A pious Christian United States, whatever its flaws, would be less susceptible to this type of foreign terrorist attack for a variety of reasons. I will leave these as an exercise to the reader to discern, except to note that OBL's primary bitch about us (not to mention most of the rest of the world) seems to revolve around cultural hegemony which is a direct product of a secular US.
It's only your inveterate hatred of his viewpoint that prevents you from seeing this. It's the same thing that keeps him from seeing the benefits of letting others live as they choose.
I'll bet you were pissed when Al Gore was misquoted regarding 'inventing the Internet'. Yet, you're doing the same thing to Mr. Falwell (and Robertson) here, using a badly phrased concept as a tool to dirty the guy up in a public forum. You should be proud of yourself - you're no better than the Republican operatives that shat all over Gore.
In 1988 I had a system with an ATI EGA Wonder 800 card. This card could do 800x600 in 16 colors, which was significantly beyond what the equivalent Macintosh hardware could do, which was 1 bit monochrome in 512x384. This card was nothing special.
The first color Mac was introduced in 1987, and the second model (IIx) didn't come out until September 1988. Incidentally my system was about $700. The Macintosh II would have run close to $4k in that time frame. The max resolution was 640x480x256. Of course, you could just as easily have bought a VGA card that supported high resolutions, if cost were no object. Virtually no one owned the above - let's compare apples to apples. (heh heh)
Where does this 'square pixel' shit come from? Because at low resolutions they were blocky looking? That applied to both a Macintosh and clone PC. Are you trying to imply that Macintoshes had round pixels. Please...continue...entertain me.
Most Macintoshes had sucky video compared to PCs, the IBM compatible systems just didn't know what to do with it.
System 7 was a buggy piece of shit and didn't settle down for a long time. You're welcome to it. I liked 6.0.x - or 7.5.3, far better. By the time 8 came around, I gave up on Macintoshes.
GEOS for the PC was released in November 1990, sadly after Windows 3.0, which had already taken over the PC GUI world by then.
The Hercules card could do underlined text as well as blinking. Dimmed and highlighted text were also possible in text mode.
I can count on my fingers the number of times I threw a Hercules card into graphics mode (maybe 4 - once to test windows, the other three were under my programmatic control). Yes, it was a 1-bit frame buffer, but if you cared enough it was most likely possible to do the same things in graphics mode as could be done in text mode.
The IBM MDA card which the author refers to was a text-only monochrome graphics adapter with an 80x25 screen, technically with a 720x350 pixel size. However, you could not write directly to the video memory.
Most people with mono monitors installed Hercules clone cards, which were the same 720x350 but they permitted you to do 4 shades of [green|amber|white] monochrome graphics in 720x350 resolution. This was in fact greater than the video resolution of the Macintosh (512x384), though of different shape (The Mac had a far more square aspect ratio until the Mac II, when the video adapters adopted VGA dimensions) (640x480x16 colors/grayscales, initially)
The IBM Color Graphics Adapter (CGA) is not significant to this discussion - in addition to having only a monochrome 640x200 or color 320x240 mode, it had horrid snow problems when drawing or scrolling. You wouldn't even attempt to use a CGA card for a GUI. (Windows 2.03 had a driver - using it was quite funny)
The IBM Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA) however, was 640x350 in 16 colors, with a 64 color palette. While this might seem anemic by today's standards, it was quite usable in 1986 or 1987. Most games back then played best in EGA mode (at least until VGA came into true vogue a year or two later).
How about ROM? Well, the first Macintosh came with 128K of RAM and a 64K ROM with the Macintosh toolbox on it. The first Mac II (first color macintosh) had a 256k ROM and 1MB of RAM. Your average PC in 1986 would have 512k or 640k of RAM in it. It might even have an EMS board in it, if it was a business system. Plus, it was expandable up to 16MB (if you wanted) of extended (assuming 286+ here) that you could actually run programs with, if you wished. It's almost certain the Mac OS would have been made into a protected mode program - it uses a very clumsy form of software memory protection (zones) on the 68k which didn't support memory protection in hardware.
The article author seemed to be at pains to suggest how those horrible PC clones back in the 80's couldn't run a GUI. This isn't absolutely true. If a better GUI than GEM or Windows 1.x or 2.x were available, more would have run one. It just didn't seem worth it with that kind of crappy ass software. When Windows 3.0 came out, people jumped on it fast, even though it was kind of sucky still. They wanted a GUI.
The author is somewhat full of shit is my point. He's being disingenous about the relative capabilities of the machines of the day.
