I have noticed that most "free, gratis, and open source software" is crap, is written by students or people in their spare time, and once the writer (because most of it certainly isn't engineered) has to actually make a living, the software stagnates.
While that may be true, I've noticed that most commercially produced software is also crap, only with a thin shiny veneer on the outside, just thick enough to generate sales. A polished turd is still a turd...
So anyway, yeah, there's a lot of crappy free software, but there's also an awful lot of good free software too.
In some places that may be true, but the big guys have (or once upon a time, had) reporters of their own who produced content, particularly local news Big city papers are a bit different from smaller local papers in that regard.
Important point. More than a side issue, I'd say. It's one thing for the DVD producers not to actively support your platform of choice. It's quite another for them to ensure that you can't legally make use of their DVD product without buying another product that they've sponsored. There's some hints of monopoly abuse there...
Yep, another reason it's important to ensure that legality matches morality (to the extent that there's relevant intersection between the two, maybe I really mean legality is a superset of morality). Of course, I believe that, given time, Blueray will be cracked in some fashion. Still, that's a massive waste of resources that could be better spent in some manner that benefits humanity.
People will always be able to rip DVDs. It doesn't matter if the law allows the circumvention or not, it's a cracked technology.
However, if the law DOES allow it, that opens the door for legitimate businesses to manufacture and sell tools to make it easy for educators to copy clips. That's one of the reasons why it's so important that it be legal.
Do people still use those old fashioned hardware debuggers with the adapter that had pins for the socket on the board where the CPU would go, so it could capture the signals on all the pins?
As of... crap, I guess it's 8 years ago now... these were still in use, but phasing out, at least in my experience. Modern processors supported a JTAG test interface that allowed in-circuit debugging via a serial connection directly into the CPU itself. Not sure what the current state is; I recall being able to do some things with the 68k ICE that were not supported on the JTAG interface -- mostly related to detailed state of registers in the CPU. I don't recall whether this was an inherent limitation of the interface or a quirk of a cheap implementation of the interface.
There is nothing which prevents any person from installing a secondary mailbox
Well, except for the other bits of law cited by the OP that make it illegal for anyone to operate a viable business that competes with the USPS for basic postal service...
(disclosure: I am taking OP at face value; I know nothing about these laws, nor have I bothered to verify anything he said, but it seems plausible to me)
Attempting to conflate the "gay rights" agenda/propaganda, with the "civil rights" struggles to remove laws that enshrined discrimination based on skin color, is disingenuous at best. The questions involved are simply not the same.
The questions being asked are pretty similar, actually. Should a person be allowed to marry (and enjoy the related benefits thereof) the person he/she loves regardless of [skin color|gender]? Should a person be allowed equal footing to seek employment regardless of [skin color|sexual orientation]? Just because you see a difference between skin color and sexual orientation with respect to these questions doesn't make them "simply not the same." Maybe they're not the same, but it's a much more nuanced argument than you make it out to be, so we shouldn't tolerate a hand-wavy sweeping of this under the rug.
The question being asked is whether society sees a benefit in extending promotion - in the form of public registration and benefits such as inherent tax/legal proxy/inheritance/survivorship rights - to homosexual pairings, or whether the current status quo (in which a homosexual pairing is treated the same as would a cohabiting, unmarried hetero pairing or mere roommates) is what serves society best.
OR whether the existing laws (both statutory and constitutional) already guarantee protection to such pairings regardless of what society may "decide" (in a simple majority sense).
Obviously there are plenty of pro-gay activists who claim that the answer is yes, out of selfish self-benefit or for other reasons.
You used the word "disingenuous" earlier in your post, but I believe your characterization of the "pro-gay activists" is disingenuous as well. "Selfish self-benefit"? Seriously, what the fuck? It's sad that we "champions of freedom and equality" have to put up with the "myopically closed-minded paranoia" that drives the "anti-fag lobby" to try to limit the rights of those who engage in a lifestyle that doesn't happen to fit with a particular moral code.
