A cigar is just a cigar. Don't apply your armchair pseudo-psychological, pseudo-philosophical meanderings to a simply-scripted story about the re-emergence of logic as a ruling force in Vulcan civilization. Give it a break, man!
Mirrordot successfully shows us the main page for each organization. Unfortunately, pages are only mirrored to a depth of ONE. Thus, we can't use mirrordot to actually SEE the stats for each organization. Got a link that works for those? I'm interested, but will forget all about the story by the time it's off the/. front page.
If I remember correctly, Feynman used what many safe crackers and computer crackers still use today: the human factor. He relied partially upon secretaries writing combinations on desk notes and mechanical failings of filing cabinets. When you have lazy people who can't remember passwords/combinations, it becomes an exercise in getting the combination from people.
Unfortunately, the timing of Suprnova and other torrent sites shutting down corresponds to the end of the fall term for most universities - so there is bound to be a decrease in internet and p2p traffic ANYWAY. I'm sure **AA will take credit for it anyway.
I'm not asking for a public-domain reporting of mail filtering rules, just a private report for myself - it would be useful and interesting for a variety of things. As for un-tagging false positives, I do this daily, but thunderbird never seems to learn 100% - I probably have a static 5% false positive rate. I've had this problem on numerous installations and multiple versions all the way back to 0.7. My friends have the same sort of problems. I think the things I suggest would be useful and interesting, and would certainly not increase the spam I receive or that makes it through the spam filters. Spammers are already adept at that.
I certainly do get a lot of false positives with thunderbird's spam-controls, and would really like an interface through which I can view the filtering logs (words, frequency, etc) that thunderbird must be creating.
A reporting feature (even if thunderbird just exports a database csv file) would provide more value to me. I'd also like to be able to transfer my thunderbird spam filtering profile to new installations (after reformatting, for example).
A lot of other packages (e.g. spamassassin) support some of these, but I see no reason that thunderbird couldn't try to include some of them too.
I've been using MT for 2 years now, and the comment spam is actually making a significant bump in the traffic to my server (I doubt anyone else actually reads my stuff...). I had looked at Wordpress a while back and didn't think it was quite "on par" with Movable Type, but MT has done it's best to alienate even myself.
I share my MT installation with my brother. Not surprisingly, we like having our own weblogs. MT now charges for something that simple.
The fact that Wordpress is released under the GPL and is actively developed gives me some further impetus to make the switch.
Thanks for the links - should be useful as I change over from MT over Christmas break.
Judging by your username (Apathetic), I would think you'd realize the one fundamental fact about the public (in general): We're apathetic about things we SHOULD care about.
We can shout at people that the government can read our email and chat logs, but very few people will make the move to encryption. People are apathetic and lazy - unless encrypted email and chat is enabled BY DEFAULT in the next version of email and chat programs, people won't do it.
Unfortunately, Century Theatres (their preferred spelling) has an asanine pricing scheme. They don't offer student ticket prices (compare to AMC, for example), charge full price on holidays (AMC actually discounts tickets on holidays), and worst of all, charge $9.25 for full price to see one movie.
For 10 dollars, I can see 2 movies at my local drive in. For 7 dollars I can see full price movies at other theaters. Century claims they're chargin "New York ticket prices," but after a visit to NYC, I can officially say that tickets are cheaper there than 9 dollars for full-priced showings.
Century is all about being a monster theater chain, driving the competition out of business, and charging an arm and a leg for one movie.
Support your local theaters. Forget AMC or Century. If down at the corner, there's a local theater showing a mix of hollywood and indy movies, try them out. The theater isn't as nice, might be a bit shabby, and the floors might be sticky. The reason is that their income has been depressed because everyone goes to your local century or amc theater instead. Think about it.
I agree - there's room for growth here. The prices the MPAA will demand distributors charge for movies will be outrageous, however, and they'll never allow current theatrical releases to be distributed online until they're in rental stages.
