:wq!

(_nobody_ else STR?)

It is also wrong because it is the responsibility of each voter to not use his vote selfishly, but to try to benefit the community

But imagine if they could give tax breaks selectively, only to the people who helped them get re-elected! That would be pretty fucked up.

Yeah, it's a good thing that politicians never enact tax breaks or subsidies that selectively benefit groups that donated to their campaigns!

but corruption at one level is a damn childish excuse for condoning it at another.

I used to know a great word for abusing a bad set of rules, umm, degenerate I think. A game with bad rules "degenerates", it doesn't corrupt. It simply becomes something pointless that no one (with morals) wants to play. Sound familiar?

cheers,
ai731

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Also, the point is that it's the same people who do take bribes to do various things in the government for large corporations, which is corruption. In addition, I really think that politicians should have better things to do than crack down on people TALKing about selling votes in jest, such as, say, cracking down on massive crack peddling and murders. Or would you say that this is more important than that?

Chris Hagar

While the rest of the world rushes to embrace the Eureka 147 digital audio broadcast (DAB) standard, America has floundered for years to develop its own digital system. Why this departure? Greed.

The Eureka system uses a single transmitter facility that is used by all broadcasters in a geographical area. Each of the participants in the system also share a common coverage area. Everyone competes on the basis of the quality of the programming they offer and not the signal available to listeners.

By contrast, powerful, entrenched American broadcasters detest the idea of fair competition. The huge corporate multi-station operators (MSO's) that own hundreds of local radio stations each, have oligopoly power and intend to keep it. They own the big, powerful stations in each market, and dominate the airwaves.

Small stations, which don't have the broadcast reach of their MSO competitors, are left marginalized by the current scheme. Thus, the choices available to the listening public are limited by technical constraints. It matters not whether the smaller broadcaster offers superior programming.

The iBiquity system is designed to perpetuate this order. All it does is piggyback a digital audio signal on the existing analog one. The result is the degradation of the analog signal. This is done so that a digital signal that is vastly technically inferior to Eukeka can be delivered in a coverage pattern that duplicates the existing one.

Add to this the deregulation of US media ownership and the result is a concentration of media power that only worsens by the day.

When selling your vote you are basically saying that voting rights should be based upon your income or property, that is: one dollar==one vote. This is certainly NOT called democracy because itís not the majority of people who rules society but rather the majority of capital who rules it, similar to how corporations are run.

So if you fancy to change your country into a corporate state, then by God's means sell your vote to the highest bidder.

It can be argued, but how effectively when you introduce the person who puts their own life in jeopardy to save another?

And that's what they want you to think! Voter apathy is rising! Typical election results: Winner 65% of the ballots; First loser 20%; 15% to people you never heard of. Voter turn out: 30%. 30%!! If those 70% of the people had turned out to vote for the person who got the least votes - that would have been our imaginary winner!

On the grand scale, yes, your vote means diddly. But it means much more with 70% of the population too lazy to stop watching the tube to get out and vote!

And in the last 100 years or so, 30-40 million people did die so you could vote. (assuming you live in a democratic country :-} )

But if votes are for sale, it is too easy to set up a self-perpetuating system, in which officeholders enrich themselves and then pay off enough people to get their gang reelected. This is how the political bosses of the 20's and 30's operated.

The Un-coolest thing at Linux World Expo was what last year was called the dot org pavilion this year was called the docking station... which reminded me of some kind of cattle pen for the non-profits and the advocacy foundations...

Did it seem wierd that the winners of the big award for best work, the Debian project, had a little pen in order to promote itself while corporations like Corel, who basically are reinventing themselves by piggybacking their desktop on top of Debian and KDE's good work?

Is VA Linux, who I heard sponsored some of these groups to be at LinuxWorld, too poor to allocate a little more space or at least more promotion for these very important organizations?

Coolest thing at the EXPO? The dot org's

Buzzword compliance is certainly a mission-critical optimization ... Captain_Carnage writes "The LinuxWorld website has an article about itstop five products today. Featured are a rollable rubber keyboard from Broumand (only an e-mail address given), a user resource allocation/accounting tool from Aurema, an IDE-based RAID card from 3ware, a Linux-based router/VPN box from Linux Wizardry, and a High-Availability clustering product from Mission Critical Linux."

Yes and in response to the discussion, the gentleman made it clear that what was being discussed was blatently illegal and would be prosecutted. Very useful fact to insert into the discussion, don'tcha think?

And did your widdle car get stolen or are you just picking something that a legislater has nothing directly to do with and pulling an imature bait and switch.

Vote selling is a serious form of fraud. I personally have worked to apply this principle to elected officials as well as those electing them, but corruption at one level is a damn childish excuse for condoning it at another.

-Kahuna Burger

Your not trying to buy my vote, are you?

They know they can get away with stuffing little amendments about privacy into school taxation bills with a little added pay raise for themselves! Because no one will notice!

To quote Babylon 5 (or misquote...) "No one takes power, it is given to them by the people..."

It needs to be able to be taken away by the people too!

And to sell your right to vote. The same right that millions of people in the world would die for, the right to vote in a free and democratic election. To give away what so many young men and women DIED for, just for beer money.

That is a much sadder state of affairs.

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Programming, is like sex.