I just bought a terabyte drive for $100 to back up the other terabyte drive I bought several months ago for $160. Now everything is backed up in multiple. And I can access it without getting online. And I don't have to worry about my cloud storage company going out of business and taking all my data with it.
And if your house burns down, you're screwed.
Seems to me that if his house burns down, he's screwed even if his terabyte of pr0n is backed up "in the cloud somewhere."
Why? He'd just restore it from where it is. Might take a little while, but better than losing it (assuming it's something that matters, not pr0n).
Just buy a few hdds, rotate them out, drop them off at a friends, or if you're really paranoid, a safety deposit box., Cheap, off-site, and better redundancy.
Been there, done that, doesn't work.
Anything that requires manual steps like shuffling drives around probably won't get done, and certainly won't get done very often.
And the redundancy of such a solution would very inferior to what Tahoe provides.
lso, since the backups are hours instead of months, they're actually going to be useful.
Nothing worse than restoring from old data.
That's not an issue with my solution. The backup and upload processes are separated so you can do daily backups in spite of the fact that it may take months to upload all of the data. The system only uploads new/changed files, so even uploading at a measly 20 KBps, you eventually catch up. Also, uploading is prioritized, with preference given to recently-changed files, so even though my backup won't be complete for months, my current working files get already get backed up daily.
I want it badly enough, that I'm building a solution myself, based on the allmydata.org Tahoe distributed file system.
Forgot to mention that the distributed file system is a "friendnet". All of the data is stored on the hard drives of friends' and family's machines in their homes. It uses Reed-Solomon encoding so even if some of the machines in the friendnet die, I won't lose any files. And all of the shares are encrypted for security. I don't really care about that; the people whose machines I'm storing my data on would be welcome to look at anything they like, but the privacy assurance is in place for those who need it.
I just bought a terabyte drive for $100 to back up the other terabyte drive I bought several months ago for $160. Now everything is backed up in multiple. And I can access it without getting online. And I don't have to worry about my cloud storage company going out of business and taking all my data with it.
And if your house burns down, you're screwed.
I want a way to get cheap, fully-automated, redundant, off-site backups.
I want it badly enough, that I'm building a solution myself, based on the allmydata.org Tahoe distributed file system.
Backups over the typical home user cable modem or ADSL line are guaranteed to be very time-consuming. As a partial solution, my system will do incremental rsync-style deltas (the infrastructure is in place now, but I want to build more confidence in the non-differential backups before turning on diffs), but even with that, large volumes of data just plain take a long time to move. My backup has been running for three weeks and it has about two months to go.
What's the point? Well, this data is important enough that if I have to wait a while to restore it, I'm okay with that. And restore will be much faster. Because of the way the underlying distributed file system works, downloads are "swarming", coming from multiple machines at once, so even though all of the machines my data is backed up to also have slow upstream connections, the aggregate can fill a big chunk of my incoming pipe, which is 18 times faster than my upstream data rate. If I could fill the whole thing, then, a three-month backup should take just five days to restore. I haven't yet to see how long it really takes.
I notice you ignored the point about the soil impact. Removing the straw from the fields rather than burning it in place is going to increase fertilization requirements.
the thing that should stand out the most is the part mentioning how someone uses cow milk to heat his house.
That is funny, but if you've ever been around a dairy farm, it makes a lot of sense.
When you milk a couple hundred cows twice daily, each giving about 3 gallons, the resulting 1200 gallons per day of blood-warm milk contains quite a lot of heat. Not only that, if the milk is intended for human consumption, it has to be heated further in the pasteurization process, raising it to about 170 degrees F -- and then it is often chilled, especially if it's going to sit in the tank for more than a day or two before being picked up.
I worked a little on my uncle's dairy farm as a kid, and I remember the big stainless steel holding tank being almost hot to the touch, and that was when he was producing grade B milk which didn't have to be pasteurized. Over the course of the day the chillers would gradually get the temperature down into the 50s (IIRC), but the next milking would heat it right back up.
There's a huge amount of waste heat that could very easily be exploited for heating.
