what's wrong with paper ballots - ignoring the pathetic wingnut canards about vast flocks of illegal aliens voting, of course. Helluva lot easier to change a number in an unprovable database than stuffing boxes with the requisite tens of thousands of fraudulent ballots.
You just answered your own question - electronic voting makes it much much easier for the media to quickly report the correct result of the election, and by "correct" I mean the preselected winner, which may or may not have been the candidate with the most votes.
Close elections are a fundamental problem not solvable by technology, and for the most part, in the grand scheme of things, if society is unable to clearly choose between A and B there is probably no significant difference anyway, and you end up with a tempest in a tea pot over an emotional issue.
So are you saying that Al Gore would have done the exact same things as president as George W Bush did? Somehow I'm skeptical.
Umm, you realize that there's the word "American" in the ACLU's name, right? I can imagine British groups like this one are not at all happy with either of these situations.
The ACLU report addresses the pro-net-neutrality arguments. The other side of the coin is the revenue requirements of the ISPs and their business models. Nobody can fairly judge this issue without consideration of both sides.
There's a constitutional protection of free speech. There is no constitutional protection of corporate profits. Are you suggesting that corporate profits should trump constitutional protections, because if that's true then Congress, the President, and the Supreme Court should close up shop and just let a bunch of guys on Wall Street run the country.
Are there any win-win scenarios that maintain net-neutrality and also provide the vast amount of capital needed for wireless infrastructure? I don't see them.
That argument would hold water if AT&T and the other ISPs weren't immensely profitable already. So option 4 is: impose net neutrality, prices remain at or near the current market price (which is what the market will bear), and the ISPs reinvest some of what is currently their profit into making service not suck.
To partake in the spoils of war or try to seek any form of long-term influence would be diplomatically problematic.
Really? It hasn't been a problem so far. Heck, the US installed a former Unocal executive as the president of Afghanistan, who immediately turned around and approved a pipeline that Unocal had been wanting for years but which the Taliban refused to allow. As far as the seeking a form of long-term influence, a country doing that sort of thing would be leaving 50,000 troops behind in Iraq even after officially "withdrawing".
As far as openly declaring itself to be trying to take over the Middle East, the Project for a New American Century, which had the backing of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld among others, more-or-less advocated precisely that.
I'd disagree about the trade war being bad for America.
1. We export far less to China than we import. That means that if that supply were cut off we'd lose a lot less financially than the Chinese would. 2. The vast majority of manufacturing that occurs in China could easily pack up and move to another poor country with poor environmental regulations, a compliant police force and army, and ridiculously low wages. Capital can and will move if it is profitable to do so. That would mean the effect on prices would be fairly small in the long run. 3. Employing people in the US might become more cost effective, improving the job situation significantly, and potentially increasing aggregate demand, which could help the US get out of the depression we're in.
The people who it would suck for are the Chinese government and the investment bankers. I'm ok with that.
Otherwise there will be nobody left healthy enough to work in their factories.
Not really. Just like the US went through back in the 1890s when there was tons of immigrant labor showing up every day, the Chinese have millions of rural peasants who would love a chance to work in their factories. They could totally ruin 50 million workers without any significant short-term effect on their economic output.
Maybe GP was thinking there was a law against pissing off a cop. There isn't, and "disorderly conduct", "disturbing the peace" and "assaulting a police officer" are not legitimate legal substitutes (although bad cops will use those sorts of laws like that).
For instance, it's perfectly legal to give a cop the finger.
The way to defeat trolls is to keep them arguing with each other all night long, until daylight arrives and they're no longer a threat. (ok, in this case it's because their mothers have sent them off to school, but the idea is similar)
If you've been following this issue, you know that The Party that I'm referring to is not a communist party or something, it's the Conservative Party of Canada, precisely because they're muzzling government scientists who they disagree with. Thankfully, these scientists aren't risking their lives, only their jobs.
Science itself is valueless. It cannot be used to set policy.
Whoa, what? Are you seriously suggesting that humanity is worse off knowing how to form various iron compounds, or how to treat leukemia, or how freshwater mussels affect trout? As far as whether it can be used to set policy, are you suggesting that we set policy with no understanding whatsoever about what the probable effects of that policy are?
It really is like religion
... except that science produces testable, verifiable, repeatable results. Unlike religion, there's absolutely nothing science tells you to accept simply because an authority says so. If you don't think a scientific result is accurate, you can look through the data and methodology, you could set up a lab and try to repeat the result, you could look at what other scientists have to say about it, and so forth.
