A lot of the speed is lost in the parsing of the source. If the source were tokenised, like the old basic stuff was, then it would probably run a lot faster.
Doesn't the name "Software Productivy Research" give it away? Doesn't the definition of work as writing and enhancing give it away.
The arguement runs like this. Anything other than writing and enhancement does not better the product. Anything that does not better the product is waste.
The notion that people may spend great amounts of time securing the position (eg debugging, building foundations, etc), or recycling waste (eg learning, trying things out, discovery) seems not to be `productive' and is thus not `work'.
Same as any other commercial activity - they say you can run the ship in fair weather with a crew of x, so that's all you need. Tough if the boat sinks.
It would prove handy keeping these people who seem to have forgotten the past damages to the market. May prove handy when we want to show MS weenies that MS is a monopoly:)
It is appropiate to compare older technology with today's prices, be it cars or computers. People bought the appropiate technology at any era, and hey, it matched (sort of).
I think what is needed out of the MS-DoJ thing is some sort of portable code emulator, a binary equal of C. Software makers would write most of the code to this, and this would run under different OS's, be they free or commercial.
You will still have a need for OS specific apps, but so much of the customer cost in OS replacement is in replacing the apps for the OS.
Different emulator codes could be optimised for different classes of program: for example, games and productivity suites have different requirements, and thus could use different emulators. You could can the games emulator to stop people running games at work:)
There is so many possibilities that we missed because of the `ILOVEYOU' affair with Windows:(.
The Aussie connection got spaded last week, and the link is 70% working. It ain't great, but you get there.
Microsoft has this ".NET" thingie, that they're building on Windows NT.:-O Just think of the openings: the Blue Screen of Net. Of course,.NET will add a whole new range of possibilities: "MS Denial of Service" or MS-DoS.
I think:) that when 99% of the net is down, then most of it would be MS-"powered".
The purpose of laws were to add restraints for what was not naturally present. The electronic age changes what is naturally present. Consider these examples.
Copyright
Before computers, one could not easily copy books, records, etc. But you could acquire at some expence, a press, and do these things. So there was certian laws enacted to stop copyright, and the target of these was sizable operations.
You enter the tape age, where people can record cassettes and videos, and so we get this nonsence of `time shifts' and royalties on blank media.
In the computer age, we have e-books, and MP3's and Napster and so forth getting into trouble because there is no easy way to control copies.
Privacy
In the paper age, if you wanted to track me, you had to pay a spook to sit in a letter box or something. Have spooks cutting clippings out of papers, and photographing me. Big money. Pick carefully.
With computers, you can run and store massive archives assembled with grep. If you play your cards right, you do not have to even pay for the processing or storage of your snooping.
Junk Mail
In the days of paper, you had to pay a printer to print your flyer, and pay some likely lasses to put the flyer in everyone's letterboxes. Costs money. Pick the target carefully.
In the computer age, you can send out bulk e-mails, or generalised mail, based on individual profiles. Annie likes Apple, send her adds for apple applications. Sally likes servers, send her out server software samplers. You get the idea. Also, you do not pay for the duplication and sending of this.
Spam is not liked because it clogs up the system, and it is paid for by those who do not benefit from it.
Anomynous Posting
If I stick a sign up that said, 'Windows sucks', then MS are going to have a devel of a time working out it was me.
If I post a message that says `Windows sucks', then MS could use some spooky program that says it came from this box, etc etc.
Covering the tracks
A privacy issue allows a person to cover ones tracks, by destroying that part of the past. There are people who seek uncover this past and use it against us. But the difficulty of deletion of data has strongly taken away from us our rights of a fair forgiveness of forgotten things. In the electronic age, we can scrape through a computer for scrap of files deleted, and tie it more clearly to a person, then if the same data had been recovered from the council tip.
Issues for a digital age
Do you see a pattern? Under the digital age, there are three natural justices that have changed, for which there is need for a new laws to protect our rights
it is easier to copy.
it is easier to analise.
it is harder to delete.
We need to address these natural justices as a totality, rather than looking at the effected issues (changes in copyright, privacy, freedom of speech,....)