Honestly, if I were him, I'd be pretty pissed about this. He really doesn't need this kind of controversy right now. They've essentially used him to make a political statement, and it's just going to cause problems at a time when he's got more than enough to deal with. It'll get the conservatives all bristly and the libs all full of themselves, and then it becomes even harder to get anything done. All for a prize that I'm sure he knows is bullshit, and will be completely hollow for him.
I think the smart thing for Obama would have been to refuse the award. Make some comments thanking the committee for their vote of confidence, but about how he doesn't feel that he has yet accomplished anything worthy of the award and asking them to consider him again in a few years.
Americans are willing to forgive a LOT in their presidents if they feel the men have integrity, honor and fortitude. That's why JFK was so loved, in spite of the fact that his presidency was basically a series of screwups. Elections in the US are more about the man than about his politics. Obama was handed a golden chance to prove his integrity and strength of character.
As a side note, I wouldn't be surprised if the man himself were shocked. I mean this is one of the greatest awards a man can receive, and it's wording is distinctly results oriented. Give him a chance to get the results, then give him an award.
I agree.
I think the best thing Obama could have done is to refuse the award. Doing that would have demonstrated the integrity that he likes to portray -- and that Americans really like to believe their presidents have.
I've never particularly liked Obama (I think he's a good man, I just disagree with his politics), but refusing this prize would have impressed me deeply. His decision to accept an award he clearly has not earned tarnishes his character in my eyes, and that's really the only thing I thought he had going for him.
Interesting how you blame MS when GnuTLS, Firefox, KDE, WGet, Mutt and others were/are all vulnerable. This wasn't caused by just Microsoft's handling of SSL certificates, but by rather a lot of other SSL libraries as well.
How does that make this Moxie Marlinspike's fault?
In the case under discussion, the defect is in code produced by Microsoft. The fact that similar code from other sources may have had the same defect doesn't remove Microsoft's culpability.
Your comment is like saying "But your honor, even though my client killed that woman, lots of other people have killed other women. Surely you shouldn't hold my client responsible for doing what others have done! We should prosecute the guy who found the body!"
WRONG. Mixing GPL code and non-GPL code results in GPL code.
You are incorrect.
Mixing GPL code and non-GPL code results in code that cannot be distributed at all. One remedy is for the owner of the non-free code to GPL it. Another is for the owner of the GPL code to license it for distribution with the non-free code.
Tar shingles are cheap, easy to install (anyone can learn how in a few minutes), self-seal given just a couple of warm days and even self-heal to some degree.
Where I live winter heating costs significantly exceed summer cooling costs, so I'd think the best choice is a slippery black roof so snow would slide off and the sun could heat the attic. Even better, of course, would be a power-generating roof which could be used to heat during the winter and cool during the summer.
Unlikely, given the speedy installation, it's a pretty good bet that the system is installed as a set of larger shingles pre-attached to each other.
They don't necessarily even have to be pre-attached. If they have relatively large contact plates, placed so that they'll touch in the regular overlapped configuration, it could be as simple as just wiring the top row of shingles in a section.
If this really is true, I might not be opposed to giving away 30 points to anyone that seems reasonable enough. If we get another few notaries on board, maybe we can register a couple thousand slashdotters in the next few weeks - so at least they all get free VeriSign email certs.
I've been meaning to get my identity validated for the web of trust for years, and never quite gotten around to it. I'm interested if you want to drop me an e-mail, and I think I can prove my identity adequately on-line, through my long history on/., USENET, blog posts, etc.
Here's an idea: Laser off the pointless closet door and throw it into space.
How do you know the door is pointless? Perhaps when closed it plays a significant part in the structure of the space ship?
Oh, and toss out the sign as well.
The sign needn't have any significant mass.
The pilot *should* be performing a pre-flight checklist
Yes, the pilot should have looked in the closet, and everywhere else, but maybe the launch has to be performed too quickly for that to be practical. And the ship's mass should have been determined empirically, not computationally, but maybe there's something about the physics of FTL flight that makes reliable measurements of large masses impossible.
And what's with all the wasted volume? It's a freaking spaceship, you don't make anything bigger than you need to.
Additional cargo space, for times when bulkier loads must be transported.
