The number one requirement is that the voters be able to understand the process. Anything that requires non-trivial math (beyond counting and maybe adding) fails that requirement.
You seem to have missed the past 50 years. I'm no fan of religion, but that's really a distraction from the key issue here: The United States didn't stop fighting when World War II ended. The USSR made a good enemy for a while - but it was never the Russians who we bombed, and we certainly didn't stop once the USSR collapsed.
The greatest weakness of the USA in military matters is that a good chunk of the population can be convinced that attacking comparatively helpless foreign countries "for their own good" makes any sense at all.
I may get modded down to nothing, but it seems the Google phone is very much like Linux: attractive to techies but a harder sell to consumers.
How are techies not consumers?
It's not like there's a line somewhere, and on one side of the line are "geeks who don't count" and on the other side of the line is "Joe Sixpack who can't set the clock on his VCR".
People who are willing to spend $200 + $60/month for a high end cell phone with a data plan are a specific market segment (of consumers), and that market segment has massive overlap with "techies".
There is a reason that, e.g., America's founders did not view a popularly elected government with unlimited authority as a suitable safeguard of liberty, and instead set up an almost totally hamstrung government and then, when that was clearly on the road to failure from lack of sufficient authority to get things done, a more powerful but still tightly restricted government.
I'd like to point out that those restrictions on the US government explicitly disallowed a standing army that could be used to go invade other countries.
You know, a long time ago, the citizens of America in the south didn't have a problem with slavery. Does that make it right?
Nobody can be trusted to decide what is right and wrong for everyone. It is much better for some people to live under unjust and unethical laws than it would be for those same unjust principles to be imposed on everyone.
Every time you think "my morals should be imposed on the world because I'm right" stop and imagine how your life would be if the people you most disagree with were able to apply their principles to you.
The problem with the West, and America especially, is the concept of democracy, morality, human rights, PROVIDED they are American Democracy, American Morality, and American Human Rights.
The rest of "the west" is a bit better, but the USA only supports human rights if they happen to make good talking points in support of bombing poor people (or whatever).
Do you have any basis for making this claim, or is this just a good sounding excuse that you heard once and are now repeating?
It could be that what you claim is what developers are thinking, but we'd have to find some game company executive in charge of that sort of decision and ask them if we wanted to find out. It's not obvious enough that we can come to a conclusion by guessing - if you declare a PC platform like "Windows XP, Direct X 9 Dedicated Graphics" that's a relatively large install base. People with older PCs are no more relevant than PS2s are if you're considering developing a PS3 game.
Certainly our governments and industries weren't run by thieves like they are now.
O RLY?
I'm pretty sure the only difference is that 50 years ago they put a bit more effort into appearing respectable (and the lack of social transparency made that easier).
Sure, except computer and cell phone 'hobbyists' can't possibly irradiate the entire neighborhood or region. Do you really want to make plutonium, uranium, and other radioactive substances generally available, available over the counter, or even available with severe restrictions, to the general public?
The last thing we need is some wannabe nuclear physicists living next door playing with plutonium cores...
I didn't actually propose full material access for nuclear hobbyists, just pointed out that it would be bad for everyone if electronic supplies to be as locked down as nuclear supplies are.
On the other hand, imagine the 9-month betavoltaic laptop batteries we could have if nuclear hobbyists did have reasonable access to supplies...
Hobbyists generally have access to basically the same tools that professionals do. If my goal was to replicate a cellphone signal today, I'd probably set up some sort of software radio (like http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuradio/) - which happens to be exactly how some of the cellphone base stations work now.
In some areas, like nuclear power, hobbyists *have* been effectively excluded by denying them access to supplies. Note how nuclear power has improved only slightly and not gotten any cheaper at all over the last 50 years. Compare that to digital computers, where the [ hobbyist to small business founder to industry changer ] path has been alive and well for the same time period.
Not only do hobbyists *have* the right to tinker, you don't want that right messed with even if you don't tinker yourself... in the long term, it's everyone who suffers from the suppressed innovation.
There are liberties you can take when you can assume that some particular integer type and a pointer type are interchangeable, or that pointers have some particular internal structure. Most 64-bit platforms break all those assumptions.