I have some objection to `free browsers-plus', because the market proved so promising before MS destroyed it.
A lot of the free stuff is just that. Free to buy, free to try. I don't have to pay for it or install it. I got StarOffice as a separate act, tried it and choofed it off my system. No harm any way. IE is free, but it screws my system up something terrible, that I need to rebuild to uninstall it. And I'm lucky, the poor sods with Win98 can't uninstall it.
You say you're a diehard Netscape user. What will you do when it dies? I mean, if you're not pumping the dosh into keeping the R&D up, who is? Netscape is doing very little because people like yourself have finished what Microsoft wanted: to cut of Netscape's oxygen supply.
Does Sun &al giving away free word processors kill innovation. Yes. Are these markets already dead? Yes. Innovation was killed off by Microsoft's white box, not by Sun's StarOffice. The white box refers to the heavily discounted version of Office bundled with new machines, funded by the exhorbantent price of new and upgrade versions.
Here's one for you. Take an RTF (rich text format) document. Remove the last brace "}". Open it in your $500 word processor. It opens it up with all of the formatting, everything, and then it gets to the end, and sees that the { and } don't match. Then it says 'duh - must be a text document - what do you want, MS-DOS Text?
Besides which, the rules change when you have a dominate share of the market. Small companies are allowed to do things to attract market share.
When you buy software for a newbie, the MS stuff has the edge, I'm sure. I was one not that long ago. But once you get the wrapping off and start to do serious work, you're going to need serious tools. MS don't provide for this niche market.:(
I think of all of the innovative Microsoft has invented. Hmmm. MS-Bob? Office Annoyer? (someone told me this was MS-Bob).... Help - I'm running out of ideas...
It's not that the idea of the Start Menu or the `send to' thing are bad. They're actually quite good ideas. But they're hardly stunning innovations.
The two click install is a point of case. You get this file called runme.exe, you click on it, you click the ok button and watch the fire works. I mean, there is no way that you can see what it does until it had its way. Hey, we spent a decade teaching people about safe computing...:(
The thing I like about MS's front line OS's is that you cant boot them from floppy. I can boot OS/2 from three floppies, and I can see long file names and weird file systems from these. Hey trying doing any of this with any Win32 system. I mean, even with Win95, you can do some really clever thing like drag and drop the c:/windows dir and then spend the next five or six hours fixing it up, like I had to. Forget about trying to see NTFS partitions from an NT boot disk. Forget about using NT boot disks for anything useful. This is innovation?.
I mean, what can you say about a company that sticks all sorts of `shoot me in the foot' stuff into the shell, so they don't have to do any thing fancy program-wise. You can't tell me that the commands `ftype' and `associate' are there for anything other than installs.
My experience with the Joe Blow and his software is that when he runs into a problem, he finds some Savvy Sally to fix his machine, like we all do when we start off. Some just never get past it if it's free. When you start paying $80 a throw, you learn. Real fast.
C# is a windows-only language. Is there a C# for OS/2, or Linux, or BeOS? Without this, it's just a C version of Virus Basic. Go for some cross-platform thingie, like REXX, Nombas's ScriptEase or 4DOS/4OS2/4NT's batch language. Life's too short to add to the languages.
OS/2's software is not busting out of the isles. But it's there if you look. I mean, you can't get Civ2 for OS/2. But you can get word processors and spreadsheets and whatever. And if you really cared about choice, you should be demanding it.
Freedom is what you make it. Nothing more, nothing less. Feed the fish for free, catch the fish for free.
The real winner is.... nobody. Don't we give fish a free feed on the end of a hook? I mean, if Word processing is fun, why not just give away Word Processors. If games are fun, why not give away games.
Programs to browse the Web have always been free. You can see from them if net browsing is a tempting to go and buy a browser. Mosaic is free. Many are based on mosaic.
Netscape made a market for a 'browser plus' application. That is, Mosaic that could do other things as well. They created a profitable product for their innovations, that took 80% of the market, even though you paid for it.
Other vendors made 'browser plus' programs, and sold them according to what they thought people would pay for the 'plus' bit. Microsoft saw this, and wheeled out their 'browser plus'. But their 'browser plus' wasn't capturing the market share that they hoped for.