"The union said in a release the recent decision to end the mandatory long-form census is the latest step in a worrying trend away from evidence-based policy making."
Well, see, there's your problem. You silly scientists, insisting that demonstrable facts are used to guide public policy. Don't you know that the truth is whatever the Party says it is?
"Software architects" are by far one of the worst things that can happen to a company that develops software products.
Heaven forbid the software that these companies produce has some sort of coherent structure!
Microsoft does have a tendency to come out with major framework releases every few years. But part of that is that the newer frameworks and libraries are significant improvements over their predecessors - try writing software for bare Win32 without any framework layers and you'll see exactly why MFC was a big help. And then after working on MFC for a little while, you'll really appreciate what.NET brought to the table. I've only dabbled in Windows programming, but they really have moved from extremely ridiculously painful to a pretty mild pain.
I should also point out that all the concepts you decry were created to solve real-world problems. SOA sounds like a worthless piece of crap until you realize that it enables you to share logic without sharing internals, hardware, or linkage. Clouds may sound silly the way the marketers talk about them, but efficient and effective use of networked hardware and bandwidth hardly sounds like a bad idea. All this architecture stuff done right means that they can get that nice new feature you really really wanted in done in 3 months instead of 5.
There is a whole ecosystem of books, online material and courses created by Microsoft to facilitate people learning their product. No such infrastructure exists for open source products. It may not even be possible to create such an infrastructure.
I'd be amazed to find out it's impossible for Open Source folks to create an infrastructure with books, onlinematerial, and training.
as long as they don't use that gay LibreOffice name
I know this is OT, but I have to call you out for using "gay" as a pejorative here. If you think it's stupid, call it that. If you think it's idiotic, call it that. If you think it's bad branding, say so. But don't call it "gay" for the same reason you wouldn't call it a "n*****" name.
Unless, of course, you mean it's a name that invokes joyful frolicking.
He's no communist, and he's definitely not a kook. He's my congressman, and I've spoken with him at several public events. The thing is, he has throughout his career taken stands that upset the rich and powerful, so they often do their best to portray him as a kook.
For instance, the most famous episode from early in his political career (as mayor of Cleveland) was refusing to sell Cleveland's municipal power company to the private company that controls most of Ohio's electricity market. The electric company's pals at the banks then threatened the city with default rather than rolling over the debt as they had been doing for decades. Dennis stood his ground, the banks made good on their threat, and Kucinich lost his reelection bid. But in the long run he saved residents and businesses in Cleveland millions of dollars in electric bills.
His more recent exploits include:
* Refusing to support the Patriot Act.
* Refusing to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He consistantly votes against appropriations for those wars, and has been doing so since before they started.
* Introducing articles of impeachment against both George W Bush and Dick Cheney.
* Acting as one of the leaders of the backbencher holdouts for a public option in the health care reform bill. Unfortunately, Obama was able to convince him that HCR without a public option was better than no HCR, so he eventually voted for it.
The Democratic leadership doesn't give a damn what he does, though, because he's not good at getting oodles of lobbyist dollars (gee, I wonder why). So when he was running for President in 2008, the questions he got during debates were about whether he'd seen a UFO, not about his plans for reforming health care without mandating that everyone buy insurance.
It's worth mentioning that the earlier doctrine for dealing with hijackings was based on experience. In most cases, the situation would end up that the plane would get redirected to, say, Cuba, and the passengers would be let off, and while it would seriously suck the passengers had a generally good chance of survival.
Does the policy seem kinda stupid in hindsight? Possibly. But it wasn't a case of wanting people to be passive sheep so much as wanting as many passengers as possible to come out of a hijacking alive.
In other words, the first casualty of war is the truth. Which is why one of George Carlin's basic political principles was refusing to believe anything the government tells the public.
my god. who would have thought we would be saying or thinking this. 10, 20, 30 years ago I never would have imagined.
Here's the thing: the US federal government has had a rather authoritarian streak for quite a long time. In both the 19th and 20th centuries, there have been federal agents who wanted to and in some cases did read people's mail without a warrant to do so. Once the telegraph came into being, security agents tapped that. When telephones became commonplace, J Edgar was there to tap those illegally. And now that the Internet is a common means of communication, these same sorts of folks are doing their best to tap that whenever possible, legally or not.
It's thoroughly part of the culture of the FBI that the rights of American citizens should be trampled on whenever the FBI think it's convenient. Foreign citizens might as well forget having any rights when they relate to the CIA. And it's worth mentioning that these agencies will do this sort of thing with or without legal sanction, and with or without the sanction of the political officials that theoretically control them, the President included.
