How convenient. I suppose now you are mysteriously missing five million posts that can't ever be recovered due to this "upgrade"? On the bright side, this does technically solve the dupe problem...
My theory: George Bush is genuinely a bumbling idiot.
His cabinet, and the rest of the people who work for him are genuinely evil, lurking behind their leader's own incompetence.
Either way, some sort of legal investigation needs to be launched into this, and those responsible punished.
If this was in any way legal, the law needs to amended so that it does not happen again. It's absurd that this was allowed to occur in the first place.
I was told some years ago that the majority of the people in the US thought it was perfectly okay for the US to... try to 'improve' other nations in various ways. I'm not sure if you're one of them, but I can say that most people in Europe at least respect the sovereignty of contries. Yes, and it took centuries of colonialism plus two world wars to pound that idea in to your heads.
America, unfortunately walked away from WWII with the opposite idea in its head, and the reported "successes" of Kosovo and the first Gulf War in the 1990s gave us far too much confidence when going into Iraq. Somehow Vietnam and decades of other failed foreign interventions didn't seem to deter us...
And those of you who disagree with the government we hold in even lower regard, because you have proven yourself unable to act in accordance with your own views. 1) The majority of us actually voted against George Bush. 2) This is one of the pitfalls of a democracy. If your elected representatives turn out to be corrupt, there's very little to do about it until the next election cycle. The 2006 elections saw the republicans swept out of Congress, and although the Democrats haven't been much better, the groundwork has been set to quickly clean things up once the next president takes power. 3) If you need proof, look at George Bush's approval rating. Even the conservative 2008 candidates are doing their best to distance themselves as far as possible from Bush.
Do you blame the Russian people for Stalin?
Even the attempts by the UN, which ironically the majority of the US hold in low regard, to monitor your latest presidential elections, where you re-elect the least approved-of president in US history, were met with resistance by your nation. [citation-needed]
Europe has tried to help, and will continue to do so even as your economy continues to plummet, in spite of your resistance. Care to offer some sort of citation for Europe offering "help", and how said "help" would magically fix the economy? The causes of our current recession are multiple and complex.
Maybe once more people in your nation realize that our help might be useful, possibly even needed, thing will improve for you. Re-read the rest of your post, and then reconsider that last sentence. I agree that the US has a lot to learn from Europe, although I'm not really sure that forcing "help" upon another is ever a good idea.
Neither did I, which is why I won't say whether or not he's guilty.. I (and you) don't have all the facts. The problem, as many here are asserting, is that the jury may not have had all the facts. Similarly, despite the fact that Nina Reiser was having an affair with a convicted serial-killer, no testimony was given to that effect.
Given the lack of anything other than circumstantial evidence, I really don't think that the jury were able to conclusively prove his guilt. Yes, there was more evidence pointing toward guilt, although so much of it just didn't add up....
I'd be modded in oblivion if I made those sort of remarks about Africans or Jews.
It's one thing to make fun of a stereotype (risqué humor), but it becomes something entirely different once you start to take those jokes in stride.
The most worrying thing is that the jokes seem to be propagated mostly by Americans themselves.... THIS IS THE FAILURE OF YOUR CULTURE AND CIVILIZATION. IT IS NOT SOMETHING TO JOKE ABOUT.
Honestly, I'm beginning to grow tired of the amount of US-bashing that goes on.
I'm none too proud of the actions of my country over the past decade, although the ongoing tirade of jokes about fat, ignorant Americans is beginning to wear on me, and could very well be construed as outright racist.
Keep it up, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy (to the point where students often make jokes about their own ignorance of world issues).
Stop making jokes, and start trying to clean up the mess.
Well, given that the body's only 150-300 years old, and was found in a remote, sparsely-populated, and geographically isolated area, it's not really all that surprising that some sort of chain of ancestry was able to be established linking him to the present-day natives of that area.
In fact, I'd be more surprised if a link wasn't found.
