Thanks, that's a decent approximation. However, it costs $249 if you don't subscribe to their Internet service (their real business), or $338 if you subscribe and immediately cancel, while the service costs $13:mo for 2 years minimum (cancelable) prepaid.
It's also kind of overkill for my app. It's got a bunch of SW preloaded, which has some kind of cost in installation/maintenance even if it's FOSS. It's got QXGA display, which I don't need, kbd/mouse ports (in addition to USB), and the 4GB Flash is costs about $30 (though power saving), which could probably buy a 40GB SATA HD - $15 buys 20GB SCSI HDs. Even the CF slot is probably a few extra unnecessary bucks.
I bet that the $249 is full of not only profit, but also higher to balance the loss of profit from the network business. And the extra HW could be another $50-75. If this box, stripped down, could sell for $100-150, then it would be exactly what I want. As long as I can telnet into it and force it to install Linux from across the ethernet.
Meanwhile, the Gumstix waysmall 200 is almost exactly what I want, for $129, but no soundchip. All the cheaper Gumstix have client-only USB, so can't take expansions. Though the $186 200xm-cf has CompactFlash, into which soundcards or CF/USB adapters can plug. And the waysmall 400m-bt has Bluetooth, which might send audio data to Bluetooth speakers or audio adapter, which could be even better, for only $200. But the audio module is $40, and the USB host module is $27, so $197 does get me all I want. Even if the extra $52 for the Zonbu gets a lot more (in a larger package). I wonder whether the Zonbu has 25% more processing power.
Since Gumstix is so close, there's probably a competitor. My app is basically an "ethernet to stereo/5.1/7.1 audio" adapter, which has got to be a popular app (at least a . Probably there's one that has either soundchip or just USB host (for external DAC), with options for either ethernet or WiFi. For under $200, if not yet under $150.
To me, the slight differences in watt consumption aren't the point, for my uses anyway. What I want is a fanless PC. With ethernet and a decent soundcard, and a PII/500MHz or faster, 256MB RAM, and maybe 1GB Flash, and a USB slot. I don't even need VGA: machines for display should be faster and beefier. And of course it should run Linux.
That gumstix looked cool. Are there more or better in its class, preferably under $150?
This could be the perfect platform for implementing touch feedback. Like a memory plastic which deforms from flat into small bumps and ridges under small voltage changes. UI can feedback directly to the fingertips, much like a keyboard, better than a touchpad, much better than a mouse, and entirely better than just a cursor on a screen.
The problem with those bumps is that they are hard to make optically transparent, or to mount on a graphic display at all without being counterproductively distracting. But if they're on the back of the device, the optical problems disappear (pun intended;). The front of the device could include something similar, but which "bumps up" only when covered by a finger actually touching the surface, which would occlude the view anyway.
What this device is actually pulling off is also making the display act like a small volume that can be interactively manipulated from front and back. Just as our 3D vision is mostly constrained to fairly close objects in a relatively narrow field and an extremely short height, this device could bring real 3D manipulation into our reach (pun intended;).
I always wondered how we'd get to the UI William Gibson described in _Neuromancer_, where Case had goggles and his hands buried inside some touch interface he couldn't directly see.
Now we're finally stepping off the old "see your fingers" path, and into a future where the eye/hand feedback is mediated by the machine.
When this new device ships with a 3D network dogfight game, we'll have arrived.
Those original pricing models were set by the government, to compensate for allowing AT&T to operate a monopoly in an essential industry. They were updated to be even more encouraging to attract foreign routing when the AT&T monopoly was broken up. Which breakup was also responsible for the fast, extensive and open growth of the Internet.
If AT&T had run its monopoly without government intervention to protect people and markets, the domestic infrastructure wouldn't have been so attractive.
Which makes the current recoup by AT&T of nearly all its monopoly such an obvious threat. And its secret collusion with its only competitor, Verizon, to wiretap us such an obviously perverted government role in assembling a cartel. And making selective prosecution of Qwest, because Qwest refused to collude with the cartel, one of the worst crimes (not involving torture or killing, at least as far as we know) that Bush has committed against us.