In order to capture the market, Microsoft had to do something different, and that is what they did. They bundled it with Windows, first as a separate application, then bound it into Windows so hard that you need to use their browser.
Windows 98 works without a browser. Check out http://www.98lite.com/ where a program to remove IE might be found.
The real reason that nobody wins is because the solution proposed kills innovation. No Windows, No Net. Simple enough.
OS/2's Web Explorer
This is Mosaic for OS/2. It fits on a single floppy, uncompressed. It is advertised as an onramp to the internet. But it's only an onramp, not the highway. If you want speed or class or whatever, go get something else.
Netscape
This is only free because Microsoft killed the market. Why pay $50 when you can get the same for free? Netscape were forced into a situation where they could not compete, and so had to give the stuff away to stay afloat. For whatever they did right or wrong, they simply were bankrolled by the Windows juggernaut.
Java
Java was a genuine attempt to allow people to write web applets for the internet. Microsoft had their way with this as well (J++, C#, VirusBasic,...).
Net Innovation
Of course you can further innovate. The OS/2 install program "WarpIn" uses a html-like script for installation. look at http://projects.netlabs.org/
Active Desktop
You don't need a browser to make the active desktop. Not even close here. Even if the active desktop and the browser share the same code, it should be possible to install both Active Desktop and Netscape. I mean, it's just DLL calls.
Why do we loose
You give a fish a feed, it wins. You reel in the line, it looses. Inverted J curve - nothing less, nothing more.
Consider the five years from 1990 to 1995, against the five years 1995-2000. You will see MS's innovation sans competition.
In the earlier stage, MS-DOS, DR-DOS, OS/2 and whatever were slogging it out for the Desktop, and WP, Amipro and Word were slugging out the word processors, we had companies listening to the users.
In the period from 1995-2000, we have "clippit", the annoying paper clip, and a word processor that is unable to deal with any damage in a document. Take an RTF document, and remove the last brace - then open it in Word!.
The whole browser thing is misrepresented. Mosaic was free. Netscape, whatever one says of it, made a market by selling a browser plus addins. It got 80% of the market against free and shareware browsers. This is a genuine innovation.
Microsoft made and sold a "browser plus" called IE, but when it looked like they were not going to compete against Netscape, they used their OS monopoly to drive NS out of the market.
An OS includes toys as follows.
Things designed not to be replaced. These are good things, because the users ought not be discontented with what's on offer.
Things designed to be replaced. You can see from 'pbrush' or 'write' if you want to do pictures or write words, but they're not mainstream graphic or word processors. If you want thes go an get a real graphics or word processor.
MS included a program not intended to be replaced, and therefore intended to kill off the market.
OS/2's net browser is advertised as an on-ramp to the information super highway - but if you want to drive around on it, go get a real browser. Web Explorer can be used something serious.
It's easy to copy things in the computer. This means that it is easier to make a copy of a book or a record, or any sort of public episode of a person.
The laws were set up on the assumption that the costs of copying a book or a record or a public episode was high, and this high cost would deter most people form copying these.
So I want a copy of your book, or your record, then I'd pay huge costs to get it, or a cheaper cost to acquire it retail. If I want to snoop on you, then I pay a lot for the detective works.
Under computers, the copying fees are next to zilch, and with most detective work, you can use other people's computers [isn't that what bots are about?].
Since there is no cost effect on the cost of duplication, this is why we're seeing things like the Napster legal issues, and privacy breaches, and so forth. Not because the legal issues have changed, but because the balancing costs of copying have disappeared.
From what I recall, it's more to deal with the types and placements of the whorls.
Consider the main proposition of On Growth and Form was that Nature relies on the underlying physics to create the forms, and skilly exploits them. Finger prints are swirls of ridges on the human skin, and are governed by the laws that govern these things. What drives it was the placement and types of the assorted deformities of the print.
I seem to recall reading somewhere (probably New Scientist) that fingerprints were made as the result of a more limited things, rather like the wat you can pull random numbers of a seed number.
The voters can't reject all issues either: see my post elsewhere in this list, where I democratically replace Linux with DOS. Hint - search for "os2fan".
