[Sussex] Microsoft fails to comply

[Steve Dobson]

Richie

On Sat, Mar 19, 2005 at 11:31:31AM +0000, Richie Jarvis wrote:
> Steve Dobson wrote:
> >Maybe there are lessons to be learned here.  Maybe we should take a 
> >leaf out of the cockroaches book.  We need government by a collectives.
> >Not a committee, a collective.  A collective that is made up of most 
> >of the people of this country, were we all get a say in all the issues:
> >health care, taxation, ...
> >
> >If, as has been shown, that the collective is greater than an expert,
> >they why not use it to rule ourselves.  It has to be better than our
> >current system of government where we "democraticly" elect a dictator.
> >Sure, we limit his powers to five years so he can't do much harm, by
> >then her can't do much good either.
> 
> A good and interesting thought Steve, however, the downside of this 
> approach is time
> that it would take to make large decisions - not that I actually 
> disagree with the
> method, I just think it would need a very clever decision making 
> paradigm to make it work.

How long does it take to make a large decision these days anyway?
And you don't need a "clever" decision making paradigm at all, that's
the point.  You may place some weight to the votes so that people who
are experts carry slightly more weight than those that don't, but that's
about it - and those methods have around for ages, and were used have
shown to be better than other ways of coming to a decision.

> I think we all agree with TeaLeg's point that something is very wrong 
> with the way in which we are governed, taxed and receive our services. 
> I also think Steve should really be living in a commune ;)

Not a commune, a collective (or I would like to).  In a commune everyone
shares the same goals.  I want diversity.

In the hive a bees leaving at the start of the day pick directions to 
travel at random.  Those that find the most plentiful food source return
and communicate it more vigorously that those that find poorer sources.
The next wave of workers leaving the hive tend to head for the better
sources of food.  This has been shown to be the most efficient way of
extracting the maximum amount of food from an area.

Don't we do the same think on this (and other) maillists?  Someone
posts a question, and often a number of different answers are posted in
reply.  The more a replier knows how to do the think in question the
more confident he will sound in is reply (maybe even submitting a 
chuck of config file or code).  The question asker then gets to try 
out one (or more) of the possible solutions.  More questions are asked,
more is learnt, and the collective (the members of the maillist) move
closer to the better answer.

So why do you not believe that this same principle can not be applied to
government?  Doesn't the Internet provide the means, all we have to do
is find the way.

Steve