Trains are also excellent candidates for early adoption of alternate fuels themselves, as they can carry large fuel loads, and only have to ensure that the fuel is available at depots/terminals (of which there are very few, especially compared to the number of petrol/gas stations on the roads).
This is one of the reasons why Natural Gas has been found to be an economical energy source for buses in city centers, while the advantages/costs aren't as favorable for widespread adoption.
There's nothing terribly special about this sort of launch. The PSLV is a fairly unremarkable vehicle, and there have been launches that have included more than 10 satellites in the past.
America did indeed even participate in the Russian launch listed above.
This launch also has virtually nothing to do with the Shuttle, which is primarily a manned crew vehicle. Retiring the shuttle is probably a good decision, given that it failed to fulfill its original design goals of being safe, cheap, and easily reusable. Unless nationalistic pride matters that to you, there's no reason why NASA shouldn't use Soyuz for the time being.
Indeed. I should have prefaced my post by adding my own personal opinion that we're being too hasty with the adoption of Ethanol-based fuels, as several other "considerably better" alternatives are very close on the horizon that deserve to be studied in-depth (preferably by a disinterested academic 3rd-party).
This "consumer ethanol appliance" is actually a fairly intriguing solution to the transmission problem, if we do choose to go along that Ethanol route, as it doesn't require the transportation of any volatile or hazardous materials, and allows them to be processed/assembled into Ethanol easily and efficiently on-site.
However, the guy building/selling them is taking the wrong angle while marketing it. Although I do imagine that he'll be able to sell a number of them to consumers to use as a "backyard" device, he'll be able to strike it big if he can package/scale this device into a version suitable for a filling station, and convert the majority of the input products to a liquefied form.
This is all, of course, ignoring the potential economic problems associated with using sugar as an input material.
(and of course, calling out the GP's political bias (blatantly false/misleading information and a 'Defeat Hillary' sig) gets me modded as flamebait. epic fail.)
The economics behind Corn/Sugar production/sale have gotten complicated and counter-intuitive to the point where I could see it swinging either way.
It might not be sustainable in the long-term, but hopefully it'll finally make us adopt sensible policies regarding farm subsidies and tariffs, which in turn will lead us to a renewable energy source, and actually fulfill some of the goals NAFTA was supposed to deliver.
Unfortunately, nobody seems to be too big of a fan of NAFTA at the moment, which is a shame given the potential it had to bring new trade opportunities to Canada, get cheap oil for the US, and pull Mexico out of poverty. Unfortunately, alternative politics got in the way, and Canada seems to have been the only one to have benefitted in any substantial way or form, while the US corn subsidies have bankrupted many Mexican farmers.
Have you ever stopped to think that the transportation systems constructed to deal with a hypothetical "ethanol infrastructure" will be powered by the same fuel that they are carrying? Even if we have to transport Ethanol by fossil-fuel-based means in the short-term, we'll still be a good bit better off than we currently are.
Similarly, any sort of ship, truck, or train carrying Ethanol is likely going to be prone to the same sort of corrosion you mention. Solutions are being developed, and there are several alternatives to deal with the problem. We won't be able to start pumping Ethanol through our oil pipelines tomorrow, although we can build new pipelines and retrofit existing ones to cope with the new challenges. (Plastic pipes come to mind!)
Although the "ingredients" to produce "renewable" Ethanol are biologically sourced, they are not necessarily derived from food-based agricultural products.
Corn-based Ethanol, which the US agricultural lobby has been pushing, is laughably inefficient, and almost certainly will never reach the break-even point. This will also inevitably bring up the ugly monster of corn subsidies...
Other crops are a bit better. Algae can produce up to 500-2000 times as much usable ethanol per square acre than Corn, although the infrastructure demands are also a good bit higher.
Similarly, cellulose-based plant matter can be used to produce Ethanol. Cellulose is found in stalks, stems, grasses, wood, and cannot be digested by humans. One proposal suggests reprocessing household/commerical waste into ethanol as an alternative to other recycling methods, as cellulose-based matter composes up to 40% of landfill waste by volume. However, the jury's still out on whether or not this method can be done economically.
