That is why I’m voting for this survey:

“Some city agencies want to reduce online services. How valuable do you consider SFGov? “

- http://www.sfgov.org/site/onlineservices_index.asp

I can pay my awesome parking citation online? Sweet! I love you, just like I love my taxes. Seriously, who or what decides the dollar amount of my citation ticket? Is it a happy middle where the people will be the least pissed and the streets will be the most clean? I wish I could see the precise time in history when this particular $40.00 was decided, and by whom. I’d like this information to be retrievable online with the query “policy revision SF-DPT citation amount $40.00″. Of course this is impossible now (i think), even with the new powerset search engine (i think).
If the government were so accessible online, what about “homeland security”?

What type of information is public, what is private, and how do you enforce privacy of sensitive government information? Hmm, you would need all hardware and software to be trusted. You don’t need all your software to be trusted, just enough so that only trusted software can display the trusted content, and that all hardware that can capture the physical displayed result will recognize that the material is private.

It’s as if all private content were red, and all public content were everything else but red. If a monitor could only display the color red from trusted software, and red can only be recorded by trusted software running on the trusted hardware, then you have a good way of protecting privacy in a world with no fluorescence. This is not true for an interesting reason.

Can we make every parking citation ticket payment a chance to win some jackpot? Like a free automobile from the yard?

i pushed a button and elected him to office and a
he pushed a button and it dropped a bomb
you pushed a button and could watch it on the television
those motherfuckers didn’t last too long ha ha
i’m sick of hearing bout the haves and the have nots
have some personal accountability
the biggest problem with the way that we’ve been doing things is
the more we let you have the less that i’ll be keeping for me

well i used to stand for something
now i’m on my hands and knees
traded in my god for this one
he signs his name with a capital G

don’t give a shit about the temperature in guatemala
don’t really see what all the fuss is about
ain’t gonna worry bout no future generations and a
i’m sure somebody’s gonna figure it out
don’t try to tell me how some power can corrupt a person
you haven’t had enough to know what it’s like
you’re only angry cause you wish you were in my position
now nod your head because you know that i’m right – all right!

well i used to stand for something
but forgot what that could be
there’s a lot of me inside you
maybe you’re afraid to see

well i used to stand for something
now i’m on my hands and knees
traded in my god for this one
he signs his name with a capital G

Take the religion away from the earth, and you get destruction of the earth.

The day that all of humanity re-accepts the earth as its religion, will be the end of times, when we finally find peace in death.

Who is on what side of this battlefield is not so important. As I see it, currently it is simply a matter of numbers. There are simply more carnivorous entities than there are peacekeepers – partly because peacekeepers arise in reaction to carnivorous entities, and partly because peacekeepers are usually not fueled by the forces of capitalism (rather, they feed on moral integrity and empathy).

Even after you read this blog posting, you will most likely not engage in any peacekeeping activity. You will not even be aware of the battlegrounds that you are walking on right now, listening to your streaming radio, burning fuel far away to keep your computer lit. But if you are awake and listening, let us try an experiment. Spread the following message to everyone by copying this blog post and signing it with your name. For if you don’t, you will be doomed to a cold and lonely death in a state of regret.

The message is this: be active in nonprofit activist organizations, and be aware of the carnage that surrounds you. Do not assume that the forces of capitalism can sustain us in cruise control. Probe into each PR campaign and strive to find the truth. Make a better choice in you daily lives to make the world more sustainable, and fight ignorance with effective communication. Say hello to your neighbor and connect with those around you, to make the world community healthier.

Fnordaaa (this is for tracking purposes)

- Jack Gardener

News Traffic vs Blog Traffic

Today we have problems detecting spam mail, spam webpages, spam images, etc. Especially spam mail that has an image attachment with stock related messages in it. Have you seen these images lately? They’re more complex than their simple black and white predecessors. This of course also implies that email providor companies like google and yahoo are putting a lot of effort into blocking spam. Here we have a situation where there is a selective pressure to create more “intelligent” spam, and the complementary selective presure to create better filters.