Still, those nits are beside the point. The point of this story is the human drama that arises when people are faced with an unavoidable choice driven by the unyielding laws of physics. And how the simple mistakes of well-intentioned but foolish people can create those situations. To let it all play out, the author also needed to construct a situation where there was enough time for everyone involved to work through it, and the addition of the brother at the destination was needed to reinforce the pathos.
I know you're saying that there are obvious ways out of the dilemma that don't allow you to fully appreciate the important parts of the story, but that's only because you don't exercise enough imagination. Begin by accepting that the designers of the spaceship were far smarter than you and that there really is nothing disposable, or wasted, and it's a great story.
The Cold Equations (Tom Godwin) - Excellent, if dated. there's a film of it, as well, but it added a lot of side material.
This is a must have. I think "The Cold Equations" is one of the best science fiction short stories ever written.
Synopsis: A young girl stows away on a small ship which has had its fuel requirements calculated to such precision that the addition of her weight will make it impossible for the ship to decelerate safely to a stop at its destination, which will doom the girl, the pilot and the recipients of the medicine that it's carrying. Policy requires that such stowaways be ejected into space before deceleration begins, but it's a policy born not of bureaucratic whim, but cold, hard engineering reality. There is nothing on board that can be jettisoned in her place. The pilot can't choose to sacrifice himself, because she could not land the craft. There is no way for the girl to survive, and only by spacing her can the pilot live, and save the girl's sick brother, who is among those who need the medicine.
The girl knew she was breaking a rule when she stowed away, but she'd been raised, like all of us, in a world made mostly safe, where breaking rules meant a stern lecture or a slap on the wrist, not a summary execution. The pilot, for his part, has no desire to kill an innocent young girl who made a stupid mistake, but he has no choice.
Apart from it being an N router (not sure what Linksys has in the way of N offerings, I'm still using a trusty WRT54G), this thing also has a USB port that you can hook up a USB drive to and use it like a NAS, which is kind of cool.
And 64 MiB of RAM. The possible applications of many of the other routers on the market are limited by their having only 16 or 32 MiB of RAM.
Hosting the Olympics might be an honour on the national level, but locally... you've got to figure out which city you can afford to disrupt over the long term.
Not necessarily. It is possible to have a well-managed Olympics that makes the event a net short- and long-term benefit to the area.
Salt Lake City's 2002 Winter Olympics turned a significant net profit, even after the state was reimbursed for all of the infrastructure investment (other than transportation improvements; those were needed anyway). The money left over was put into a fund which should be able to maintain all of the specialized venues for decades -- except that many of the venues have proven to be profitable on their own. The bobsled and luge tracks, for example, are operated year-round for tourists, who ride sleds (wheeled in the summer) that move at much slower but still exciting speeds. Taken as a whole, the olympic venues and museum operate at a very slight loss, which the fund should be able to maintain for a very, very long time.
The long-term effects on Utah's tourism industry, both summer and winter, have been significant, and would have justified a fair amount of taxpayer investment even if the direct revenues hadn't been able to repay the state.
Like, allow states to branch laws in their private repositories?
Allow states to modify federal law? That makes no sense, since the US Constitution specifies that federal law supersedes state law and constitutions -- what would that mean if state legislatures could modify federal law?
Each state already has its own constitution and it's own body of state law.
And I think there's a lot of value to it, especially if you use a distributed VCS, like git or mercurial.
In fact, I've even set up a github project that tracks the US Code. I have a small Python script that retrieves the entirety of the code from uscode.house.gov and extracts and organizes the titles. There's a cron job that runs this process daily and commits any changes to the local repository, then pushes them to github. So you can use the github project to track the changes that are delivered into the final version of the law.
Where this gets really interesting, though, is if you use the DVCS in the process of crafting the law, not just to store it and track changes. The README file at the top directory of my github project describes some ideas. I have some more ideas about how the whole thing could be integrated with a sort of legislative social networking site, like github or launchpad, but with some important differences, and much more user-friendly. Here's the content of the README:
This repository contains the complete United States Code. Its purpose
is to publish the federal code in a way that makes it easy for
interested individuals to access both its content and its changes over
time.