<troll>Also, I've noticed that conservatives are using that "stupid stupid stupid" line quite a bit these days. Is that part of the handbook?</troll>
TFA mentions that the device requires 14 Lbs. (6.5kg) of NAFTA-approved nonedible sugar from Mexico, which costs approximately $0.025 per pound in addition to several other "ingredients". Regular "edible" sugar costs about $0.20 per pound.
Apart from the blatant inefficiencies present in transporting these quantities of raw materials, I imagine that the cost of sugar will skyrocket even if the thing actually works.
As another university student I do have to add a small caveat:
Burnout sucks.... and if you're "working" for 12+ Hours a day, it can very easily happen.
If I get back from work at 9PM, it's fairly therapeutic to relax and unwind by sitting down and watching an hour or so of TV. Similarly, gathering a few friends every week to watch Lost (or whatever other serial happens to be fashionable at the moment) is a great excuse to socialize.
Interestingly, I lived above the arctic circle last summer, and found that thanks to the 24-hour sunlight, I was going outdoors after work, and finding "better" things to do with my nightly downtime.
The next generation is considerably more computer literate, and most Windows users now do have a semi-decent idea of "what not to do" in terms of avoiding nastyware (or at the very least, the average user is more cognicent of this sort of thing than 3-4 years ago).
I don't care how secure your OS is, if users are going to click on SomeFamousPersonNaked.exe , then they are going to eventually get owned - "secure" OS or not. We've all heard the "Linux doesn't get attacked much because it has an insignificant market share" and sort of argued around it - maybe the real one is "Linux doesn't get attacked much because the average Linux user knows enough to not click on ridiculous shit that gets emailed to them." No. Linux and MacOS do not get attacked, because normal users don't run with the sort of privileges that would allow the virus (or trojan as in your example) to do very much damage or replicate itself.
Similarly, replication of such a virus becomes even more difficult, as E-mail clients and servers both generally tend to block attachments containing executables...
Sure, there are mechanisms for it to happen, but trojans generally don't spread very fast or very far. A true "virus" typically utilizes an OS exploit, or the fact that every *%*$#&ing Windows user runs with full administrative privileges.
Because polymorphism is considerably easier to implement than it is to circumvent (if it's even possible at all).
Essentially, this punches a huge hole in the security model of Norton and McAfee's product lines, rendering them completely ineffective against this sort of threat.
Personally, I've always found it remarkable that they've managed to hold on as long as they have, given just how deeply flawed the very notion of an Antivirus is.
As long as you've got a decently secure operating system, nothing more than a rudimentary antivirus should be necessary.
You can't blame the professors here (unless they wrote the book, which would open a whole different ethical can of worms in and of itself)
A prof can't exactly assign an out-of-print version of a textbook as reading material, as he cannot guarantee a supply of those books.
A 'good' professor will structure his course in such a way that both the current and previous editions of the text may be used (unless the content radically changed between the two).
The practice of putting out a new edition every 2-3 years strikes me as the most blatantly illegal and immoral practice used by the publishing industry.
The safety differences between Soyuz and Shuttle are statistically insignificant. Unless you engage in shady practices like not counting Soyuz-1 and Soyuz-10 "because they were a long time ago", etc... By that that metric one should be able to discard Challenger as well - at which point Shuttle's safety is still equal to or better than any other booster excepting only Soyuz. Even so, the difference is still statistically insignificant because neither vehicle has a enough flights to create valid statistics. No, we discount Soyuz-1 and Soyuz-10, because they were completely different craft than the capsules that are flying today.
And, yes. I think you actually might be able to discount Challenger, because the fundamental design "bug" that caused it to happen was fixed.
