He has not paid for the right to endanger my life unnecessarily without my trying to take steps (legislative if possible) to stop him. And in terms of wear-and-tear on the roads, the hummer driver is getting a bargain.
"The anti-hummer rant sounds more like typical anti-wealthy rants than any sane reasoning."
Well, I don't have any problem with people who want to buy expensive luxury sedans. But Hummers are stupid, dangerous (to the owners and others) toys for people with serious inferiority complexes. Anyone who drives one regularly on entirely on-road trips is an a-hole.
In a sailboat, I can go sideways relative to the wind. I can even tie off the sheet and keep going sideways using only the winds energy.
With a solar sail, you can accelerate away from the star at some speed (sail fully unfurled); you can let gravity accelerate you toward the star (sail furled), or somewhere in between (sail partially furled; accelerating toward or away from the star at any speed between the two limits). But you cannot go sideways.
It is NOT like sailing. It is like flying a blimp with no engines. Attach all the sails and kites you want to said blimp; use your muscle energy to arange them how you want; you won't go sideways relative to the wind. You will just go downwind. If you like, you can spin around in circles while going downwind, but your center of mass will just go straight.
My muscle energy is not what makes a sailboat go sideways.
I don't see how the stars gravity helps. Gravity provides a force toward the star; the solar wind provides force away from it. Still no way to go sideways. Not even kinda.
You are incorrect. Sailboats sail in directions other than directly downwind by exploiting the difference in velocities between air and water.
In the solar sail scenario, there is no second medium, no aether if you will, to constrain your direction of movement as a keel in the water constrains the direction of a sailboats movement.
To those who think they can maneuver using only a solar sail: Describe to me your design for an unpowered blimp that does anything but move directly downwind.
First of all, Firefox runs on Windows, so it's not much of a reason to switch to Linux.
Secondly, if there is a problem, I don't care whos fault it is. If IE renders a pafge the way the designer wanted it to, and Firefox does not, what matters to me is that I should use IE if I want to veiw that page. So I'd better be on Windows.
I've never actually ordered any parts from them, but if you're looking for free (as in beer) technical drawing software, eMachineShop rocks.
Re:Changed the view of the US? - REAGAN spent???
on
Bobby Fischer Found
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· Score: 1
I do not say that tax rates are too low. In fact, I reject any statement about what the correct tax rate is that does not mention the spending rate.
The tax rates under Bush are woefully incompatible with the spending rates under Bush.
I would like government spending to be consistant with revenue. The Bush administration does not seem to realize there is even any connection.
So, if we were to first stipulate that government spending would not significantly exceed revenue, I'd be happy to discuss what the absolute rate ought to be. IMO, slightly higher taxes, which would still imply dramatically lower spending. I'm of the (perhaps radical) opinion that there are legitimate things that are best done by government, and even that a limited amount of straight out wealth redistribution is good for society. Many people disagree with these opinoions, and I see where they are coming from and respect that. Other people think taxes should be lower regardless of how much the government spends. These people I have no respect for; they are idiots.
If we're going to live in the Bush fantasy world, where you can spend as much as you want regardless of revenue, then obviously the tax rate should be zero. He'd probably propose that if he didn't think people would cath on. So instead he just proposes zeroing the taxes that cheifly effect the wealthy.
Re:Changed the view of the US? - REAGAN spent???
on
Bobby Fischer Found
·
· Score: 1
"Need I remind you that the Executive Branch does NOT approve the budget"
Need I remind you that, in reality, the Executive Branch DOES approve the budget?
"Everyone also knows that lowering tax rates during the 80s doubled tax revenues within a few years"
Everyone who "knows" this is smoking crack. It is not true. Tax revenues under Reagan increased only very slightly. I would attribute that increase less to his tax cuts and more to his spending (by which I mean the spending he both proposed in the first place and signed into law.) In any case, Reagans policies did not pay for themselves; they drove us into debt faster than anyone before by an order of magnitude.