Another purpose for this repository is to explore some ideas around
how to better facilitate the legislative process. Legislation comes
in the form of bills which are essentially patches to the existing
legal code. Many different versions of a patch may float around to be
debated, discussed, amended, etc., before a final version is applied
to the "trunk". The process is extremely similar to how developers
manage software changes, particularly in the open source world.
I think it would be very cool if something like github were used to
manage the actual law, all in the open and fully visible to everyone.
I imagine the official code as sort of a master repository. Each
legislator could fork this repository and hack on his own copy.
Legislators could pull from one another as they massage the language
to get it right. The House and Senate would each have their own
forks, as would the committees. The president, too would have a fork
of the official repository.
The legislative process would then be fully visible to anyone who
cares to look. Congressman Blowhard commits a change to his code and
pushes it to the public fork. Congressman Slick looks at it, likes
it, pulls, commits a change and tells Blowhard about his change, etc.
Eventually, the bill makes it to committee, and the committee may have
several branches indicating the status of bills as they progress
through the committee. Eventually, if the bill is voted for
presentation to the House, it is pulled into the committee's "trunk".
If the House votes to approve the bill, then it's pulled to the
House's trunk, available to be pulled by the Senate. The Senate can
make its own modifications, and perhaps the result must pass through a
House/Senate reconciliation committee, before being pushed to the
"Passed" branch (or fork), with a message to the president.
Anyway, that's the idea. It may seem kind of silly, but if you've
ever actually tried to track the progress of a bill through the
existing web interfaces, it's horribly difficult, and there's a lot of
information about the bill's movement through the process that simply
isn't available. I think using revision management tools just might
make the whole process both easier and more transparent.
And that's what I want to play with.
I fully recognize that many legislators may not WANT the sort of transparency that the system would facilitate, but I think that there are a crop of young reformers every year who would embrace it, and in another decade the "facebook generation" will start entering the legislative halls in a big way. It would take a long time to get something like this incorporated into the process, but the result would be a great improvement to our republic.
Slashdot Mirror
He's GOT NO FUCKING HOUSE! How is that *not* screwed?
My data is more important than my house. My house is insured, and can be replaced. Much of my data is irreplaceable.
Seems to me that if his house burns down, he's screwed even if his terabyte of pr0n is backed up "in the cloud somewhere."
Why? He'd just restore it from where it is. Might take a little while, but better than losing it (assuming it's something that matters, not pr0n).
Just buy a few hdds, rotate them out, drop them off at a friends, or if you're really paranoid, a safety deposit box., Cheap, off-site, and better redundancy.
Been there, done that, doesn't work.
Anything that requires manual steps like shuffling drives around probably won't get done, and certainly won't get done very often.
And the redundancy of such a solution would very inferior to what Tahoe provides.
lso, since the backups are hours instead of months, they're actually going to be useful.
Nothing worse than restoring from old data.
That's not an issue with my solution. The backup and upload processes are separated so you can do daily backups in spite of the fact that it may take months to upload all of the data. The system only uploads new/changed files, so even uploading at a measly 20 KBps, you eventually catch up. Also, uploading is prioritized, with preference given to recently-changed files, so even though my backup won't be complete for months, my current working files get already get backed up daily.
I want it badly enough, that I'm building a solution myself, based on the allmydata.org Tahoe distributed file system.
Forgot to mention that the distributed file system is a "friendnet". All of the data is stored on the hard drives of friends' and family's machines in their homes. It uses Reed-Solomon encoding so even if some of the machines in the friendnet die, I won't lose any files. And all of the shares are encrypted for security. I don't really care about that; the people whose machines I'm storing my data on would be welcome to look at anything they like, but the privacy assurance is in place for those who need it.
I just bought a terabyte drive for $100 to back up the other terabyte drive I bought several months ago for $160. Now everything is backed up in multiple. And I can access it without getting online. And I don't have to worry about my cloud storage company going out of business and taking all my data with it.
And if your house burns down, you're screwed.
I want a way to get cheap, fully-automated, redundant, off-site backups.
I want it badly enough, that I'm building a solution myself, based on the allmydata.org Tahoe distributed file system.
Backups over the typical home user cable modem or ADSL line are guaranteed to be very time-consuming. As a partial solution, my system will do incremental rsync-style deltas (the infrastructure is in place now, but I want to build more confidence in the non-differential backups before turning on diffs), but even with that, large volumes of data just plain take a long time to move. My backup has been running for three weeks and it has about two months to go.