The biggest problem for a distributor will be getting the MPAA on board. The second biggest problem will be developing an application (and protocol, perhaps) to allow downloading of the files. Bittorrent won't work since DRM won't work like this. The popularity of bittorrent makes the file transfers as fast as they are - no central server from Apple could really rival that.
Perhaps bittorrent could be used if you downloaded an avi file wrapped in an executable which locked the DRM to your own machine?
Of course I have no doubt what would then happen - someone would figure out that it's only 2-bit encryption holding the avi file inside the executable wrapper, and release a "tool" to unwrap the avi.
Distributors aren't going to win in this field, I think. The MPAA won't let them, and information (movies included) want to be free.
You conveniently neglect the facts. I'm not neglecting Hubble. However: astronomers will tell you that a political decision was made to place Hubble in low earth orbit, such that it could be serviced by manned space missions. This was not the IDEAL placement for the telescope - it's not totally beyond the reach of atmospheric interference, for example - but it was made in order to give our astronauts something to do.
Of course, this placement turned out to be lucky when Hubble needed an optical adjustment, but its placement was decided on a political basis, not a scientific basis. This describes the problem I was referring to - hiring a politician to do a scientific job is going to lead to more failures than successes.
To respond to your second statement, which interplanetary spacecraft are you referring to? None manned, certainly. And the missions to mars you've seen on the TV with the robotic rovers - those were launced via unmanned rocket from Earth. No shuttle needed. We developed orbiters and landers for the moon - but without further purpose than just GOING there. That was an engineering feat in its own right and is the essence of human aspiration, but it served no larger scientific purpose than "lets see what the moon is made of." An unmanned mission could have done that just as well. Less inspiring, yes, but just as possible. What have we used those orbiters and landers for since? Nothing? Ah. Are we going to use them again for another moon shot? Nope? Ah. Well, at least we made 'dem orbiters and landers, right?
I think you misunderstand - NASA is responsible for a large portion of research dollars in aerospace, materials, and other engineering and science disciplines. NASA should not be about how to get most easily to earth orbit at the cost of research.
Let's put it this way - we've already been in orbit for 20+ years on regular shuttle flights. What did it get us? We were doing reasearch for PERFUME companies. (ok, we were also doing surveillance satellite deployment, repair, and collection, but ignore that for a moment). The reasearch in earth orbit doesn't justify orbital flights.
Of course, despite my opinion, it is part of NASA's mission to get to space and do "stuff" there. Advances in materials and aerospace science and engineering will lead to easier access to orbit. You only get there with research funding, not by cutting research budgets.
What worries me most is that the new director could be the man in charge of the "missile defense" system. It's unsuccessful, unverified, way over budget, and fails most tests until the test criteria are re-written to make a failure a success. This is not the sort of person you want running a civilian research and scientific space agency.
I agree completely. New licenses and license features won't prevent any of the problems (security or ID verification) which are supposed to be fixed.
By far, the most common way that my underage friends get into the bars with us, is they use SOMEONE ELSE'S DRIVER'S LICENSE. It's not fake, and the bearer has a passing resemblence to the picture on the card. This will in no way prevent this sort of circumvention.
It's the analog-hole of security, so to speak. If you want to make sure the card bearer is the person to whom the license was issued, it's going to take a better biometric than a simple facial picture. Add all the watermarks you want - using someone else's real card is still a problem.
I know a lot of people will take this opportunity to laught at AIM users for using a closed protocol. Now lets be honest: how many of you here use AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, or MSN Messenger? I suspect that whichever of these services most of your friends use, you are likely to use.
Here's my whole point. Instead of saying it's the user's fault and proprietary protocols lead to this sort of thing, why don't we use it as an opportunity? With the outage of AIM for a weekend fresh in their minds, talk to your friends. Let them know that you found a "cool, new program" called Jabber (or some other open-protocol service) that wasn't out for the weekend. Get a few to at least try it out.
If at least a few of each of our friends AND WE try a different protocol and chat program, there's a chance that we can finally stop making fun of AIM users. (I know it's fun, but wouldn't using a better protocol be even better?)