I think you give national authorities far too much credit for competence in the IT arena. I cannot relate much in real data unfortunately except to specify that a data center that I once worked in was host to a couple of FBI data taps. This was about 3 years ago, just before 9/11. It wasn't real well done in my opinion, relying on some pretty clunky equipment.
I would also state that Nixon's taping didn't bring him down as much as John Dean did with his testimony. Imagine the President's counsel turning on him - how devastating! Haldeman and Ehrlichman being taken down shortly thereafter, mostly on Dean's testimony, didn't help either. Oh, and the bunch of burglars who busted into the Watergate not once but twice, got caught, and then started singing when they weren't paid their hush money. Well, except for Liddy, but his silence didn't buy him much but a long prison term.
The tapes were a bunch of horseshit that didn't have much relevance, but made for good serial journalism and SNL jokes about "Throw another tape on the fire!".
Ultimately the VoIP provider going to have a CO somewhere. Admittedly peer to peer VoIP links are possible (and happening) too, but this would take the provider out of the equation and then how do they make money? That is why no one is commercially popularizing this idea yet.
Leaving the obvious dodge of the peer to peer link out of this, my point was "What if the CO isn't in the US?". I see visions of a "Great Firewall of China" for the US when I think about this.
...which in this case is the VoIP provider. For example, let's say you have Vonage - the taps would occur there. They aren't going to bother sniffing packets, they're going to tap the stream at the CO, same as they would do with a landline.
Ditto for Nextel's PTT stuff.
Of course, you could use a VoIP provider that is based outside the US. That is going to present a problem for law enforcement.
I learned touch typing on an old Royal manual typewriter. I got up to 40wpm with an old typing teacher with a ruler in her hand who would whack my wrists if I dropped them. Running that return bar really slowed me down. Much faster on computers.
I last tested at about 93wpm with one of those tutor programs. I'm faster than that now. I prefer one of the old IBM 42H1292 clickety-clack keyboards. I have one rigged up at home, manufactured in 1992 and still chugging along happily. It's a real pleasure to type on. Go here if you want one.
I think that old lady (whose name is now lost in the sands of time) rocks now. She'd be unhappy about my sketchy use of the shift key - i'm frequently using the right shift for right-fingered stuff. Oh well.
At the facility I work for, the standard logic is that "No one ever got fired for incompetence. Plenty of people got fired for security breaches, though"
No, they didn't. You have to use their actual Real player to play any Real format. Helix by itself is just a stock media player that doesn't know about Real's proprietary stuff.
It's like Microsoft open sourced Windows but the OSS version will only run OSS applications, not anything Win32. It's Real using the community to develop a media player for OSS platforms.
You might like or dislike that, but as for them opening up their formats, that's BS.
So then they'll use third-party contractors to do the dirty work, just like they do with e-mail spam and cleaning services. Therefore, the company is clean, it's just their contractors that suck and spam your mailbox or hire illegal aliens at below minimum wage.
It doesn't matter what anyone really thinks about this, DMCA isn't going away anytime soon.
That said, seeing Real Networks get crushed would be very pleasant. They have polluted computer systems for the last 8 or so years with their lameass player. Time for it to die.
Actually you are incorrect, it was available for Windows for Workgroups 3.11. It wasn't a dialup stack, it was for NICs. The primary reason for its existence was for those who were only running TCP/IP on their networks, so that they could use the WFW clients for SMB networking over IP, which was supported in the versions of NT available at that time, as well as LanMan.
You can still find a copy on an old install CD of NT 4 as well as 3.51 in the CLIENTS directory.
The aggressive moves are developer lock-in and Active Directory, and both are long-term strategies. Both are ineffective in the long term - Microsoft's own rise to dominance demonstrates that businesses will take a short-term loss in functionality in exchange for cheaper licensing.
The lack of canned 'enterprise solutions' does not mean that they are not possible on Linux, just that you have to make your own. This will change as vendors figure out how to make money atop OSS solutions. It'll happen - it's just a matter of time.
Hint: the server platform is the one they are afraid of losing. If they lose control of the server side then they become a technology niche player again like they were back in the early '90s. The war against Novell was long and hard and perhaps you don't remember it. I do.
Litigation IS the only thing they have left on that side. If they lose control of that, the free desktop will conquer them easily just through license simplification and cost.
I agree that it would be difficult for SCO to pull out of this now. I don't know if it's impossible - i'm assuming there is a way for them to thread the needle out of this until proven otherwise. This whole thing has enhanced my skepticism about 'sure things'.