What's the point? Well, this data is important enough that if I have to wait a while to restore it, I'm okay with that. And restore will be much faster. Because of the way the underlying distributed file system works, downloads are "swarming", coming from multiple machines at once, so even though all of the machines my data is backed up to also have slow upstream connections, the aggregate can fill a big chunk of my incoming pipe, which is 18 times faster than my upstream data rate. If I could fill the whole thing, then, a three-month backup should take just five days to restore. I haven't yet to see how long it really takes.
Among other issues, production of fertilizer consumes energy.
I notice you ignored the point about the soil impact. Removing the straw from the fields rather than burning it in place is going to increase fertilization requirements.
the thing that should stand out the most is the part mentioning how someone uses cow milk to heat his house.
That is funny, but if you've ever been around a dairy farm, it makes a lot of sense.
When you milk a couple hundred cows twice daily, each giving about 3 gallons, the resulting 1200 gallons per day of blood-warm milk contains quite a lot of heat. Not only that, if the milk is intended for human consumption, it has to be heated further in the pasteurization process, raising it to about 170 degrees F -- and then it is often chilled, especially if it's going to sit in the tank for more than a day or two before being picked up.
I worked a little on my uncle's dairy farm as a kid, and I remember the big stainless steel holding tank being almost hot to the touch, and that was when he was producing grade B milk which didn't have to be pasteurized. Over the course of the day the chillers would gradually get the temperature down into the 50s (IIRC), but the next milking would heat it right back up.
There's a huge amount of waste heat that could very easily be exploited for heating.
Honestly, if I were him, I'd be pretty pissed about this. He really doesn't need this kind of controversy right now. They've essentially used him to make a political statement, and it's just going to cause problems at a time when he's got more than enough to deal with. It'll get the conservatives all bristly and the libs all full of themselves, and then it becomes even harder to get anything done. All for a prize that I'm sure he knows is bullshit, and will be completely hollow for him.
I think the smart thing for Obama would have been to refuse the award. Make some comments thanking the committee for their vote of confidence, but about how he doesn't feel that he has yet accomplished anything worthy of the award and asking them to consider him again in a few years.
Americans are willing to forgive a LOT in their presidents if they feel the men have integrity, honor and fortitude. That's why JFK was so loved, in spite of the fact that his presidency was basically a series of screwups. Elections in the US are more about the man than about his politics. Obama was handed a golden chance to prove his integrity and strength of character.
As a side note, I wouldn't be surprised if the man himself were shocked. I mean this is one of the greatest awards a man can receive, and it's wording is distinctly results oriented. Give him a chance to get the results, then give him an award.
I agree.
I think the best thing Obama could have done is to refuse the award. Doing that would have demonstrated the integrity that he likes to portray -- and that Americans really like to believe their presidents have.
I've never particularly liked Obama (I think he's a good man, I just disagree with his politics), but refusing this prize would have impressed me deeply. His decision to accept an award he clearly has not earned tarnishes his character in my eyes, and that's really the only thing I thought he had going for him.
No, it indicates that you don't understand the reason for using the two repositories.
Interesting how you blame MS when GnuTLS, Firefox, KDE, WGet, Mutt and others were/are all vulnerable. This wasn't caused by just Microsoft's handling of SSL certificates, but by rather a lot of other SSL libraries as well.
How does that make this Moxie Marlinspike's fault?
In the case under discussion, the defect is in code produced by Microsoft. The fact that similar code from other sources may have had the same defect doesn't remove Microsoft's culpability.
Your comment is like saying "But your honor, even though my client killed that woman, lots of other people have killed other women. Surely you shouldn't hold my client responsible for doing what others have done! We should prosecute the guy who found the body!"
He didn't cause their grief. Microsoft did. He's just an easier target.
WRONG. Mixing GPL code and non-GPL code results in GPL code.
You are incorrect.
Mixing GPL code and non-GPL code results in code that cannot be distributed at all. One remedy is for the owner of the non-free code to GPL it. Another is for the owner of the GPL code to license it for distribution with the non-free code.