We got those privileges because we kept our telecom monopolies under control, and our government in the service of protecting the people. Now that Bush has reversed that system, egging on monopolies to use them against the people, our entire system is a nightmare.
Right. Everything's everything, when you can attack a Democrat. Regardless of the extremely tangential relationship. How about Laura Bush's killing her immediate ex-boyfriend by running a stop sign right into him, in a similarly drunken scene never properly investigated or reported? Still outraged?
Meanwhile, what's your position on Bush's massive secret government, suppressed by mass media for years to sneak through elections? Like the NY Times suppressing for over a year James Risen's investigation of Bush repeatedly violating FISA, through the 2004 elections, until Risen published his own book to report it? Silence...
You're just another Republican who thinks words are meaningful only when they can get a negative reaction out of the person you tell them to.
Whatever Kennedy's drunken car crash might have been, it wasn't a way to cheat an election.
I don't expect you to understand that after the third or fourth time I repeated that simple fact. But it is fun to say those meaningful words to someone who is mentally incapable of reacting to them. Like the medieval pastime of taunting the retard.
Er, I pointed out that it's Ohioans, not exclusively your politicians, who are responsible for the culture.
And I implied where I'm from: NYC. From here, it looked like your old Governor Taft was impeached for a lot more than "free golf" from lobbyists (which is always code for serious bribery if it makes it to the mass media). But what's that compared to the Republican fundraisers stealing state money as they invested it in their own "rare coin" collection that was never actually produced? And how about that rigged 2004 presidential election that was the difference between a Bush and a Kerry victory? The one where the Democratic districts were forced to stand in the cold rain for hours to vote on too few machines, where the Warren County votes were counted in secret by invoking a fraudulent "FBI terrorist red alert", where the Republcian Secretary of State (overseer of elections) was Bush's state campaign manager, and was humiliated in his campaign to replace his disgraced governor, Taft, with masses voting against him for his obvious corruption in that travesty of administration?
Oh yeah, Republicans are just the ones who get caught. Well, there is indeed corruption in both parties. But just as it's not evenly distributed between the two, the delusion that it's OK is not evenly spread around the country, as your blithe answer demonstrates. Ohio seems to really stand out, even while the Indians are losing.
Ohioans are supposed to be pretty average, dull, predictable plodders (at least in the eyes of New Yorkers - if you're watching from, say, Iowa, maybe they're exciting daredevils). Criminal scandals took down most of their Republicans in the past few years, following the landmark corruption shown in their 2004 election fraud.
What is it about Ohioans that such a culture of permissive corruption flourishes in their state?
Where can I get my iBat, a flying robot bat that eats these flying spook "bugs"? If the spook bugs don't exist, no one will complain when they disappear.
I wonder what kind of authentication those spook bugs use in their surveillance network. Once a few are captured, how will the spook operators tell that fake data isn't being injected into their system by the surveillance targets?
Since the PlayStation 3 has only a small main memory that's hardwired and nonexpandable (Sony's lamest design decision of all), the Linux that runs on it is severely constrained. PS3 Linux is constantly swapping to compensate for the small memory. But the PS3 does have another small VRAM bank (that's extremely fast XDR). PS3 Linux hackers are working on using VRAM as swap, out of necessity. Their design analysis is probably instructive for anyone considering any platform's VRAM as swap.
But even those other systems aren't as reliable as Flash. Batteries wear out and fail, especially after 3-4 years of use.
This is not an all or nothing proposal. Clearly there is a spectrum of reliability, grades of risk, that are better addressed (and increasing cost) by RAM, +UPS, +battery, Flash, HD. Flash is the "happy medium": relatively cheap per capacity (within the scales required for what we're discussing), relatively high performance, physically small, relatively low power, and highly reliable.
As you say, apps have to use the facility. Any exceptional app that doesn't use the session support leaves a "hole in the session". And there are apt to be many.
