TDDPirate’s Ideas

This particular spam E-mail is very annoying to me. It is annoying because it appears to have come from a political party, which I otherwise would have considered voting for in the coming 10 February 2009 elections in Israel. And now I cannot consider voting for them, due to my policy of zero tolerance of spam.

It is an appeal to vote for the party of the people with disabilities (מפלגת הנכים) in those elections.

The first time I got the E-mail, I thought it was sent to me because I am in some mailing list of people with disabilities. The second time, it was sent to an E-mail address which is not publicly known and which I never use for subscribing to mailing lists.

It was also sent from a gmail account, rather than from the party’s own domain.

I sent spam complaint E-mails to both my E-mail provider and the real party’s E-mail address, as publicized in their Web site.

Today I went to Bank Discount, where I have a checking account, to pay my municipal tax (”arnona”) bill. In the far past, such transactions bore no bank charges, as the municipality in question reimbursed the bank for its transaction expenses.

Today I found that this year, payments to the municipality are not exempt from bank charges.

I further found that, contrary to past practice, I was charged twice. Once for the bill payment itself. Once for the act of withdrawing money from my bank account.

The municipal tax bill was not that small, so the total bank charges amounted to about 0.3% - not worth fighting over in the form of letter writing, making an appointment with the branch manager for a calm (but prolonged) argument, etc.

This is like one of the Soddom stories - how they screwed a brickmaker by having each Soddomite take just one brick from his workshop. Too small for a lawsuit, but nevertheless he got bankrupted, without any reasonable legal recourse.

Not having the time or justification to pursue the matter via the proper channels, I balanced things out by shouting at the branch manager for about 5 seconds in the presence of other people.

Suppose you have been contacted by someone with a great Web 2.0 idea and he wants you to join his startup.
You need to know whether he knows what he is talking about.
The following checklist may help you tell the clueful apart from clueless.
I hope people will be able to contribute advice concerning each item in the checklist as well as more items I missed.

1. Dealing with bad content:
   • Spam
   • Trolling
   • Off-topic user-contributed content
2. Vandalism (and in general, content backup/restore).
3. Legal:
   • Acceptable use guidelines
   • Copyright violations and other issues
4. Content ownership/lockdown policies - will a contributor be able to export his contributions into file/s in his own PC?
5. How will the network effect be overcome (if another Web 2.0 site already exists serving the same need, how to get people to use your Web site instead of the other site, if they already have stuff).
6. Business model (i.e. how to actually get people to pay for the stuff).
7. Scaling with demand (nowadays, thanks to cloud computing services availability, the required scaling is not that of servers but that of customer service personnel and maybe other critical resources).
8. Are there standards (such as XML schema) relevant to the kind of content to be served by the site?

If what Alan Carter says in his The Programmers’ Stone blog is right, then the way our society treats software developers is like requiring surgeons to operate in non-sterile theaters, with inadequate equipment and without enough help from other doctors and nurses.

Yesterday, the primaries election of the Labor party in Israel was aborted and postponed to a later date due to serious malfunctioning of the voting machines deployed for this purpose.

The provider of those machines was Taldor LTD.

Sources (in Hebrew):

• Primaries in Labor Party: why did the voting machines fail?
• Farce in Labor Party: the primaries were postponed due to the failures

I wrote previously about computerized elections.

In the 28.11.2008 issue of “7 Days”, the Saturday supplement of Yediot Aharonot, Yair Lapid wrote about “The Real Crisis”.  It is about the financial crisis facing several nonprofits, which live on donations from well to do people, and which perform various services in behalf of people at need. Eventually, this financial crisis could adversely affect several vulnerable people.

The crisis is due to the drying up of the donations due to the financial/economic crisis happening now. Yair Lapid’s conclusion is that the Government should provide for those services rather than relying upon nonprofits.

I would like to offer another solution to the problem.

At times of economic depression, traditional economic doctrine calls upon governments to pump money into the economy.  Usually this is done by make work projects, infrastructure investments, etc.

I suggest that in addition to the above measures, the Government hand out stimulus money also to the above nonprofits, in proportion to the amount they got from donations in previous years.  Only nonprofits, which meet the criteria for proper management practices, would qualify for this.

My reasoning is that such monetary infusion will help keep employed people with special skills, so eloquently listed by Yair Lapid.  Also, since it can be assumed that people vet on nonprofits before making donations, the Government money will be almost well-spent as the monies of the private donors during previous years.