By the way, I apologize if I'm misreading your intent, but I find your phrasing to be a bit thick with unreasonable spin. It is not at all fair to characterize the movement for equality with respect to sexual orientation as "pro-gay activists" seeking "selfish self-benefit" and then, almost as an afterthought, "or other reasons." Many, probably the vast majority, of us are not pro-anything "activists," we just don't buy the arguments for restricting the legal institution of marriage to a special class of people. But nice try attempting to cast this as "activists" against "ordinary folk" if that's what you were aiming to do...
A) Are you seriously claiming that people without children put aside their own self-interest and decide morality in some self-sacrificing manner for the good of society? What world are you living in? It clearly isn't this one.
2) Because one parent made a statement you disagreed with about the complex and heavily debated topic of universal health care and (so you claim) they backed this up with a bogus reason pertaining to their children, you conclude that morality exists only due to childless people?
iv) Come back in a few years and re-read your comment after you've had children. Then you'll understand how ridiculous you sound.
Anyway, I can't tell to what degree you're joking, but I completely disagree with your comment. People are in general not very strongly motivated by the common good in their day-to-day decisions, regardless of what they may claim. If anything, I think having children makes you *more* aware of others because you suddenly have a vested interest in your society agreeing to obey morals that ensure your child will be protected even when he's out of your watchful eye.
I'm sick of hearing MIT and the Ivies tote the line that they "turn away hundreds if not thousands of perfectly qualified applicants" while doing nothing to increase their capacity. This reeks of elitism, and needs to stop immediately if they're to be taken seriously as educational institutions.
It has nothing to do with elitism. Well, maybe not nothing, but it's certainly not a major reason. The size of an institution is a major part of its dynamics, and MIT works very well at its current size. I did my undergrad at MIT and I'm now a graduate student at Caltech, which is ~1/5 the size of MIT, so I have a bit of perspective on the topic.
You can't just decide to admit more students -- if you add students, you have to add faculty, add research opportunities, add facilities, etc, etc. It's not easy to find faculty of the caliber they have. Further, even if you could, increasing the size of a department reduces the ability of faculty to know each other, students to know faculty, etc. If anything, I think MIT is on the large side for its dynamic to work. The major strength of MIT (and Caltech) really has only a little to do with its courses. The biggest benefit is that you get to work with/near some of the best researchers (faculty, staff, postdocs, grad students, and undergrads) while you're doing your coursework. The vast majority of undergrads get directly involved in research. These aren't things you can just decide to make more slots available for...
They say they turn away qualified applicants because it's true. Fortunately, most students who are qualified will also apply for and be qualified for other schools too. It's not like MIT is the only place to get a great education; for many people it's decidedly NOT (for reasons having nothing to do with ability). Enrollment space is a limited commodity, and it has to be that way -- if you stretch it too far, the program suffers and suddenly it's not such a great place to be any more.
Release early/often is great for development, but I completely agree it's awful for end users. I spent years enjoying bleeding edge software and was happy to put up with bugs and workarounds, etc, but in the last few years I've actually had more important things to do than tinker with my computer. It bothers me to no end when "released" software contains what should be show-stopper class bugs. I think it's great to have direct access to in-progress builds, source code, etc, but if you want non-technical users to start using your software, you need to carefully prepare end-user builds that will provide a usable experience.
So maybe 1.0 doesn't mean anything for most projects, but that's a horrible, horrible mistake. If you want to put together a project that is useful to non-technical users, you need to make an effort to explain things in familiar terms. The non-technical people are the ones most likely to misunderstand that, e.g., you're not actually supposed to use 4.0 -- 4.2 (or maybe 4.2.2) will be the first ready-for-primetime release....
