His example: A software package that just looks like the modern equivalent of LOGO. Interesting, sure. Probably lots of fun to play with as a child. More compelling that e-mail or Wikipedia? Please.
Don't belittle Smallalk. It ain't. Case in point: some years ago, a friend of mine had the misfortune of having sold beaucoup computers and servers to an ailing airline, which was pretty much behind in it's payments.
One day, I get an enthusiastic phone call from him: Can you go to the airport and go to $AIRLINE offices to fix their macintosh??? (I was the outside mac expert). When I got there, the V.P. of finance was at the reception waiting for me and handed me a five-figure cheque for the outstanding invoiced...
Turns out that this single computer had an AI application written in Smalltalk that handled all the logistics and scheduling of their aircraft fleet; their whole operations depended on this one computer.
I was not able to fix the mac: it's motherboard was shot.
A week later, they filed for bankrupcy but at least, the cheque cleared.
I've been touching computers for close to 30 years, and working with them for 25 years, and what we have now is not functionally different from what he had then.
The only difference is eye candy like menus, windows and whatnot.
Otherwise, it's pretty much the same, and, even when you put in particularly creative applications like Photoshop, Illustrator/Freehand, Autocad or any music composing system, you basically have "a better version of an older tool, pen and paper".
There aren't really NEW applications that are really creative; perhaps the only thing that goes close would be USENET if it wasn't swamped by the line noise...
On the contrary, it's particularly an Asian thing, both in electronics and in cars. The Japanese auto makers change things at the part level much more frequently than the Americans do, for example.
You obviously didn't grow-up in the 1960's... For a given make and model, from year to year, cars were radically different.
You know what? Four terminal fuckedbrainess is precisely what's wrong with the US. People like you are the prime reason why world-war III will start, and it already started on 9-11, when Oussama's minions drove aircraft in the WTC.
Such US shitheadness attitude will only turn the world against you, and since they can't match your military might, you can expect "terrorist" commando surgical actions.
Why all that mayhem? Because a few cavemen just don't want to act civilized and hoard all the wealth while screwing every one else.
Isn't anyone on the right concerned about e-voting and what it could mean for election integrity?
They are not concerned, because they only care about one dollar-one vote.
Right-wing people do not like democracy, because it puts the elite on the same footing as the rabble. Worse, it gives the rabble the power to oust the elite that has been busy protecting those who screw the people.
The road to universal voting in anglo-saxon democracies is a long, rocky road barred by landowners. Where I live (a british colony), for example, until about 35 years ago, only landlords were able to vote for the mayor of the city I live in, a city that has a majority of renters.
Anything to undermine democracy is good; this is why, for the last quarter century, we see an unprecedented assault on the State from the right-wing, their goal being the virtual elimination of State activity beyond the maintenance of law and order, the idea being that the rich be able to make a maximum profit on the back of the poor, all the while paying no taxes at all.
So, anything that can discredit democracy is okay: first, they discredit politicians, by insuring that only incompetents and corrupt sycophant and demagogues get appointed to public office (Ronald Reagan is a prime example of that). The net result is the cynical outlook the people currently have about politicians. And the next step is to attack the very core of Democracy: nothing less than the voting system itself. When the people will see that electronic voting has but replaced the electoral process by a business-driven farce, they will totally lose hope in Democracy, and may, in fact, welcome any upcoming dictatorship.
This was the way followed by the between-the-war fascists in Europe; Mussolini and Hitler banked on a widespread resentment against democratic institutions, and were able to seize power and precipitate mankind into unprecedented horror.
In the USA, if shrub is re-elected, not having to worry about re-election, he sure will push forward his hegemonic agenda and the current patriot act road-kill of civil liberties will look pretty tame compared to the widespread lossage of human-rights that will ensue, and the worse is that people will go along with it, having been brainwashed into thinking it being necessary against virtually non-existent terrorist threats.
I have voted in many districts across multiple states. In one there were actual watchers. (the local candidates were actually there to meet and greet too)
In the rest, it was a completely unsupervised operation. The dead vote every single election. Who they vote for is whomever the person running the polls wants them to.