However, one of the chief "safety" features of Soyuz is the robustness of the basic capsule itself, which has allowed it to protect the crew, even in the event of the catastrophic failure of several of its systems (one of them exploded on the launchpad, and the crew survived). As long as the retro-rockets and parachutes are intact, a free-fall to earth is usually survivable.
The shuttle, on the other hand, does not have many favorable abort modes. If any part of the craft fails, the integrity of the entire craft is compromised, and the crew are almost certainly doomed. Had a challenger-type incident occurred during a Soyuz, it is likely that the crew would have survived. Similarly, the fact that the crew entered literally upside-down during this past mission demonstrates that a Columbia-type failure isn't all that likely either.
The Space Shuttle has literally millions of parts and components, the failure of any one of which can spell doom for the mission and crew. The Soyuz engineers were not nearly as optimistic regarding their own manufacturing and quality-control abilities, and made something that was idiot-proof.
Ironically, NASA's next-generation craft design resembles the Soyuz more closely than anything else. The Russian and ESA designs all opted for something that most closely resembles a hybrid between a capsule design and shuttle design (but on a much smaller and less extravagant scale).
Re:RMS: If we outlaw spam the terrorists have won!
on
Spam Is 30 Years Old
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· Score: 3, Interesting
3) It has just been suggested that we impose someone's standards on us because otherwise he MIGHT do so. Well, if you feel that those standards are right and necessary, go right ahead and support them. But if you disagree with them, as I do, why hand your opponents the victory on a silver platter? By the suggested reasoning, we should always follow the political views that we don't believe in, and especially those of terrorists, in anticipation of their attempts to impose them on us. If those who think that the job offers are bad are going to try to prevent them, then those of us who think they are unrepugnant should uphold our views. Besides, I doubt that anyone can successfully force a site from outside to impose censorship, if the people there don't fundamentally agree with the desirability of it.
This was written in 1978.
For some reason, I really can't get that to settle in, and as much as I hate to call RMS a "visionary", that comment might as well have been written last week...
The fact that RMS and his supporters "won" this side of the debate may very well have played a significant role in shaping the events of the past 15 years.
I can't "downgrade" a 747 into a vending machine, even though the 747 is the more complex bit of machinery and has proven to be extremely reliable.
They're two separate things entirely. Granted, yes, Diebold's experience with ATMs does make them appear more qualified to build voting machines, though there are still several important fundamental differences present.
The US is only just now beginning to realize the importance of addressing the underlying causes of crime, and figuring out other ways to deter criminals from committing crimes.
Unfortunately, the mentality of much of our legal system is based upon "punishment", and not deterrence/rehabilitation. Long prison sentences simply don't work except for the most egregious and violent of offenders.
On the other hand, I *do* support the several recent cases that have put high-profile individuals and celebrities in prison for white-collar offenses. Enron, Martha Stewart, and most recently, Wesley Snipes, actually do seem to serve as a significant deterrent to those sort of crimes.
I hate to play devil's advocate, but an ATM is an extremely complicated mechanical device. It doesn't shock me in the slightest that they're more expensive to produce than an electronic voting booth.
Of course, their voting products do suck, although I don't think that cost has terribly much to do with it.
Slashdot Mirror
My theory:
George Bush is genuinely a bumbling idiot.
His cabinet, and the rest of the people who work for him are genuinely evil, lurking behind their leader's own incompetence.
Either way, some sort of legal investigation needs to be launched into this, and those responsible punished.
If this was in any way legal, the law needs to amended so that it does not happen again. It's absurd that this was allowed to occur in the first place.
America, unfortunately walked away from WWII with the opposite idea in its head, and the reported "successes" of Kosovo and the first Gulf War in the 1990s gave us far too much confidence when going into Iraq. Somehow Vietnam and decades of other failed foreign interventions didn't seem to deter us... And those of you who disagree with the government we hold in even lower regard, because you have proven yourself unable to act in accordance with your own views. 1) The majority of us actually voted against George Bush.