That said, one person on Groklaw suggested that this might be an attempt by Baystar to put a seal on whatever documents link them with Microsoft. If the stuff is subject to litigation on another front it can be kept out of the IBM suit perhaps, which is advantageous to both Microsoft, Baystar and perhaps SCO.
That was another interesting potential purpose to this nascent litigation.
Hanford isn't a nuclear plant, it was a nuclear weapons research facility that also mass-produced plutonium for nuclear weapons.
Moreover, Hanford was one of the places where we found out about dangerous isotopes and how to handle them. It wasn't run properly and in fact hardly could have been. Not to say that there weren't huge screwups there, but comparing this to a well run nuclear power plant is just wrong.
The facts are that SCO has bungled this in a massive way. There are repeated mishandlings of the discovery of the IBM case, a poor choice in suing Novell for "Slander of Title", and poor choice in suing Daimler-Chrysler. This is not subject to debate.
Baystar wanted a competent anti-Linux legal attack. That was what the money was for. They repeatedly asked for this, and got more incompetence. Therefore, they are cutting bait, but more than that, they want to make sure this stuff doesn't continue along the current destructive path. They want SCO to die, and fast.
Otherwise, why not just take their money and run? Why prolong the agony looking for a declaratory judgement?
You fail to explain this, and that's why i'm closer to the mark.
as an attempt to shut down the SCO fiasco before any really harmful judgements are handed down that prevent further Microsoft-funded FUD against Linux.
Obviously there are regulatory hurdles on the way to Longhorn. Slowing Linux adoption is clearly in the best interests of Redmond, and sowing doubt through litigation is pretty much the only strategy they have left that will work.
Think about dollars, pounds, euros, whatever you want.
What happens to that dollar when it is spent by the average consumer at a retail establishment?
- First, government gets its cut as a sales tax, or VAT. God bless Oregon and other places where this doesn't exist.
The remainder of that dollar is earnings for the business owner. Of course, that owner has to pay a few things.
-Employee salaries -Merchandise -Utilities -Rent or Mortgage and Property taxes
Please note that in all cases what is being spent directly supports people in their subsistence. Moreover, capitalism assures us that not a cent more than the reasonable market value is going to be spent on those things. Last point, capitalism also assures us that the owner is going to look to grow his business. That's how he makes more money. Therefore, more employees will be hired, greater amounts of merchandise will pass through his facility - and he might even get another if business is good. Truck drivers delivering the goods, utility workers maintaining his sewage/electric/phone/whatever are kept employed, manufacturing people who make the goods - the list goes on.
Envision the same dollar falling into a governmental till. What will happen to it? Well, if the drunken and drug addicted guys living in the nearby welfare motel are any indication, not much that is good. I suppose financing the nearby drug dealers is an economic cycle of sorts, but providing a roll of flash cash for them and paying for hookers probably wasn't what you were thinking about either when you were talking about tax dollars. Was it?
Government wastes your money. Why? Because it isn't theirs. Why should they give two shits what happens to it? This is why we get wasteful, unsafe space shuttles instead of cost-efficient non-reusable vehicles.
So why would you want to give them even a cent more than absolutely needed? Cut the nuts off of every budget. Say "You can take 5% off the top of ANYTHING" and cut it. Make them justify every expenditure. Demand results.
Last point, if NASA engineers a program without sufficient budget, the officials in charge should be arrested and convicted of manslaughter at the very least. If they knew they were under budget, they should just not do it, or fire some of the deadwood in their offices for increased funds. There's a lot of that i'm sure, like in every federal agency. Unfortunately it's almost impossible to fire a government worker, sadly. So if you wonder why NASA looks incompetent, maybe it's because it is.
One of the nice things about the Electoral College is that it reduces the impact of ballot box stuffing in urban areas. At worst, NYC can only screw up the New York vote. This is what it was intended for - to provide some additional power to the smaller states and prevent the larger ones from controlling everything.
The system isn't broken - besides it would require a constitutional amendment to change it, and it wouldn't pass because of the reason cited.
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He actually has a good point.
A pious Christian United States, whatever its flaws, would be less susceptible to this type of foreign terrorist attack for a variety of reasons. I will leave these as an exercise to the reader to discern, except to note that OBL's primary bitch about us (not to mention most of the rest of the world) seems to revolve around cultural hegemony which is a direct product of a secular US.