Also, the difference between 1-2s poweron and 30s poweron is a total loss of the "mental moment". There's a qualitative loss of "instant on". Which is why the Flash is worth the small improvement: while the disk is just spinning up, the Flash can be done reloading the image to RAM. Especially if the Flash is connected to the RAM by an ASIC that does only that: pump the image, and maybe recalc the parameters that need new state, like DHCP and timers (clock).
One way or another, the massive redundant computation at startup (plus at shutdown) has got to go. The OS should compute an image that is persistent between boots that can be saved and save it, even before the command to shutdown. Then, at shutdown, only the part of the image that needs updating from the new state should be updated and stored. Then, at poweron, just reload the whole image, and update the parts that need updating for current time, DHCP, etc. That entire up/down cycle could take a second or two. Which also means that Flash's zero startup time, and a Flash/RAM bus faster than that to disk, would reduce the small storage time that would then still be a significant percentage of the entire short store/restore time. If all disk access is buffered through that Flash, then startup/shutdown could be nearly instantaneous.
The app sessions are really useful for "reboots" of apps once the OS has effectively no reboot of its own to take down those apps and restart them periodically. Most of those processes have memory leaks or other accumulation of corrupted state over time, so it's good to restart them "from scratch" once in a while. Stop/start the entire RAM image eliminates the periodic refresh we're used to. So a facility to do so for each app will become essential. Storing highlevel state in app sessions is a good way, because it makes app reboot much faster. And there's probably a good argument here for making app "Quit" and "Launch" into exactly the kind of image based schemes I just detailed for the OS.
We've now been using these kinds of PC OS'es for over a quarter century. Some of the fundamental use cases are now very clear and stable in their operational outline. We clearly have 4 "restart" scenarios: "reboot" from scratch (regenerate executable image, regenerate user state); de/activate from execution (save/load executable image, persistent user state); "reset" to flush corrupt state (regenerate executable image, save/load user state); and "restart" (save/load executable image - or just retain it, persistent user state). For both the OS and apps, and the DB objects that are something else.
If we can add support to those 4 lifecycle phases generically to the OS for those executables and their state, and some simple GUIs (and automation, like timers for app "reset"), we'll have both a much more interactive, and reliable, platform.
The only problem with everything you said is the IQ test for voting. Because the other big problem already is that so few people vote. Which means the #1 function of democratic voting, obtaining the consent of the governed, is lost. The #2 function, choosing an official, is lost in the collapse of the rest of the system, but it's already besides the point because the governed doesn't actually consent. Many more people need to vote, not fewer.
And even the IQ test is self-defeating, because the worst voters are the half-bright smart enough to vote their self-interest, but not smart enough to realize how their self-interest depends on the general welfare.
What we need is education. Political stupidity is the kind most easily dispelled by even the most basic critical thinking, which also needs introspection to test one's own tests. That kind of smarts can be taught to nearly any junior high schooler, and of course makes those citizens a greater asset generally.
And maybe a few little electoral tweaks to build more feedback into the system.
For example, the party primaries should be held in order of how closely each state voted with the previous couple of general elections' results. In a series designed get the most voters to buy in as possible. Which means also holding a separate, nonbinding primary for independents, to encourage more interest in them. Holding the deciding votes off until the convention, during which something unknown, the candidate selection, is actually decided. That process would give a reasonable influence first at the beginning of the "mainstream" states defining the field, then the "fringe" states deciding the final candidate, which is the most fair, or even a slight difference in which fringe/mainstream states are paired for early influence and the deciding primaries are cast by the true middle of the roaders (or even the reverse of that ordering). But mainly it would give a blended horserace for the entire country to watch and to bet on. And it would force candidates to appeal to those voters in an order that isn't defined by the current party insiders, who of course design the process to exclude as many voters as possible, with whom they'd be sharing power (and each of whom costs money to pitch to).
Then there's impeachment, which should be as common (given the relative corruption rates) among officials as is indictment among civilians. An impeachment office in each jurisdiction for each tier of official should immediately open for collecting impeachment evidence. Maybe even an impeachment committee composed of the official's opponents, whose vote counts as much as the victor's larger representation in the legislature's Judicial committee (at least in legislative officials and executives with a legislature), so party majorities can't just ignore impeachments. Something like that which gives a chance to the competition that balances powers only when it's easier and more successful than cooperating to attack the people instead. Successful impeachment that fails to convict during the trial should still trigger a recall election. Recalls should require petitions of 1% the turnout of the election being overturned to go to ballot, and require 75%+1 of the original turnout's total votes to pass.