2) This is one of the pitfalls of a democracy. If your elected representatives turn out to be corrupt, there's very little to do about it until the next election cycle. The 2006 elections saw the republicans swept out of Congress, and although the Democrats haven't been much better, the groundwork has been set to quickly clean things up once the next president takes power.
3) If you need proof, look at George Bush's approval rating. Even the conservative 2008 candidates are doing their best to distance themselves as far as possible from Bush.
Do you blame the Russian people for Stalin? Even the attempts by the UN, which ironically the majority of the US hold in low regard, to monitor your latest presidential elections, where you re-elect the least approved-of president in US history, were met with resistance by your nation. [citation-needed] Europe has tried to help, and will continue to do so even as your economy continues to plummet, in spite of your resistance. Care to offer some sort of citation for Europe offering "help", and how said "help" would magically fix the economy? The causes of our current recession are multiple and complex. Maybe once more people in your nation realize that our help might be useful, possibly even needed, thing will improve for you. Re-read the rest of your post, and then reconsider that last sentence. I agree that the US has a lot to learn from Europe, although I'm not really sure that forcing "help" upon another is ever a good idea.
Given the lack of anything other than circumstantial evidence, I really don't think that the jury were able to conclusively prove his guilt. Yes, there was more evidence pointing toward guilt, although so much of it just didn't add up....
Can you say with complete seriousness that the plot of 12 Angry Men was entirely removed from reality?
To be fair, although I imagine that most juries do give the case proper consideration, there are also ones that fall through the cracks.
I'd be modded in oblivion if I made those sort of remarks about Africans or Jews.
It's one thing to make fun of a stereotype (risqué humor), but it becomes something entirely different once you start to take those jokes in stride.
The most worrying thing is that the jokes seem to be propagated mostly by Americans themselves.... THIS IS THE FAILURE OF YOUR CULTURE AND CIVILIZATION. IT IS NOT SOMETHING TO JOKE ABOUT.
Honestly, I'm beginning to grow tired of the amount of US-bashing that goes on.
I'm none too proud of the actions of my country over the past decade, although the ongoing tirade of jokes about fat, ignorant Americans is beginning to wear on me, and could very well be construed as outright racist.
Keep it up, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy (to the point where students often make jokes about their own ignorance of world issues).
Stop making jokes, and start trying to clean up the mess.
Well, given that the body's only 150-300 years old, and was found in a remote, sparsely-populated, and geographically isolated area, it's not really all that surprising that some sort of chain of ancestry was able to be established linking him to the present-day natives of that area.
In fact, I'd be more surprised if a link wasn't found.
Trains are also excellent candidates for early adoption of alternate fuels themselves, as they can carry large fuel loads, and only have to ensure that the fuel is available at depots/terminals (of which there are very few, especially compared to the number of petrol/gas stations on the roads).
This is one of the reasons why Natural Gas has been found to be an economical energy source for buses in city centers, while the advantages/costs aren't as favorable for widespread adoption.
I think I just heard the sound of an iChair being thrown against a wall....
There's nothing terribly special about this sort of launch. The PSLV is a fairly unremarkable vehicle, and there have been launches that have included more than 10 satellites in the past.
America did indeed even participate in the Russian launch listed above.
This launch also has virtually nothing to do with the Shuttle, which is primarily a manned crew vehicle. Retiring the shuttle is probably a good decision, given that it failed to fulfill its original design goals of being safe, cheap, and easily reusable. Unless nationalistic pride matters that to you, there's no reason why NASA shouldn't use Soyuz for the time being.
Indeed. I should have prefaced my post by adding my own personal opinion that we're being too hasty with the adoption of Ethanol-based fuels, as several other "considerably better" alternatives are very close on the horizon that deserve to be studied in-depth (preferably by a disinterested academic 3rd-party).
This "consumer ethanol appliance" is actually a fairly intriguing solution to the transmission problem, if we do choose to go along that Ethanol route, as it doesn't require the transportation of any volatile or hazardous materials, and allows them to be processed/assembled into Ethanol easily and efficiently on-site.