And a major company can finish porting a program to a new, reasonably similar, platform in less than 6 years. Sorry, lame excuses about porting to 64 bit being hard were great in 2005 or so, but at this point it's completely clear that there's no 64 bit flash player simply because Macromedia / Adobe has chosen not to devote the resources to it. It's not like they're the ones who will get shit when web browsers hit the 2GB barrier.
The service that they're talking about providing is a network connection, not email, maps or pornography. If it's just a toy for getting cooking recipes, then the government shouldn't waste the money. If this is intended to be a major communication channel, even the primary network link for people who can't afford other services, then the government certainly shouldn't be censoring it.
Either the public infrastructure is intended to be a major resource for the public, in which case censoring it is obviously unacceptable; or it's not intended to be useful for much of anything, in which case the federal government shouldn't be wasting their time with it.
Counting miles driven on electric power gotten from charging the car off mains electricity towards "miles per gallon of petrol" is lying, pure and simple.
I'm pretty sure the car went that many miles and burned that many gallons. The fact that it's measuring the quantity you expected doesn't make the ratio any less factual.
Project Orion is definitely not chemical propulsion. It may well be the right answer for interplanetary travel, and it's certainly the only current possibility for interstellar travel, but it's not going to get used by private companies for launches to orbit any time soon.
Personally, I hope (and reasonably expect) that we'll have other appropriate propulsion technologies to use before we get to the point where we can do the things that Project Orion would be a good match for.
Taxes? Don't come the "Private is best" crap with me whilst your government is propping up failing banks.
If you are seriously asserting that banks in the United States have anything to do with "private companies" or "free markets", then you're either lying, confused, or uneducated.
The amazing shrinking transistor is a whole different kettle of fish from chemical rocket propulsion. Spaceflight may get cheaper, but there certainly won't be any price reduction like a 1960's supercomputer to the 1990's scientific calculator.
There could be a major breakthrough in (non-chemical) propulsion, but if so we're still looking at the "vaccuum tube" era where those "only a few tons" predictions were entirely appropriate and even optimistic.
Think of it this way: If the software were instead a paper describing an algorithm, and you implemented that algorithm yourself in the process of writing your own paper (or academically published software with a citations list), would you have cited the original paper in your paper? If so, citing the software is obviously correct. If not, then the algorithm / process that the software performed must not have been very relevant in your research area.
The primary reason giving said credit is not to pat the source on the back, it is to avoid giving the impression that you are the author of the material. With a few exceptions, software is not a source, it is a tool that performs some shorthand in the process of interpreting information that came from a source.
If you use a piece of software that uses a non-trivial technique that is essential to your research topic, you wouldn't want to give the impression that that technique and the implementation thereof was your work. This isn't about citing Firefox because you used it to do your research, this is about citing some piece of academically-produced software that is the published result of previous research.
But by doing this, we won't help our grand grandchildren. If they wake up at 8:00 am, 5 hours after the day started, well, it will be weird. And they will have something to care about.
After thinking about this a bit, I'm not sure I can see the problem. In a lifetime, the sun will rise and set a couple minutes earlier - which no-one will notice. Eventually - after many lifetimes - the sun will rise at 4am instead of 6am and set at 5pm instead of 7pm. Big deal - seasons shift sunset and sunrise around by like 4 hours where I live anyway.
When it's shifted by 4 hours and people consistently need to wake up "the day before", it might be worth changing something. They can deal with it then.
Together with Half Life 1, I think Deus Ex introduced graphics that were "good enough". Anything that came later is nice as eyecandy but does not make better games.
I first played through HL1 when HL2 came out so that I wasn't missing any plot. You can get into "for its time" and "first to do X" arguments, but straight up playing them back to back I had more fun with HL2 and the graphics contributed to that significantly.
Especially for first person style game where some of the goal of the game play is simulation and immersion, improving the graphics will continue to make the game better for quite a while.
It's not that games were somehow better back then, it's that you were younger and had more time to spend selecting and learning to play video games - and that you're comparing random games from today with your best memories of the best games of the past.
