Ok, Most of those are handled by property tax,(roughly $400/year) plus schools. Sewer, water, trash cost about $30/quarter. Road and Bridge maintenance are part of the 4% sales tax thing. Flip side is that there is a low police/citizen ratio, trash is only picked up twice a week. And the roads get grated once a year.
You're comparing the most expensive cost of living (NYC) versus one of the least expensive cost of living (Wyoming). As such, your example is not correct given that their salaries are based on the cost of living versus percentage of income paid to municipal services. On an absolute basis, New Yorkers may pay more per person than someone in Wyoming for the same municipal services. But then, New Yorkers pay more for everything than people in Wyoming. But, if you look at the percentage of income paid to municipal services of New Yorkers versus residents of Wyoming, the people of Wyoming probably pay more.
Its a well thought out idea, but Wyoming is in energy territory. So While my 9$ Electrical Base Fee might be a higher percent of my income than a new york residents, I still make out like a bandit at $15 as my monthly charge.
As far as natural gas goes, I paid three hundred bucks this january (over due $40), I still have a credit on my account.
Roughnecks seem to bring the state wage up quite a bit working 80 hour weeks at $20-$30/hr + overtime.
The residents only pay the state goventment sales tax which is 4%.
Batman owned a 20,000 decibel bat-belt. Now I'm not sure the writers had a clue as to how dangerous something of that magnitude would be. But batman has a weapon that it above and beyond 99% of all Sci-fi weapons... A Death Starhas nothing on that bad boy.
If 20,000 decibels doesnt sound like much, you havent heard it:)
The problem isnt hardware support, it's install hell. When your RPM requires lib blah.bla.o and lib blah.blip.o, then you need to satisfy those dependencies, but sometimes those arent able to run with your current kernel. or need a compiler that you dont have installed. Before you know it your trying to install a compiler, and getting dependency errors for it, wondereing just how many hoops you need to jump through just to get one dinky peice of software to work. Once the Install-HELL is gone and the hardware "works by default" then linux has a go at the desktop. Then there is "Directory Hell" where the average user never wants to learn why a folder isnt a file, and why you cant view a folder full of family photos when you click open.
Until you can get the easy things doable by the masses, then you have a chance at taking the desktop.
IT guys dont bother getting a clue because they see these actions as unimportant. And until they "See the Light" they wont spend time on it. The best approach that Ive found is to put it into some really stupid rules, or checklists that they are required to hold to.
For instance:
Greet user by name, walk over to the computer, ask them exactly what their problem is, if your not solid about it, have them show it to you.. (at no time should you be touching the computer). Once you have an Idea of what the problem is, ask if anything else has been acting up on their PC (double whammie here). Then give the user an idea of what your going to do, and let them know if they need to stay to re-login, or if they can hit coffee, or if they need to move to a different workstation.
assuming that the machine gets fixed, then you have the user test the machine in front of you, and ask them if it is working the way they want.
Then call back about 4-8 buisness hours later to verify that everything is just fine. Ad give them some "commandments" that spell out some not-so obvious social blunders (i.e. dont blurt out what to do next while another technician is doing their job) even though IT guys have a need to be right.
Storm
out of the field for three years, your mileage may vary.
After the 3rd time you fumble in the dark and stub your (toe/ eye/ groin ) your memory will dramatically improve, in fact you may be prone to check the sensors quite a bit.
Why go around wearing two eye patches. when it only takes one to make you a pirate? (same goes for the peg leg) (insert groin joke here (be sure to reference the "hard enough time" from parent).
Wow, I only thought Antibodies dealt with small particles, like phages, virii, and polypeptides in general. But an Antibody that coagulates crocodiles together, wow, thats nobel prize stuff there. Heck at that scale we could start using mutant "Croc Antibodies" for building materials.
On a more serious note, Give'em hell Adam, Even if this is just another ingredient in the coctail it's still going to make millions of lives more bearable. That is a truly heroic endeavor.
ok.... Before submitting any math, ask yourself does this seem reasonable?
A gallon of gas weighing 60-70 grams?
