I can see that you are very concerned about having an absurdly broad definition of sanitation. More power to you, we are just going to talk past each other on this one.
As far as children getting AIDS goes, you are right, the problem is easily fixed. The problem is that there isn't enough money to implement the very simple programs. $1 per child was too much for the western world to foot apparently.
As you point out, disease prevention is a more dificult topic to overcome than "keeping the floor washed and the garbage removed twice a week." It is very difficult and expensive. That's why we have CDC and departments of health at every level of government in the US.
To use your example, I have worked in two buildings now where empolyees have organized to request the manager increase fresh air intake and improve filtration and the managers said they didn't have enough money.
However, with all that said, I repeat myself when I say that I don't understand what NASA's budget has to do with any of this. The point I am arguing is that things are not simple. The world is not full of simple answers or quick fixes that we just haven't woken up and realized.
Drainage is not the same as sanitation. And, in many parts of the world, mosquitos are a fact of life that comes with the climate and ecosystem - it's not that there are pools of stagnant water that no one has been efficient enough to clean up, it's that it is simply a hot, wet climate. How exactly would you drain a rain forest?
Many, many people in Africa did not get AIDS from casual sex. With 30% of people infected (for example, Botswana) and few opportunities for testing, let alone incentive to test since there is no treatment, many people get AIDS from trusted, long-term lovers and spouses. Many babies get AIDS from their mothers. On top of all that, so many adults have died in some areas that there is famine because no one is alive to farm; schools are empty because all the teachers have died. You can be a nun and it won't help you survive in that atmosphere, if there is no one to grow food and run the country.
TB is spread through the air, when a person with active TB coughs. It is more easily spread in crowded conditions, which may correspond with poor sanitation but does not always. The main link between TB and poor sanitation is that you are more likely to get active TB if your immune system is compromised due to other illnesses, such as those caused by poor sanitation. However, the link is indirect. You could have a perfect sanitation system and still have a TB problem. There are diseases that are spread primarily through poor sanitation, like cholera, but TB is not one of them.
Neither malaria nor TB are caused or spread by poor sanitation. Malaria is a parasite that is spread by mosquitos, sanitation has nothing to do with it. TB is highly communicable and quarantine is an issue as is drug resistance but sanitation is also largely irrelevant here.
If you live in a country where 30% of the country is infected with AIDS, the fact that the disease is preventable is not going to do you a whole heck of a lot of good.
There are towns of children because all the adults have died, there are countries that can not produce food because everyone is either sick or caring for the dying. These people need help. Even far right Senator Jesse Helms agrees.
That said, I don't know why NASA is the agency we have to cut.
Right, the people involved in this project know all this... In other news, Zubrin is an armchar scientist and the people in the linked NYT article are real physicists. These specialists know what they are talking about.
Similarly, the effects of low doses of ionizing radiation does not cause cancer in most cases. for a dose of, say 200 mSv (20 rem), your increased risk of dieing of cancer is still less than 1% (this is far above the legal limit of per year exposure to radiation workers). i.e. almost all people will see no illeffect what so ever.
Even with large sources, your risk of dieing is completely unaffected, it is still 100%. So in the vast majority of cases, radiation has no effect on outcome what so ever!
So lets undo our licensing restriction on radiation sources, right?
okay, now mod me down flame bait for making a point against one of many slashdot reader's pet points.
Isn't the ISP, or some other internet site upstream from a hard hit server suposed to cache pages that are being hit a lot? isn't that part of the way the internet is suposed to work?
Had to take your first paragraph seperately. You sophmoric writing style is difficult to take seriously but what the heck.
I'm sorry, but that doesn't mean anything to me.
Yeah, it is a disapointing reference in my mind too.
[...]Any effort to enlighten only a small portion of the people as to the way politics works is elitist and, necessarily, counterproductive to the principal goal of democracy: the distribution of power.
You may like to read John Locke's* writings about why governments should be organized in roughly the way ours is organized. To state the obvious, a representative democracy does distribute power, it concentrates power in people who must become experts in government. In fact, even the elected officials can't possibly perform all the specific, intricate, and difficult tasks that running a government requires, they need assistants. At the federal level, legislators have an outlet, this is their staff AND offices like the GAO that can do extreamly intricate work for them (look at some of their reports, they are amazing). Offices like the GAO are essential to an efficient government and require people trained in many areas of thinking, esp. how government is run.
*I know, this would be educating your self, and others in the world may not have read it, so it is counterproductive unless you can get everyone to read it at the same time.
So a horribly corrupt system is better than a merely flawed system.
You chose an ironic phrasing for your point. Corruption is often used to reffer to loss of integrity through bribery (i.e. buying votes). That said, your concern is a valid one (that the voting system does not have the integrity you desire). However, trading one form of possible corruption for another is hardly a good idea.
It looks like your unproven assumption is that the present system is a "horribly corrupt system." While corruption is both possibly in all cases an evident in some, there is also good evidence that it is not yet common.
Lets say you are correct, and corruption is extreamly common... then what would posting votes do? If changing votes is already common, how hard can silencing people be? If things are that bad, your best bet is to pack up and leave.
For one, about 40% of people don't vote for the party they are registered for and probably only a few percent just vote the ticket....
I think that's way, way off, but feel free to back it up with a link or two. 40%?!? I have to see that to believe it.
Sorry, this is something I learned in a political science class. It turns out that there are all these people who register one way and vote the other more than not. They describe them selves as "weak Republicans" or "weak Democrats." It is very suprising to learn (esp. for a "strong Republican" or a "strong Democrat" who has all friends who are also in the same classification).