My best memories of, say, Deus Ex are much better than Crysis was... but I'm sure they're much better than Deus Ex actually was too.
Gmail isn't perfect at filtering spam. I've received 35,214 spam messages in the last month. I estimate that Gmail failed to filter around 100 of them.
OK, you win a point for open source, but only if you promise to criticise everyone who ever writes a snarky one-liner about how wonderful the Linux world is compared to any alternative platform because you can just "{package manager} {get command} {package name}".
Why are those benifits mutually exclusive?
Over 99% of the time you can install common software with a single apt/yum command and have it work perfectly. Occasionally, when a packaging mistake is made, it's reasonably straightforward for an expert to install the software manually.
This is the general usability case for FOSS software: In the normal case, it Just Works. In the exceptional case, you can make it work. With proprietary software, the supplier's business model frequently makes you sacrifice *both* of those properties. You have to deal with license compliance stuff to make it work at all, and if it breaks you don't have what you need to fix it.
Slashdot Mirror
The number one requirement is that the voters be able to understand the process. Anything that requires non-trivial math (beyond counting and maybe adding) fails that requirement.
You seem to have missed the past 50 years. I'm no fan of religion, but that's really a distraction from the key issue here: The United States didn't stop fighting when World War II ended. The USSR made a good enemy for a while - but it was never the Russians who we bombed, and we certainly didn't stop once the USSR collapsed.
The greatest weakness of the USA in military matters is that a good chunk of the population can be convinced that attacking comparatively helpless foreign countries "for their own good" makes any sense at all.
How are techies not consumers?
It's not like there's a line somewhere, and on one side of the line are "geeks who don't count" and on the other side of the line is "Joe Sixpack who can't set the clock on his VCR".
People who are willing to spend $200 + $60/month for a high end cell phone with a data plan are a specific market segment (of consumers), and that market segment has massive overlap with "techies".
I'd like to point out that those restrictions on the US government explicitly disallowed a standing army that could be used to go invade other countries.
Nobody can be trusted to decide what is right and wrong for everyone. It is much better for some people to live under unjust and unethical laws than it would be for those same unjust principles to be imposed on everyone.
Every time you think "my morals should be imposed on the world because I'm right" stop and imagine how your life would be if the people you most disagree with were able to apply their principles to you.
The rest of "the west" is a bit better, but the USA only supports human rights if they happen to make good talking points in support of bombing poor people (or whatever).
Do you have any basis for making this claim, or is this just a good sounding excuse that you heard once and are now repeating?
It could be that what you claim is what developers are thinking, but we'd have to find some game company executive in charge of that sort of decision and ask them if we wanted to find out. It's not obvious enough that we can come to a conclusion by guessing - if you declare a PC platform like "Windows XP, Direct X 9 Dedicated Graphics" that's a relatively large install base. People with older PCs are no more relevant than PS2s are if you're considering developing a PS3 game.
No, I'm pretty sure that Bruce Schneier isn't a retarded douchebag who endorsed Mike Huckabee.
O RLY?
I'm pretty sure the only difference is that 50 years ago they put a bit more effort into appearing respectable (and the lack of social transparency made that easier).
I didn't actually propose full material access for nuclear hobbyists, just pointed out that it would be bad for everyone if electronic supplies to be as locked down as nuclear supplies are.
On the other hand, imagine the 9-month betavoltaic laptop batteries we could have if nuclear hobbyists did have reasonable access to supplies...
Hobbyists generally have access to basically the same tools that professionals do. If my goal was to replicate a cellphone signal today, I'd probably set up some sort of software radio (like http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuradio/) - which happens to be exactly how some of the cellphone base stations work now.
In some areas, like nuclear power, hobbyists *have* been effectively excluded by denying them access to supplies. Note how nuclear power has improved only slightly and not gotten any cheaper at all over the last 50 years. Compare that to digital computers, where the [ hobbyist to small business founder to industry changer ] path has been alive and well for the same time period.
Not only do hobbyists *have* the right to tinker, you don't want that right messed with even if you don't tinker yourself... in the long term, it's everyone who suffers from the suppressed innovation.