However, the guy building/selling them is taking the wrong angle while marketing it. Although I do imagine that he'll be able to sell a number of them to consumers to use as a "backyard" device, he'll be able to strike it big if he can package/scale this device into a version suitable for a filling station, and convert the majority of the input products to a liquefied form.
This is all, of course, ignoring the potential economic problems associated with using sugar as an input material.
(and of course, calling out the GP's political bias (blatantly false/misleading information and a 'Defeat Hillary' sig) gets me modded as flamebait. epic fail.)
The economics behind Corn/Sugar production/sale have gotten complicated and counter-intuitive to the point where I could see it swinging either way.
It might not be sustainable in the long-term, but hopefully it'll finally make us adopt sensible policies regarding farm subsidies and tariffs, which in turn will lead us to a renewable energy source, and actually fulfill some of the goals NAFTA was supposed to deliver.
Unfortunately, nobody seems to be too big of a fan of NAFTA at the moment, which is a shame given the potential it had to bring new trade opportunities to Canada, get cheap oil for the US, and pull Mexico out of poverty. Unfortunately, alternative politics got in the way, and Canada seems to have been the only one to have benefitted in any substantial way or form, while the US corn subsidies have bankrupted many Mexican farmers.
Have you ever stopped to think that the transportation systems constructed to deal with a hypothetical "ethanol infrastructure" will be powered by the same fuel that they are carrying? Even if we have to transport Ethanol by fossil-fuel-based means in the short-term, we'll still be a good bit better off than we currently are.
Similarly, any sort of ship, truck, or train carrying Ethanol is likely going to be prone to the same sort of corrosion you mention. Solutions are being developed, and there are several alternatives to deal with the problem. We won't be able to start pumping Ethanol through our oil pipelines tomorrow, although we can build new pipelines and retrofit existing ones to cope with the new challenges. (Plastic pipes come to mind!)
Although the "ingredients" to produce "renewable" Ethanol are biologically sourced, they are not necessarily derived from food-based agricultural products.
Corn-based Ethanol, which the US agricultural lobby has been pushing, is laughably inefficient, and almost certainly will never reach the break-even point. This will also inevitably bring up the ugly monster of corn subsidies...
Other crops are a bit better. Algae can produce up to 500-2000 times as much usable ethanol per square acre than Corn, although the infrastructure demands are also a good bit higher.
Similarly, cellulose-based plant matter can be used to produce Ethanol. Cellulose is found in stalks, stems, grasses, wood, and cannot be digested by humans. One proposal suggests reprocessing household/commerical waste into ethanol as an alternative to other recycling methods, as cellulose-based matter composes up to 40% of landfill waste by volume. However, the jury's still out on whether or not this method can be done economically.
<troll>Also, I've noticed that conservatives are using that "stupid stupid stupid" line quite a bit these days. Is that part of the handbook?</troll>
TFA mentions that the device requires 14 Lbs. (6.5kg) of NAFTA-approved nonedible sugar from Mexico, which costs approximately $0.025 per pound in addition to several other "ingredients". Regular "edible" sugar costs about $0.20 per pound.
Apart from the blatant inefficiencies present in transporting these quantities of raw materials, I imagine that the cost of sugar will skyrocket even if the thing actually works.
Probably not a good thing...
As another university student I do have to add a small caveat:
Burnout sucks.... and if you're "working" for 12+ Hours a day, it can very easily happen.
If I get back from work at 9PM, it's fairly therapeutic to relax and unwind by sitting down and watching an hour or so of TV. Similarly, gathering a few friends every week to watch Lost (or whatever other serial happens to be fashionable at the moment) is a great excuse to socialize.
Interestingly, I lived above the arctic circle last summer, and found that thanks to the 24-hour sunlight, I was going outdoors after work, and finding "better" things to do with my nightly downtime.
You underestimate humanity.
