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Government

Submission + - Governance By Website Instead Of Politicians?

An anonymous reader writes: When the internet spread out to mainstream population, it did not take long for politicians and activists to start using it as a way to communicate to their constituents, to organize supporters, and more recently even to solicit input. Then as collaborative technologies began to develop, some people started to wonder what exactly we needed the politicians for. After all, complex projects like Wikipedia and SlashDot are driven in large part by the user-base, not a small group of overlords. So why can't every governance system be open to input from everyone? Over the past couple of years, this movement has been crystalizing in the Metagovernment project, and now they have brought together numerous software projects (most in late Alpha) which are actively building governance systems meant to operate with little or no input from elected leaders. It should be pointed out that none of these systems are majority-rule or referenda systems: they are much more complex collaborative decision-making systems, deliberately designed to avoid the pitfalls of traditional direct democracy. The group has also compiled a much longer list of related projects. So, what is the future of the idea of "open sourcing" human governance: doomed, possible, or inevitable?

Comment Re:Riiiight. (Score 1) 882

What's causing traffic is the drivers in the other lanes that do not let or make difficult for the other drivers to merge. It's more efficient for traffic to merge in one point (preferably the end) than to merge at a bunch of different points over that 1/4 mile. Like a zipper! This is why you see solid white lines before merge points at interchanges.

Comment Re:Liability (Score 3, Interesting) 198

The ID scan itself is already of shaky legal status, but the most troubling issue here is that the ID information from the scan (name, address, etc) is retained by the club in a private database.

I have received junk mail as result of my ID being scanned at a night club in PA. Luckily that night club has since closed and I no longer receive it. Ironically, they had to close because of fines from serving too many underage drinkers over time. They also lost business because of regular police raids. Who wants to keep going to a club where there buzz is killed from a police raid.

Comment Re:Road signs (Score 1) 519

Just like using a calculator in math class... it's how you use the tool. I turn off the voice on my gps in areas I'm somewhat familiar with, but would like to learn the streets better. I turn it onto the bird's eye view to get more of a feel for which direction I'm travelling (don't look at it enough to get my eyes off the road). I use the displayed turn by turn direction at the top to know what the next road to look for is (do not look at it again until I need to know the next turn). GPS is a guide for me not a crutch.

Incidentally, I was thinking about buying my Dad a GPS for Father's day last month, but I know how much joy he gets from giving directions to other people.

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