Have we forgotten the protest vote, everyone? Here me out.
It's all well and fine to rant on about reducing voting errors, but we've got to give the voters the right to reject all options as a concious vote. Consider this electoral issue.
So, we hold a vote on "Which DOS should we replace Linux with?"
"PC-DOS"
"MS-DOS"
We get in the votes. If the vote is electronic, you get all of these cards that say "Keep Linux!!!" - Sorry - invalid vote. You get Linuxers staying away - no vote - no count. Your voting machines accept only valid choices: PC-DOS or MS-DOS. Do what you like. PC-DOS wins the day - and we replace Linux with PC-DOS. And, just think - it is the democratic choice!
It could happen. It did in Tasmania, with the Franklin referendum. Read `dam the Gordon' for 'Replace Linux with DOS', replace above and below for PC-DOS and MS-DOS, read No Dam for keep Linux.
You need some mechanism to allow people to say your choices are bonkers. Some are going to turn up and say your choices are bonkers anyway, so you need a threshhold to say Too many people are saying we're hitting the wrong thing - let's do it differently
You have to protect against overly restrictive choices in your electoral schemes. What would you do if we had an election, like this:
We're going to replace all of Unix and Linux boxen with DOS boxes, and, for good measure we'll have an election so
you can decide whether you want PC-DOS or MS-DOS. Then, we could install the winning DOS because that's what the people wanted! Ooh! I love democarcy!:-) And, to top thing off, no matter what howls those weenies make, it's going to make squat diddly to the vote. Hey - they can stay away in droves for all we care - that's just less votes to count.
We had an election like this in the Oz, a referendum where people of Tasmania could decide whether the Gordon river should be dammed above or below the Franklin River. No `no dam' choice.
Our electral system has compulsory voting, and the number of invalid (called `informal') votes are tracked as well. Normally, these consist of people who made accidents on their cards, but there is a percentage of deliberate `No thanks' votes.
The No Dam people used this method to send a clear message that NONE of the options were welcome.
An electronic system should
Allow people to post a non-vote
Have some mechanism to allow some reconsideration of the issues if the non-vote count gets over a stated percentage.
One thing that vote reform forgets is that the voters need to be able to reject all options and be heard.
Voters are not necessarily voting FOR someone, sometimes they are aiding the enemy of, or whatever. Sometimes they might want to burn a vote like people burn flags.
For example. `We're going to replace Linux with DOS, which DOS do you want? (a) PC-DOS, (b) MS-DOS.' One of them is going to win. So Linux gets replaced by DOS under the guise of popular vote! And since the Linuxers can't vote for Linux, ooh, God, I love democracy!! I mean they can stay away in their droves and a DOS will win.
This happened over here. `We're damming the Gordon River, do you want it (a) above, (b) below, the Franklin.'
Over here, we have compulsory voting, and even the invalid votes are tabulated and published (as informals). So there is a general awareness of the people who don't want to vote, or have difficulty with the system.
The `no dam' people ran a successful case that pushed this informal vote through the roof, and as a result, the wish of the people became known by rejecting all on offer.
Once running, one can guage the background scrap vote, and then decide what fraction of the vote needs to be informal to seriously rethink the issue.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of the speed is lost in the parsing of the source. If the source were tokenised, like the old basic stuff was, then it would probably run a lot faster.
The arguement runs like this. Anything other than writing and enhancement does not better the product. Anything that does not better the product is waste.
The notion that people may spend great amounts of time securing the position (eg debugging, building foundations, etc), or recycling waste (eg learning, trying things out, discovery) seems not to be `productive' and is thus not `work'.
Same as any other commercial activity - they say you can run the ship in fair weather with a crew of x, so that's all you need. Tough if the boat sinks.
It is appropiate to compare older technology with today's prices, be it cars or computers. People bought the appropiate technology at any era, and hey, it matched (sort of).
You will still have a need for OS specific apps, but so much of the customer cost in OS replacement is in replacing the apps for the OS.
Different emulator codes could be optimised for different classes of program: for example, games and productivity suites have different requirements, and thus could use different emulators. You could can the games emulator to stop people running games at work :)
There is so many possibilities that we missed because of the `ILOVEYOU' affair with Windows :(.