The next generation is considerably more computer literate, and most Windows users now do have a semi-decent idea of "what not to do" in terms of avoiding nastyware (or at the very least, the average user is more cognicent of this sort of thing than 3-4 years ago).
Similarly, replication of such a virus becomes even more difficult, as E-mail clients and servers both generally tend to block attachments containing executables...
Sure, there are mechanisms for it to happen, but trojans generally don't spread very fast or very far. A true "virus" typically utilizes an OS exploit, or the fact that every *%*$#&ing Windows user runs with full administrative privileges.
Because polymorphism is considerably easier to implement than it is to circumvent (if it's even possible at all).
Essentially, this punches a huge hole in the security model of Norton and McAfee's product lines, rendering them completely ineffective against this sort of threat.
Personally, I've always found it remarkable that they've managed to hold on as long as they have, given just how deeply flawed the very notion of an Antivirus is.
As long as you've got a decently secure operating system, nothing more than a rudimentary antivirus should be necessary.
You can't blame the professors here (unless they wrote the book, which would open a whole different ethical can of worms in and of itself)
A prof can't exactly assign an out-of-print version of a textbook as reading material, as he cannot guarantee a supply of those books.
A 'good' professor will structure his course in such a way that both the current and previous editions of the text may be used (unless the content radically changed between the two).
The practice of putting out a new edition every 2-3 years strikes me as the most blatantly illegal and immoral practice used by the publishing industry.
And, yes. I think you actually might be able to discount Challenger, because the fundamental design "bug" that caused it to happen was fixed.
However, one of the chief "safety" features of Soyuz is the robustness of the basic capsule itself, which has allowed it to protect the crew, even in the event of the catastrophic failure of several of its systems (one of them exploded on the launchpad, and the crew survived). As long as the retro-rockets and parachutes are intact, a free-fall to earth is usually survivable.
The shuttle, on the other hand, does not have many favorable abort modes. If any part of the craft fails, the integrity of the entire craft is compromised, and the crew are almost certainly doomed. Had a challenger-type incident occurred during a Soyuz, it is likely that the crew would have survived. Similarly, the fact that the crew entered literally upside-down during this past mission demonstrates that a Columbia-type failure isn't all that likely either.
The Space Shuttle has literally millions of parts and components, the failure of any one of which can spell doom for the mission and crew. The Soyuz engineers were not nearly as optimistic regarding their own manufacturing and quality-control abilities, and made something that was idiot-proof.
Ironically, NASA's next-generation craft design resembles the Soyuz more closely than anything else. The Russian and ESA designs all opted for something that most closely resembles a hybrid between a capsule design and shuttle design (but on a much smaller and less extravagant scale).
This was written in 1978.
For some reason, I really can't get that to settle in, and as much as I hate to call RMS a "visionary", that comment might as well have been written last week...
The fact that RMS and his supporters "won" this side of the debate may very well have played a significant role in shaping the events of the past 15 years.
It's not that simple.
I can't "downgrade" a 747 into a vending machine, even though the 747 is the more complex bit of machinery and has proven to be extremely reliable.
They're two separate things entirely. Granted, yes, Diebold's experience with ATMs does make them appear more qualified to build voting machines, though there are still several important fundamental differences present.
Exactly.
The US is only just now beginning to realize the importance of addressing the underlying causes of crime, and figuring out other ways to deter criminals from committing crimes.
Unfortunately, the mentality of much of our legal system is based upon "punishment", and not deterrence/rehabilitation. Long prison sentences simply don't work except for the most egregious and violent of offenders.
On the other hand, I *do* support the several recent cases that have put high-profile individuals and celebrities in prison for white-collar offenses. Enron, Martha Stewart, and most recently, Wesley Snipes, actually do seem to serve as a significant deterrent to those sort of crimes.
I hate to play devil's advocate, but an ATM is an extremely complicated mechanical device. It doesn't shock me in the slightest that they're more expensive to produce than an electronic voting booth.
Of course, their voting products do suck, although I don't think that cost has terribly much to do with it.