GWB is now trying to best Reagans fiscal-irresponsibility record, and it looks like he'll succeed. It boggles my mind that seemingly inteligent people can advance the notion that his tax cuts will make the economy grow faster and make up for his spending. If we keep his tax and spending rates, the economy will have to start growing faster than it ever has before, and keep doing so forever. It's not going to happen.
Even after adjusting for inflation, almost all of the National Debt when GW Bush took office was incurred by Reagan. GW has made his own noteworthy contribution.
"Almost all incurred by Reagan and GW" holds if you adjust for inflation, if you consider it relative to GDP, if you figure it in Gallons of milk it could buy, if you figure it relative to the S&P 500, etc. In short if you consider it in any remotely sensible way.
Reagan and GW spent more than they made to a greater degree than anyone else by an order of magnitude.
Thank you for your blind assertion, but actually, almost all of it WAS run up by Reagan and Bush; there is nothing artificial about it. I guess you could say banks "colaborated" with Reagan and Bush to take the publics money without working for it. I'd instead say that Reagan and Bush expressed an interest in borrowing vast amounts of money on the publics behalf, and offered specific rates of interest to anyone who would lend it to them. All sorts of people took them up on it, from big banks to yours truly. I think it's fantastically irresponsible to have borrowed so rampantly, but before you ask, yes, I'll be wanting my money, with interest. I'll need it to pay the interest on my share of all the other money they borrowed.
"If Reagan-omics where a bad idea why do we still use it today?"
Because low taxes and high spending is politically popular.
"But maybe if you know the other name for Reagan-omics that is free market economics."
Uh, what part of "free market economics" implies dumping in vast amounts of borrowed government money? Anyone can make the economy good in the short run if they don't care about the long run.
"'StarWars' help fund research for faster computers and other new technologies that are in use today"
Right. So why didn't we just spend the money on researching those things directly and get more out of it rather than put up with the friction of directing all that research toward tech everyone in their right mind had already concluded wouldn't work?
"Reagan was one of the most popular presidents in our time"
True.
"being re-elected his second term by 49 of the states"
Which is a stupid way to measure popularity, even though it sounds much more impressive than "58% of the votes" (it's still a landslide). Then again, popularity isn't necessarily the measure of a good president; Lincoln only got 40% of the vote.
People who didn't like him want to write history to emphasize the things they didn't like. People who liked him want to emphasize the things they liked. Big surprise. Neither is rewriting, and nobody has "proved" anything.
"He was not an member of any ivy league college, just a down to earth guy"
When did being smart become a bad thing? I hate that.
Imagine you know two people. One sometimes makes you feel dumb because he's really smart, the other buys you lots of stuff by running up his credit cards. While I'd rather hang out with the latter, which do you want to put in charge of your retirement savings?
But they don't. They go down while our spending goes up, which is why our debt goes up ever faster.
And while your history of the national debt is informative, and your analysis somewhat interesting, you're ignoring an important fact: Of the current debt, almost all of it was incurred by just two administrations: Reagan and GW Bush.
Who the heck cares what anyone else thinks is the "proper" way to dispose of a worn out flag?
If it's flying on a pole, and symbolizing lots of good things like freedom, and the people who have sacrificed to obtain and protect those things, then by all means, be respectful. Get a little choked up over it if you want, I've been known to.
But when I pull it out of a drawer and notice moths have gotten at it, and it's all mildew stained? It's a peice of cloth. It symbolizes nothing. I'm cutting it up for rags.
And if someone publicly burns an American flag in protest, I'd say they are making a powerful statement about what that flag has come to symbolize for them (something bad). I'd probably even like to know why. I'm certainly not going to suggest they should be prevented from making that statement, thus betraying the very thing that flag represents to me. If it is possible to desecrate the flag, surely it is done by making it a symbol of the opression of free thought and expression.
"Should it break in the middle then the top half is still attached to the orbital platform no need to worry there"
Unless anyone is on board the platform, or the platform is at all expensive or took a lot of work to get into place. If the cable breaks, the "platform" is of course headed out of earth orbit at high speed...
Jackie Robinson would not be remotely as important historically if he were not black.
Turing would be every bit as important historically if he were not gay.