Just remember - AOL may have given us a golden opportunity here. Let's take advantage of it rather than complain for the next year.
I believe if you read some of the higher modded comments on this topic near the beginning of the discussion, you might see something worth noting.
What you have described is marketing. What site ads strive for is sales. Immediate spending of money with a referral of the site hosting the ad. A web-ad for coke is useless - I probably already have some in my fridge or will buy some at the piggly wiggly next time I head out. How is a content provider supposed to get money from that?
While companies may pay to run ads to increase name recognition, these are precisely the sorts of ads we should be blocking. They don't help the content provider (no click-throughs) and simply annoy.
A quick glance at the site shows that they plan on having a peer-review process, whereby certain articles are "locked" when they have been deemed complete and factually accurate, partially locked when only some things remain to be fixed, and open for general editing for new news that needs to be filled out. I think they're working on something similar for wikipedia in the future, too.
I'll grant you that brand dilution is a possibility under OSS, but I'm worried about Netscape/AOL touting this new browser as a chimera of Firefox and Internet Explorer, the best of both worlds, so to speak. Using the brand name "Firefox" when talking about the mixture is where the brand dilution will come from. I hope AOL just (unrightfully) claims credit for all the code rather than mentioning Firefox at all.
The Mozilla Organization worked *hard* to brand Firefox and create brand recognition in the public. Netscape releasing a browser with (potential) security problems dilutes Firefox's brand and serves to confuse the public.
I am more worried about brand dilution hurting Firefox adoptation than I am about the potential security holes in Netscape via IE. The security holes will be bad PR, and that can only hurt Netscape, which by proxy will hurt Firefox. The public is easily confused.
Bigger problem, even? What incentive is there for web developers to create standards-based websites (for viewing in *nearly* standards compliant browsers such as Firefox or Opera) when the end-user can just up and switch the rendering engine to IE?
I think this is a bad idea, but not just because of the security problems that/.'ers seem to love jerking their knee to.
In addition to his points on haphazard editing, look at what he says about the factual content of the article:
"The article is rife with typographic errors, styling errors, and errors of grammar and diction. No doubt there are other factual errors as well, but I hardly needed to fact-check the piece to form my opinion."
Now, I'm no expert, but if he's so high and mighty up there at EB, why does he just assume all articles are rife with errors but he doesn't need to check them to form that opinion? That's a pretty egotistical and derogatory position to take. It's in effect "I'm right and don't need proof to know it". Bull. The more contributors to wikipedia there are, the better it gets. Will it ever be done? Probably not quite. Is EB the definitive encyclopaedia? Nope. You can't take just one source and use it. Anyone who thinks wikipedia is any different isn't living in reality.
Sticking your head in the sand is an interesting solution to a problem that is currently being dealt with by content distributors, internet providers, and producers of content.
Yes, P2P itself is legal. To think there is no controversy over its use is naive. Software manufacturers include LENGTHY cd keys and broken audio tracks on CDs in attempts to prevent illicit reproduction of their products. Movies are being increasingly traded across bittorrent, gnutella, and other p2p services. Music is not the only area where there are legal problems, it's just the one where the content distributor is actively targetting those who swap its product.
To contaminate pieces of software (e.g. Gaim or Firefox) which are open source and provide a real service to a lot of us, with all the problems currently associated with p2p would be ill advised.
I agree, you can get some really good music in other ways than through the RIAA, but you have to be a realist (rare on Slashdot, I know) and see that mixing well-intended software with controversial software contaminates the former.
Perhaps if GAIM had a list of plugins that it officially supported, it would have solid footing for saying that this plugin was off the reservation, so to speak.
I know they don't officially support any of these third party plugins, but in a way similar to microsoft warning you before you install third party hardware drivers, gaim could warn you that it's an unreviewed unsuported plugin? Just a thought.
I think then even the dumbest civil court judge would be able to understand that GAIM isn't a part of this p2p shennanigan.