Microsoft has this ".NET" thingie, that they're building on Windows NT. :-O Just think of the openings: the Blue Screen of Net. Of course, .NET will add a whole new range of possibilities: "MS Denial of Service" or MS-DoS.
I think :) that when 99% of the net is down, then most of it would be MS-"powered".
Select choice - because diversity matters.
Copyright
Before computers, one could not easily copy books, records, etc. But you could acquire at some expence, a press, and do these things. So there was certian laws enacted to stop copyright, and the target of these was sizable operations.
You enter the tape age, where people can record cassettes and videos, and so we get this nonsence of `time shifts' and royalties on blank media.
In the computer age, we have e-books, and MP3's and Napster and so forth getting into trouble because there is no easy way to control copies.
Privacy
In the paper age, if you wanted to track me, you had to pay a spook to sit in a letter box or something. Have spooks cutting clippings out of papers, and photographing me. Big money. Pick carefully.
With computers, you can run and store massive archives assembled with grep. If you play your cards right, you do not have to even pay for the processing or storage of your snooping.
Junk Mail
In the days of paper, you had to pay a printer to print your flyer, and pay some likely lasses to put the flyer in everyone's letterboxes. Costs money. Pick the target carefully.
In the computer age, you can send out bulk e-mails, or generalised mail, based on individual profiles. Annie likes Apple, send her adds for apple applications. Sally likes servers, send her out server software samplers. You get the idea. Also, you do not pay for the duplication and sending of this.
Spam is not liked because it clogs up the system, and it is paid for by those who do not benefit from it.
Anomynous Posting
If I stick a sign up that said, 'Windows sucks', then MS are going to have a devel of a time working out it was me.
If I post a message that says `Windows sucks', then MS could use some spooky program that says it came from this box, etc etc.
Covering the tracks
A privacy issue allows a person to cover ones tracks, by destroying that part of the past. There are people who seek uncover this past and use it against us. But the difficulty of deletion of data has strongly taken away from us our rights of a fair forgiveness of forgotten things. In the electronic age, we can scrape through a computer for scrap of files deleted, and tie it more clearly to a person, then if the same data had been recovered from the council tip.
Issues for a digital age
Do you see a pattern? Under the digital age, there are three natural justices that have changed, for which there is need for a new laws to protect our rights
We need to address these natural justices as a totality, rather than looking at the effected issues (changes in copyright, privacy, freedom of speech, ....)
A lot of the free stuff is just that. Free to buy, free to try. I don't have to pay for it or install it. I got StarOffice as a separate act, tried it and choofed it off my system. No harm any way. IE is free, but it screws my system up something terrible, that I need to rebuild to uninstall it. And I'm lucky, the poor sods with Win98 can't uninstall it.
You say you're a diehard Netscape user. What will you do when it dies? I mean, if you're not pumping the dosh into keeping the R&D up, who is? Netscape is doing very little because people like yourself have finished what Microsoft wanted: to cut of Netscape's oxygen supply.
Does Sun &al giving away free word processors kill innovation. Yes. Are these markets already dead? Yes. Innovation was killed off by Microsoft's white box, not by Sun's StarOffice. The white box refers to the heavily discounted version of Office bundled with new machines, funded by the exhorbantent price of new and upgrade versions.
Here's one for you. Take an RTF (rich text format) document. Remove the last brace "}". Open it in your $500 word processor. It opens it up with all of the formatting, everything, and then it gets to the end, and sees that the { and } don't match. Then it says 'duh - must be a text document - what do you want, MS-DOS Text?
Besides which, the rules change when you have a dominate share of the market. Small companies are allowed to do things to attract market share.
When you buy software for a newbie, the MS stuff has the edge, I'm sure. I was one not that long ago. But once you get the wrapping off and start to do serious work, you're going to need serious tools. MS don't provide for this niche market. :(
I think of all of the innovative Microsoft has invented. Hmmm. MS-Bob? Office Annoyer? (someone told me this was MS-Bob). ... Help - I'm running out of ideas ...