While I'm not going to argue that the US government is perfect, I don't think your inability to do any of the things you've listed indicates any real problem. There are hundreds of millions of people in this country. How exactly do you suggest the government operate in such a way that any of these citizens can interrupt Congress to share an idea, or wander up to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and just pop in to visit the President? There are certainly problems with the political system here, but that's not why you can't do these things. Power within our government is distributed hierarchically because that is the only way to manage something on that scale. So no, you can't interrupt Congress just because you want to speak. But try your City Council or equivalent-- odds are pretty good you'll be given a few minutes to speak at the podium.
Just think of it this way -- your vote accounts for ~1/250,000,000 of the political power in the country at the maximum. There are about 30,000,000 seconds in a year. So we each got to address the President for 0.1 seconds each year, he'd have no time left to do anything else...
Automatic initialization sounds great, but it doesn't address the problem. The problem is that if you're trying to read a value before you set it, you have flawed code. Unless you know something about the algorithm, it's hard to predict a good value to start with. I think the right approach is the fail-fast approach -- if possible, refuse to compile code that doesn't guarantee initialization. Anything else just hides programming errors...
While the science you propose might be interesting, your probe obtains no benefit from actually being on the asteroid in any way (other than the incorrect supposition that survivably landing on an asteroid is somehow easier than simply matching speed and position at a time when there is no asteroid there). There's no reason to expect that any particular asteroid is going to travel somewhere interesting, so there's just no incentive to hurry up to ride it. That asteroid is not going to go anywhere that your probe won't go on its own!
If you want to explore the asteroid zone with a self-assembling network of probes with no attitude control, then just let them fly freely. Really, really, being on the asteroid doesn't buy you anything.
The laws that cover reselling a CD are very very different (or, rather, in some cases are very very different) from those that cover selling a digital copy of a CD, so it's not that simple. Operating any operation internationally is very complicated. You have to ensure compliance with differing laws, shipping systems, customs, etc. The benefit of selling to a market has to outweigh the substantial costs of legally doing business in that market before it makes sense. Furthermore, even within the US, the actual interpretation of the laws that govern digital music sales has not been settled, adding risk-based costs to the assessment.
Add on that selling digital music is still a business in its infancy and I don't see why there has to be talk of anything more complicated than proving a model in one market before taking on the complexity of carrying it into other markets.
I don't have any inside information, but I can think of a couple very good reasons why they might not be ready to allow DRM-free MP3 downloads outside the US: non-uniform copyright laws and uncooperative copyright holders. For Amazon to actually allow MP3 downloads is not as simple as deciding they want to do it and then doing it. They need to be sure that they are not breaking copyright laws by doing so, which takes lots of lawyers lots of billable hours. They also need agreement from the copyright holders to license them to sell a downloadable copy of the MP3, which takes negotiation. If the copyright holders say no for whatever reason, their hands are tied.
It sucks, but it doesn't necessarily mean that Amazon is at fault or involved in anything more nefarious than not wanting to jeopardize their relationships with their content providers.
IAAA, granted not one who studies near-Earth objects or asteroids...
But, beyond direct exploration of the asteroid itself (and, ok, the kickass-cool factor of riding an asteroid), there really is little purpose to tagging along. Furthermore, it's serious sci-fi to even contemplate doing so. Your tether idea is interesting, but remember the speed difference between the asteroid and your probe is gonna be thousands of MPH so we're not just talking about a climbing rope here... so the path from "interesting" to "plausible" to deployment is a major engineering undertaking!
The asteroid is unlikely to provide significant shielding in any useful way. It's going to be rotating rapidly, and there's no reason to suspect it'd be on the right side to provide shielding even if it were not spinning. A probe you could even pretend to use for rapid-response activity like this with a straight face is not going to have any capability to move after it's landed, so you can't play some game claiming you'll just move to the "safe" side.
Furthermore, once you're in the same orbit as the asteroid, you really will follow its path. Unless you think the thing is a self-propelled asteroid, it isn't going to change direction. There's no advantage to actually being on it. I think the reality is, given the cost of even a cheap probe, for the simple matter of getting around the solar system, it's probably not worth it. You'd have to get the cost down to the point where you can afford just throwing away a lot of probes that don't wind up somewhere interesting -- until then, you really need to very carefully choose where your instrument winds up.