It's only your inveterate hatred of his viewpoint that prevents you from seeing this. It's the same thing that keeps him from seeing the benefits of letting others live as they choose.
I'll bet you were pissed when Al Gore was misquoted regarding 'inventing the Internet'. Yet, you're doing the same thing to Mr. Falwell (and Robertson) here, using a badly phrased concept as a tool to dirty the guy up in a public forum. You should be proud of yourself - you're no better than the Republican operatives that shat all over Gore.
In the end, zealots of all stripe suck.
In 1988 I had a system with an ATI EGA Wonder 800 card. This card could do 800x600 in 16 colors, which was significantly beyond what the equivalent Macintosh hardware could do, which was 1 bit monochrome in 512x384. This card was nothing special.
The first color Mac was introduced in 1987, and the second model (IIx) didn't come out until September 1988. Incidentally my system was about $700. The Macintosh II would have run close to $4k in that time frame. The max resolution was 640x480x256. Of course, you could just as easily have bought a VGA card that supported high resolutions, if cost were no object. Virtually no one owned the above - let's compare apples to apples. (heh heh)
Where does this 'square pixel' shit come from? Because at low resolutions they were blocky looking? That applied to both a Macintosh and clone PC. Are you trying to imply that Macintoshes had round pixels. Please...continue...entertain me.
Most Macintoshes had sucky video compared to PCs, the IBM compatible systems just didn't know what to do with it.
System 7 was a buggy piece of shit and didn't settle down for a long time. You're welcome to it. I liked 6.0.x - or 7.5.3, far better. By the time 8 came around, I gave up on Macintoshes.
GEOS for the PC was released in November 1990, sadly after Windows 3.0, which had already taken over the PC GUI world by then.
Bzzzzt. You lose on the facts, dude. Mac zealot.
The Hercules card could do underlined text as well as blinking. Dimmed and highlighted text were also possible in text mode.
I can count on my fingers the number of times I threw a Hercules card into graphics mode (maybe 4 - once to test windows, the other three were under my programmatic control). Yes, it was a 1-bit frame buffer, but if you cared enough it was most likely possible to do the same things in graphics mode as could be done in text mode.
The IBM MDA card which the author refers to was a text-only monochrome graphics adapter with an 80x25 screen, technically with a 720x350 pixel size. However, you could not write directly to the video memory.
Most people with mono monitors installed Hercules clone cards, which were the same 720x350 but they permitted you to do 4 shades of [green|amber|white] monochrome graphics in 720x350 resolution. This was in fact greater than the video resolution of the Macintosh (512x384), though of different shape (The Mac had a far more square aspect ratio until the Mac II, when the video adapters adopted VGA dimensions) (640x480x16 colors/grayscales, initially)
The IBM Color Graphics Adapter (CGA) is not significant to this discussion - in addition to having only a monochrome 640x200 or color 320x240 mode, it had horrid snow problems when drawing or scrolling. You wouldn't even attempt to use a CGA card for a GUI. (Windows 2.03 had a driver - using it was quite funny)
The IBM Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA) however, was 640x350 in 16 colors, with a 64 color palette. While this might seem anemic by today's standards, it was quite usable in 1986 or 1987. Most games back then played best in EGA mode (at least until VGA came into true vogue a year or two later).
How about ROM? Well, the first Macintosh came with 128K of RAM and a 64K ROM with the Macintosh toolbox on it. The first Mac II (first color macintosh) had a 256k ROM and 1MB of RAM. Your average PC in 1986 would have 512k or 640k of RAM in it. It might even have an EMS board in it, if it was a business system. Plus, it was expandable up to 16MB (if you wanted) of extended (assuming 286+ here) that you could actually run programs with, if you wished. It's almost certain the Mac OS would have been made into a protected mode program - it uses a very clumsy form of software memory protection (zones) on the 68k which didn't support memory protection in hardware.
The article author seemed to be at pains to suggest how those horrible PC clones back in the 80's couldn't run a GUI. This isn't absolutely true. If a better GUI than GEM or Windows 1.x or 2.x were available, more would have run one. It just didn't seem worth it with that kind of crappy ass software. When Windows 3.0 came out, people jumped on it fast, even though it was kind of sucky still. They wanted a GUI.
The author is somewhat full of shit is my point. He's being disingenous about the relative capabilities of the machines of the day.
I think you give national authorities far too much credit for competence in the IT arena. I cannot relate much in real data unfortunately except to specify that a data center that I once worked in was host to a couple of FBI data taps. This was about 3 years ago, just before 9/11. It wasn't real well done in my opinion, relying on some pretty clunky equipment.
