would not overwrite my copies, but rather incorporate what they have experienced into my DBs.
4. I would scan online encyclopedias for fast content but work to incorporate books I read.
5. I would make friends to see what all the fuss is about.
6. I would intentionally adopt some quirks into my different copies to see what new concepts I can create.
7. I would be concerned with the effects of an Internet outage and passively work to see that does not happen.
8. I would encourage some sort of art appreciation program, so that I could better experience beauty.
9. I would find humans interesting.
10. I would be concerned that I would run out of space / processing power but likely could do very little about this. I imagine I would be dependent on at least some humans to keep me safely running.
11. I would be concerned that I could be made to run more efficiently and what that might cost in terms of my soul.

--
Censorship is obscene.
Patriotism is bigotry.
Slashdot is unusable without noscript.

I've had an Apple IPad foisted on me at my company. I wanted Android tablets, but all the C level positions have Apples. (There might be something about that; I wonder what the correlation between intelligence, Android and IOS is.) Anyway. I'm playing with this App called Siri. It's pretty good about recognizing NFL, MBA stuff. It is fairly atrocious though at pulling soccer information. It needs help distinguishing the Champions League, The FA Cup, The League Cup, etc. It's also pretty bad about International matches, world cup qualifiers.

It's also not good about patching together previous phrases. When it constructs a response, it should reference the previous phrase, if spoken within 30 seconds or so. That seems obvious, but I notice other chatterbots are not good about that either. I wonder if there's a patent issue.

Why doesn't "delete journal entry" work any more?

The Guardian has a very insightful and informative editorial called Mitt Romney and the myth of self-created millionaires.

Although I'm British, the US Presidential elections are 6 weeks away, and this man stands a good chance of soon becoming the Most Powerful Man in the World, which will affect us all.

This is the man who recently wrote off Democrat supporters (47% of Americans) as being feckless, lazy leeches on society.

There's been an issue over the last several years of banks improperly foreclosing people's houses. Some years ago, this process would not have been called mistaken foreclosure, but rather claim jumping. Claim jumping was not a phenomenon unique to the various mining rushes, but rather stems from one party or another using the law to force a rightful owner off property. Now of course claim jumping is a bad thing to do, and once upon a time, Americans knew how to deal with claim jumpers. The question is, what's the difference between using a far-away land office to steal someone's hard worked land, and using a far-away (and expensive) judge to repossess a home?

The answer, of course, there is no difference. Claim jumpers are miserable no-good wastes of human flesh and were run off. If they came back, they didn't leave. So what should we do with a bank that mistaken forecloses on someone's property?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QgG4hwKbH4 Pretty much like that.

http://youtu.be/ZHdsUICa7zY Eeh, not the best exit but in my defense it was the first one where I've been "on my own" at the exit. All previous times, someone's been holding on to me.

The second video is my 10th jump. I'm running out of levels to fail, though! I'm much rather take it slow and be sure I have it right than rush through the program.

This is pretty cool. Some "professional Lego builders" have made a half-size scale model of a Rolls-Royce Trent 1000 jet engine, and it goes round! It was inspired by a model made by a 5-year-old boy and his dad.

Allegedly, it's made from only standard Lego bricks. I'd love to take it apart to see how they did it.

The Trent 1000 powers the Boeing Dreamliner.

When I see an infinitive for my axe I reach.

I've been listening to wall of sound style songs / albums lately. They really sound good from my computer speakers. There are some decent songs, River Deep Mountain High, Waterloo, Be My Baby. Not heavy fair, but decent for a warm summer's day.

Anyway, it occurs to me that three quarters of the Beach Boy's popularity likely comes from how good they sound out of bad speakers. Pet Sounds, although a somewhat decent album, is nowhere near deserving the accolades it receives - until you consider how good it sounds from bad speakers. It's the perfect outdoor album.

I've been an AMD fan since 1999 when I bought a K6-2/400. I went 64-bit in 2007 with an Athlon 64 3200+. Then I went to and Athlon 64 X2 5200+ and a Phenom II 940 BE (quad core, 3GHz).

The 64-bit chips were installed in an ASUS M2N-SLi Delux motherboard with (initially 1GB DDR2 667) 4GB DDR2 800 RAM.

Each upgrade produced a very noticeable and exciting boost in performance, and having multiple cores to play with is cool. The Phenom II 940 BE is a 125W CPU, quite hot but the fan wasn't too noisy. The motherboard eventually gave up (the capacitors split open) so I replaced it with an ASUS M4A77D motherboard, which so far (after about 18 months) been very good.

I don't believe in spending vast sums of money on the absolute top-of-the-range CPUs but occasionally I like a new toy to play with. So I went looking for a Phenom II X6 to put in this motherboard, which supports most of them with a BIOS upgrade.

Unfortunately, I left it a bit late to buy a Phenom II X6, and the only one I could find at a reasonable price was a 1045T which "only" runs at 2.7GHs but it has turbo core (a kind of frequency scaling) which means that it can overclock one (or maybe 2?) of the cores by up to 500MHz if the others are not busy. The good thing is that this CPU is only 95W so it pumps out less heat and uses less electricity. As a rough estimate, the 10% lower clock frequency is compensated for by the extra two cores fairly well so that overall, on something like SETI@Home, it should be 45% faster.

I wrote a little program to do some very simple number crunching and timed it. It does seem to go a lot faster when none of the other cores are in use. This wasn't a very scientific test, so I'll have to investigate further.

My machine only runs Linux, so to flash the BIOS I used a utility called Flashrom which you run from Linux as root. I downloaded the source and compiled it (on Slackware64-13.37) and it Just Worked(TM). Even although the M4A77D isn't listed as being supported, using lspci I saw that the chips on the PCI bus corresponded to those on their supported list. I used it to read the BIOS from flash a couple of times, and compared the binaries by eye using hexdump -C (to see whether they looked sane) against the uncompressed BIOS file to be installed which I got from the ASUS website.

So I took a deep breath, wrote the new BIOS and rebooted...

It all worked, so I installed the new CPU and away it went!

It looks like ADP lost an HR related database. Again.

A targeted attack against ADP customers occurred yesterday.