Um, no. Just because the Russians beat the US and English-speaking world to space does not mean the word was there first.
In fact, the first recorded use of "cosmonaut" was in 1959, while "astronaut" was first recorded in 1929. Check the OED before you make silly, easily disproven statements.
Your blind faith in this unproven, hugely expensive, engineering disgrace that a majority of scientists and engineers oppose or criticise as a completely ineffective and unproven and that could not actually defend us from missiles is what makes America great.
The biggest problem with the bucket counting system is that the US is not expanding the number of buckets with the population.
I'm fairly certain that the number of buckets IS increased with increasing populationa, as you mentioned we have a 10-year census to re-determine House of Representatives numbers based on population. The number of electors each state has is equal to the number of Representatives + 2 (the number of Senators). It's not perfectly representative of the population, nor is it necessarily based on the true, instantaneous population, but it's pretty close.
We tend to think that technology allows us to overcome all problems. What about the census? The only way to figure out how many people live in this country is to send people out door to door and underpass to underpass. You can't just press the "census button" and get an updated count. For large, unmanageable things like populations of a country, counting votes of a country, etc. It's hard to beat the census and electoral college.
As an aside: I sincerely hope that the courts haven't usurped the authority of the electoral college, totally. The only contested issue was whether the counting should be suspended. That's a states' rights issue and never should have made it to the supreme court in the first place.
I do believe that Bush can be moderate in his ideas and appointments to judgeships. I just worry about the people advising him. He's surrounded by yes-men, and advisors who we'd best describe as Neo-Conservatives. These people (for the large part) believe in ideological politics which we didn't elect George W. Bush for. I have no shame to say I voted for Bush in 2000. I do think that his advisors and closed-door administration have led to the neo-conservatives strongly controlling policy in appointed and cabinet positions. I don't support their ideology, so cannot in good conscience vote for George W. Bush again. If he somehow distanced himself from them and realized that opposing views can STRENGTHEN your policies and decisions, he could win my vote. Too late for him to change, now, though.
Slashdot Mirror
A cigar is just a cigar. Don't apply your armchair pseudo-psychological, pseudo-philosophical meanderings to a simply-scripted story about the re-emergence of logic as a ruling force in Vulcan civilization. Give it a break, man!
Mirrordot successfully shows us the main page for each organization. Unfortunately, pages are only mirrored to a depth of ONE. Thus, we can't use mirrordot to actually SEE the stats for each organization. Got a link that works for those? I'm interested, but will forget all about the story by the time it's off the /. front page.
If I remember correctly, Feynman used what many safe crackers and computer crackers still use today: the human factor. He relied partially upon secretaries writing combinations on desk notes and mechanical failings of filing cabinets. When you have lazy people who can't remember passwords/combinations, it becomes an exercise in getting the combination from people.
Unfortunately, the timing of Suprnova and other torrent sites shutting down corresponds to the end of the fall term for most universities - so there is bound to be a decrease in internet and p2p traffic ANYWAY. I'm sure **AA will take credit for it anyway.
I'm not asking for a public-domain reporting of mail filtering rules, just a private report for myself - it would be useful and interesting for a variety of things. As for un-tagging false positives, I do this daily, but thunderbird never seems to learn 100% - I probably have a static 5% false positive rate. I've had this problem on numerous installations and multiple versions all the way back to 0.7. My friends have the same sort of problems. I think the things I suggest would be useful and interesting, and would certainly not increase the spam I receive or that makes it through the spam filters. Spammers are already adept at that.
I certainly do get a lot of false positives with thunderbird's spam-controls, and would really like an interface through which I can view the filtering logs (words, frequency, etc) that thunderbird must be creating.
A reporting feature (even if thunderbird just exports a database csv file) would provide more value to me. I'd also like to be able to transfer my thunderbird spam filtering profile to new installations (after reformatting, for example).
A lot of other packages (e.g. spamassassin) support some of these, but I see no reason that thunderbird couldn't try to include some of them too.