Sure a reasonable human being can object, and not on the grounds you cite. The EC amplifies the impact of small states in the national election. Doing away with this is a big change to the fundamental agreement under which our nation was assembled. You can argue that state independence is irrelevant (or less important) in the modern era, but that's hardly something you can just wave your hands and assume.
One simple problem with strict nationwide popular vote is that the concerns of the huge chunk of our population concentrated in urban areas are very different from those of folks who live in less dense regions. Since you can't just argue that NYC is more important than Kansas (that food has to be farmed somewhere), it's important to the nation as a whole to be sure that the few people attuned to Kansas' concerns are relevant to the political system. "One person one vote" is a great slogan, but I'm not sure it's always the most appropriate system.
This is not protecting the country from the voters, per se, it's simply ensuring that political power has some geographical distribution.
I agree about My World, but Coma was one of my favorites. Not all the time, but there was a lot going on in it and it was good sorta background. Overall I thought the albums worked well. Yeah, not every song was a hit single, but (other than My World) together they made up a nice complete work. Also, I don't think you can combine the two into a single very well. The two parts had very different tones-- 1 really felt "red" and 2 really felt "blue" to me, matching the cover artwork.
Kindle and its like are interesting, but not perfect replacements for magazines. A mag can be rolled/folded/wedged into a pocket, and if you leave it behind somewhere, sit on it, someone spills coffee on it, etc, you're out $3 not $300.
Slashdot Mirror
Those old phone books are occasionally useful. It's sometimes hard to find low-tech, small, local businesses (e.g., plumbers) online.
I have noticed that most "free, gratis, and open source software" is crap, is written by students or people in their spare time, and once the writer (because most of it certainly isn't engineered) has to actually make a living, the software stagnates.
While that may be true, I've noticed that most commercially produced software is also crap, only with a thin shiny veneer on the outside, just thick enough to generate sales. A polished turd is still a turd...
So anyway, yeah, there's a lot of crappy free software, but there's also an awful lot of good free software too.
In some places that may be true, but the big guys have (or once upon a time, had) reporters of their own who produced content, particularly local news Big city papers are a bit different from smaller local papers in that regard.
Important point. More than a side issue, I'd say. It's one thing for the DVD producers not to actively support your platform of choice. It's quite another for them to ensure that you can't legally make use of their DVD product without buying another product that they've sponsored. There's some hints of monopoly abuse there...
Yep, another reason it's important to ensure that legality matches morality (to the extent that there's relevant intersection between the two, maybe I really mean legality is a superset of morality). Of course, I believe that, given time, Blueray will be cracked in some fashion. Still, that's a massive waste of resources that could be better spent in some manner that benefits humanity.
People will always be able to rip DVDs. It doesn't matter if the law allows the circumvention or not, it's a cracked technology.
However, if the law DOES allow it, that opens the door for legitimate businesses to manufacture and sell tools to make it easy for educators to copy clips. That's one of the reasons why it's so important that it be legal.
Do people still use those old fashioned hardware debuggers with the adapter that had pins for the socket on the board where the CPU would go, so it could capture the signals on all the pins?
As of... crap, I guess it's 8 years ago now... these were still in use, but phasing out, at least in my experience. Modern processors supported a JTAG test interface that allowed in-circuit debugging via a serial connection directly into the CPU itself. Not sure what the current state is; I recall being able to do some things with the 68k ICE that were not supported on the JTAG interface -- mostly related to detailed state of registers in the CPU. I don't recall whether this was an inherent limitation of the interface or a quirk of a cheap implementation of the interface.
There is nothing which prevents any person from installing a secondary mailbox
Well, except for the other bits of law cited by the OP that make it illegal for anyone to operate a viable business that competes with the USPS for basic postal service...
