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Then send Dubya to Mars, if you think he's so great... If he can land on an aircraft carrier, he can land on Mars, right? Oh wait, he didn't actually fly the jet that landed...

From what I've read, it seems they were correct to cull the less-advanced robots from the "herd" - their reasoning is sound.

In the government eyes: "expensive" == good. Not: "working" == good. Remember, this is the same government that routinely approves $435 for a frickin' hammer.

You still believe that more people is better on an engineering team. This is not necessarily so. Smaller teams are more likely to have a more efficient, reliable, more cohesive and less complex solution to the problem. It doesn't mean that the human beings on either team are any less intelligent - or necessarily have a different chance of success.

For example, one of the military teams is making a robotic HummVee conversion, while one of the smaller teams in the independent competition is custom making a little dune buggy.

To the "money no object" thinkers, a Hummer would be an obvious choice to impress the military brass - and likely to overrule any technical considerations. But anyone who is into offroading can tell you how unsuitable Hummers are for serious offroading over random terrain - they're too damn big (wide) for most trails, not very nimble - and too heavy to inspire confidence. They're not *awful*, but not good either.

I'm sure the race won't be over difficult & badly rocky off-roading terrain, but the teams using big expensive flashy vehicles are making the problem more difficult before they've even started..

It's very important for the shadow government to be able to stay in touch.

A quote from this article.

The complexity makes it tough to say whether Issa, a Republican from Vista, broke the law with portions of $650,000 in contributions to the campaign to recall Davis.

Darrell Issa wanted to be governor. He paid enough petition gatherers $0.50 - $1.00 per petition signature to the legally required number of signatures. Why'd he drop out of the race afterwards? Arnie decided to run and apparently, he was afraid of getting his ass kicked yet again by The Terminator.

There's no mass movement here to rid the world of bad government. Just an ambitious politician who "broke into tears as he announced he would retain his seat in Congress so he could work toward peace in the Middle East." when he found out that he had no chance of winning.

While Davis sucks, at worst, he's about average... 0wn3d by the usual suspects.

Your wish has been granted. Don't you feel better? Now the Air Marshals are onboard to enforce the rules, ensuring you don't get up to go to the bathroom, or act too curiously. There have always been a whole bunch of crazy rules on airplanes, which carried the weight of federal law. Now there are air marshals watching everything you do to make sure you do not break those laws, though they cannot properly handle their firearms (I tried to find other articles, but the articles I linked mentioned several incidents of leaving firearms in bathrooms and one in which a firearm went off in a bathroom) and are not well trained. They are also overworked and underpaid, which has real consequences (for the click-challenged, sleeping air marshals with their guns openly available to terrorists present little protection).

Still, be that as it may, the short and sweet of it is don't fuck with air marshalls. They have guns, they are tired, cranky, and edgy, and have the right to shoot you with minimal cause and arrest you with no cause. So for those of you who wanted to have enforcement of the seatbelt rules, you now have it at the barrel of a gun. Ditto for smoking or using the bathroom or cell phones. In the article a man was immediately arrested in the UK for having his cell phone on (though not in use) and sentenced to 12 months in jail. That'll teach that terrorist bastard, eh? I would have to wonder what the US would have done.

Now, I have been flying for years (though not since 9/11) and it has been pretty well obvious that being on a plane is serious business (for instance, even before 9/11 smoking or saying the words bomb, gun, etc could get you booted/thrown in prison in the US). I understand it is important to have rules for safety since a cock-up on a plane is no joke, and I follow the rules assiduously. But I have to wonder if what we are doing now is not too much of the keeping the ordinary passengers' seat belts on and not enough of the stopping the real terrorists.

An ex-coworker of mine used a dry ice bomb on his neighbor, who was being too loud.

The cops came, a cop took another dry ice bomb out of this guys freezer, and it blew up in the cops hand.

Arrested, jail until trial, half-way house for 6 months.

In this post - 9/11 America, dry ice bombs are a bad idea.

link

Spoken like a true Libertarian (or a demagoguing Republican). There are budget cuts happening all over California. They're coming in public schools, rural healthcare, state parks, higher education, and more. Those are services that most Americans, and especially Californians, think are important. In fact, in order to cover the necessary gap, Gov. Davis has proposed more cuts than new taxes.

Incidentally, I decided to reply instead of modding you down, even though zapping your "insightful" bonus was very tempting.

The USA Today article really glosses over the political battle on this issue and the good reasons for that battle. Many people in Houston are actually quite angry about the adoption of SimDesk, and it has nothing to do with pro-Microsoft bias or SimDesk's "unproven track record" thing.

This timeline would claim Houston spent $42,000 marketing a possible SimDesk contract before the proposal was even requested. This article suggests the City's CIO "had decided on that vendor before the city's mandatory bidding process had even started." I'll leave it as an excercise to the reader to google for more information, but my point is that this is a much more significant issue than USA Today suggests in the article.

I'm as happy about my city using non-monopoly software as the next guy, but I think in this instance there's a strong likelihood that the SimDesk contract was awarded in a non-competitive environment anyway. Surely this is not the way any of us want alternatives to MSFT to be chosen.

On an even furthur unrelated note, I wonder how many parties/terrorist plots are ruined by falling bullets. I bet it's a lot.

If it happens in the US from time to time (the link mentions 2 injuries in one year in one county) I'd guess that yes, it comes up from time to time. Wouldn't you feel silly...

a grrl & her server

The wiretaps are taking place for your protection.

need to lie to the courts. The courts want the Bad Guys caught, don't they?

Now, every once in a while I get asked this question: how is it that a VCR can record a TV show when the TV isn't turned on? Yeah, I can hear the snickers. But I get this from a lot of basically intelligent people. And the frustrating thing is, I've never found an explanation that makes sense to the asker. To me it's obvious, "You see, there's two tuners, the TV has one, the VCR has one...." But the eyes just glaze over.

So the whole idea of Making Systems User Friendly is just plain bogus. It assumes that people can come to terms with any system if you just find the right methaphro for them to use. Doesn't work.

In the real world, there are three solutions to this problem:

1. You do a better job of explaining the basic concepts of the system to your users. But only a few really brilliant teachers seem to have much luck with this approach.
2. You build systems that do a good job of hiding the unfamiliar paradigm with a simpler paradigm ordinary people can wrap their minds around. But again, this takes a certain brilliance on the part of the designer, who has to be at home with both paradigms.
3. You take the Kuhnsian approach. That is, instead of trying to bridge the nerd-mundane gap, you wait for both sides to die off, to be replaced by big-thumbed folks who've grown up with the technolgy and have no trouble coming to terms with it.

How's this for irony:
California HAS BEEN HERE BEFORE.
Believe it or not, last year the energy budget crunch in California was blamed for delays in California's proposed bullet train system (LA-SF)
So this time the politicians want trains to solve the energy deficit?!?