If you're talking about Turing as a victim of discrimination, obviously his sexual orientation is relevant. But most of the time when people are talking about Turing (this article for example) they are talking about his intelectual accomplishments, and his being gay is irrelevant.
Sigh. If there is a lesson to take from the example of Turing, it ought to be that being gay should not have been considered a particularly important thing about him at the time.
I think Mars is setting the bar too high when no private entity has yet taken the prize for a mere sub-orbital flight. I'd go for the moon.
I also think the whole point is letting private industry figure out the best way to get the job done, whatever that may be; and I'm not convinced "manned" is necessarily the way to go.
So the "job" is "go there, do stuff, come back", and we want to offer prize money for the first person to do it. But this involves all sorts of rules/definitions about what you've got to do, judges, arguments about exactly what counts and whether the rules need to be or can be ammended, etc. (witness the DARPA Grand Challenge), all of which bugs me. We should keep it simple.
So here's my proposal:
Figure out an amount of prize money that would reasonably motivate people to mount a moon mission. Then, avoid all restrictive definitions of the task, arguments, etc. To do this, take the prize money, and convert it into gold bullion. Stick the gold in a rocket, and crash the thing into the Moon. If you can get the gold, it's yours.
Well this app would really kill it, but remember for a moment the days when we had no choice but to look up phone numbers on paper, and called them ourselves... At some conference I was talking (drinking) with some Marketing guys, and one of them told the story of what he considered the best marketing ploy ever:
So there's this small college town where the local place, let's call it Al's Pizza, had been relatively competition free for a long time until a new Domino's Franchise sprouted up. Domino's promptly began killing Al's. Al tries various promotions, specials, deals, etc. of his own devising. Doesn't help. Damn college kids are just flocking to Domino's, Al's is going down the tubes. At some point Al gets a pitch from some guy who claims to be a marketing consultant. Al says OK, tell me what to do, if I'm still in business a year from now, you get paid.
So this guy goes around to the student center, dorm lounges, etc. and says "Hey, anybody want pizza? You order, I'm buying." (a hard sell I'm sure) Guy watches as every time the college kids pull out the yellow pages and read the number for Domino's off the big full-page ad. Guy notes the much smaller, consistently ignored "Al's" ad on the facing page. Guy goes back to Al and says "OK, here's what you're going to do..."
The next week, the campus is flooded with flyers from Al's proclaiming "A large one-topping pizza for ONE DOLLAR with this coupon and the Domino's ad from your yellow pages". In a matter of days, no one knows Domino's phone number any more. Consultant gets paid. Al runs this promo yearly, just to be sure.
Which college town are you in? IIRC, Gumby's is exclusively a college town establishment, it's hook being that it is somewhat cheaper than everyone else, and so prefered by poor college students.
I'm not a poor college student, but I don't mind saving a couple bucks. But I actually like the pizza from Gumby's here in CUville (Boulder CO). It's at least as good as anything else that can be made to show up at your door.
Anyway, I ask what college town you're in because I'd imagine Gumby's has some pretty variable quality control issues: In my experience, every Gumby's employee you deal with in getting your pizza WILL be stoned out of their skull.
Sorry, but I'm not crazy about your example, and your math is just bad.
The keyboard may have 101 keys, but you can't use them all in passwords. Then you use 52 (# of alpha charachters) instead of 26 (# of keys), which is correct, but confusing.
My keyboard (which I beleive to be standard) has 47 keys that produce unique non-whitespace charachters, each of which can be shifted, so 94 password charachters, 52 of them alpha. Assuming an 8 charachter password that's 6,095,689,385,410,816 combinations.
OK, not much different. A little less, which actually should help your argument.
But you really go wrong on the constraint. Your math is requiring the last charachter be non-alpha. To require that any charachter be non-alpha, we just have to compute the number of pure-alpha passwords and subtract.
The number of pure alpha 8 charachter passwords is
8 charachter passwords with at least one non-alpha charachter.
The keyspace has been reduced by 0.877%. I'd call that trivial, especially in light of the percent of users who would use a password out of the dictionary if allowed to (I'm guessing high 90s).