Spam generators are evolving. Filters are evolving. Evolution of intelligence happens in the  real battlefield of the free (and abused) market. The text in research papers that describe the algorithms are the genes of these virtual lifeforms. Humans are ribosomes. Food for thought.

FOG project #1: a minimal democratic virtual nation

Rules of Citizenship

• to become a citizen, you need the nomination(s) of current citizen(s). The requirements for becoming a citizen shall meet the following requisites:
  1. the requirements are such that there is an incentive to nominate only those individuals that do not yet have citizenship.
  2. the details of the requirements are determined by the people through a [collaborative process]
• citizens can hold multiple citizenships to other nations, but only one to this nation.
• citizens may lose their citizenship if they do not satisfy the conditions of citizenship decided by a [collaborative process]

Collaborative Process

work in progress

Some distributed things are also decentralized. Take for example, BitTorrent. Just last week, I was able to download 3 gigabytes of my favorite linux distro within an hour. The ‘torrent file’ that bootstrapped my download was hosted on a central tracker server, but it did not have to reside in any one server.

I am interested in decentralized P2P systems. What is necessary to make decentralized services robust, secure, anonymous, and responsive? What are the characteristics of services that could do well as decentralized services? For example, will search engines become decentralized? I mean, will Google search or Yahoo search ever be replaced by a decentralized P2P service that is robust to spoofing, responsive, anonymous, and ad-free? I believe search and many other services can become decentralized and thus become better than the centralized counterparts; it’s just a matter finding the right implementation to satisfy all the indepedent concerns.

On a slight tangent, here is a search service that integrates user contribution. Check out my idea swicki. I’m still experimenting with it, so please feel free to join in and or comment about it here.

<request>
    <request-document>my shopping cart</request-document>
    <request-parameters>
        <name>Jack Gardener</name>
        <session-id>1234567890</session-id>
        <filters>
            <filter key="item-name" op="regex">.*battery.*</filter>
            <filter key="item-view-date" op="greater">12-12-2006</filter>
        </filters>
        <view-preference>
            <skin>Milky White v1.0</skin>
            <font-metric>px</font-metric>
        </view-preference>
    </request-parameters>
</request>

You can see that this request is inherently a GET request; it fetches a cache-able document with no side effects. Also, the request object is inherently structured and belongs in XML form. Herein lies the problem. The usual approach to this problem is to fit the request parameters into a single line in URL-Escaped form. I think it would also be possible to fit the request XML object in the body of a POST request, but I believe most browsers cannot do this well, at least not with HTML-forms (also, the request is not inherently a POST request, so this would be a bad idea).

SOAP could be used to represent request parameters for websites, but it doesn’t solve the cache problem. Also, it’s a far ways from becoming incorporated into browsers and web-servers; it’s too abstract / transport independent to get widespread adoption. I may be wrong, but when it comes to adoption, I’m a strong believer of evolution (like IP > TCP > HTTP), not intelligent design. Just ask these guys.

Here is an idea: The client POSTs the request object to the server, and the server redirects the client to either (1) a URL that includes a session parameter or (2) a URL that includes a parameter that represents the request object, possibly in compressed and base64 form. In the first case, the server is responsible for remembering the request object, and in the second case, the server doesn’t. Either way, the request is completely cache-able in all levels as long as the browser or client can associate the request object with the redirect URL.

There are several layers of caching that needs to be considered:

1. browser level caching of the final response document
2. browser level caching of the final redirect URL based on response object
3. cloud level caching of the document
4. server level caching of the final redirect URL based on response object
5. server level caching of the response document

Caching of levels 1, 3, and 5 come free because the browser/client is redirected to a HTTP GET requests to fetch the document (See how). Level 4 is easily implemented by a servlet or module, or even by a third party webservice (kind of like tinyurl). Level 1, I believe, requires a new browser plugin or implementation. But, at least it’s possible. Image if links were no longer a long cryptic string but a structured XML document with human readable parameter values. There are also many benefits that come with structured requests and the ability to declare name-spaces that I won’t write right now, but I’m thinking along the lines of client/browser and user preferences.