(disclosure: I am taking OP at face value; I know nothing about these laws, nor have I bothered to verify anything he said, but it seems plausible to me)
A few words on building a proper file room... never put it in the basement or other low area where water would naturally accumulate.
The Boston Public Library learned this one the hard way.
Attempting to conflate the "gay rights" agenda/propaganda, with the "civil rights" struggles to remove laws that enshrined discrimination based on skin color, is disingenuous at best. The questions involved are simply not the same.
The questions being asked are pretty similar, actually. Should a person be allowed to marry (and enjoy the related benefits thereof) the person he/she loves regardless of [skin color|gender]? Should a person be allowed equal footing to seek employment regardless of [skin color|sexual orientation]? Just because you see a difference between skin color and sexual orientation with respect to these questions doesn't make them "simply not the same." Maybe they're not the same, but it's a much more nuanced argument than you make it out to be, so we shouldn't tolerate a hand-wavy sweeping of this under the rug.
The question being asked is whether society sees a benefit in extending promotion - in the form of public registration and benefits such as inherent tax/legal proxy/inheritance/survivorship rights - to homosexual pairings, or whether the current status quo (in which a homosexual pairing is treated the same as would a cohabiting, unmarried hetero pairing or mere roommates) is what serves society best.
OR whether the existing laws (both statutory and constitutional) already guarantee protection to such pairings regardless of what society may "decide" (in a simple majority sense).
Obviously there are plenty of pro-gay activists who claim that the answer is yes, out of selfish self-benefit or for other reasons.
You used the word "disingenuous" earlier in your post, but I believe your characterization of the "pro-gay activists" is disingenuous as well. "Selfish self-benefit"? Seriously, what the fuck? It's sad that we "champions of freedom and equality" have to put up with the "myopically closed-minded paranoia" that drives the "anti-fag lobby" to try to limit the rights of those who engage in a lifestyle that doesn't happen to fit with a particular moral code.
By the way, I apologize if I'm misreading your intent, but I find your phrasing to be a bit thick with unreasonable spin. It is not at all fair to characterize the movement for equality with respect to sexual orientation as "pro-gay activists" seeking "selfish self-benefit" and then, almost as an afterthought, "or other reasons." Many, probably the vast majority, of us are not pro-anything "activists," we just don't buy the arguments for restricting the legal institution of marriage to a special class of people. But nice try attempting to cast this as "activists" against "ordinary folk" if that's what you were aiming to do...
Narrow-mindedness may be increased by children, or it may not, depending on the person. And children aren't a requirement for it, either.
I agree with this, and I think it contradicts what the OP said-- children are not a unique cause or trigger of irrational moral decisions.
(by the way, my point iv was intended as a joke, but apparently it didn't come across that way....)
True, true. Sorry about that. I think this whole subthread has suffered from it a bit.
*whoosh*
*crickets chirping*
(it's ok, we all miss one now and then)
Bull shit.
A) Are you seriously claiming that people without children put aside their own self-interest and decide morality in some self-sacrificing manner for the good of society? What world are you living in? It clearly isn't this one.
2) Because one parent made a statement you disagreed with about the complex and heavily debated topic of universal health care and (so you claim) they backed this up with a bogus reason pertaining to their children, you conclude that morality exists only due to childless people?
iv) Come back in a few years and re-read your comment after you've had children. Then you'll understand how ridiculous you sound.
Anyway, I can't tell to what degree you're joking, but I completely disagree with your comment. People are in general not very strongly motivated by the common good in their day-to-day decisions, regardless of what they may claim. If anything, I think having children makes you *more* aware of others because you suddenly have a vested interest in your society agreeing to obey morals that ensure your child will be protected even when he's out of your watchful eye.
I'm sick of hearing MIT and the Ivies tote the line that they "turn away hundreds if not thousands of perfectly qualified applicants" while doing nothing to increase their capacity. This reeks of elitism, and needs to stop immediately if they're to be taken seriously as educational institutions.