In This is not the end of capitalism, Mark Shuttleworth (of Ubuntu fame) points out the need for capitalism with regulation. The regulators - those people who would regulate businesses - would need to have extraordinary personal qualities of resourcefulness, wisdom and incorruptibility. In other words, they need to have caliber like E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensmen (the qualities required by Lensmen include intelligence, utter incorruptibility, a high drive to succeed, and the highest drive to fight evil).

However, like Santa Claus, such people exist only in fiction. Therefore another solution is needed. A practical solution would, by necessity, be based upon a system, in which imperfect and corruptible people would nevertheless do almost as good job as incorruptible ones.

Fortunately, there is a precedent for systems obviating the need for supermen. The 18^th century political philosophers faced a similar problem. They were faced with the problem of designing a regime, in which people will enjoy freedom, even though they are governed by other imperfect people. The solution was to devise a system of checks and balances. It was embodied in the constitution of USA and worked well for several years.

Therefore, a possible solution to the problem of regulating capitalism is likely to come from a system of checks and balances. In the following I’ll try to sketch a possible design for such a system.

A business operating in an industry, which needs to be regulated, has to answer to the following stakeholders:

• Shareholders
• Employees
• Business partners (customers and suppliers)
• Environment

Regulation, when it is enforced, aims at restoration of balance of the interests of all those stakeholders. Regulation has to be enacted when money fails to work as a means to motivate the business to serve its stakeholders in a balanced way.

Let’s try to set up a feedback loop, in which bad regulation translates into loss of profits. This can be accomplished by nominating people, who act like the historical kings or modern Benevolent Dictators For Life (BDFLs). Each BDFL will be responsible for regulating all businesses in a particular geographical area. Every business in the region will pay the BDFL 1% of its profits. On the other hand, the BDFL will be subjected to lawsuits from any stakeholder, who believes to have been wronged by a business under the BDFL’s responsibility.

Thus, the BDFL will have an interest at ensuring that the businesses in his area will prosper in a balanced way. Since small businesses have larger growth potential than big businesses, the BDFL will tend to favor small businesses. The BDFL will balance the interests of businesses with those of the other stakeholders when formulating regulations, so that the business will thrive and the BDFL won’t lose too much money to lawsuits.

This proposal is incomplete, and leaves out answers to several questions such as:

1. What happens if a business operating in a geographical area gets to be so large that the BDFL of that area will profit more from favoring it than from nurturing other businesses?
2. Is the BDFL only to regulate businesses, or also develop infrastructure (like kings)?
3. How to select BDFLs from among candidates?
4. When and how to replace BDFLs, who do not do good work?
5. How to preserve the sovereignity of the people in a BDFL-controlled area?

Yesterday, USA elected the next President. Obama won the elections by clear cut margin. There was higher than usual turnout of voters.

Next Tuesday, on Nov. 11^th, there will be municipal elections in Israel. In some cities, in particular Jerusalem, the elections will have critical importance.

I’d like to urge everyone eligible to vote - to vote in those elections.

Remember, if you do not bother to vote, you in effect are voting for the candidate you hate the most!

Ken Hess listed 5 Things Every Good Linux Administrator Knows and left out the most important thing. It is more important than uptime. It is more important than controlling the network services. It is more important than making users happy. It is more important than documentation.

REGULAR BACKUPS!

UPDATE (2008 Nov 07):
A day after I wrote the above, Ken Hess added 3 More Things Every Good Linux Adminstrator Knows, the first of which is regular backups.

I have fulfilled my exercise walking quota today - by walking from computer shops to locksmith’s shops to electricity supply shops.

The objective of my search?

Those keys are used for locking PCs against turning them on by accident, and they also lock disk trays in bays which allow disks to be swapped.

My PC has two such trays, and yesterday I broke the last good key, as I was swapping disks a lot, in an attempt to make a new disk bootable.  So I need few new keys, and more important - a supplier to whom I can turn in the future if I need even more keys.  Locksmith shops are one natural place for finding such keys, but two locksmith shops, which I visited had no such a thing.  PC repair shops should have a stock of those keys as well, but the places, which I visited, had none.

If I don’t find a supplier for those keys, I may have to resort to opening the computer case - not once but several times.