Also, public campaign finance is no good, from the fundamental perspective that it will only ensure that there's more money in campaigns, and the criteria for awarding it manipulable directly by the government to favor specific candidates or party characteristics. No, the only fair campaign finance is to allow any human (no corporation or org) to donate as much money as we want, but never to any individual, party, or org. Donations only to a single account that every candidate registered in the race can draw equally. And all campaigns audited to exclude any expenses from any other source, including (especially) the candidate themself.
I want my PC to hibernate to flash, storing an image that requires only the slightest update to reflect network state, time, and a few other counters. And all apps to store their state so they can be "rebooted" to flush memory leaks, but return to their highlevel state.
That would give instant-on that's great for mobiles, but also good for desktops. Why is that so hard? Isn't hibernating to flash with a little update a lot easier than rewriting the BIOS?
Campaign crime, you partisan fool. Campaign crime. Not just some excuse for you to rant about "evil Democrats" and "bad Doc Ruby who hates them".
Where's the campaign crime? You've got none. You're the perfect partisan: facts and reason are invisible to you. All you can see or say is a partisan attack opportunity, even when it isn't there.
I guess that explains how people like you can vote for politicians who cheat you: your mind doesn't process their cheating, just their political party.
How is that a campaign crime? And which crime exactly would leaving her to drown have been, especially if he was that drunk?
But that's entirely besides the point. Even if it were a crime, what has that got to do with cheating in elections? Except "character", an unproveable word game that is not what we're talking about here, and that all these bigshots lack in outstanding quantities.
"Fox" is just the TV channel that Murdoch uses to promote the same global fascism that his new ownership of the Wall Street Journal will bring to print. The "Fox Business Channel" is yet another face. There's plenty of evil business/political people out there to fill the seats, and plenty of people paying money to get their badly skewed content with which to pay the staff.
What I like is that all of these incompetent liars are accumulating in one place, which makes it convenient to ignore them all at once. Maybe they'll achieve critical mass and collapse into total conversion to whatever negative energy crapons degrade to.
Kennedy wasn't campaigning. It's not even clear that he committed a crime (except maybe driving drunk). What does that have to do with cheating in electoral campaigns?
This isn't a question about "character" or "sin". This is about people getting votes even when getting caught stealing (or cheating to get) votes. Which is a very specific contradiction that should be obviously disqualifying, but isn't.
Or are you just unable to distinguish political questions from irrelevant propaganda, like jokes about a drowned girl?
I'm not sure what you mean about Ted Kennedy: where's his campaign crime?
Of course no one wants their pork cut. But why do people elect people who have been shown to be lying or cheating even in the act of asking for their vote?
These people are asking for the greatest powers we can give, including life & death, and much of the course of the whole world's future. You'd think that if they were to actually get caught cheating their way in, that the trust and respect would be destroyed, and they'd be disqualified.
But even when they are caught, voters let them off the hook. There are many examples, but someone tell me how John Sununu remained in office, and is now campaigning to likely keep his New Hampshire Senate seat, even though he was narrowly elected in 2002 with the help of active phone jamming his opponent's Election Day "get out the vote" system? He stopped voters from voting to win. The guy actually operating the operation went to jail and gave evidence he'd coordinated with the Republican National Committee, and his phone logs show he worked with the White House during the operation. Sununu isn't just some "random senator": he's on the Senate Commerce Committee, which controls the FCC and telecom.
Of course these politicians will do anything for power. But when they're caught, what's our excuse for ignoring their criminal careers when we vote for them?
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Thanks, that's a decent approximation. However, it costs $249 if you don't subscribe to their Internet service (their real business), or $338 if you subscribe and immediately cancel, while the service costs $13:mo for 2 years minimum (cancelable) prepaid.