Most password attacks aren't going to try to search the whole keyspace. They're going to search some subset of it the attacker thinks is likely to contain the password (e.g. dictionary words spelled forward and backwards, all combinations of two dictionary words, etc.). Password rules make sense if they force people out of this subset.
"remember that in the U.S. you can file for a patent as long as the material hasn't been publically known for a year, so there is still some danger involved"
I beleive you've misinterpreted this. If you publish details of something today, you'd have a year to file for a patent on it. If I publish details of something today, you'd have to have filed yesterday.
The publically know for a year is to prevent an inventor from waiting until everyone adopts, then patenting. Prior art has no delay.
"What disadvantage do you perceive in requiring that voting systems have source code available for public scrutiny"
I don't see any disadvantage in that. I see a big advantage in it. I just don't see enough advantage in that or anything else besides after the fact verifiability to justify doing away with after the fact verifiability.
I just want the ability, if there is a need, to go back and check any and all votes cast, just as in current procedures. Most of the time there is, and will be, no need.
I don't beleive any system used by millions of people will ever be problem free. So why would we possibly want that system to prevent us not just from correcting those problems, but from even knowing when they occur in the first place.
What disadvantage do you perceive in requiring voting systems to be independantly verifiable, just as current election procedures are?
"If a paper+electronic system were used, the electronic version would still need to be verifiable and open; otherwise if it counted votes incorrectly there would be no way of knowing. If it drastically miscounted, nobody would bother with a recount."
Hogwash. Right in my post I suggest we would want to do a recount on some small random sample of precincts after every election. In the case of a drastic miscount, this will catch it.
It still makes things a lot cheaper. The vast majority of elections aren't remotely close, and for these, no manual counting (beyond that random sample) will be needed.
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He has not paid for the right to endanger my life unnecessarily without my trying to take steps (legislative if possible) to stop him. And in terms of wear-and-tear on the roads, the hummer driver is getting a bargain.
"The anti-hummer rant sounds more like typical anti-wealthy rants than any sane reasoning."
Well, I don't have any problem with people who want to buy expensive luxury sedans. But Hummers are stupid, dangerous (to the owners and others) toys for people with serious inferiority complexes. Anyone who drives one regularly on entirely on-road trips is an a-hole.
In a sailboat, I can go sideways relative to the wind. I can even tie off the sheet and keep going sideways using only the winds energy.
With a solar sail, you can accelerate away from the star at some speed (sail fully unfurled); you can let gravity accelerate you toward the star (sail furled), or somewhere in between (sail partially furled; accelerating toward or away from the star at any speed between the two limits). But you cannot go sideways.
It is NOT like sailing. It is like flying a blimp with no engines. Attach all the sails and kites you want to said blimp; use your muscle energy to arange them how you want; you won't go sideways relative to the wind. You will just go downwind. If you like, you can spin around in circles while going downwind, but your center of mass will just go straight.
My muscle energy is not what makes a sailboat go sideways.
"They'd use the gravity of the star to tack."
I don't see how the stars gravity helps. Gravity provides a force toward the star; the solar wind provides force away from it. Still no way to go sideways. Not even kinda.
You are incorrect. Sailboats sail in directions other than directly downwind by exploiting the difference in velocities between air and water.
In the solar sail scenario, there is no second medium, no aether if you will, to constrain your direction of movement as a keel in the water constrains the direction of a sailboats movement.
To those who think they can maneuver using only a solar sail:
Describe to me your design for an unpowered blimp that does anything but move directly downwind.
First of all, Firefox runs on Windows, so it's not much of a reason to switch to Linux.
Secondly, if there is a problem, I don't care whos fault it is. If IE renders a pafge the way the designer wanted it to, and Firefox does not, what matters to me is that I should use IE if I want to veiw that page. So I'd better be on Windows.
"The only real thing to be concerned about is 'Will it be in my lifetime or not?'"
Oh, OK, that's easy then:
No. Not even remotely close.
Not that I disagree with your larger point, but this:
"had all their data stolen"
is no where close. 82 gig was stolen. That's peanuts. Acxiom has more data than God.
