Heard about this?

http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/

Supposedly they're shipping right now, but I'm waiting for someone to post a video review.

As it is, the only voice they hear are those of lobbyist for major media companies who want laws like this on the books.

Are you seriously making the argument that the poor little Congressmen's minds are confused about basic right and wrong because they're overwhelmed with the voices of lobbyists?

They're not confused, they're complicit. To be fair, so are the cops that arrest people for crap like this, judges that don't throw out cases like these, and juries who convict people on charges like these.

No.

See police, courts, and speeding tickets.

See patents and the patent office.

See the monstrosity called US Code and US Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Written by lawyers, which coincidentally, takes an army of lawyers to manage.

Well said.

I read someone here, can't remember who, talking about how another trick they use is passing things late at night with only a few members present. Of course, they all know it's happening and would stop it if they wanted, but it's a way to pass something and deflect heat from most of the legislators.

Things like this convince me that legislative rules should be outlined in the Constitution, even at the price of making it more verbose. The system should be biased against temporarily appearing to support something, then backing off.

An easy way to stop the problem of things passing with a handful of votes is to just require an absolute number of votes to pass. So if we want simple majorities, then each bill in the House should require 218 votes to pass. Abstaining the vote is effectively a NO vote, which is how it should be IMO.

Anyway, if you think the House is bad, I come from Texas, where the State Reps and Senators openly cast votes for each other.

It's only been a few weeks since the law dubbed Zugangserschwerungsgesetz (access impediment law)

Consistently separating words by spaces became a general custom about the tenth century A.D., and lasted until about 2009, when Germans abandoned the practice.

Slashdot has a char limit on sigs, but my original list also included left, right, and fascism. I wanted to compare them to "cracker" and how they've lost their meaning and are just used to balkanize people, but it would have been way too long with all of that.

FWIW, I wrote in Paul for President last time, as well as voted for him in the primaries (and had to register as a dirty Republican to do it), although I don't agree with everything he says or does. Even though he's not a Libertarian, both him and the Libertarians seem to think there really isn't anything that government does well. I don't quite go that far.

But he's the first politician that ever motivated me to vote, and that says something, I guess.

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/u_s_holds_going_out_of_business

It's not so much that the good, competent people aren't usually willing to improve things, as if they need some catalyst. It's that, most of the time, the (for lack of a better word) shitty people will fight the good, competent people tooth and nail until the situation is so obviously bad that it can't be denied and can't be sustained. And the shitty people vastly outnumber the good, competent people.

Anything else would be a premature admission of guilt on the part of the shitty people. They won't admit guilt until they're backed into a corner.

Anyway, this is what usually happens, there are exceptions of course.

I'd like to know exactly which central banks we're doing those swaps with, so I emailed his office and asked them to give me a link to the report they're citing in the video. If they give me a link I'll post it.

As far as currency swaps, they essentially amount to arbitrage on the part of whichever central bank is inflating their money supply the fastest. AFAICT, it should be legislators in other countries jumping their central banks for doing currency swaps with us. We seem to be getting the better deal here.

Found this about currency swaps, take it FWIW:
http://www.marketskeptics.com/2009/04/fed-using-currency-swaps-to-boost.html

If you're not familiar with the process of binary diff (I wasn't) there's a paper linked from the article that explains some about bsdiff:

http://www.daemonology.net/papers/bsdiff.pdf

Wayback from 2007/07/09:
http://web.archive.org/web/20070709234208/http://www.daemonology.net/papers/bsdiff.pdf

The one thing that has been correlated to curbing population growth to replacement levels, education, is denied to the third world. The Anglo-American axis has had policies for decades that deny educational, economic, and technological growth to the third world.

And this hits the point, it's all lies:

Tighter control of the internet:
Stated reasons - kiddie pr0n, terrorism, "cyber-bullying"
Real reasons - control of the means of communication

Gun control:
Stated reasons - reduce crime
Real reasons - disarmament of potential resistance

No fly list:
Stated reasons - terrorism
Real reasons - removal of presumption of innocence and right to a trial by jury, control of the means of transportation, expanding the list in the future (they're trying to expand it to gun control right now)

Drug war:
Stated reasons - protect the women and children
Real reasons - PROFIT!!ONEONE, removal of presumption of innocence, control over populace (Rand style "everything's a crime") through selective enforcement, excuse to build a police state

Invasion of Afghanistan:
Stated reasons - Bin Laden, Taliban
Real reasons - Unocal pipeline, encirclement of Russia and China

Invasion of Iraq:
Stated reasons - 911, wmd
Real reasons - send a message to oil exporters thinking about trading in non-USD currencies

The overpopulation, global-cooling-climate-warming-change (the wing dedicated to carbon taxes, not the people who genuinely care about environmental damage, and want to see real solutions) is no different. Ask yourself, why are we even debating carbon credits when the following three things have not happened in America:

1) Nuclear power plants have sprung up like wildfire, run by national/state governments for the benefit of the people, like water service in many cities
2) Trillions of have dollars have been spent researching batteries for cars, solar cells, better software and net infrastructure for telecommuting, rather than given to the financial establishment
3) America finally gets a real high speed rail network, like every other grown up country in the world

The reason that we're going to have carbon taxes, yet we have not done these things (1 and 3 we have the tech for already) is because, shock, they don't care about the environment or overpopulation!

Here are some suggestions:

We could build nuke plants.
Nuclear is icky. NIMBY.
But what if we put it in the woods and cordoned off a 10 mil--
No, ICKY. Next.

We could build high speed rail to move freight more efficiently and take huge rigs off the Insterstate highways. We could have high speed rail ports in LA, and bring in our crap from China through there rather than trucking it in from Mexico.
La la la, I can't hear you!

We could stop funding the IMF, which has a history of crushing development in the third world. This would allow them to get educated and start doing things more efficiently. It would also curb population growth in a completely humane and voluntary way.
The IMF is a cornerstone of the international finance system!

We could abolish patents, or at least stop trying to enforce them on the third world through the WTO. They obviously can't pay anyway, but giving them free reign over technology could really speed up their development.
Intellectual property is the new backbone of the American economy. It's what allows us to synergize our enervations in dynamic environments! And pretty soon (any day now), we're going to have magical replicators, raw materials will all be commodities, and IP will be the only meaningful property.

Magical replicators?
LA LA LA!

We could plan our cities and towns much better to leave more room for bikers and walkers. Of course, to do this, we would have to stop the oil-for-USD system. Otherwise Americans wouldn't have any economic incentive to do it.
But that would crash the entire economy! *

We could fund public domain open source software to make telecommuting much easier. We could nullify the patents on h264.
You want to give the people a Just Works open source OS? But how will we control that OS vicariously through the company that makes it? And you want to give the plebs even more encryption? What are you hiding on your hard drive, citizen?



This whole overpopulation/carbon tax agenda, and in general, the agenda across much of the world right now, is nothing but neofeudalism: control of the means of production, transportation, and communication.

The domination of all things economic, intellectual, and military by, surprise, surprise, a tiny elite.

* This one is actually true.

This capability is especially convenient for managing network overload due to P2P traffic. Conventionally, P2P is filtered out using a technique called deep packet inspection, or DPI, which looks at the data portion of all packets. With flow management, you can detect P2P because it relies on many long-duration flows per user. Then, without peeking into the packets' data, you can limit their transmission to rates you deem fair.

If routers started doing this, wouldn't torrent clients just start randomizing their port numbers? According to him, different port numbers will get counted as a different "flow". I'd think, if they wanted to do this, they'd at least have to look at IPs, port numbers are easy to change.