One of the reasons that there has been so much recent interest in the US in electronic voting systems is that the overall election result is so sensitive to (even relatively small) errors in the vote counting process. Realistically, there are two solutions to the problem: reducing the error rate, and making the overall voting outcome less sensitive to vote counting errors. Indeed, an unstable voting system (such as first-past-the-post in the US/UK elections) where a change of one vote can trigger a drastic change of result is fundamentally undemocratic - it gives some individual voters (e.g. in Florida) much more influence on the final result that others. If you are trying to measure any quantity reliably, you want your metric to be as insensitive to errors in you input data as possible, and a proportional electoral system is one way out of that problem. Not all the blame belongs with the vote counting technology.
How do you feel Open Source software is in Sun's commercial interests, and is this basis on which you have to justify Sun's involvement in it to others within Sun?
But WWII was a different type of war entirely, with two equally-sized, similar opponents.
This "war" is between one massive, technologically-advanced superpower, which puts a high price on the lives of its own soldiers, and a loose group of guerrilla-terrorists, distributed across half the world.
This war is much less winnable by the US than any it has ever engaged in, because the enemy is so distributed and intangible.
The US could maybe invade and take over Afghanistan and Iraq, but the cost in lives and money would be disproportionate to the good it would do. (It would probably do much more harm than good, anyway).
Slashdot Mirror
One of the reasons that there has been so much recent interest in the US in electronic voting systems is that the overall election result is so sensitive to (even relatively small) errors in the vote counting process. Realistically, there are two solutions to the problem: reducing the error rate, and making the overall voting outcome less sensitive to vote counting errors.
Indeed, an unstable voting system (such as first-past-the-post in the US/UK elections) where a change of one vote can trigger a drastic change of result is fundamentally undemocratic - it gives some individual voters (e.g. in Florida) much more influence on the final result that others.
If you are trying to measure any quantity reliably, you want your metric to be as insensitive to errors in you input data as possible, and a proportional electoral system is one way out of that problem. Not all the blame belongs with the vote counting technology.
How do you feel Open Source software is in Sun's commercial interests, and is this basis on which you have to justify Sun's involvement in it to others within Sun?
But WWII was a different type of war entirely, with two equally-sized, similar opponents.
This "war" is between one massive, technologically-advanced superpower, which puts a high price on the lives of its own soldiers, and a loose group of guerrilla-terrorists, distributed across half the world.
This war is much less winnable by the US than any it has ever engaged in, because the enemy is so distributed and intangible.
The US could maybe invade and take over Afghanistan and Iraq, but the cost in lives and money would be disproportionate to the good it would do. (It would probably do much more harm than good, anyway).