liketechnothrillers?

How about a real-life technothriller story with secret codes, international intrigue, and factionalism and personality conflicts in the face of a devastating global threat? It has 1337 haxxors, and a non-government, not-for-profit, adhocratic organization working for good. And the ending ominously warns, "it's not over yet."

From the pages of Wired

h8enoughforya

(Since the topic doesn't seem to be disappearing from the news...)

I say let the enemies of freedom have their short-lived victory in California. The last time it came to a vote, their side had sixty-something percent, this time they had fifty-something percent. In a few years gay marriage will come to popular vote again and they will lose.

Look for social conservatives to become more and more obviously desperate as they look around and realize that their whole philosophy is dead in the water if people born after 1970 take a liking to this whole democracy thing.

thecommunitynuke

Here's something they can stick in that huge pit in Sugarhouse.

http://www.dailytech.com/Miniature+Nuclear+Reactors+to+be+on+Sale+Within+5+Years/article13389.htm

? ...fail?

Hmm... interesting... Blogger seems to be a few minutes ahead of TribTalk.

timestampandvote

Just another little thing I want published and timestamped here before it's uploaded to a forum controlled by someone else:

It is especially imperative in a free society that the election process be totally open. The basic balloting process where everyone writes their choice down, the votes are counted and the totals announced is very open. Anyone can understand how it works, and think of any possible places where it might run into problems, and suggest ways to deal with those problems.

Closed-source voting machines are inimical to a free society. Their inner workings are secrets known only to their "owners." Any accidental or deliberate problems in their operation are concealed from the people.

All democratic processes should be open, therefore if electronic voting machines are used, every aspect of their design and programming must be open. The law should require that only voting machines based on public domain hardware and software may be used (or at the very least they must be under an open license such as CC or GPL).

And this law should be retroactive. All hardware specs and software code associated with any machine ever used in a legal election should be ordered to be released into the public domain or at least an open license.

And if the government instead colludes with these corporations to keep the voting machines secret, then any citizen in a position to do so is morally justified and perhaps even morally obligated to "pirate" the hardware designs and software code and release them to the public.

The Limits of Power

Excellent Bill Moyers interview on PBS. Link is to part one. Part two is another link on the page.

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/09262008/watch.html

todaysheadspace

My lengthy contribution to the discussion of this piece in the Tribune:

A lot of anarchist and libertarian socialists criticized Marx, and Lenin all the more, for creating a dictatorship of the bureaucracy. Republicans don't know what socialism is, but neither do liberals. The socialist spectrum is as or more diverse than the conventional American political party divides.

Bringing up Linux as a claim against socialism is interesting, because the OS must be understood in the context of Software Libre. While under the lens of capitalism, all the developers retain ownership of their code contributions, the open source licenses mean they have effectively ceded that ownership to the masses. FLOSS forms a whole information economy that works according to one of the basic premises of socialism --collective ownership of the means of production. What's interesting is that capitalistic businesses have voluntarily subsumed themselves to this system, operating on services in an environment where copyleft licenses have blurred the idea of property. So you have capitalist subsystems in a socialist node created out of capitalist law. Software Libre works in the capitalist world, often outperforming proprietary models, and embodies the best ideals of bottom-up socialism.

The whole internet runs on open source. It's often referred to as the LAMP stack (linux, apache, mysql, perl/php/python). I like to speculate that as science and technology improve, manufacturing is going to become cheaper and easier until it's effectively a home industry. Information will be the only thing of trade value, and that information will be open source. It will be socialism by default.

I believe in markets, but I believe most in the marketplace of ideas. That means free exchange, not making ideas into commodities. The sciences and arts must be open source. Information wants to be free.

thebigO

No mere president is going to put the country on the right path (whatever you think that is.) To a disturbing extent, elections serve to convince people they've had all the voice and choice they need, deserve, or are capable of exercising, so they'll stop clamoring and let those who already have power get on with using it.

Still, the choice of leader is informative about what kind of society people want to have, which can help you decide how better to share your ideas and ideals with them.
While there are no saviors, a president does have impact, and I think on the whole an Obama presidency would cause less harm and more good than a McCain presidency.

assoandsosays

There are roughly two motives in quoting someone. In one you expect the esteem for the person to lend credence to the words. In the other you expect the words to be judged on their own, and the attribution is merely giving credit where credit is due --and perhaps to affect the esteem for the person.
The first approach is authoritarian. The second is the ideal of rational discourse.