I would also state that Nixon's taping didn't bring him down as much as John Dean did with his testimony. Imagine the President's counsel turning on him - how devastating! Haldeman and Ehrlichman being taken down shortly thereafter, mostly on Dean's testimony, didn't help either. Oh, and the bunch of burglars who busted into the Watergate not once but twice, got caught, and then started singing when they weren't paid their hush money. Well, except for Liddy, but his silence didn't buy him much but a long prison term.
The tapes were a bunch of horseshit that didn't have much relevance, but made for good serial journalism and SNL jokes about "Throw another tape on the fire!".
Ultimately the VoIP provider going to have a CO somewhere. Admittedly peer to peer VoIP links are possible (and happening) too, but this would take the provider out of the equation and then how do they make money? That is why no one is commercially popularizing this idea yet.
Leaving the obvious dodge of the peer to peer link out of this, my point was "What if the CO isn't in the US?". I see visions of a "Great Firewall of China" for the US when I think about this.
...which in this case is the VoIP provider. For example, let's say you have Vonage - the taps would occur there. They aren't going to bother sniffing packets, they're going to tap the stream at the CO, same as they would do with a landline.
Ditto for Nextel's PTT stuff.
Of course, you could use a VoIP provider that is based outside the US. That is going to present a problem for law enforcement.
I learned touch typing on an old Royal manual typewriter. I got up to 40wpm with an old typing teacher with a ruler in her hand who would whack my wrists if I dropped them. Running that return bar really slowed me down. Much faster on computers.
I last tested at about 93wpm with one of those tutor programs. I'm faster than that now. I prefer one of the old IBM 42H1292 clickety-clack keyboards. I have one rigged up at home, manufactured in 1992 and still chugging along happily. It's a real pleasure to type on. Go here if you want one.
I think that old lady (whose name is now lost in the sands of time) rocks now. She'd be unhappy about my sketchy use of the shift key - i'm frequently using the right shift for right-fingered stuff. Oh well.
A lot of people in Germany went west to avoid the Soviets in 1945. Von Mellenthin's "Panzer Battles" has an interesting discussion of this.
Obviously not.
At the facility I work for, the standard logic is that "No one ever got fired for incompetence. Plenty of people got fired for security breaches, though"
No, they didn't. You have to use their actual Real player to play any Real format. Helix by itself is just a stock media player that doesn't know about Real's proprietary stuff.
It's like Microsoft open sourced Windows but the OSS version will only run OSS applications, not anything Win32. It's Real using the community to develop a media player for OSS platforms.
You might like or dislike that, but as for them opening up their formats, that's BS.
So then they'll use third-party contractors to do the dirty work, just like they do with e-mail spam and cleaning services. Therefore, the company is clean, it's just their contractors that suck and spam your mailbox or hire illegal aliens at below minimum wage.
Just ask Wal-Mart or XXX mortgage broker.
It doesn't matter what anyone really thinks about this, DMCA isn't going away anytime soon.
That said, seeing Real Networks get crushed would be very pleasant. They have polluted computer systems for the last 8 or so years with their lameass player. Time for it to die.
Political satire now has to be hosted outside the US because of stupid laws.
The copyright on this song should have expired years ago. I hope Congress is proud of itself.
Actually you are incorrect, it was available for Windows for Workgroups 3.11. It wasn't a dialup stack, it was for NICs. The primary reason for its existence was for those who were only running TCP/IP on their networks, so that they could use the WFW clients for SMB networking over IP, which was supported in the versions of NT available at that time, as well as LanMan.
You can still find a copy on an old install CD of NT 4 as well as 3.51 in the CLIENTS directory.
The aggressive moves are developer lock-in and Active Directory, and both are long-term strategies. Both are ineffective in the long term - Microsoft's own rise to dominance demonstrates that businesses will take a short-term loss in functionality in exchange for cheaper licensing.
The lack of canned 'enterprise solutions' does not mean that they are not possible on Linux, just that you have to make your own. This will change as vendors figure out how to make money atop OSS solutions. It'll happen - it's just a matter of time.
I don't know why you got a troll mod but I found your post interesting, thanks!
We're being pedantic here - when we think nuclear plant we think 'nuclear power plant' which is what Hanford assuredly is not.
Agreed on the other bit, that was what I was expressing not so succinctly in the grandparent.