I've been using MT for 2 years now, and the comment spam is actually making a significant bump in the traffic to my server (I doubt anyone else actually reads my stuff...). I had looked at Wordpress a while back and didn't think it was quite "on par" with Movable Type, but MT has done it's best to alienate even myself.
I share my MT installation with my brother. Not surprisingly, we like having our own weblogs. MT now charges for something that simple.
The fact that Wordpress is released under the GPL and is actively developed gives me some further impetus to make the switch.
Thanks for the links - should be useful as I change over from MT over Christmas break.
Judging by your username (Apathetic), I would think you'd realize the one fundamental fact about the public (in general): We're apathetic about things we SHOULD care about.
We can shout at people that the government can read our email and chat logs, but very few people will make the move to encryption. People are apathetic and lazy - unless encrypted email and chat is enabled BY DEFAULT in the next version of email and chat programs, people won't do it.
Unfortunately, Century Theatres (their preferred spelling) has an asanine pricing scheme. They don't offer student ticket prices (compare to AMC, for example), charge full price on holidays (AMC actually discounts tickets on holidays), and worst of all, charge $9.25 for full price to see one movie.
For 10 dollars, I can see 2 movies at my local drive in. For 7 dollars I can see full price movies at other theaters. Century claims they're chargin "New York ticket prices," but after a visit to NYC, I can officially say that tickets are cheaper there than 9 dollars for full-priced showings.
Century is all about being a monster theater chain, driving the competition out of business, and charging an arm and a leg for one movie.
Support your local theaters. Forget AMC or Century. If down at the corner, there's a local theater showing a mix of hollywood and indy movies, try them out. The theater isn't as nice, might be a bit shabby, and the floors might be sticky. The reason is that their income has been depressed because everyone goes to your local century or amc theater instead. Think about it.
I agree - there's room for growth here. The prices the MPAA will demand distributors charge for movies will be outrageous, however, and they'll never allow current theatrical releases to be distributed online until they're in rental stages.
The biggest problem for a distributor will be getting the MPAA on board. The second biggest problem will be developing an application (and protocol, perhaps) to allow downloading of the files. Bittorrent won't work since DRM won't work like this. The popularity of bittorrent makes the file transfers as fast as they are - no central server from Apple could really rival that.
Perhaps bittorrent could be used if you downloaded an avi file wrapped in an executable which locked the DRM to your own machine?
Of course I have no doubt what would then happen - someone would figure out that it's only 2-bit encryption holding the avi file inside the executable wrapper, and release a "tool" to unwrap the avi.
Distributors aren't going to win in this field, I think. The MPAA won't let them, and information (movies included) want to be free.
You conveniently neglect the facts. I'm not neglecting Hubble. However: astronomers will tell you that a political decision was made to place Hubble in low earth orbit, such that it could be serviced by manned space missions. This was not the IDEAL placement for the telescope - it's not totally beyond the reach of atmospheric interference, for example - but it was made in order to give our astronauts something to do.
Of course, this placement turned out to be lucky when Hubble needed an optical adjustment, but its placement was decided on a political basis, not a scientific basis. This describes the problem I was referring to - hiring a politician to do a scientific job is going to lead to more failures than successes.
To respond to your second statement, which interplanetary spacecraft are you referring to? None manned, certainly. And the missions to mars you've seen on the TV with the robotic rovers - those were launced via unmanned rocket from Earth. No shuttle needed. We developed orbiters and landers for the moon - but without further purpose than just GOING there. That was an engineering feat in its own right and is the essence of human aspiration, but it served no larger scientific purpose than "lets see what the moon is made of." An unmanned mission could have done that just as well. Less inspiring, yes, but just as possible. What have we used those orbiters and landers for since? Nothing? Ah. Are we going to use them again for another moon shot? Nope? Ah. Well, at least we made 'dem orbiters and landers, right?
I think you misunderstand - NASA is responsible for a large portion of research dollars in aerospace, materials, and other engineering and science disciplines. NASA should not be about how to get most easily to earth orbit at the cost of research.