If the polls go unsupervised like that, this shows how much people in your place care about Democracy.
Voting has been screwed up since the very beginning. You have to trust the people working at the election districts who handle the ballots. I don't. Do you?
Score 0: troll.
Have you ever worked in an election? You obviously never did.
A truly democratic system allows witnesses to overlook the ballot-counting process.
I was a poll clerk in last week's canadian federal elections, and the personnel's work was continuously monitored by candidate representatives.
Canada has 1/10th the number of people as the USA. Not only is the scale of votes greater, but consequently the complexity of relationships among the people, therefore the political groupings and representations.
So what? You just need to have 10 times the number of electoral personnel as canada does. The canadian manual process scales well...
Every time this issue comes up, someone points out that the Canadian system works perfectly (Elections Canada runs elections in many foreign countries which lack the infrastructure). Then someone claims that it won't scale. Ridiculous.
There are a bunch of polling stations for each riding. After the polls close, people at each polling station manually count the collected paper slips. These small numbers are then sent to a central point, summed, and the winner is determined.
It's distributed. If a riding had ten times as many voters, it would have ten times as many polling stations, and ten times as many people counting votes. It scales perfectly. As long as X% of the population is involved in ballot counting, the size of the population is irrelevant.
I just worked for the federal elections last week as a poll clerk. (I'm the one who crosses-out the name of the voters as they came to vote).
Each poll had about 500 electors - more than half of those showed-up in my poll.
The system scales pretty well, and the paper-trail is there: we're having an automatic recount, as there was only 35 votes difference out of 45,566 (less than 0.1%). No diddling about hanging chads, each one of every actual hand-marked ballot is physically looked-up by a human-being and counted.
Now what happens when, as this train is pulling into an urban area, someone de-rails it.
So what? Freight trains that currently carry hazarduous materials are far more dangerous to urban areas than fast passenger trains. And yet, we still don't see many terrorists derailing those either.
Also, 18 wheelers have no infrastructure and only require one operator per vehicle, and can work on any schedule.
So, highways, streets, roads, tunnels and bridges are NOT infrastructure???
And how about the mechanics needed to fix the trucs, the road maintainers to fix the roads, they're not personnel too?
And with a train, two operators (engineer+conductor) will carry far more stuff than two trucks... And that keeps true if you factor-in the dispatching personnel too.
Trucks are only used because they are "cheaper" (read: subsidized by automobiles). A SINGLE truck makes 10,000 times as road damage as a single automobile. Do truck license plates cost 10,000 times as much???
On the other hand, railroads OWN the tracks they run on and FULLY PAY for their construction, maintenance and upkeep.
The first guy who will come out with a laptop-form factor chassis for those motherboards will make a killing, a bit like the "lunchbox" chassis of yesteryear.
We'll be able to crank-out custom laptops make to suit our desires without having to contend with proprietary crap which won't properly run [insert favourite non-proprietary open-source/subversive operating system]...
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Don't belittle Smallalk . It ain't. Case in point: some years ago, a friend of mine had the misfortune of having sold beaucoup computers and servers to an ailing airline, which was pretty much behind in it's payments.
One day, I get an enthusiastic phone call from him: Can you go to the airport and go to $AIRLINE offices to fix their macintosh??? (I was the outside mac expert). When I got there, the V.P. of finance was at the reception waiting for me and handed me a five-figure cheque for the outstanding invoiced...
Turns out that this single computer had an AI application written in Smalltalk that handled all the logistics and scheduling of their aircraft fleet; their whole operations depended on this one computer.
I was not able to fix the mac: it's motherboard was shot.
A week later, they filed for bankrupcy but at least, the cheque cleared.The only difference is eye candy like menus, windows and whatnot.
Otherwise, it's pretty much the same, and, even when you put in particularly creative applications like Photoshop, Illustrator/Freehand, Autocad or any music composing system, you basically have "a better version of an older tool, pen and paper".
There aren't really NEW applications that are really creative; perhaps the only thing that goes close would be USENET if it wasn't swamped by the line noise...
So, finally, we'll be able to have a beowulf clus...
This would last forever and be able to migrate through other technologies, such as RFID.