It's not that the idea of the Start Menu or the `send to' thing are bad. They're actually quite good ideas. But they're hardly stunning innovations.
The two click install is a point of case. You get this file called runme.exe, you click on it, you click the ok button and watch the fire works. I mean, there is no way that you can see what it does until it had its way. Hey, we spent a decade teaching people about safe computing... :(
The thing I like about MS's front line OS's is that you cant boot them from floppy. I can boot OS/2 from three floppies, and I can see long file names and weird file systems from these. Hey trying doing any of this with any Win32 system. I mean, even with Win95, you can do some really clever thing like drag and drop the c:/windows dir and then spend the next five or six hours fixing it up, like I had to. Forget about trying to see NTFS partitions from an NT boot disk. Forget about using NT boot disks for anything useful. This is innovation?.
I mean, what can you say about a company that sticks all sorts of `shoot me in the foot' stuff into the shell, so they don't have to do any thing fancy program-wise. You can't tell me that the commands `ftype' and `associate' are there for anything other than installs.
My experience with the Joe Blow and his software is that when he runs into a problem, he finds some Savvy Sally to fix his machine, like we all do when we start off. Some just never get past it if it's free. When you start paying $80 a throw, you learn. Real fast.
C# is a windows-only language. Is there a C# for OS/2, or Linux, or BeOS? Without this, it's just a C version of Virus Basic. Go for some cross-platform thingie, like REXX, Nombas's ScriptEase or 4DOS/4OS2/4NT's batch language. Life's too short to add to the languages.
OS/2's software is not busting out of the isles. But it's there if you look. I mean, you can't get Civ2 for OS/2. But you can get word processors and spreadsheets and whatever. And if you really cared about choice, you should be demanding it.
Freedom is what you make it. Nothing more, nothing less. Feed the fish for free, catch the fish for free.
Were Linux in the dock, you'ld wonder who was holding the knife, because its packaging has been forked. :)
Programs to browse the Web have always been free. You can see from them if net browsing is a tempting to go and buy a browser. Mosaic is free. Many are based on mosaic.
Netscape made a market for a 'browser plus' application. That is, Mosaic that could do other things as well. They created a profitable product for their innovations, that took 80% of the market, even though you paid for it.
Other vendors made 'browser plus' programs, and sold them according to what they thought people would pay for the 'plus' bit. Microsoft saw this, and wheeled out their 'browser plus'. But their 'browser plus' wasn't capturing the market share that they hoped for.
In order to capture the market, Microsoft had to do something different, and that is what they did. They bundled it with Windows, first as a separate application, then bound it into Windows so hard that you need to use their browser.
Windows 98 works without a browser. Check out http://www.98lite.com/ where a program to remove IE might be found.
The real reason that nobody wins is because the solution proposed kills innovation. No Windows, No Net. Simple enough.
OS/2's Web Explorer
This is Mosaic for OS/2. It fits on a single floppy, uncompressed. It is advertised as an onramp to the internet. But it's only an onramp, not the highway. If you want speed or class or whatever, go get something else.
Netscape
This is only free because Microsoft killed the market. Why pay $50 when you can get the same for free? Netscape were forced into a situation where they could not compete, and so had to give the stuff away to stay afloat. For whatever they did right or wrong, they simply were bankrolled by the Windows juggernaut.
Java
Java was a genuine attempt to allow people to write web applets for the internet. Microsoft had their way with this as well (J++, C#, VirusBasic, ...).
Net Innovation
Of course you can further innovate. The OS/2 install program "WarpIn" uses a html-like script for installation. look at http://projects.netlabs.org/
Active Desktop
You don't need a browser to make the active desktop. Not even close here. Even if the active desktop and the browser share the same code, it should be possible to install both Active Desktop and Netscape. I mean, it's just DLL calls.
Why do we loose
You give a fish a feed, it wins. You reel in the line, it looses. Inverted J curve - nothing less, nothing more.
In the earlier stage, MS-DOS, DR-DOS, OS/2 and whatever were slogging it out for the Desktop, and WP, Amipro and Word were slugging out the word processors, we had companies listening to the users.