I've never actually ordered any parts from them, but if you're looking for free (as in beer) technical drawing software, eMachineShop rocks.
I do not say that tax rates are too low. In fact, I reject any statement about what the correct tax rate is that does not mention the spending rate.
The tax rates under Bush are woefully incompatible with the spending rates under Bush.
I would like government spending to be consistant with revenue. The Bush administration does not seem to realize there is even any connection.
So, if we were to first stipulate that government spending would not significantly exceed revenue, I'd be happy to discuss what the absolute rate ought to be. IMO, slightly higher taxes, which would still imply dramatically lower spending. I'm of the (perhaps radical) opinion that there are legitimate things that are best done by government, and even that a limited amount of straight out wealth redistribution is good for society. Many people disagree with these opinoions, and I see where they are coming from and respect that. Other people think taxes should be lower regardless of how much the government spends. These people I have no respect for; they are idiots.
If we're going to live in the Bush fantasy world, where you can spend as much as you want regardless of revenue, then obviously the tax rate should be zero. He'd probably propose that if he didn't think people would cath on. So instead he just proposes zeroing the taxes that cheifly effect the wealthy.
"Need I remind you that the Executive Branch does NOT approve the budget"
Need I remind you that, in reality, the Executive Branch DOES approve the budget?
"Everyone also knows that lowering tax rates during the 80s doubled tax revenues within a few years"
Everyone who "knows" this is smoking crack. It is not true. Tax revenues under Reagan increased only very slightly. I would attribute that increase less to his tax cuts and more to his spending (by which I mean the spending he both proposed in the first place and signed into law.) In any case, Reagans policies did not pay for themselves; they drove us into debt faster than anyone before by an order of magnitude.
GWB is now trying to best Reagans fiscal-irresponsibility record, and it looks like he'll succeed. It boggles my mind that seemingly inteligent people can advance the notion that his tax cuts will make the economy grow faster and make up for his spending. If we keep his tax and spending rates, the economy will have to start growing faster than it ever has before, and keep doing so forever. It's not going to happen.
Well, if they cure the symptoms of cancer, such as, say, death, that's good enough for me.
Let me restate my previous assertion:
Even after adjusting for inflation, almost all of the National Debt when GW Bush took office was incurred by Reagan. GW has made his own noteworthy contribution.
"Almost all incurred by Reagan and GW" holds if you adjust for inflation, if you consider it relative to GDP, if you figure it in Gallons of milk it could buy, if you figure it relative to the S&P 500, etc. In short if you consider it in any remotely sensible way.
Reagan and GW spent more than they made to a greater degree than anyone else by an order of magnitude.
"Artificial numbers."
Thank you for your blind assertion, but actually, almost all of it WAS run up by Reagan and Bush; there is nothing artificial about it. I guess you could say banks "colaborated" with Reagan and Bush to take the publics money without working for it. I'd instead say that Reagan and Bush expressed an interest in borrowing vast amounts of money on the publics behalf, and offered specific rates of interest to anyone who would lend it to them. All sorts of people took them up on it, from big banks to yours truly. I think it's fantastically irresponsible to have borrowed so rampantly, but before you ask, yes, I'll be wanting my money, with interest. I'll need it to pay the interest on my share of all the other money they borrowed.
"If Reagan-omics where a bad idea why do we still use it today?"
Because low taxes and high spending is politically popular.
"But maybe if you know the other name for Reagan-omics that is free market economics."
Uh, what part of "free market economics" implies dumping in vast amounts of borrowed government money? Anyone can make the economy good in the short run if they don't care about the long run.
"'StarWars' help fund research for faster computers and other new technologies that are in use today"
Right. So why didn't we just spend the money on researching those things directly and get more out of it rather than put up with the friction of directing all that research toward tech everyone in their right mind had already concluded wouldn't work?
"Reagan was one of the most popular presidents in our time"
True.
"being re-elected his second term by 49 of the states"
Which is a stupid way to measure popularity, even though it sounds much more impressive than "58% of the votes" (it's still a landslide). Then again, popularity isn't necessarily the measure of a good president; Lincoln only got 40% of the vote.
