I sent the following messages to my Congressional representatives today:
To Bob Casey (D-PA), who currently supports PIPA
I'm writing to say that as a constituent, I strongly oppose the PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA), S. 968. While I understand the need to protect intellectual property rights, PIPA would remove essential checks on the enforcement of such rights, and would place too much power in the hands of copyright owners. I urge Senator Casey to reconsider his support for this bill, and specifically to vote against the upcoming cloture motion.
(unfortunately I forgot to adjust this to account for the fact that the cloture vote has been postponed)
To Pat Toomey (R-PA), who currently opposes PIPA
I'm writing to say that as a constituent, I strongly oppose the PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA), S. 968. I just wanted to express my thanks to Senator Toomey for understanding the dangers of this legislation and publicly opposing it.
To Glenn Thompson (R-PA), who is undecided
I'm writing to say that as a constituent, I strongly oppose the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), H.R. 3261. While I understand the need to protect intellectual property rights, SOPA would remove essential checks on the enforcement of such rights, and would place too much power in the hands of copyright owners. If and when SOPA is reintroduced, I hope Representative Thompson will oppose it unless major changes are made to preserve legitimate freedoms online.
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/do-they-call-it-air-force-one-elect/
Is is just me, or does that bear a subtle similarity to a version number?
Now I can only think of Obama as President 44.0 rc2 ;-)
Seen the latest McCain commercial? The one that goes "Barack Obama is for higher taxes. John McCain is for workin' Joes." and so on, with monotonous (monorhythmic actually, it's just a beat) string music playing in the background. Take a closer listen to that music. Notice how all of the "McCain is for..." soundbites are set to lovely major chords whereas the "Obama is for..." bits have ugly dissonances in the background.
Could that be turned into an ad for Obama just by switching the consonant and dissonant chords? If I get my hands on that video I have to try it.
So apparently all the news/fake news/crap on TV now is about this random plumber dude who said some random stuff to some random presidential candidate. Who I'm not going to give the distinction of naming.
AAAAAHHHH who cares?! About all I can get out of this is the fact that the people reporting on world events are the kind of morons who will wake up one day and say "hey, let's sensationalize something totally useless today"
grrrr
Do I even need to justify this?
Seriously.
You know that little audience reaction graphic that CNN puts on the bottom of the screen during debates? I want one.
OK, backing up: as I understand it, CNN puts about 80 people in a room in Ohio to watch the debate and equips them with little dials which they can turn left and right to indicate, on a scale of 0 to 100 . . . something. I'm guessing the dial setting is supposed to correspond to how much people agree with or identify with what's currently being said, but it really didn't say; unfortunately CNN didn't give any vertical scale other than "+.....-" (Note to anyone who wants to do better-than-useless data analysis: this is a Very Bad Idea. Always label your axes.) Anyway, the graph at the bottom of the TV screen shows some sort of average opinion over the focus group, split up by party affiliation or gender or whatever.
During the second presidential debate last night, I started thinking, why couldn't we the people pull this nifty trick for ourselves? It should be pretty easy to emulate CNN's dial gadget with a small Java applet to allow people to contribute their opinions over the internet. Of course, the UI part would be pretty trivial. The problem, I think, comes in when we start to consider communication.
The most obvious way to implement this is a simple client-server model, in which each contributing applet (client) reports every change in its setting to the server, probably with a UDP packet. In that case the data rate received by the server would be O(n) in the number of clients. The client would also have to display a live feed of the average opinion, which means an outgoing data rate from the server of O(n) if we send out updates at fixed intervals. The thing is, for anything more than just a few clients, this can put a lot of stress on a server like, say, the one this website is hosted on (which is the only one I have with a static IP address).
Of course, the simple client-server model probably isn't the best way to set up the system. It could use a hierarchial network structure, with the main server at the root, which could decrease server load to O(n1/k) for k = 2, 3, 7, whatever...but that could get pretty complicated. The point is, I'd love to be able to get something like this ready for the final presidential debate next Wednesday, but I don't see it happening in a week. Maybe someone else is doing this already - actually, I'm kind of surprised I didn't find it out there already. Oh well, here's looking to 2012...