In addition to sympathy, I wish we were better at telling people close to us to go see a doctor about their depression, or mental health in general. In particular, I wish someone had told me to do so ~7 years ago; would have saved a lot of misery.
> This is rational. It, for me, is not a label like "depression". It a conclusion based on my observation and experience.
Our rational minds are not somehow separate from our emotions and brain chemistry, though. Beware rational conclusions that have feelings attached, and that make you feel positive affect. And if it's only rational for you, well then that's a statement about your mind (brain), not the world or anything else.
I am also puzzled by this:
> Oh yeah, be drugged up. That solves it all. Well, it might for people with things like chemical imbalances
How would you know whether or not you have one (chemical imbalance isn't correct, but how do you know what your brain chemistry looks like?) And rational conclusions tend not to magically go away due to drugs unless it's drugs that make you seriously impaired in general (which you would notice). And SSRIs don't "put thinkers to sleep", go do some research, and note the thinkers that have been on them for large-ish parts of their careers/productive years.
Finally, have you been checked for common physical illnesses that can cause depression? Off the top of my head, vitamin deficiency is famous for this. Read about people with brain tumours and damage, too, and note how these things can have effects on feelings and whatnot without being noticeable by the person having them.
Here's a way to avoid it: Change the process. Do counting, re-counting, appeals, etc. first, until a final decision as to the correct count and valid votes is made (all appeals exhausted or no longer possible due to time elapsed). We have final decisions on all these matters in current systems. This way, you will "know" that the election was fair, since this depends on the ballots, not the candidate.
Then do the random step. The drawback is that there may be a month or two between casting votes and having the results, but I don't see why this is a big deal.
This is a wonderful idea, particularly since even a partial implementation would do good. Just having a license for derivative works and the latex source would do wonders.
A typical situation is that you notice an obvious extension to a result in a paper, which does not warrant publication. Being able to make an updated version of a paper with that easily would be a good thing.
The author doesn't quite get it. Nonwithstanding the fact that physical infrastructure is never free (his fido example is a case in point: phone lines), once something turns big corporations will enter the game, and then even freifunk-like architecture would suddenly be corporate-owned, as their nodes outnumber private ones.
Also, what non-free internet? Pirate bay is still up (despite many attempts), wikileaks is still up (!), etc. Wikileaks isn't even blocked by the search engines.
> Also, what non-free internet? Pirate bay is still up (despite many attempts), wikileaks is still up (!), etc. Wikileaks isn't even blocked by the search engines.
This is a good point. But I don't think we should be complacent: if the USA and EU got serious about blocking these, they would be able to shut down both, with the current network infrastructure.
While it's true that physical infrastructure is never free, there is communications infrastructure available that is truly independent and distributed. For example, Ham Radio has the ability to send digital signals around the world. Equipment is required, of course, and our overlords have ruled that encryption on these bands is illegal, and that it cannot be used for business purposes, and so on.
In fact the rules and restrictions governing Ham transmissions are very interesting in light of the evil government/corporate overlord tone of the article.
The book Little Brother by Cory Doctorow proposed a free distributed network formed by peer-to-peer links on hacked game consoles with wifi. Certainly something like that could be done with various technologies we have today including hacked wireless routers.
However untenable the situation, we're (surely? hopefully?) in a better position to do it with today's technology than we were a few decades ago.