People who didn't like him want to write history to emphasize the things they didn't like. People who liked him want to emphasize the things they liked. Big surprise. Neither is rewriting, and nobody has "proved" anything.
"He was not an member of any ivy league college, just a down to earth guy"
When did being smart become a bad thing? I hate that.
Imagine you know two people. One sometimes makes you feel dumb because he's really smart, the other buys you lots of stuff by running up his credit cards. While I'd rather hang out with the latter, which do you want to put in charge of your retirement savings?
"There's little wonder that taxes keep going up."
But they don't. They go down while our spending goes up, which is why our debt goes up ever faster.
And while your history of the national debt is informative, and your analysis somewhat interesting, you're ignoring an important fact: Of the current debt, almost all of it was incurred by just two administrations: Reagan and GW Bush.
Who the heck cares what anyone else thinks is the "proper" way to dispose of a worn out flag?
If it's flying on a pole, and symbolizing lots of good things like freedom, and the people who have sacrificed to obtain and protect those things, then by all means, be respectful. Get a little choked up over it if you want, I've been known to.
But when I pull it out of a drawer and notice moths have gotten at it, and it's all mildew stained? It's a peice of cloth. It symbolizes nothing. I'm cutting it up for rags.
And if someone publicly burns an American flag in protest, I'd say they are making a powerful statement about what that flag has come to symbolize for them (something bad). I'd probably even like to know why. I'm certainly not going to suggest they should be prevented from making that statement, thus betraying the very thing that flag represents to me. If it is possible to desecrate the flag, surely it is done by making it a symbol of the opression of free thought and expression.
"Should it break in the middle then the top half is still attached to the orbital platform no need to worry there"
Unless anyone is on board the platform, or the platform is at all expensive or took a lot of work to get into place. If the cable breaks, the "platform" is of course headed out of earth orbit at high speed...
Jackie Robinson would not be remotely as important historically if he were not black.
Turing would be every bit as important historically if he were not gay.
If you're talking about Turing as a victim of discrimination, obviously his sexual orientation is relevant. But most of the time when people are talking about Turing (this article for example) they are talking about his intelectual accomplishments, and his being gay is irrelevant.
Sigh. If there is a lesson to take from the example of Turing, it ought to be that being gay should not have been considered a particularly important thing about him at the time.
I think Mars is setting the bar too high when no private entity has yet taken the prize for a mere sub-orbital flight. I'd go for the moon.
I also think the whole point is letting private industry figure out the best way to get the job done, whatever that may be; and I'm not convinced "manned" is necessarily the way to go.
So the "job" is "go there, do stuff, come back", and we want to offer prize money for the first person to do it. But this involves all sorts of rules/definitions about what you've got to do, judges, arguments about exactly what counts and whether the rules need to be or can be ammended, etc. (witness the DARPA Grand Challenge), all of which bugs me. We should keep it simple.
So here's my proposal:
Figure out an amount of prize money that would reasonably motivate people to mount a moon mission. Then, avoid all restrictive definitions of the task, arguments, etc. To do this, take the prize money, and convert it into gold bullion. Stick the gold in a rocket, and crash the thing into the Moon. If you can get the gold, it's yours.
Well this app would really kill it, but remember for a moment the days when we had no choice but to look up phone numbers on paper, and called them ourselves... At some conference I was talking (drinking) with some Marketing guys, and one of them told the story of what he considered the best marketing ploy ever:
So there's this small college town where the local place, let's call it Al's Pizza, had been relatively competition free for a long time until a new Domino's Franchise sprouted up. Domino's promptly began killing Al's. Al tries various promotions, specials, deals, etc. of his own devising. Doesn't help. Damn college kids are just flocking to Domino's, Al's is going down the tubes. At some point Al gets a pitch from some guy who claims to be a marketing consultant. Al says OK, tell me what to do, if I'm still in business a year from now, you get paid.
