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Here's a link to a story regarding the Crosswalk Sign replacements in NYC to the new LED signs. Includes pictures.

Social Design Notes - Crosswalk Usability - 2004-04-08

you can't force people to come up with brilliant designs at gunpoint.

Most government-driven industrial failures do not involve design but execution, e.g. Yugoslav and Soviet peacetime designs were good enough, it was the execution that was shoddy, as was the lack of finish (somewhat like the Gnome/KDE desktops, really...). It is execution that improves dramatically at gunpoint (pun intended).

So yes, it is interesting that you point to totalitarian/wartime efforts as your success stories. You remind me so much of that old fascist apology: "...but the trains ran on time."

If you're funded by the government you're essentially (except for legal technicalities) a government employee.

So the BBN and Berkeley guys who worked on TCP/IP were government employees. Wow. Thank you for completely misunderstanding the nature of research grants.

My dentist lives 15 minutes walk from me, and I live in a medium-sized town. Considering that the NHS problems in Wales even made it to CNN here, I'd say you're not bullshitting, you're just ignorant. Or English ;-) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/3432181.stm

Could it do without the legal system to enforce the GPL? Stop changing the argument. The legal system has NOTHING to do with setting up a putative Federal Software Development Authority. You are just arguing for the heck of it.

I expect that everyone will have access to healthcare

That sounds good on Star Trek, but *I* expect everyone to obey the laws of economics, and that includes bleeding heart socialists and the governments who pander to them. And everyone will, in this generation or the next.

The Flash map itself if powered by my DIY Map tool. It's free (as in beer) for personal and non-profit use. You can download it at http://backspace.com/mapapp/.

Pagify is a perl script I wrote to do this for another job. It's basically a series of regular expressions that: 1. purges all the proprietary XML gunk from the HTML file you save from Word. 2. chops the file into smaller files wherever a Heading 1 appears 3. attaches endnotes as footnotes to the appropriate pages. It's GPL'd, so go nuts.

Here's the first example I googled up:

The Red Menace

According to this article the internet played a major role in getting the South Korea president elected. According to the Guardian Internet participatory democracy is having major impact on South Korean policy as well.

For keeping your passwords safe from the average laptop thief, Disk Copy is probably fine. But for protecting your sensitive info from The Man, I'd be just a little wary of proprietary packages. Has anyone seen the source code for Disk Copy? Are you absolutely sure that there are no backdoors for law enforcement? Apple would stand up to the Feds in defense of their loyal customers, right?

Depending on the level of security you're after, I recommend open source software that's been audited by lots of paranoid geeks.

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Design + Activism