I'm not saying the ideas described in my post are in fact accurate, I'm saying that that's the perception you're contending with when you go in trying to convince management that they should use FOSS.
There are communistic tendencies in FOSS. That doesn't mean people don't make money using FOSS (GOOG), providing services for FOSS platforms (RHAT, IBM), selling software that runs on top of FOSS (ORCL), or selling software based on FOSS but isn't FOSS (APPL). But when you download the latest and greatest X.org version, you don't pay unless you want to. If you take the time to chip in on a project, you don't get paid by the patch.
Take a look at my quote earlier, and tell me how that doesn't apply. Then realize that it's the basic idea of Communism.
It's about philosophy. One of the unwritten qualifications for the upper echelons of corporate management is believing wholeheartedly that capitalist corporations are the most efficient way of producing the highest quality goods and services (and it should be pointed out that for many products, they're absolutely right). After all, if you didn't believe in corporations, why would you make the sacrifices necessary to get to an upper management position?
And here come a bunch of long-haired hippies who explain how their stuff is better. But it can't be, because it's not produced by a corporation. I mean, which car is more reliable, the old beat-up Thunderbird your mechanic brother-in-law tinkered with constantly, or the one just driven off the Mercedes parking lot? And then cognitive dissonance creeps in: If the hippies' stuff actually is better, then perhaps the corporation isn't always right, and perhaps the manager has wasted his better years in the office rather than spending quality time with his children.
Software is one of those strange products where "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" really works well, because there's tiny tiny costs (namely, downloading bandwidth) for having freeloaders. But for those who've bought completely into capitalism, they react about as well to this idea as a Unix geek would to converting their beloved webservers to run IIS.
In other words, "the age of privacy is over" if like an idiot you share information you don't want public with the public. Funny thing that.
Although in the interests of full disclosure, I don't even have a Facebook account. If somebody wants to tell me about their life, we can have a nice low-tech conversation. I don't get all the latest juice on everyone I conceivably know, but I get a lot of good face-to-face time.
Slashdot Mirror
what's wrong with paper ballots - ignoring the pathetic wingnut canards about vast flocks of illegal aliens voting, of course. Helluva lot easier to change a number in an unprovable database than stuffing boxes with the requisite tens of thousands of fraudulent ballots.
You just answered your own question - electronic voting makes it much much easier for the media to quickly report the correct result of the election, and by "correct" I mean the preselected winner, which may or may not have been the candidate with the most votes.
Close elections are a fundamental problem not solvable by technology, and for the most part, in the grand scheme of things, if society is unable to clearly choose between A and B there is probably no significant difference anyway, and you end up with a tempest in a tea pot over an emotional issue.
So are you saying that Al Gore would have done the exact same things as president as George W Bush did? Somehow I'm skeptical.
Umm, you realize that there's the word "American" in the ACLU's name, right? I can imagine British groups like this one are not at all happy with either of these situations.
The ACLU report addresses the pro-net-neutrality arguments. The other side of the coin is the revenue requirements of the ISPs and their business models. Nobody can fairly judge this issue without consideration of both sides.
There's a constitutional protection of free speech. There is no constitutional protection of corporate profits. Are you suggesting that corporate profits should trump constitutional protections, because if that's true then Congress, the President, and the Supreme Court should close up shop and just let a bunch of guys on Wall Street run the country.
Are there any win-win scenarios that maintain net-neutrality and also provide the vast amount of capital needed for wireless infrastructure? I don't see them.
That argument would hold water if AT&T and the other ISPs weren't immensely profitable already. So option 4 is: impose net neutrality, prices remain at or near the current market price (which is what the market will bear), and the ISPs reinvest some of what is currently their profit into making service not suck.
To partake in the spoils of war or try to seek any form of long-term influence would be diplomatically problematic.
Really? It hasn't been a problem so far. Heck, the US installed a former Unocal executive as the president of Afghanistan, who immediately turned around and approved a pipeline that Unocal had been wanting for years but which the Taliban refused to allow. As far as the seeking a form of long-term influence, a country doing that sort of thing would be leaving 50,000 troops behind in Iraq even after officially "withdrawing".
As far as openly declaring itself to be trying to take over the Middle East, the Project for a New American Century, which had the backing of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld among others, more-or-less advocated precisely that.
I'd disagree about the trade war being bad for America.