It's also kind of overkill for my app. It's got a bunch of SW preloaded, which has some kind of cost in installation/maintenance even if it's FOSS. It's got QXGA display, which I don't need, kbd/mouse ports (in addition to USB), and the 4GB Flash is costs about $30 (though power saving), which could probably buy a 40GB SATA HD - $15 buys 20GB SCSI HDs. Even the CF slot is probably a few extra unnecessary bucks.
I bet that the $249 is full of not only profit, but also higher to balance the loss of profit from the network business. And the extra HW could be another $50-75. If this box, stripped down, could sell for $100-150, then it would be exactly what I want. As long as I can telnet into it and force it to install Linux from across the ethernet.
Meanwhile, the Gumstix waysmall 200 is almost exactly what I want, for $129, but no soundchip. All the cheaper Gumstix have client-only USB, so can't take expansions. Though the $186 200xm-cf has CompactFlash, into which soundcards or CF/USB adapters can plug. And the waysmall 400m-bt has Bluetooth, which might send audio data to Bluetooth speakers or audio adapter, which could be even better, for only $200. But the audio module is $40, and the USB host module is $27, so $197 does get me all I want. Even if the extra $52 for the Zonbu gets a lot more (in a larger package). I wonder whether the Zonbu has 25% more processing power.
Since Gumstix is so close, there's probably a competitor. My app is basically an "ethernet to stereo/5.1/7.1 audio" adapter, which has got to be a popular app (at least a . Probably there's one that has either soundchip or just USB host (for external DAC), with options for either ethernet or WiFi. For under $200, if not yet under $150.
To me, the slight differences in watt consumption aren't the point, for my uses anyway. What I want is a fanless PC. With ethernet and a decent soundcard, and a PII/500MHz or faster, 256MB RAM, and maybe 1GB Flash, and a USB slot. I don't even need VGA: machines for display should be faster and beefier. And of course it should run Linux.
That gumstix looked cool. Are there more or better in its class, preferably under $150?
This could be the perfect platform for implementing touch feedback. Like a memory plastic which deforms from flat into small bumps and ridges under small voltage changes. UI can feedback directly to the fingertips, much like a keyboard, better than a touchpad, much better than a mouse, and entirely better than just a cursor on a screen.
;). The front of the device could include something similar, but which "bumps up" only when covered by a finger actually touching the surface, which would occlude the view anyway.
;).
The problem with those bumps is that they are hard to make optically transparent, or to mount on a graphic display at all without being counterproductively distracting. But if they're on the back of the device, the optical problems disappear (pun intended
What this device is actually pulling off is also making the display act like a small volume that can be interactively manipulated from front and back. Just as our 3D vision is mostly constrained to fairly close objects in a relatively narrow field and an extremely short height, this device could bring real 3D manipulation into our reach (pun intended
I always wondered how we'd get to the UI William Gibson described in _Neuromancer_, where Case had goggles and his hands buried inside some touch interface he couldn't directly see.
Now we're finally stepping off the old "see your fingers" path, and into a future where the eye/hand feedback is mediated by the machine.
When this new device ships with a 3D network dogfight game, we'll have arrived.
Those original pricing models were set by the government, to compensate for allowing AT&T to operate a monopoly in an essential industry. They were updated to be even more encouraging to attract foreign routing when the AT&T monopoly was broken up. Which breakup was also responsible for the fast, extensive and open growth of the Internet.
If AT&T had run its monopoly without government intervention to protect people and markets, the domestic infrastructure wouldn't have been so attractive.
Which makes the current recoup by AT&T of nearly all its monopoly such an obvious threat. And its secret collusion with its only competitor, Verizon, to wiretap us such an obviously perverted government role in assembling a cartel. And making selective prosecution of Qwest, because Qwest refused to collude with the cartel, one of the worst crimes (not involving torture or killing, at least as far as we know) that Bush has committed against us.
We got those privileges because we kept our telecom monopolies under control, and our government in the service of protecting the people. Now that Bush has reversed that system, egging on monopolies to use them against the people, our entire system is a nightmare.
Hear that, AT&T?