Tar shingles are cheap, easy to install (anyone can learn how in a few minutes), self-seal given just a couple of warm days and even self-heal to some degree.
Where I live winter heating costs significantly exceed summer cooling costs, so I'd think the best choice is a slippery black roof so snow would slide off and the sun could heat the attic. Even better, of course, would be a power-generating roof which could be used to heat during the winter and cool during the summer.
Unlikely, given the speedy installation, it's a pretty good bet that the system is installed as a set of larger shingles pre-attached to each other.
They don't necessarily even have to be pre-attached. If they have relatively large contact plates, placed so that they'll touch in the regular overlapped configuration, it could be as simple as just wiring the top row of shingles in a section.
Disposal is a larger issue. Even you average wood shingle is will last 100 years in a land fill. Asphalt is anyone's guess.
I suspect that within 50 years we'll be mining our landfills anyway, so I don't worry about that issue so much.
If this really is true, I might not be opposed to giving away 30 points to anyone that seems reasonable enough. If we get another few notaries on board, maybe we can register a couple thousand slashdotters in the next few weeks - so at least they all get free VeriSign email certs.
I've been meaning to get my identity validated for the web of trust for years, and never quite gotten around to it. I'm interested if you want to drop me an e-mail, and I think I can prove my identity adequately on-line, through my long history on /., USENET, blog posts, etc.
Here's an idea: Laser off the pointless closet door and throw it into space.
How do you know the door is pointless? Perhaps when closed it plays a significant part in the structure of the space ship?
Oh, and toss out the sign as well.
The sign needn't have any significant mass.
The pilot *should* be performing a pre-flight checklist
Yes, the pilot should have looked in the closet, and everywhere else, but maybe the launch has to be performed too quickly for that to be practical. And the ship's mass should have been determined empirically, not computationally, but maybe there's something about the physics of FTL flight that makes reliable measurements of large masses impossible.
And what's with all the wasted volume? It's a freaking spaceship, you don't make anything bigger than you need to.
Additional cargo space, for times when bulkier loads must be transported.
Still, those nits are beside the point. The point of this story is the human drama that arises when people are faced with an unavoidable choice driven by the unyielding laws of physics. And how the simple mistakes of well-intentioned but foolish people can create those situations. To let it all play out, the author also needed to construct a situation where there was enough time for everyone involved to work through it, and the addition of the brother at the destination was needed to reinforce the pathos.
I know you're saying that there are obvious ways out of the dilemma that don't allow you to fully appreciate the important parts of the story, but that's only because you don't exercise enough imagination. Begin by accepting that the designers of the spaceship were far smarter than you and that there really is nothing disposable, or wasted, and it's a great story.
The Cold Equations (Tom Godwin) - Excellent, if dated. there's a film of it, as well, but it added a lot of side material.
This is a must have. I think "The Cold Equations" is one of the best science fiction short stories ever written.
Synopsis: A young girl stows away on a small ship which has had its fuel requirements calculated to such precision that the addition of her weight will make it impossible for the ship to decelerate safely to a stop at its destination, which will doom the girl, the pilot and the recipients of the medicine that it's carrying. Policy requires that such stowaways be ejected into space before deceleration begins, but it's a policy born not of bureaucratic whim, but cold, hard engineering reality. There is nothing on board that can be jettisoned in her place. The pilot can't choose to sacrifice himself, because she could not land the craft. There is no way for the girl to survive, and only by spacing her can the pilot live, and save the girl's sick brother, who is among those who need the medicine.
The girl knew she was breaking a rule when she stowed away, but she'd been raised, like all of us, in a world made mostly safe, where breaking rules meant a stern lecture or a slap on the wrist, not a summary execution. The pilot, for his part, has no desire to kill an innocent young girl who made a stupid mistake, but he has no choice.
Apart from it being an N router (not sure what Linksys has in the way of N offerings, I'm still using a trusty WRT54G), this thing also has a USB port that you can hook up a USB drive to and use it like a NAS, which is kind of cool.
And 64 MiB of RAM. The possible applications of many of the other routers on the market are limited by their having only 16 or 32 MiB of RAM.
I believe the GP was looking for an argument, not contradiction.