Yet Another Way For Automatically Pressing Delete.
Of couse, this won't solve the bandwidth/ressource theft problem...
No, the only solution to kill spam is to immediately nullroute any network that keeps any spammer (or spamming zombie) for more than 2 hours.
Plonk!
It will then possible to show that every fundy asshole sonovabitch busybody complaint is not founded...
What better way could there be to have the right-wingnuts make a bunch of fools of themselves???
It's very unusual to have more than one ballot (except for municipal elections, where you vote separately for a councillor and for the mayor).
Such US shitheadness attitude will only turn the world against you, and since they can't match your military might, you can expect "terrorist" commando surgical actions.
Why all that mayhem? Because a few cavemen just don't want to act civilized and hoard all the wealth while screwing every one else.
Like having a Chicago El train go through Manhattan???
What about a Dubya mouthpiece mod???
They are not concerned, because they only care about one dollar-one vote.
Right-wing people do not like democracy, because it puts the elite on the same footing as the rabble. Worse, it gives the rabble the power to oust the elite that has been busy protecting those who screw the people.
The road to universal voting in anglo-saxon democracies is a long, rocky road barred by landowners. Where I live (a british colony), for example, until about 35 years ago, only landlords were able to vote for the mayor of the city I live in, a city that has a majority of renters.
Anything to undermine democracy is good; this is why, for the last quarter century, we see an unprecedented assault on the State from the right-wing, their goal being the virtual elimination of State activity beyond the maintenance of law and order, the idea being that the rich be able to make a maximum profit on the back of the poor, all the while paying no taxes at all.
So, anything that can discredit democracy is okay: first, they discredit politicians, by insuring that only incompetents and corrupt sycophant and demagogues get appointed to public office (Ronald Reagan is a prime example of that). The net result is the cynical outlook the people currently have about politicians. And the next step is to attack the very core of Democracy: nothing less than the voting system itself. When the people will see that electronic voting has but replaced the electoral process by a business-driven farce, they will totally lose hope in Democracy, and may, in fact, welcome any upcoming dictatorship.
This was the way followed by the between-the-war fascists in Europe; Mussolini and Hitler banked on a widespread resentment against democratic institutions, and were able to seize power and precipitate mankind into unprecedented horror.
In the USA, if shrub is re-elected, not having to worry about re-election, he sure will push forward his hegemonic agenda and the current patriot act road-kill of civil liberties will look pretty tame compared to the widespread lossage of human-rights that will ensue, and the worse is that people will go along with it, having been brainwashed into thinking it being necessary against virtually non-existent terrorist threats.
People get the democracy they deserve.
Have you ever worked in an election? You obviously never did.
A truly democratic system allows witnesses to overlook the ballot-counting process.
I was a poll clerk in last week's canadian federal elections, and the personnel's work was continuously monitored by candidate representatives.
I just worked for the federal elections last week as a poll clerk. (I'm the one who crosses-out the name of the voters as they came to vote).
Each poll had about 500 electors - more than half of those showed-up in my poll.
The system scales pretty well, and the paper-trail is there: we're having an automatic recount, as there was only 35 votes difference out of 45,566 (less than 0.1%). No diddling about hanging chads, each one of every actual hand-marked ballot is physically looked-up by a human-being and counted.
/meesa guess that Paul Boutin will update his résumé real soon now!!!
And how about the mechanics needed to fix the trucs, the road maintainers to fix the roads, they're not personnel too?
And with a train, two operators (engineer+conductor) will carry far more stuff than two trucks... And that keeps true if you factor-in the dispatching personnel too.
Trucks are only used because they are "cheaper" (read: subsidized by automobiles). A SINGLE truck makes 10,000 times as road damage as a single automobile. Do truck license plates cost 10,000 times as much???
On the other hand, railroads OWN the tracks they run on and FULLY PAY for their construction, maintenance and upkeep.
The first guy who will come out with a laptop-form factor chassis for those motherboards will make a killing, a bit like the "lunchbox" chassis of yesteryear.
We'll be able to crank-out custom laptops make to suit our desires without having to contend with proprietary crap which won't properly run [insert favourite non-proprietary open-source/subversive operating system]...