Right. Everything's everything, when you can attack a Democrat. Regardless of the extremely tangential relationship. How about Laura Bush's killing her immediate ex-boyfriend by running a stop sign right into him, in a similarly drunken scene never properly investigated or reported? Still outraged?
Meanwhile, what's your position on Bush's massive secret government, suppressed by mass media for years to sneak through elections? Like the NY Times suppressing for over a year James Risen's investigation of Bush repeatedly violating FISA, through the 2004 elections, until Risen published his own book to report it? Silence...
You're just another Republican who thinks words are meaningful only when they can get a negative reaction out of the person you tell them to.
Whatever Kennedy's drunken car crash might have been, it wasn't a way to cheat an election.
I don't expect you to understand that after the third or fourth time I repeated that simple fact. But it is fun to say those meaningful words to someone who is mentally incapable of reacting to them. Like the medieval pastime of taunting the retard.
Er, I pointed out that it's Ohioans, not exclusively your politicians, who are responsible for the culture.
And I implied where I'm from: NYC. From here, it looked like your old Governor Taft was impeached for a lot more than "free golf" from lobbyists (which is always code for serious bribery if it makes it to the mass media). But what's that compared to the Republican fundraisers stealing state money as they invested it in their own "rare coin" collection that was never actually produced? And how about that rigged 2004 presidential election that was the difference between a Bush and a Kerry victory? The one where the Democratic districts were forced to stand in the cold rain for hours to vote on too few machines, where the Warren County votes were counted in secret by invoking a fraudulent "FBI terrorist red alert", where the Republcian Secretary of State (overseer of elections) was Bush's state campaign manager, and was humiliated in his campaign to replace his disgraced governor, Taft, with masses voting against him for his obvious corruption in that travesty of administration?
Oh yeah, Republicans are just the ones who get caught. Well, there is indeed corruption in both parties. But just as it's not evenly distributed between the two, the delusion that it's OK is not evenly spread around the country, as your blithe answer demonstrates. Ohio seems to really stand out, even while the Indians are losing.
Ohioans are supposed to be pretty average, dull, predictable plodders (at least in the eyes of New Yorkers - if you're watching from, say, Iowa, maybe they're exciting daredevils). Criminal scandals took down most of their Republicans in the past few years, following the landmark corruption shown in their 2004 election fraud.
What is it about Ohioans that such a culture of permissive corruption flourishes in their state?
Where can I get my iBat, a flying robot bat that eats these flying spook "bugs"? If the spook bugs don't exist, no one will complain when they disappear.
I wonder what kind of authentication those spook bugs use in their surveillance network. Once a few are captured, how will the spook operators tell that fake data isn't being injected into their system by the surveillance targets?
Since the PlayStation 3 has only a small main memory that's hardwired and nonexpandable (Sony's lamest design decision of all), the Linux that runs on it is severely constrained. PS3 Linux is constantly swapping to compensate for the small memory. But the PS3 does have another small VRAM bank (that's extremely fast XDR). PS3 Linux hackers are working on using VRAM as swap, out of necessity. Their design analysis is probably instructive for anyone considering any platform's VRAM as swap.
But even those other systems aren't as reliable as Flash. Batteries wear out and fail, especially after 3-4 years of use.
This is not an all or nothing proposal. Clearly there is a spectrum of reliability, grades of risk, that are better addressed (and increasing cost) by RAM, +UPS, +battery, Flash, HD. Flash is the "happy medium": relatively cheap per capacity (within the scales required for what we're discussing), relatively high performance, physically small, relatively low power, and highly reliable.
Well, there are some problems with that approach.
As you say, apps have to use the facility. Any exceptional app that doesn't use the session support leaves a "hole in the session". And there are apt to be many.
Also, the difference between 1-2s poweron and 30s poweron is a total loss of the "mental moment". There's a qualitative loss of "instant on". Which is why the Flash is worth the small improvement: while the disk is just spinning up, the Flash can be done reloading the image to RAM. Especially if the Flash is connected to the RAM by an ASIC that does only that: pump the image, and maybe recalc the parameters that need new state, like DHCP and timers (clock).