1. We export far less to China than we import. That means that if that supply were cut off we'd lose a lot less financially than the Chinese would.
2. The vast majority of manufacturing that occurs in China could easily pack up and move to another poor country with poor environmental regulations, a compliant police force and army, and ridiculously low wages. Capital can and will move if it is profitable to do so. That would mean the effect on prices would be fairly small in the long run.
3. Employing people in the US might become more cost effective, improving the job situation significantly, and potentially increasing aggregate demand, which could help the US get out of the depression we're in.
The people who it would suck for are the Chinese government and the investment bankers. I'm ok with that.
Otherwise there will be nobody left healthy enough to work in their factories.
Not really. Just like the US went through back in the 1890s when there was tons of immigrant labor showing up every day, the Chinese have millions of rural peasants who would love a chance to work in their factories. They could totally ruin 50 million workers without any significant short-term effect on their economic output.
This sort of idle speculation looks an awful lot like somebody trying to drive up Facebook's stock price with dreams of a favorable buyout.
Maybe GP was thinking there was a law against pissing off a cop. There isn't, and "disorderly conduct", "disturbing the peace" and "assaulting a police officer" are not legitimate legal substitutes (although bad cops will use those sorts of laws like that).
For instance, it's perfectly legal to give a cop the finger.
The way to defeat trolls is to keep them arguing with each other all night long, until daylight arrives and they're no longer a threat. (ok, in this case it's because their mothers have sent them off to school, but the idea is similar)
Actually, in Soviet Canada, cold dish serves you!
If you've been following this issue, you know that The Party that I'm referring to is not a communist party or something, it's the Conservative Party of Canada, precisely because they're muzzling government scientists who they disagree with. Thankfully, these scientists aren't risking their lives, only their jobs.
Science itself is valueless. It cannot be used to set policy.
Whoa, what? Are you seriously suggesting that humanity is worse off knowing how to form various iron compounds, or how to treat leukemia, or how freshwater mussels affect trout? As far as whether it can be used to set policy, are you suggesting that we set policy with no understanding whatsoever about what the probable effects of that policy are?
It really is like religion
... except that science produces testable, verifiable, repeatable results. Unlike religion, there's absolutely nothing science tells you to accept simply because an authority says so. If you don't think a scientific result is accurate, you can look through the data and methodology, you could set up a lab and try to repeat the result, you could look at what other scientists have to say about it, and so forth.
"The union said in a release the recent decision to end the mandatory long-form census is the latest step in a worrying trend away from evidence-based policy making."
Well, see, there's your problem. You silly scientists, insisting that demonstrable facts are used to guide public policy. Don't you know that the truth is whatever the Party says it is?
"Software architects" are by far one of the worst things that can happen to a company that develops software products.
Heaven forbid the software that these companies produce has some sort of coherent structure!
Microsoft does have a tendency to come out with major framework releases every few years. But part of that is that the newer frameworks and libraries are significant improvements over their predecessors - try writing software for bare Win32 without any framework layers and you'll see exactly why MFC was a big help. And then after working on MFC for a little while, you'll really appreciate what .NET brought to the table. I've only dabbled in Windows programming, but they really have moved from extremely ridiculously painful to a pretty mild pain.
I should also point out that all the concepts you decry were created to solve real-world problems. SOA sounds like a worthless piece of crap until you realize that it enables you to share logic without sharing internals, hardware, or linkage. Clouds may sound silly the way the marketers talk about them, but efficient and effective use of networked hardware and bandwidth hardly sounds like a bad idea. All this architecture stuff done right means that they can get that nice new feature you really really wanted in done in 3 months instead of 5.
There is a whole ecosystem of books, online material and courses created by Microsoft to facilitate people learning their product. No such infrastructure exists for open source products. It may not even be possible to create such an infrastructure.
I'd be amazed to find out it's impossible for Open Source folks to create an infrastructure with books, online material, and training.
as long as they don't use that gay LibreOffice name
I know this is OT, but I have to call you out for using "gay" as a pejorative here. If you think it's stupid, call it that. If you think it's idiotic, call it that. If you think it's bad branding, say so. But don't call it "gay" for the same reason you wouldn't call it a "n*****" name.
Unless, of course, you mean it's a name that invokes joyful frolicking.
He's no communist, and he's definitely not a kook. He's my congressman, and I've spoken with him at several public events. The thing is, he has throughout his career taken stands that upset the rich and powerful, so they often do their best to portray him as a kook.