In this case there are roughtly 3 kilos of weight in a gallon of gas, and 45MJ a peice. equaling a startling 2.79 MJ total... Wait a frickin minute. Your looking for something in the 100-150 MJ range.
Now going conservative here. $3.00/gal 100 MJ= 33 MJ / dollar.. Then change the gas to power at 20% efficiency and you are looking at 7 MJ/ dollar. At you conservative estimate your looking about 12 MJ / dollar. So we're in a similar ballpark for money factor. We havent Talked about charging losses yet either, so there are some other losses on the electric side.
Devils advocate time:
1) The millions of batteries arent really all that fun to clean up.
2) The Electricity will be coming from COAL, unless your looking for a pebble bed (nuke) reactor in your back yard.
3) Production is efficient, but the distribution is where the power gets sucked down.
Still I think electric is great. We need good clean power, and hydrogen is still in the stupid phase right now. If we can get a good clean battery solution we'd be set.
With the temperature of CPU's rising, and the use of aluminum casing. the only good way to be satisfied, is to Anodise the case, and fry up an omelet and some crispy hash browns and bacon.. mmm bacon.
Now if that isnt a case that can satisfy you, I dont know what is.
Quote from 2045: (to grandkids) I remember the time when cases were so cold you could cook an egg on them, and we didnt need fancy concrete cooling towers in the back yard )(.
It's the high end games that make us lust after the hardware that can make it look real. Do you see people buying high end hardware for quake 3 anymore? And if there is demand, there will be sales in volume, if there are high volume sales, the cost will drop. Once the price drops, the high end gets so much better.
As for the physics and memory, it might not be "there" yet, but this is one of those "OMG" moments, where you can see that a game at this level isnt a pipe dream anymore. These graphics make Doom 3 look cheezy. I was reading the tech page, and they are using around 1000 polygons for the heads, so I think they might be able to really do something here.
Can you imagine if we just stagnated at the 486, we'd be stoked about doom quality games. Now were whining about mind blowing graphics that cost a couple grand, and you'll need that horsepower for longhorn anyway.
And yea, once Longhorn is out, the whole bandwagon will be all over it, bugs and all.
Ok, IANAQP (quantum-physicist), so I am going to butcher this horribly. From what I get from the article is that they are able to pipe photons distances less than their wavelength. by the use of surface plasmons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasmon this lets them use longer wavelenght light (ie visible spectrum> with very small parts. The use of short wavelength light (x-rays) can break covalent bonds of the chip, causing the chip to fail.
So pretty much this means that optic technology has made a nice stride in catching up to classic electronic technology. But we wont be seeing the Pentuim-Optic and day soon.
Rock-Star programmers are a two edged sword. They dont make the mistakes that humble the everyday maintenance coder, but they make mistakes of a much higher order. These problems are way harder to catch and or fix.
Here is a bit of a dumbed down example.
Build a program to build a prime number seive (boolean array) of one billion elements.
Novice approach:
Go to each position in the seive and check by modulus if it is divisible by a lower number.
Standard Coder approach:
Go to each position in the seive and check for modulus up to sqrt(currentIndex), because anything higher is silly.
Rock-Star approach:
Mark everything as prime, then foreach prime 2..sqrt(one billion)) multiply prime*each other remaining prime up to (one billion/prime) and mark it as composite.
The Rock star method is fast furious and brilliant. And if you payed really close attention it's ALMOST perfect. The problem is that you mismark a few items if you go from the remaining primes up to (one billion/prime) but it would take another Rock Star QA person to catch the logic flaw.
Storm
Math Nerd Note:
The Rock Star method works if you mark_composite(mult prime*(each remaining prime starting at (one billion/prime).DOWNTO.prime)).
The success of linux in any market is almost entirely based on it's suitability. Even as much as I like linux, I wouldn't dream of trying to load RedHat on my parents PC. Linux will manage to gain footholds in areas where it is a suitable technology.
However a large userbase ala windows will provide a larger developer base, and allow for more applications in a given area.
Windows has managed to be a monster in the desktop side, but that are a joke in the supercomputing arena. Their clustering systems while complete just arent utilized by a signifigant percentage of supercomputers.