Hint: the server platform is the one they are afraid of losing. If they lose control of the server side then they become a technology niche player again like they were back in the early '90s. The war against Novell was long and hard and perhaps you don't remember it. I do.
Litigation IS the only thing they have left on that side. If they lose control of that, the free desktop will conquer them easily just through license simplification and cost.
I agree that it would be difficult for SCO to pull out of this now. I don't know if it's impossible - i'm assuming there is a way for them to thread the needle out of this until proven otherwise. This whole thing has enhanced my skepticism about 'sure things'.
That said, one person on Groklaw suggested that this might be an attempt by Baystar to put a seal on whatever documents link them with Microsoft. If the stuff is subject to litigation on another front it can be kept out of the IBM suit perhaps, which is advantageous to both Microsoft, Baystar and perhaps SCO.
That was another interesting potential purpose to this nascent litigation.
Hanford isn't a nuclear plant, it was a nuclear weapons research facility that also mass-produced plutonium for nuclear weapons.
Moreover, Hanford was one of the places where we found out about dangerous isotopes and how to handle them. It wasn't run properly and in fact hardly could have been. Not to say that there weren't huge screwups there, but comparing this to a well run nuclear power plant is just wrong.
The facts are that SCO has bungled this in a massive way. There are repeated mishandlings of the discovery of the IBM case, a poor choice in suing Novell for "Slander of Title", and poor choice in suing Daimler-Chrysler. This is not subject to debate.
Baystar wanted a competent anti-Linux legal attack. That was what the money was for. They repeatedly asked for this, and got more incompetence. Therefore, they are cutting bait, but more than that, they want to make sure this stuff doesn't continue along the current destructive path. They want SCO to die, and fast.
Otherwise, why not just take their money and run? Why prolong the agony looking for a declaratory judgement?
You fail to explain this, and that's why i'm closer to the mark.
as an attempt to shut down the SCO fiasco before any really harmful judgements are handed down that prevent further Microsoft-funded FUD against Linux.
Obviously there are regulatory hurdles on the way to Longhorn. Slowing Linux adoption is clearly in the best interests of Redmond, and sowing doubt through litigation is pretty much the only strategy they have left that will work.
Think about dollars, pounds, euros, whatever you want.
What happens to that dollar when it is spent by the average consumer at a retail establishment?
- First, government gets its cut as a sales tax, or VAT. God bless Oregon and other places where this doesn't exist.
The remainder of that dollar is earnings for the business owner. Of course, that owner has to pay a few things.
-Employee salaries
-Merchandise
-Utilities
-Rent or Mortgage and Property taxes
Please note that in all cases what is being spent directly supports people in their subsistence. Moreover, capitalism assures us that not a cent more than the reasonable market value is going to be spent on those things. Last point, capitalism also assures us that the owner is going to look to grow his business. That's how he makes more money. Therefore, more employees will be hired, greater amounts of merchandise will pass through his facility - and he might even get another if business is good. Truck drivers delivering the goods, utility workers maintaining his sewage/electric/phone/whatever are kept employed, manufacturing people who make the goods - the list goes on.
Envision the same dollar falling into a governmental till. What will happen to it? Well, if the drunken and drug addicted guys living in the nearby welfare motel are any indication, not much that is good. I suppose financing the nearby drug dealers is an economic cycle of sorts, but providing a roll of flash cash for them and paying for hookers probably wasn't what you were thinking about either when you were talking about tax dollars. Was it?
Government wastes your money. Why? Because it isn't theirs. Why should they give two shits what happens to it? This is why we get wasteful, unsafe space shuttles instead of cost-efficient non-reusable vehicles.
So why would you want to give them even a cent more than absolutely needed? Cut the nuts off of every budget. Say "You can take 5% off the top of ANYTHING" and cut it. Make them justify every expenditure. Demand results.
Last point, if NASA engineers a program without sufficient budget, the officials in charge should be arrested and convicted of manslaughter at the very least. If they knew they were under budget, they should just not do it, or fire some of the deadwood in their offices for increased funds. There's a lot of that i'm sure, like in every federal agency. Unfortunately it's almost impossible to fire a government worker, sadly. So if you wonder why NASA looks incompetent, maybe it's because it is.
One of the nice things about the Electoral College is that it reduces the impact of ballot box stuffing in urban areas. At worst, NYC can only screw up the New York vote. This is what it was intended for - to provide some additional power to the smaller states and prevent the larger ones from controlling everything.
The system isn't broken - besides it would require a constitutional amendment to change it, and it wouldn't pass because of the reason cited.