One way or another, the massive redundant computation at startup (plus at shutdown) has got to go. The OS should compute an image that is persistent between boots that can be saved and save it, even before the command to shutdown. Then, at shutdown, only the part of the image that needs updating from the new state should be updated and stored. Then, at poweron, just reload the whole image, and update the parts that need updating for current time, DHCP, etc. That entire up/down cycle could take a second or two. Which also means that Flash's zero startup time, and a Flash/RAM bus faster than that to disk, would reduce the small storage time that would then still be a significant percentage of the entire short store/restore time. If all disk access is buffered through that Flash, then startup/shutdown could be nearly instantaneous.
The app sessions are really useful for "reboots" of apps once the OS has effectively no reboot of its own to take down those apps and restart them periodically. Most of those processes have memory leaks or other accumulation of corrupted state over time, so it's good to restart them "from scratch" once in a while. Stop/start the entire RAM image eliminates the periodic refresh we're used to. So a facility to do so for each app will become essential. Storing highlevel state in app sessions is a good way, because it makes app reboot much faster. And there's probably a good argument here for making app "Quit" and "Launch" into exactly the kind of image based schemes I just detailed for the OS.
We've now been using these kinds of PC OS'es for over a quarter century. Some of the fundamental use cases are now very clear and stable in their operational outline. We clearly have 4 "restart" scenarios: "reboot" from scratch (regenerate executable image, regenerate user state); de/activate from execution (save/load executable image, persistent user state); "reset" to flush corrupt state (regenerate executable image, save/load user state); and "restart" (save/load executable image - or just retain it, persistent user state). For both the OS and apps, and the DB objects that are something else.
If we can add support to those 4 lifecycle phases generically to the OS for those executables and their state, and some simple GUIs (and automation, like timers for app "reset"), we'll have both a much more interactive, and reliable, platform.
I mean that it requires power. Else why use anything but RAM for storage of anything?
Also, reliability is not measured in 6 months on a single workstation, but across millions of workstations across years of use.
Y'know, (and y'do), you're mostly right.
The only problem with everything you said is the IQ test for voting. Because the other big problem already is that so few people vote. Which means the #1 function of democratic voting, obtaining the consent of the governed, is lost. The #2 function, choosing an official, is lost in the collapse of the rest of the system, but it's already besides the point because the governed doesn't actually consent. Many more people need to vote, not fewer.
And even the IQ test is self-defeating, because the worst voters are the half-bright smart enough to vote their self-interest, but not smart enough to realize how their self-interest depends on the general welfare.
What we need is education. Political stupidity is the kind most easily dispelled by even the most basic critical thinking, which also needs introspection to test one's own tests. That kind of smarts can be taught to nearly any junior high schooler, and of course makes those citizens a greater asset generally.
And maybe a few little electoral tweaks to build more feedback into the system.
For example, the party primaries should be held in order of how closely each state voted with the previous couple of general elections' results. In a series designed get the most voters to buy in as possible. Which means also holding a separate, nonbinding primary for independents, to encourage more interest in them. Holding the deciding votes off until the convention, during which something unknown, the candidate selection, is actually decided. That process would give a reasonable influence first at the beginning of the "mainstream" states defining the field, then the "fringe" states deciding the final candidate, which is the most fair, or even a slight difference in which fringe/mainstream states are paired for early influence and the deciding primaries are cast by the true middle of the roaders (or even the reverse of that ordering). But mainly it would give a blended horserace for the entire country to watch and to bet on. And it would force candidates to appeal to those voters in an order that isn't defined by the current party insiders, who of course design the process to exclude as many voters as possible, with whom they'd be sharing power (and each of whom costs money to pitch to).
Then there's impeachment, which should be as common (given the relative corruption rates) among officials as is indictment among civilians. An impeachment office in each jurisdiction for each tier of official should immediately open for collecting impeachment evidence. Maybe even an impeachment committee composed of the official's opponents, whose vote counts as much as the victor's larger representation in the legislature's Judicial committee (at least in legislative officials and executives with a legislature), so party majorities can't just ignore impeachments. Something like that which gives a chance to the competition that balances powers only when it's easier and more successful than cooperating to attack the people instead. Successful impeachment that fails to convict during the trial should still trigger a recall election. Recalls should require petitions of 1% the turnout of the election being overturned to go to ballot, and require 75%+1 of the original turnout's total votes to pass.