And a major company can finish porting a program to a new, reasonably similar, platform in less than 6 years. Sorry, lame excuses about porting to 64 bit being hard were great in 2005 or so, but at this point it's completely clear that there's no 64 bit flash player simply because Macromedia / Adobe has chosen not to devote the resources to it. It's not like they're the ones who will get shit when web browsers hit the 2GB barrier.
The service that they're talking about providing is a network connection, not email, maps or pornography. If it's just a toy for getting cooking recipes, then the government shouldn't waste the money. If this is intended to be a major communication channel, even the primary network link for people who can't afford other services, then the government certainly shouldn't be censoring it.
Either the public infrastructure is intended to be a major resource for the public, in which case censoring it is obviously unacceptable; or it's not intended to be useful for much of anything, in which case the federal government shouldn't be wasting their time with it.
I'm pretty sure the car went that many miles and burned that many gallons. The fact that it's measuring the quantity you expected doesn't make the ratio any less factual.
Project Orion is definitely not chemical propulsion. It may well be the right answer for interplanetary travel, and it's certainly the only current possibility for interstellar travel, but it's not going to get used by private companies for launches to orbit any time soon.
Personally, I hope (and reasonably expect) that we'll have other appropriate propulsion technologies to use before we get to the point where we can do the things that Project Orion would be a good match for.
If you are seriously asserting that banks in the United States have anything to do with "private companies" or "free markets", then you're either lying, confused, or uneducated.
The amazing shrinking transistor is a whole different kettle of fish from chemical rocket propulsion. Spaceflight may get cheaper, but there certainly won't be any price reduction like a 1960's supercomputer to the 1990's scientific calculator.
There could be a major breakthrough in (non-chemical) propulsion, but if so we're still looking at the "vaccuum tube" era where those "only a few tons" predictions were entirely appropriate and even optimistic.
Think of it this way: If the software were instead a paper describing an algorithm, and you implemented that algorithm yourself in the process of writing your own paper (or academically published software with a citations list), would you have cited the original paper in your paper? If so, citing the software is obviously correct. If not, then the algorithm / process that the software performed must not have been very relevant in your research area.
If you use a piece of software that uses a non-trivial technique that is essential to your research topic, you wouldn't want to give the impression that that technique and the implementation thereof was your work. This isn't about citing Firefox because you used it to do your research, this is about citing some piece of academically-produced software that is the published result of previous research.
Wait... are you implying that Screen isn't a top of the line desktop environment? I hope not, because that would be false, wrong, and dumb.
After thinking about this a bit, I'm not sure I can see the problem. In a lifetime, the sun will rise and set a couple minutes earlier - which no-one will notice. Eventually - after many lifetimes - the sun will rise at 4am instead of 6am and set at 5pm instead of 7pm. Big deal - seasons shift sunset and sunrise around by like 4 hours where I live anyway.
When it's shifted by 4 hours and people consistently need to wake up "the day before", it might be worth changing something. They can deal with it then.
I first played through HL1 when HL2 came out so that I wasn't missing any plot. You can get into "for its time" and "first to do X" arguments, but straight up playing them back to back I had more fun with HL2 and the graphics contributed to that significantly.
Especially for first person style game where some of the goal of the game play is simulation and immersion, improving the graphics will continue to make the game better for quite a while.
It's not that games were somehow better back then, it's that you were younger and had more time to spend selecting and learning to play video games - and that you're comparing random games from today with your best memories of the best games of the past.
My best memories of, say, Deus Ex are much better than Crysis was... but I'm sure they're much better than Deus Ex actually was too.
Gmail isn't perfect at filtering spam. I've received 35,214 spam messages in the last month. I estimate that Gmail failed to filter around 100 of them.
Why are those benifits mutually exclusive?
Over 99% of the time you can install common software with a single apt/yum command and have it work perfectly. Occasionally, when a packaging mistake is made, it's reasonably straightforward for an expert to install the software manually.
This is the general usability case for FOSS software: In the normal case, it Just Works. In the exceptional case, you can make it work. With proprietary software, the supplier's business model frequently makes you sacrifice *both* of those properties. You have to deal with license compliance stuff to make it work at all, and if it breaks you don't have what you need to fix it.