It has nothing to do with elitism. Well, maybe not nothing, but it's certainly not a major reason. The size of an institution is a major part of its dynamics, and MIT works very well at its current size. I did my undergrad at MIT and I'm now a graduate student at Caltech, which is ~1/5 the size of MIT, so I have a bit of perspective on the topic.
You can't just decide to admit more students -- if you add students, you have to add faculty, add research opportunities, add facilities, etc, etc. It's not easy to find faculty of the caliber they have. Further, even if you could, increasing the size of a department reduces the ability of faculty to know each other, students to know faculty, etc. If anything, I think MIT is on the large side for its dynamic to work. The major strength of MIT (and Caltech) really has only a little to do with its courses. The biggest benefit is that you get to work with/near some of the best researchers (faculty, staff, postdocs, grad students, and undergrads) while you're doing your coursework. The vast majority of undergrads get directly involved in research. These aren't things you can just decide to make more slots available for...
They say they turn away qualified applicants because it's true. Fortunately, most students who are qualified will also apply for and be qualified for other schools too. It's not like MIT is the only place to get a great education; for many people it's decidedly NOT (for reasons having nothing to do with ability). Enrollment space is a limited commodity, and it has to be that way -- if you stretch it too far, the program suffers and suddenly it's not such a great place to be any more.
Release early/often is great for development, but I completely agree it's awful for end users. I spent years enjoying bleeding edge software and was happy to put up with bugs and workarounds, etc, but in the last few years I've actually had more important things to do than tinker with my computer. It bothers me to no end when "released" software contains what should be show-stopper class bugs. I think it's great to have direct access to in-progress builds, source code, etc, but if you want non-technical users to start using your software, you need to carefully prepare end-user builds that will provide a usable experience.
So maybe 1.0 doesn't mean anything for most projects, but that's a horrible, horrible mistake. If you want to put together a project that is useful to non-technical users, you need to make an effort to explain things in familiar terms. The non-technical people are the ones most likely to misunderstand that, e.g., you're not actually supposed to use 4.0 -- 4.2 (or maybe 4.2.2) will be the first ready-for-primetime release....
While I'm not going to argue that the US government is perfect, I don't think your inability to do any of the things you've listed indicates any real problem. There are hundreds of millions of people in this country. How exactly do you suggest the government operate in such a way that any of these citizens can interrupt Congress to share an idea, or wander up to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and just pop in to visit the President? There are certainly problems with the political system here, but that's not why you can't do these things. Power within our government is distributed hierarchically because that is the only way to manage something on that scale. So no, you can't interrupt Congress just because you want to speak. But try your City Council or equivalent-- odds are pretty good you'll be given a few minutes to speak at the podium.
Just think of it this way -- your vote accounts for ~1/250,000,000 of the political power in the country at the maximum. There are about 30,000,000 seconds in a year. So we each got to address the President for 0.1 seconds each year, he'd have no time left to do anything else...
Automatic initialization sounds great, but it doesn't address the problem. The problem is that if you're trying to read a value before you set it, you have flawed code. Unless you know something about the algorithm, it's hard to predict a good value to start with. I think the right approach is the fail-fast approach -- if possible, refuse to compile code that doesn't guarantee initialization. Anything else just hides programming errors...
While the science you propose might be interesting, your probe obtains no benefit from actually being on the asteroid in any way (other than the incorrect supposition that survivably landing on an asteroid is somehow easier than simply matching speed and position at a time when there is no asteroid there). There's no reason to expect that any particular asteroid is going to travel somewhere interesting, so there's just no incentive to hurry up to ride it. That asteroid is not going to go anywhere that your probe won't go on its own!
If you want to explore the asteroid zone with a self-assembling network of probes with no attitude control, then just let them fly freely. Really, really, being on the asteroid doesn't buy you anything.