The Hubble is a great scope, but we need to go farther. The hubble has flaws of up to 1300 nanometers. Where the magellan has up to 15 nanometer flaws.
Just for some perspective, a silicon arom has a radius of 1.46 angstroms or.146 nanometers. giving it a.292 nanometers, so were looking at a mirror that is within 50 atoms of perfection.
Heck, the optic technology alone is enough to have real world impacts. So yea I think the investment is well worth it.
Ok, the problem is that most people out there arent going to stoop to a spammers level.
If I felt the urge to make the spammers lives hell, I could be really evil.. The trick: build an automatic CC number generator, and have it automatically "purchase" items from the website. That way it would make a CC# that the spammers would attempt to authorize and fail. Some banks charge for authorization checks. Usually a few cents per authorization
Spammers don't really worry about, only customers are going to authorize right? Not Haywood Jablome from 123 anywhere court. And his 2 million fictional neighbors.
So people have ways to make the spamming hurt the spammer. But for the most part arent that sleazy.
Most people just boycott spammers, it's just that 10% of the population that has bought from spammers that makes my inbox angry.
How about this......
1. REDO the whole fricking architecture....
A. The memory should be shallow, where there is a low end processor that handles simple stuff for each memory block (ie 64k) etched right into the memory chip itself.. for instance walking through an array would be a simple procedurem where the memory access time would be ameloriated. Searching memory would be much faster..
B. The main system should be user-centric, the whole waiting 15 seconds for the words to show when I type in a URL in IE because some POS hogging resources is a Joke with the cap J. The user side of things should always be responsive and snappy.
C. Memory protection IN HARDWARE.. where the memory itself is guarded with low latency.
D. Wild parallel processing, 2 procs is weak, when a well done machine could run with 64 on a chip and have some brutally low latency. you would need some wide memory, but it would make a system really smooth.
Nope All the drivers in the world dont help.
Even with a computer that is recognized by linux I would never install a current version for my parents. They would go insane trying to install software. It's a big honking mess.
The big factor is how much a user can get done without touching a book. And as much as I use Linux, Windows is an easier beast. Macintosh is a simple machine to use, but I miss the right mouse button.
Here is the crux, if you can put a machine together that a novice can take a picture on their new digital camera, put a caption at the bottom, save it, and email it to a buddy, print it out on 3x5 photo paper, and then burn the album on a DVD, you have a winner.
By novice I mean someone who thinks that cut and paste is mind-blowing.
So it required hardware support, but try that on a linux box, your dealing with a ton of applications.. Windows has a freakload of things that are designed to make the dumb stuff easy. Once there is a machine that can do that, where my Dad isnt growling at the monitor, I'm there.
1. The temporary Credit card number would contain a one time transaction, for a Fixed amount of money. I'll agree far from foolproof, but it's better than letting a 419er drain your whole account at once. Lets make them work for it.
2. The central registry would be choosable by the user, however it would probably default to some profitable organization that would charge companies to be listed. What is does stop is spoofing. The whole point is that regardless yo know that the "System error" is a real system error because it isnt ORANGE or RED boardered. This is just so your you can tell your mom.. If a window says you have a virus, only trust the blue boardered ones.. (hand waving here)
3. The tokens would be a proof of work system that would be hard to compute, easy to verify. While I'll add some hand waving here.. it could be something as simple as running a checksum on the FULL email (including recipient name and time), and then finding where a fixed number of binary digits occur in PI. Generally the hardened email system would gradually up the criteria for what can get through.. making the sending of mass spam expensive.. (more hand waving here)
4. Each application gets it's own sandboxing, application X cant keylog application Y.. and the OS should let you turn off any third party application, I dont want the Bonzai Buddy turning on an 'unturnoffable' flag that says that bonzai buddy is way too important to be disabled.
But it still leaves some big honking holes in how to get it happy.
5. Ok the whole not spying thing pretty much prevents the just your talking about from the start. The apps dont have the option to "raw read, or patch themselves into the OS, if you added a hook to a system library, it would invalidate the system library because the checksum/sig wouldnt be valid. The operating system would require that all system files be "signed" as in cryptographically. If a new patch comes out, it has to be signed as well. The sig would only be valid from MS for their OS, I really dont want ANYONE else adding to windows, even if it is convienent, it still opens up too many holes.