So this guy goes around to the student center, dorm lounges, etc. and says "Hey, anybody want pizza? You order, I'm buying." (a hard sell I'm sure) Guy watches as every time the college kids pull out the yellow pages and read the number for Domino's off the big full-page ad. Guy notes the much smaller, consistently ignored "Al's" ad on the facing page. Guy goes back to Al and says "OK, here's what you're going to do..."
The next week, the campus is flooded with flyers from Al's proclaiming "A large one-topping pizza for ONE DOLLAR with this coupon and the Domino's ad from your yellow pages". In a matter of days, no one knows Domino's phone number any more. Consultant gets paid. Al runs this promo yearly, just to be sure.
Which college town are you in? IIRC, Gumby's is exclusively a college town establishment, it's hook being that it is somewhat cheaper than everyone else, and so prefered by poor college students.
I'm not a poor college student, but I don't mind saving a couple bucks. But I actually like the pizza from Gumby's here in CUville (Boulder CO). It's at least as good as anything else that can be made to show up at your door.
Anyway, I ask what college town you're in because I'd imagine Gumby's has some pretty variable quality control issues: In my experience, every Gumby's employee you deal with in getting your pizza WILL be stoned out of their skull.
Sorry, but I'm not crazy about your example, and your math is just bad.
The keyboard may have 101 keys, but you can't use them all in passwords. Then you use 52 (# of alpha charachters) instead of 26 (# of keys), which is correct, but confusing.
My keyboard (which I beleive to be standard) has 47 keys that produce unique non-whitespace charachters, each of which can be shifted, so 94 password charachters, 52 of them alpha. Assuming an 8 charachter password that's 6,095,689,385,410,816 combinations.
OK, not much different. A little less, which actually should help your argument.
But you really go wrong on the constraint. Your math is requiring the last charachter be non-alpha. To require that any charachter be non-alpha, we just have to compute the number of pure-alpha passwords and subtract.
The number of pure alpha 8 charachter passwords is
52 * 52 * 52 * 52 * 52 * 52 * 52 * 52 = 53,459,728,531,456
leaving
6,095,689,385,410,816 - 53,459,728,531,456 = 6,042,229,656,879,360
8 charachter passwords with at least one non-alpha charachter.
The keyspace has been reduced by 0.877%. I'd call that trivial, especially in light of the percent of users who would use a password out of the dictionary if allowed to (I'm guessing high 90s).
Most password attacks aren't going to try to search the whole keyspace. They're going to search some subset of it the attacker thinks is likely to contain the password (e.g. dictionary words spelled forward and backwards, all combinations of two dictionary words, etc.). Password rules make sense if they force people out of this subset.
"remember that in the U.S. you can file for a patent as long as the material hasn't been publically known for a year, so there is still some danger involved"
I beleive you've misinterpreted this. If you publish details of something today, you'd have a year to file for a patent on it. If I publish details of something today, you'd have to have filed yesterday.
The publically know for a year is to prevent an inventor from waiting until everyone adopts, then patenting. Prior art has no delay.
"What disadvantage do you perceive in requiring that voting systems have source code available for public scrutiny"
I don't see any disadvantage in that. I see a big advantage in it. I just don't see enough advantage in that or anything else besides after the fact verifiability to justify doing away with after the fact verifiability.
I just want the ability, if there is a need, to go back and check any and all votes cast, just as in current procedures. Most of the time there is, and will be, no need.
I don't beleive any system used by millions of people will ever be problem free. So why would we possibly want that system to prevent us not just from correcting those problems, but from even knowing when they occur in the first place.
What disadvantage do you perceive in requiring voting systems to be independantly verifiable, just as current election procedures are?
"If a paper+electronic system were used, the electronic version would still need to be verifiable and open; otherwise if it counted votes incorrectly there would be no way of knowing. If it drastically miscounted, nobody would bother with a recount."
Hogwash. Right in my post I suggest we would want to do a recount on some small random sample of precincts after every election. In the case of a drastic miscount, this will catch it.
It still makes things a lot cheaper. The vast majority of elections aren't remotely close, and for these, no manual counting (beyond that random sample) will be needed.