Let's put it this way - we've already been in orbit for 20+ years on regular shuttle flights. What did it get us? We were doing reasearch for PERFUME companies. (ok, we were also doing surveillance satellite deployment, repair, and collection, but ignore that for a moment). The reasearch in earth orbit doesn't justify orbital flights.
Of course, despite my opinion, it is part of NASA's mission to get to space and do "stuff" there. Advances in materials and aerospace science and engineering will lead to easier access to orbit. You only get there with research funding, not by cutting research budgets.
What worries me most is that the new director could be the man in charge of the "missile defense" system. It's unsuccessful, unverified, way over budget, and fails most tests until the test criteria are re-written to make a failure a success. This is not the sort of person you want running a civilian research and scientific space agency.
I agree completely. New licenses and license features won't prevent any of the problems (security or ID verification) which are supposed to be fixed.
By far, the most common way that my underage friends get into the bars with us, is they use SOMEONE ELSE'S DRIVER'S LICENSE. It's not fake, and the bearer has a passing resemblence to the picture on the card. This will in no way prevent this sort of circumvention.
It's the analog-hole of security, so to speak. If you want to make sure the card bearer is the person to whom the license was issued, it's going to take a better biometric than a simple facial picture. Add all the watermarks you want - using someone else's real card is still a problem.
I know a lot of people will take this opportunity to laught at AIM users for using a closed protocol. Now lets be honest: how many of you here use AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, or MSN Messenger? I suspect that whichever of these services most of your friends use, you are likely to use.
Here's my whole point. Instead of saying it's the user's fault and proprietary protocols lead to this sort of thing, why don't we use it as an opportunity? With the outage of AIM for a weekend fresh in their minds, talk to your friends. Let them know that you found a "cool, new program" called Jabber (or some other open-protocol service) that wasn't out for the weekend. Get a few to at least try it out.
If at least a few of each of our friends AND WE try a different protocol and chat program, there's a chance that we can finally stop making fun of AIM users. (I know it's fun, but wouldn't using a better protocol be even better?)
Just remember - AOL may have given us a golden opportunity here. Let's take advantage of it rather than complain for the next year.
I believe if you read some of the higher modded comments on this topic near the beginning of the discussion, you might see something worth noting.
What you have described is marketing. What site ads strive for is sales. Immediate spending of money with a referral of the site hosting the ad. A web-ad for coke is useless - I probably already have some in my fridge or will buy some at the piggly wiggly next time I head out. How is a content provider supposed to get money from that?
While companies may pay to run ads to increase name recognition, these are precisely the sorts of ads we should be blocking. They don't help the content provider (no click-throughs) and simply annoy.
A quick glance at the site shows that they plan on having a peer-review process, whereby certain articles are "locked" when they have been deemed complete and factually accurate, partially locked when only some things remain to be fixed, and open for general editing for new news that needs to be filled out. I think they're working on something similar for wikipedia in the future, too.
I'll grant you that brand dilution is a possibility under OSS, but I'm worried about Netscape/AOL touting this new browser as a chimera of Firefox and Internet Explorer, the best of both worlds, so to speak. Using the brand name "Firefox" when talking about the mixture is where the brand dilution will come from. I hope AOL just (unrightfully) claims credit for all the code rather than mentioning Firefox at all.
The Mozilla Organization worked *hard* to brand Firefox and create brand recognition in the public. Netscape releasing a browser with (potential) security problems dilutes Firefox's brand and serves to confuse the public.
/.'ers seem to love jerking their knee to.
I am more worried about brand dilution hurting Firefox adoptation than I am about the potential security holes in Netscape via IE. The security holes will be bad PR, and that can only hurt Netscape, which by proxy will hurt Firefox. The public is easily confused.
Bigger problem, even? What incentive is there for web developers to create standards-based websites (for viewing in *nearly* standards compliant browsers such as Firefox or Opera) when the end-user can just up and switch the rendering engine to IE?