6. The registry would just be a user-vote system, with the results to simply be a compilation of data from users who felt that feedback was nessisary. But the legal options do need to be examined..
The databases would be run by various organizations, and users would have to select a "trustable" source.... still not a perfect world.
hmmm you are right, I need more of a -1 offtopic, but my fingers were needing a good walk.
My apologies to all of the eyeballs that read through my tripe. and to the grey-matter behind them.
Ok NO amount of change is going to get rid of human mistakes. However there are some big changes that need to occur to prevent some of this junk.
#1 Change: User side one time only credit charges. The only way to do a transaction would be to use an encrypted transaction that would prevent fishing from being any good at all. This would be more of a banking change, and most people would hate it, but the whole CC# and Bank info phishing has to end, the transaction mechanism needs to change.
#2 Change: Add a decorator pattern to ALL explorer windows, making user that every popup has a BRIGHT ORANGE BORDER, turn off the ability to disable the X button. Pretty much make all popups automatically listed as unsecure.
Tag all 3 party "unsigned" apps with a Bright RED BORDER, if it isnt trusted you should know, every time you run it.
#3 Change: Add a hardened Email System to the main email. Where hardened email can be flagged as less likely to be spam. The hardened email system would be unprofitable for spammers to use, Proof of work tolkens or a small monitary deposit required for emails that are "in play". This would leave the old email as functional, but would gradually replace it as old email wont be used by real people.
#4 Change: Reduce to number of auto-launched services, anything that it out of the "OS-normal" for launching would be in one big happy spot, where it could be removed. The operating system wouldnt have a "backdoor startup" or a way for the program to re-insrt itself into the system. and the OS would solidly isolate itself from getting nailed by a trojan.. keeping almost everything in a sandbox.
#5 Change: Prevent the system from being able to spy on you. yea, it gets rid of some legitamate monitoring applications, But make it an option in the control panel that is stupid obvious that no-one really wants to turn it on (except corporations that are monitoring their employees).
#6 Change: Have a nice big registry of "BAD Software" If people are online anyway, there should be a way to tag software as JUNK, or SPYWARE, or a dozen other bad bad things.. and when the software is being downloaded, it shoudl be checked against the big database and the user should be VERY appropraitly warned.
Ok that's six off the top of my head.. yea they are mostly focused on microsoft, but thats where most people are hosed anyway. The net isnt bad, but some SIMPLE changes would really make the experience much beter for everyone.
You might instantly find out if you had a tumor in your palm though. Cancer often triggers angiogenesis, which would change the layout of the blood vessels of palm. This technology might have some really cool medical uses for skin cancer in general. Just have a full body venal position scan as part of the physical.
People dont expect the government to be competent. They dont really expect the government to be active and efficient at resolving the issues of the everyday person. I'm quite suprised that the government is even close to the level of service that it maintains today.
I dont care to worry about the day to day dealings of the government, Reading what congress changes daily (Reading the Full Bill with comprehension) would eat about 79 hours out of each day. When the Patriot Act was passed 98-0 how many of the senators actually read through the THOUSANDS of pages? I cant imagine more than five. The point is that it cant be done, and even if it could it would eat your life up.
I want to be sure that I have a good shot at a good life. I want to have a fair and just government. We have some issues, but the down side is that America as a people tolerate things I find wrong. As long as your in a minority of your belief, you wont be heard.
The Government does care about the people and their sensitivities. The problem is that people will always have some sort of opinion that is outside of what you feel is right.
If people REALLY wanted their vote to count they would join the party opposed to their own, and vote against the primary election frontrunner who has an opinion you dislike. Then you've hedged your bets on issues you care about. You can still vote againt your new party in the general election..
Vote with your wallet, The huge election money has to come from somewhere, make sure that your not spending money to elect the opposition. I'm wondering how many republicans permanantly switched to del-monte ketchup?
It's late, I'm ranting,, I probably should have just popped this junk in a journal.