For instance, the most famous episode from early in his political career (as mayor of Cleveland) was refusing to sell Cleveland's municipal power company to the private company that controls most of Ohio's electricity market. The electric company's pals at the banks then threatened the city with default rather than rolling over the debt as they had been doing for decades. Dennis stood his ground, the banks made good on their threat, and Kucinich lost his reelection bid. But in the long run he saved residents and businesses in Cleveland millions of dollars in electric bills.
His more recent exploits include:
* Refusing to support the Patriot Act.
* Refusing to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He consistantly votes against appropriations for those wars, and has been doing so since before they started.
* Introducing articles of impeachment against both George W Bush and Dick Cheney.
* Acting as one of the leaders of the backbencher holdouts for a public option in the health care reform bill. Unfortunately, Obama was able to convince him that HCR without a public option was better than no HCR, so he eventually voted for it.
The Democratic leadership doesn't give a damn what he does, though, because he's not good at getting oodles of lobbyist dollars (gee, I wonder why). So when he was running for President in 2008, the questions he got during debates were about whether he'd seen a UFO, not about his plans for reforming health care without mandating that everyone buy insurance.
It's worth mentioning that the earlier doctrine for dealing with hijackings was based on experience. In most cases, the situation would end up that the plane would get redirected to, say, Cuba, and the passengers would be let off, and while it would seriously suck the passengers had a generally good chance of survival.
Does the policy seem kinda stupid in hindsight? Possibly. But it wasn't a case of wanting people to be passive sheep so much as wanting as many passengers as possible to come out of a hijacking alive.
"Your plastic pal who's fun to be with"
In other words, the first casualty of war is the truth. Which is why one of George Carlin's basic political principles was refusing to believe anything the government tells the public.
my god. who would have thought we would be saying or thinking this. 10, 20, 30 years ago I never would have imagined.
Here's the thing: the US federal government has had a rather authoritarian streak for quite a long time. In both the 19th and 20th centuries, there have been federal agents who wanted to and in some cases did read people's mail without a warrant to do so. Once the telegraph came into being, security agents tapped that. When telephones became commonplace, J Edgar was there to tap those illegally. And now that the Internet is a common means of communication, these same sorts of folks are doing their best to tap that whenever possible, legally or not.
It's thoroughly part of the culture of the FBI that the rights of American citizens should be trampled on whenever the FBI think it's convenient. Foreign citizens might as well forget having any rights when they relate to the CIA. And it's worth mentioning that these agencies will do this sort of thing with or without legal sanction, and with or without the sanction of the political officials that theoretically control them, the President included.
I'm not saying the ideas described in my post are in fact accurate, I'm saying that that's the perception you're contending with when you go in trying to convince management that they should use FOSS.
There are communistic tendencies in FOSS. That doesn't mean people don't make money using FOSS (GOOG), providing services for FOSS platforms (RHAT, IBM), selling software that runs on top of FOSS (ORCL), or selling software based on FOSS but isn't FOSS (APPL). But when you download the latest and greatest X.org version, you don't pay unless you want to. If you take the time to chip in on a project, you don't get paid by the patch.
Take a look at my quote earlier, and tell me how that doesn't apply. Then realize that it's the basic idea of Communism.
It's not really about reliability.
It's about philosophy. One of the unwritten qualifications for the upper echelons of corporate management is believing wholeheartedly that capitalist corporations are the most efficient way of producing the highest quality goods and services (and it should be pointed out that for many products, they're absolutely right). After all, if you didn't believe in corporations, why would you make the sacrifices necessary to get to an upper management position?
And here come a bunch of long-haired hippies who explain how their stuff is better. But it can't be, because it's not produced by a corporation. I mean, which car is more reliable, the old beat-up Thunderbird your mechanic brother-in-law tinkered with constantly, or the one just driven off the Mercedes parking lot? And then cognitive dissonance creeps in: If the hippies' stuff actually is better, then perhaps the corporation isn't always right, and perhaps the manager has wasted his better years in the office rather than spending quality time with his children.
Software is one of those strange products where "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" really works well, because there's tiny tiny costs (namely, downloading bandwidth) for having freeloaders. But for those who've bought completely into capitalism, they react about as well to this idea as a Unix geek would to converting their beloved webservers to run IIS.
In other words, "the age of privacy is over" if like an idiot you share information you don't want public with the public. Funny thing that.
Although in the interests of full disclosure, I don't even have a Facebook account. If somebody wants to tell me about their life, we can have a nice low-tech conversation. I don't get all the latest juice on everyone I conceivably know, but I get a lot of good face-to-face time.