I think this is a bad idea, but not just because of the security problems that
Now, I'm no expert, but if he's so high and mighty up there at EB, why does he just assume all articles are rife with errors but he doesn't need to check them to form that opinion? That's a pretty egotistical and derogatory position to take. It's in effect "I'm right and don't need proof to know it". Bull. The more contributors to wikipedia there are, the better it gets. Will it ever be done? Probably not quite. Is EB the definitive encyclopaedia? Nope. You can't take just one source and use it. Anyone who thinks wikipedia is any different isn't living in reality.
Sticking your head in the sand is an interesting solution to a problem that is currently being dealt with by content distributors, internet providers, and producers of content.
Yes, P2P itself is legal. To think there is no controversy over its use is naive. Software manufacturers include LENGTHY cd keys and broken audio tracks on CDs in attempts to prevent illicit reproduction of their products. Movies are being increasingly traded across bittorrent, gnutella, and other p2p services. Music is not the only area where there are legal problems, it's just the one where the content distributor is actively targetting those who swap its product.
To contaminate pieces of software (e.g. Gaim or Firefox) which are open source and provide a real service to a lot of us, with all the problems currently associated with p2p would be ill advised.
I agree, you can get some really good music in other ways than through the RIAA, but you have to be a realist (rare on Slashdot, I know) and see that mixing well-intended software with controversial software contaminates the former.
Perhaps if GAIM had a list of plugins that it officially supported, it would have solid footing for saying that this plugin was off the reservation, so to speak.
I know they don't officially support any of these third party plugins, but in a way similar to microsoft warning you before you install third party hardware drivers, gaim could warn you that it's an unreviewed unsuported plugin? Just a thought.
I think then even the dumbest civil court judge would be able to understand that GAIM isn't a part of this p2p shennanigan.
Um, no. Just because the Russians beat the US and English-speaking world to space does not mean the word was there first.
In fact, the first recorded use of "cosmonaut" was in 1959, while "astronaut" was first recorded in 1929. Check the OED before you make silly, easily disproven statements.
Your blind faith in this unproven, hugely expensive, engineering disgrace that a majority of scientists and engineers oppose or criticise as a completely ineffective and unproven and that could not actually defend us from missiles is what makes America great.
Seriously, read Bob Park once in a while - it's his favorite subject. (example at http://www.aps.org/WN/WN04/wn102204.cfm)
The biggest problem with the bucket counting system is that the US is not expanding the number of buckets with the population.
I'm fairly certain that the number of buckets IS increased with increasing populationa, as you mentioned we have a 10-year census to re-determine House of Representatives numbers based on population. The number of electors each state has is equal to the number of Representatives + 2 (the number of Senators). It's not perfectly representative of the population, nor is it necessarily based on the true, instantaneous population, but it's pretty close.
We tend to think that technology allows us to overcome all problems. What about the census? The only way to figure out how many people live in this country is to send people out door to door and underpass to underpass. You can't just press the "census button" and get an updated count. For large, unmanageable things like populations of a country, counting votes of a country, etc. It's hard to beat the census and electoral college.
As an aside: I sincerely hope that the courts haven't usurped the authority of the electoral college, totally. The only contested issue was whether the counting should be suspended. That's a states' rights issue and never should have made it to the supreme court in the first place.
I do believe that Bush can be moderate in his ideas and appointments to judgeships. I just worry about the people advising him. He's surrounded by yes-men, and advisors who we'd best describe as Neo-Conservatives. These people (for the large part) believe in ideological politics which we didn't elect George W. Bush for.
I have no shame to say I voted for Bush in 2000. I do think that his advisors and closed-door administration have led to the neo-conservatives strongly controlling policy in appointed and cabinet positions. I don't support their ideology, so cannot in good conscience vote for George W. Bush again.
If he somehow distanced himself from them and realized that opposing views can STRENGTHEN your policies and decisions, he could win my vote. Too late for him to change, now, though.