Also, public campaign finance is no good, from the fundamental perspective that it will only ensure that there's more money in campaigns, and the criteria for awarding it manipulable directly by the government to favor specific candidates or party characteristics. No, the only fair campaign finance is to allow any human (no corporation or org) to donate as much money as we want, but never to any individual, party, or org. Donations only to a single account that every candidate registered in the race can draw equally. And all campaigns audited to exclude any expenses from any other source, including (especially) the candidate themself.
And voting should be on any day in Novembe
No.
Yes.
Because it's unreliable.
I want my PC to hibernate to flash, storing an image that requires only the slightest update to reflect network state, time, and a few other counters. And all apps to store their state so they can be "rebooted" to flush memory leaks, but return to their highlevel state.
That would give instant-on that's great for mobiles, but also good for desktops. Why is that so hard? Isn't hibernating to flash with a little update a lot easier than rewriting the BIOS?
Campaign crime, you partisan fool. Campaign crime. Not just some excuse for you to rant about "evil Democrats" and "bad Doc Ruby who hates them".
Where's the campaign crime? You've got none. You're the perfect partisan: facts and reason are invisible to you. All you can see or say is a partisan attack opportunity, even when it isn't there.
I guess that explains how people like you can vote for politicians who cheat you: your mind doesn't process their cheating, just their political party.
How is that a campaign crime? And which crime exactly would leaving her to drown have been, especially if he was that drunk?
But that's entirely besides the point. Even if it were a crime, what has that got to do with cheating in elections? Except "character", an unproveable word game that is not what we're talking about here, and that all these bigshots lack in outstanding quantities.
"Cold Cash" Jefferson is an excellent example of voters too stupid to fire politicians guaranteed to screw them. As I said, there are many.
"Fox" is just the TV channel that Murdoch uses to promote the same global fascism that his new ownership of the Wall Street Journal will bring to print. The "Fox Business Channel" is yet another face. There's plenty of evil business/political people out there to fill the seats, and plenty of people paying money to get their badly skewed content with which to pay the staff.
What I like is that all of these incompetent liars are accumulating in one place, which makes it convenient to ignore them all at once. Maybe they'll achieve critical mass and collapse into total conversion to whatever negative energy crapons degrade to.
Kennedy wasn't campaigning. It's not even clear that he committed a crime (except maybe driving drunk). What does that have to do with cheating in electoral campaigns?
This isn't a question about "character" or "sin". This is about people getting votes even when getting caught stealing (or cheating to get) votes. Which is a very specific contradiction that should be obviously disqualifying, but isn't.
Or are you just unable to distinguish political questions from irrelevant propaganda, like jokes about a drowned girl?
I'm not sure what you mean about Ted Kennedy: where's his campaign crime?
Of course no one wants their pork cut. But why do people elect people who have been shown to be lying or cheating even in the act of asking for their vote?
These people are asking for the greatest powers we can give, including life & death, and much of the course of the whole world's future. You'd think that if they were to actually get caught cheating their way in, that the trust and respect would be destroyed, and they'd be disqualified.
But even when they are caught, voters let them off the hook. There are many examples, but someone tell me how John Sununu remained in office, and is now campaigning to likely keep his New Hampshire Senate seat, even though he was narrowly elected in 2002 with the help of active phone jamming his opponent's Election Day "get out the vote" system? He stopped voters from voting to win. The guy actually operating the operation went to jail and gave evidence he'd coordinated with the Republican National Committee, and his phone logs show he worked with the White House during the operation. Sununu isn't just some "random senator": he's on the Senate Commerce Committee, which controls the FCC and telecom.
Of course these politicians will do anything for power. But when they're caught, what's our excuse for ignoring their criminal careers when we vote for them?