Hence the idea of using a version control system, to be able to read side-by-side the law before and after the bill.
This allows you to look at the diffs after they become law, not before, but it demonstrates the idea.
http://github.com/divegeek/uscode
Hosting the Olympics might be an honour on the national level, but locally... you've got to figure out which city you can afford to disrupt over the long term.
Not necessarily. It is possible to have a well-managed Olympics that makes the event a net short- and long-term benefit to the area.
Salt Lake City's 2002 Winter Olympics turned a significant net profit, even after the state was reimbursed for all of the infrastructure investment (other than transportation improvements; those were needed anyway). The money left over was put into a fund which should be able to maintain all of the specialized venues for decades -- except that many of the venues have proven to be profitable on their own. The bobsled and luge tracks, for example, are operated year-round for tourists, who ride sleds (wheeled in the summer) that move at much slower but still exciting speeds. Taken as a whole, the olympic venues and museum operate at a very slight loss, which the fund should be able to maintain for a very, very long time.
The long-term effects on Utah's tourism industry, both summer and winter, have been significant, and would have justified a fair amount of taxpayer investment even if the direct revenues hadn't been able to repay the state.
Like, allow states to branch laws in their private repositories?
Allow states to modify federal law? That makes no sense, since the US Constitution specifies that federal law supersedes state law and constitutions -- what would that mean if state legislatures could modify federal law?
Each state already has its own constitution and it's own body of state law.
And I think there's a lot of value to it, especially if you use a distributed VCS, like git or mercurial.
In fact, I've even set up a github project that tracks the US Code. I have a small Python script that retrieves the entirety of the code from uscode.house.gov and extracts and organizes the titles. There's a cron job that runs this process daily and commits any changes to the local repository, then pushes them to github. So you can use the github project to track the changes that are delivered into the final version of the law.
Where this gets really interesting, though, is if you use the DVCS in the process of crafting the law, not just to store it and track changes. The README file at the top directory of my github project describes some ideas. I have some more ideas about how the whole thing could be integrated with a sort of legislative social networking site, like github or launchpad, but with some important differences, and much more user-friendly. Here's the content of the README:
This repository contains the complete United States Code. Its purpose is to publish the federal code in a way that makes it easy for interested individuals to access both its content and its changes over time.
Another purpose for this repository is to explore some ideas around how to better facilitate the legislative process. Legislation comes in the form of bills which are essentially patches to the existing legal code. Many different versions of a patch may float around to be debated, discussed, amended, etc., before a final version is applied to the "trunk". The process is extremely similar to how developers manage software changes, particularly in the open source world.
I think it would be very cool if something like github were used to manage the actual law, all in the open and fully visible to everyone. I imagine the official code as sort of a master repository. Each legislator could fork this repository and hack on his own copy. Legislators could pull from one another as they massage the language to get it right. The House and Senate would each have their own forks, as would the committees. The president, too would have a fork of the official repository.
The legislative process would then be fully visible to anyone who cares to look. Congressman Blowhard commits a change to his code and pushes it to the public fork. Congressman Slick looks at it, likes it, pulls, commits a change and tells Blowhard about his change, etc. Eventually, the bill makes it to committee, and the committee may have several branches indicating the status of bills as they progress through the committee. Eventually, if the bill is voted for presentation to the House, it is pulled into the committee's "trunk".
If the House votes to approve the bill, then it's pulled to the House's trunk, available to be pulled by the Senate. The Senate can make its own modifications, and perhaps the result must pass through a House/Senate reconciliation committee, before being pushed to the "Passed" branch (or fork), with a message to the president.
Anyway, that's the idea. It may seem kind of silly, but if you've ever actually tried to track the progress of a bill through the existing web interfaces, it's horribly difficult, and there's a lot of information about the bill's movement through the process that simply isn't available. I think using revision management tools just might make the whole process both easier and more transparent.
And that's what I want to play with.
I fully recognize that many legislators may not WANT the sort of transparency that the system would facilitate, but I think that there are a crop of young reformers every year who would embrace it, and in another decade the "facebook generation" will start entering the legislative halls in a big way. It would take a long time to get something like this incorporated into the process, but the result would be a great improvement to our republic.