In the period from 1995-2000, we have "clippit", the annoying paper clip, and a word processor that is unable to deal with any damage in a document. Take an RTF document, and remove the last brace - then open it in Word!.
The whole browser thing is misrepresented. Mosaic was free. Netscape, whatever one says of it, made a market by selling a browser plus addins. It got 80% of the market against free and shareware browsers. This is a genuine innovation.
Microsoft made and sold a "browser plus" called IE, but when it looked like they were not going to compete against Netscape, they used their OS monopoly to drive NS out of the market.
An OS includes toys as follows.
MS included a program not intended to be replaced, and therefore intended to kill off the market.
OS/2's net browser is advertised as an on-ramp to the information super highway - but if you want to drive around on it, go get a real browser. Web Explorer can be used something serious.
The laws were set up on the assumption that the costs of copying a book or a record or a public episode was high, and this high cost would deter most people form copying these.
So I want a copy of your book, or your record, then I'd pay huge costs to get it, or a cheaper cost to acquire it retail. If I want to snoop on you, then I pay a lot for the detective works.
Under computers, the copying fees are next to zilch, and with most detective work, you can use other people's computers [isn't that what bots are about?].
Since there is no cost effect on the cost of duplication, this is why we're seeing things like the Napster legal issues, and privacy breaches, and so forth. Not because the legal issues have changed, but because the balancing costs of copying have disappeared.
Consider the main proposition of On Growth and Form was that Nature relies on the underlying physics to create the forms, and skilly exploits them. Finger prints are swirls of ridges on the human skin, and are governed by the laws that govern these things. What drives it was the placement and types of the assorted deformities of the print.
The voters can't reject all issues either: see my post elsewhere in this list, where I democratically replace Linux with DOS. Hint - search for "os2fan".
It's all well and fine to rant on about reducing voting errors, but we've got to give the voters the right to reject all options as a concious vote. Consider this electoral issue.
So, we hold a vote on "Which DOS should we replace Linux with?"
- "PC-DOS"
- "MS-DOS"
We get in the votes. If the vote is electronic, you get all of these cards that say "Keep Linux!!!" - Sorry - invalid vote. You get Linuxers staying away - no vote - no count. Your voting machines accept only valid choices: PC-DOS or MS-DOS. Do what you like. PC-DOS wins the day - and we replace Linux with PC-DOS. And, just think - it is the democratic choice!It could happen. It did in Tasmania, with the Franklin referendum. Read `dam the Gordon' for 'Replace Linux with DOS', replace above and below for PC-DOS and MS-DOS, read No Dam for keep Linux.
You need some mechanism to allow people to say your choices are bonkers. Some are going to turn up and say your choices are bonkers anyway, so you need a threshhold to say Too many people are saying we're hitting the wrong thing - let's do it differently
Our electral system has compulsory voting, and the number of invalid (called `informal') votes are tracked as well. Normally, these consist of people who made accidents on their cards, but there is a percentage of deliberate `No thanks' votes.
The No Dam people used this method to send a clear message that NONE of the options were welcome.
An electronic system should
Voters are not necessarily voting FOR someone, sometimes they are aiding the enemy of, or whatever. Sometimes they might want to burn a vote like people burn flags.
For example. `We're going to replace Linux with DOS, which DOS do you want? (a) PC-DOS, (b) MS-DOS.' One of them is going to win. So Linux gets replaced by DOS under the guise of popular vote! And since the Linuxers can't vote for Linux, ooh, God, I love democracy!! I mean they can stay away in their droves and a DOS will win.
This happened over here. `We're damming the Gordon River, do you want it (a) above, (b) below, the Franklin.'
Over here, we have compulsory voting, and even the invalid votes are tabulated and published (as informals). So there is a general awareness of the people who don't want to vote, or have difficulty with the system.
The `no dam' people ran a successful case that pushed this informal vote through the roof, and as a result, the wish of the people became known by rejecting all on offer.
Once running, one can guage the background scrap vote, and then decide what fraction of the vote needs to be informal to seriously rethink the issue.
For this to work, you need:
- Some means to mark a vote as spent
- Some threshold to cause a rethink of questions.
My 2d. worthOS/2 for ever!