Slashdot Mirror
Storm
As far as natural gas goes, I paid three hundred bucks this january (over due $40), I still have a credit on my account.
Roughnecks seem to bring the state wage up quite a bit working 80 hour weeks at $20-$30/hr + overtime.
The residents only pay the state goventment sales tax which is 4%.
Storm
If 20,000 decibels doesnt sound like much, you havent heard it :)
Storm
Until you can get the easy things doable by the masses, then you have a chance at taking the desktop.
Storm
For instance:
Greet user by name, walk over to the computer, ask them exactly what their problem is, if your not solid about it, have them show it to you.. (at no time should you be touching the computer). Once you have an Idea of what the problem is, ask if anything else has been acting up on their PC (double whammie here). Then give the user an idea of what your going to do, and let them know if they need to stay to re-login, or if they can hit coffee, or if they need to move to a different workstation.
assuming that the machine gets fixed, then you have the user test the machine in front of you, and ask them if it is working the way they want.
Then call back about 4-8 buisness hours later to verify that everything is just fine. Ad give them some "commandments" that spell out some not-so obvious social blunders (i.e. dont blurt out what to do next while another technician is doing their job) even though IT guys have a need to be right.
Storm
out of the field for three years, your mileage may vary.
Why go around wearing two eye patches. when it only takes one to make you a pirate? (same goes for the peg leg) (insert groin joke here (be sure to reference the "hard enough time" from parent).
Storm
On a more serious note, Give'em hell Adam, Even if this is just another ingredient in the coctail it's still going to make millions of lives more bearable. That is a truly heroic endeavor.
Storm
A gallon of gas weighing 60-70 grams?
In this case there are roughtly 3 kilos of weight in a gallon of gas, and 45MJ a peice. equaling a startling 2.79 MJ total... Wait a frickin minute. Your looking for something in the 100-150 MJ range.
Now going conservative here. $3.00/gal 100 MJ= 33 MJ / dollar.. Then change the gas to power at 20% efficiency and you are looking at 7 MJ/ dollar. At you conservative estimate your looking about 12 MJ / dollar. So we're in a similar ballpark for money factor. We havent Talked about charging losses yet either, so there are some other losses on the electric side.
Devils advocate time:
1) The millions of batteries arent really all that fun to clean up.
2) The Electricity will be coming from COAL, unless your looking for a pebble bed (nuke) reactor in your back yard.
3) Production is efficient, but the distribution is where the power gets sucked down.
Still I think electric is great. We need good clean power, and hydrogen is still in the stupid phase right now. If we can get a good clean battery solution we'd be set.
Storm
Now if that isnt a case that can satisfy you, I dont know what is.
Quote from 2045: (to grandkids) I remember the time when cases were so cold you could cook an egg on them, and we didnt need fancy concrete cooling towers in the back yard )( .
Storm
Storm
Just wunderin, cause I only want to highlight the right one.
Storm
As for the physics and memory, it might not be "there" yet, but this is one of those "OMG" moments, where you can see that a game at this level isnt a pipe dream anymore. These graphics make Doom 3 look cheezy. I was reading the tech page, and they are using around 1000 polygons for the heads, so I think they might be able to really do something here.
Can you imagine if we just stagnated at the 486, we'd be stoked about doom quality games. Now were whining about mind blowing graphics that cost a couple grand, and you'll need that horsepower for longhorn anyway.
And yea, once Longhorn is out, the whole bandwagon will be all over it, bugs and all.
Storm
So pretty much this means that optic technology has made a nice stride in catching up to classic electronic technology. But we wont be seeing the Pentuim-Optic and day soon.
Storm
mark everything 'prime' ; that is, start with array filled with one. say sieve is one-based array of length billion
does eratosthenes sound familiar, math nerd?
Um it does work, but you will sieve[30].setComposite() 3 times when it only needs to be done once. By one billion your really duplicating work.
Here is a bit of a dumbed down example. Build a program to build a prime number seive (boolean array) of one billion elements.
Novice approach:
Go to each position in the seive and check by modulus if it is divisible by a lower number.