The laws that cover reselling a CD are very very different (or, rather, in some cases are very very different) from those that cover selling a digital copy of a CD, so it's not that simple. Operating any operation internationally is very complicated. You have to ensure compliance with differing laws, shipping systems, customs, etc. The benefit of selling to a market has to outweigh the substantial costs of legally doing business in that market before it makes sense. Furthermore, even within the US, the actual interpretation of the laws that govern digital music sales has not been settled, adding risk-based costs to the assessment.
Add on that selling digital music is still a business in its infancy and I don't see why there has to be talk of anything more complicated than proving a model in one market before taking on the complexity of carrying it into other markets.
I don't have any inside information, but I can think of a couple very good reasons why they might not be ready to allow DRM-free MP3 downloads outside the US: non-uniform copyright laws and uncooperative copyright holders. For Amazon to actually allow MP3 downloads is not as simple as deciding they want to do it and then doing it. They need to be sure that they are not breaking copyright laws by doing so, which takes lots of lawyers lots of billable hours. They also need agreement from the copyright holders to license them to sell a downloadable copy of the MP3, which takes negotiation. If the copyright holders say no for whatever reason, their hands are tied.
It sucks, but it doesn't necessarily mean that Amazon is at fault or involved in anything more nefarious than not wanting to jeopardize their relationships with their content providers.
IAAA, granted not one who studies near-Earth objects or asteroids...
But, beyond direct exploration of the asteroid itself (and, ok, the kickass-cool factor of riding an asteroid), there really is little purpose to tagging along. Furthermore, it's serious sci-fi to even contemplate doing so. Your tether idea is interesting, but remember the speed difference between the asteroid and your probe is gonna be thousands of MPH so we're not just talking about a climbing rope here... so the path from "interesting" to "plausible" to deployment is a major engineering undertaking!
The asteroid is unlikely to provide significant shielding in any useful way. It's going to be rotating rapidly, and there's no reason to suspect it'd be on the right side to provide shielding even if it were not spinning. A probe you could even pretend to use for rapid-response activity like this with a straight face is not going to have any capability to move after it's landed, so you can't play some game claiming you'll just move to the "safe" side.
Furthermore, once you're in the same orbit as the asteroid, you really will follow its path. Unless you think the thing is a self-propelled asteroid, it isn't going to change direction. There's no advantage to actually being on it. I think the reality is, given the cost of even a cheap probe, for the simple matter of getting around the solar system, it's probably not worth it. You'd have to get the cost down to the point where you can afford just throwing away a lot of probes that don't wind up somewhere interesting -- until then, you really need to very carefully choose where your instrument winds up.
Sure a reasonable human being can object, and not on the grounds you cite. The EC amplifies the impact of small states in the national election. Doing away with this is a big change to the fundamental agreement under which our nation was assembled. You can argue that state independence is irrelevant (or less important) in the modern era, but that's hardly something you can just wave your hands and assume.
One simple problem with strict nationwide popular vote is that the concerns of the huge chunk of our population concentrated in urban areas are very different from those of folks who live in less dense regions. Since you can't just argue that NYC is more important than Kansas (that food has to be farmed somewhere), it's important to the nation as a whole to be sure that the few people attuned to Kansas' concerns are relevant to the political system. "One person one vote" is a great slogan, but I'm not sure it's always the most appropriate system.
This is not protecting the country from the voters, per se, it's simply ensuring that political power has some geographical distribution.
I agree about My World, but Coma was one of my favorites. Not all the time, but there was a lot going on in it and it was good sorta background. Overall I thought the albums worked well. Yeah, not every song was a hit single, but (other than My World) together they made up a nice complete work. Also, I don't think you can combine the two into a single very well. The two parts had very different tones-- 1 really felt "red" and 2 really felt "blue" to me, matching the cover artwork.
Kindle and its like are interesting, but not perfect replacements for magazines. A mag can be rolled/folded/wedged into a pocket, and if you leave it behind somewhere, sit on it, someone spills coffee on it, etc, you're out $3 not $300.