Standard Coder approach:
Go to each position in the seive and check for modulus up to sqrt(currentIndex), because anything higher is silly.
Rock-Star approach:
Mark everything as prime, then foreach prime 2..sqrt(one billion)) multiply prime*each other remaining prime up to (one billion/prime) and mark it as composite.
The Rock star method is fast furious and brilliant. And if you payed really close attention it's ALMOST perfect. The problem is that you mismark a few items if you go from the remaining primes up to (one billion/prime) but it would take another Rock Star QA person to catch the logic flaw.
Storm
Math Nerd Note:
The Rock Star method works if you mark_composite(mult prime*(each remaining prime starting at (one billion/prime).DOWNTO.prime)).
Thanks for catching my screwup
Storm
However a large userbase ala windows will provide a larger developer base, and allow for more applications in a given area.
Windows has managed to be a monster in the desktop side, but that are a joke in the supercomputing arena. Their clustering systems while complete just arent utilized by a signifigant percentage of supercomputers.
Storm
Just for some perspective, a silicon arom has a radius of 1.46 angstroms or .146 nanometers. giving it a .292 nanometers, so were looking at a mirror that is within 50 atoms of perfection.
Heck, the optic technology alone is enough to have real world impacts. So yea I think the investment is well worth it.
Storm
If I felt the urge to make the spammers lives hell, I could be really evil.. The trick: build an automatic CC number generator, and have it automatically "purchase" items from the website. That way it would make a CC# that the spammers would attempt to authorize and fail. Some banks charge for authorization checks. Usually a few cents per authorization
Spammers don't really worry about, only customers are going to authorize right? Not Haywood Jablome from 123 anywhere court. And his 2 million fictional neighbors.
So people have ways to make the spamming hurt the spammer. But for the most part arent that sleazy.
Most people just boycott spammers, it's just that 10% of the population that has bought from spammers that makes my inbox angry.
Storm
P.S. Alan Ralsky sucks
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Ralsky
A. The memory should be shallow, where there is a low end processor that handles simple stuff for each memory block (ie 64k) etched right into the memory chip itself.. for instance walking through an array would be a simple procedurem where the memory access time would be ameloriated. Searching memory would be much faster..
B. The main system should be user-centric, the whole waiting 15 seconds for the words to show when I type in a URL in IE because some POS hogging resources is a Joke with the cap J. The user side of things should always be responsive and snappy.
C. Memory protection IN HARDWARE.. where the memory itself is guarded with low latency.
D. Wild parallel processing, 2 procs is weak, when a well done machine could run with 64 on a chip and have some brutally low latency. you would need some wide memory, but it would make a system really smooth.
ok, my time here is up..
Storm
The big factor is how much a user can get done without touching a book. And as much as I use Linux, Windows is an easier beast. Macintosh is a simple machine to use, but I miss the right mouse button.
Here is the crux, if you can put a machine together that a novice can take a picture on their new digital camera, put a caption at the bottom, save it, and email it to a buddy, print it out on 3x5 photo paper, and then burn the album on a DVD, you have a winner.
By novice I mean someone who thinks that cut and paste is mind-blowing.
So it required hardware support, but try that on a linux box, your dealing with a ton of applications.. Windows has a freakload of things that are designed to make the dumb stuff easy. Once there is a machine that can do that, where my Dad isnt growling at the monitor, I'm there.
Storm
2. The central registry would be choosable by the user, however it would probably default to some profitable organization that would charge companies to be listed. What is does stop is spoofing. The whole point is that regardless yo know that the "System error" is a real system error because it isnt ORANGE or RED boardered. This is just so your you can tell your mom.. If a window says you have a virus, only trust the blue boardered ones.. (hand waving here)
3. The tokens would be a proof of work system that would be hard to compute, easy to verify. While I'll add some hand waving here.. it could be something as simple as running a checksum on the FULL email (including recipient name and time), and then finding where a fixed number of binary digits occur in PI. Generally the hardened email system would gradually up the criteria for what can get through.. making the sending of mass spam expensive.. (more hand waving here)
4. Each application gets it's own sandboxing, application X cant keylog application Y.. and the OS should let you turn off any third party application, I dont want the Bonzai Buddy turning on an 'unturnoffable' flag that says that bonzai buddy is way too important to be disabled. But it still leaves some big honking holes in how to get it happy.
5. Ok the whole not spying thing pretty much prevents the just your talking about from the start. The apps dont have the option to "raw read, or patch themselves into the OS, if you added a hook to a system library, it would invalidate the system library because the checksum/sig wouldnt be valid. The operating system would require that all system files be "signed" as in cryptographically. If a new patch comes out, it has to be signed as well. The sig would only be valid from MS for their OS, I really dont want ANYONE else adding to windows, even if it is convienent, it still opens up too many holes.
6. The registry would just be a user-vote system, with the results to simply be a compilation of data from users who felt that feedback was nessisary. But the legal options do need to be examined..
The databases would be run by various organizations, and users would have to select a "trustable" source.... still not a perfect world.
hmmm you are right, I need more of a -1 offtopic, but my fingers were needing a good walk.
My apologies to all of the eyeballs that read through my tripe. and to the grey-matter behind them.
Storm
P.S. 'ere
#1 Change: User side one time only credit charges. The only way to do a transaction would be to use an encrypted transaction that would prevent fishing from being any good at all. This would be more of a banking change, and most people would hate it, but the whole CC# and Bank info phishing has to end, the transaction mechanism needs to change.
#2 Change: Add a decorator pattern to ALL explorer windows, making user that every popup has a BRIGHT ORANGE BORDER, turn off the ability to disable the X button. Pretty much make all popups automatically listed as unsecure. Tag all 3 party "unsigned" apps with a Bright RED BORDER, if it isnt trusted you should know, every time you run it.
#3 Change: Add a hardened Email System to the main email. Where hardened email can be flagged as less likely to be spam. The hardened email system would be unprofitable for spammers to use, Proof of work tolkens or a small monitary deposit required for emails that are "in play". This would leave the old email as functional, but would gradually replace it as old email wont be used by real people.
#4 Change: Reduce to number of auto-launched services, anything that it out of the "OS-normal" for launching would be in one big happy spot, where it could be removed. The operating system wouldnt have a "backdoor startup" or a way for the program to re-insrt itself into the system. and the OS would solidly isolate itself from getting nailed by a trojan.. keeping almost everything in a sandbox.
#5 Change: Prevent the system from being able to spy on you. yea, it gets rid of some legitamate monitoring applications, But make it an option in the control panel that is stupid obvious that no-one really wants to turn it on (except corporations that are monitoring their employees).
#6 Change: Have a nice big registry of "BAD Software" If people are online anyway, there should be a way to tag software as JUNK, or SPYWARE, or a dozen other bad bad things.. and when the software is being downloaded, it shoudl be checked against the big database and the user should be VERY appropraitly warned.
Ok that's six off the top of my head.. yea they are mostly focused on microsoft, but thats where most people are hosed anyway. The net isnt bad, but some SIMPLE changes would really make the experience much beter for everyone.
Storm
Storm
I dont care to worry about the day to day dealings of the government, Reading what congress changes daily (Reading the Full Bill with comprehension) would eat about 79 hours out of each day. When the Patriot Act was passed 98-0 how many of the senators actually read through the THOUSANDS of pages? I cant imagine more than five. The point is that it cant be done, and even if it could it would eat your life up.
I want to be sure that I have a good shot at a good life. I want to have a fair and just government. We have some issues, but the down side is that America as a people tolerate things I find wrong. As long as your in a minority of your belief, you wont be heard.
The Government does care about the people and their sensitivities. The problem is that people will always have some sort of opinion that is outside of what you feel is right.
If people REALLY wanted their vote to count they would join the party opposed to their own, and vote against the primary election frontrunner who has an opinion you dislike. Then you've hedged your bets on issues you care about. You can still vote againt your new party in the general election..
Vote with your wallet, The huge election money has to come from somewhere, make sure that your not spending money to elect the opposition. I'm wondering how many republicans permanantly switched to del-monte ketchup?
It's late, I'm ranting,, I probably should have just popped this junk in a journal.
Storm