Sure, we will lose a few votes that way, but what we gain in return is worth it. An election with integrity.
I guess the idea is to have a good election system that doesn't disenfranchise anyboyd. This idea blatantly disenfrachises a whole class of people and can therefore be taken off the table.
If you were to stack up all of the injustices experienced in our democracy and compare them, I'd wager that the outright buying of votes wouldn't even rate in the top ten.
That's because we have private voting. Lets keep it that way so this isn't the number one issue.
I can see that you are concerned about voting accuracy but I assure you, there is no magic bullet. This problem is complex and multifacited, in the near future at least, its solution will not be complete. Diebold's machines were a magic bullet and look at how good they were. In light of that flop, the solution that we next impliment should have a good shot of not disenfranchising most voters.
Actually, I was asking about how you would verify that the random hash piece of paper you took home from the election is the same as what is on the screen. I imagine a vote would look very complex (if you look at how complex even a simple character looked in the paper when it was encripted). You may note that this paper does not propose a humanly readable vote, just a human readable id number. That way you can't prove who you voted for, but you can (if you try hard) verify your vote.
A large number of people have not been able to vote in private given the present system (i.e. blind people and people with poor vision). Electronic voting allows these people to vote. Granted, they would be hard pressed to seperate paper in just the right way... much less to verify it.
You may care to read the article, but they actually appear to have found a secure and verifable way of voting. In fact, the best objection to it would be that it is either too verifiable (i.e. you can decript its result after voting to a third party) or not verifiable (i.e. try to verify a 1024 bit encripted key).
The only way I can think of to keep vote you made readable would be to take into the booth a bogus second layer and then hand it to the poll worker to shred--leaving your vote intact and readable.
As far as not verifiable, you have to be able to tell if this random hash you have in your hands is the one on the screen--how would you do that? It's not like you can print it, all.pdf viewers are different and even if they weren't only a very few printers have the precision to print exactly to scale to the precision that would be required... Consider that even printing machines have errors on the scale that they would require.
how do you see the publishing of a vote as being any different than registering for a political party
For one, about 40% of people don't vote for the party they are registered for and probably only a few percent just vote the ticket....
For two, I'm not registered as any party for exactly the reason you point out.
For three, how can you buy a vote if you can't verify who it was for? I mean, buying a registration is very different. Don't forget vote purchasing is not the only problem, there is also social pressure (from a family member or work relation) that you could circumvent with registration but not with a published vote.
Yeah, right after NASA canceled its project with Boeing because it could not meet its goals of being both efficient and quite. They decided that there was no way of being both. These thing could never go from Japan to France at this speed--there is no country that would let them fly over them at supersonic flight speeds.
Here is a BBC news story on the topic. NASA's canceld project is on the top.
Yeah, like when the Prime Minister feed his daughter beef on TV to show that mad cow was not a danger in the country... Apparently the umpire was on a holiday.
Slashdot Mirror
But his system generates a paper-base receipt. Doesn't mater if you or a machine generate it. It is still a paper record of your vote.
As far as children getting AIDS goes, you are right, the problem is easily fixed. The problem is that there isn't enough money to implement the very simple programs. $1 per child was too much for the western world to foot apparently.
As you point out, disease prevention is a more dificult topic to overcome than "keeping the floor washed and the garbage removed twice a week." It is very difficult and expensive. That's why we have CDC and departments of health at every level of government in the US.
To use your example, I have worked in two buildings now where empolyees have organized to request the manager increase fresh air intake and improve filtration and the managers said they didn't have enough money.
However, with all that said, I repeat myself when I say that I don't understand what NASA's budget has to do with any of this. The point I am arguing is that things are not simple. The world is not full of simple answers or quick fixes that we just haven't woken up and realized.
If you live in a country where 30% of the country is infected with AIDS, the fact that the disease is preventable is not going to do you a whole heck of a lot of good.
There are towns of children because all the adults have died, there are countries that can not produce food because everyone is either sick or caring for the dying. These people need help. Even far right Senator Jesse Helms agrees.
That said, I don't know why NASA is the agency we have to cut.
Right, the people involved in this project know all this... In other news, Zubrin is an armchar scientist and the people in the linked NYT article are real physicists. These specialists know what they are talking about.
Similarly, the effects of low doses of ionizing radiation does not cause cancer in most cases. for a dose of, say 200 mSv (20 rem), your increased risk of dieing of cancer is still less than 1% (this is far above the legal limit of per year exposure to radiation workers). i.e. almost all people will see no illeffect what so ever.
Even with large sources, your risk of dieing is completely unaffected, it is still 100%. So in the vast majority of cases, radiation has no effect on outcome what so ever!
So lets undo our licensing restriction on radiation sources, right?
okay, now mod me down flame bait for making a point against one of many slashdot reader's pet points.
Isn't the ISP, or some other internet site upstream from a hard hit server suposed to cache pages that are being hit a lot? isn't that part of the way the internet is suposed to work?
I have often noticed people going around saying that something is imposible just because they don't want to put in the effort to do it.
I'm sorry, but that doesn't mean anything to me.
Yeah, it is a disapointing reference in my mind too.
[...]Any effort to enlighten only a small portion of the people as to the way politics works is elitist and, necessarily, counterproductive to the principal goal of democracy: the distribution of power.
You may like to read John Locke's* writings about why governments should be organized in roughly the way ours is organized. To state the obvious, a representative democracy does distribute power, it concentrates power in people who must become experts in government. In fact, even the elected officials can't possibly perform all the specific, intricate, and difficult tasks that running a government requires, they need assistants. At the federal level, legislators have an outlet, this is their staff AND offices like the GAO that can do extreamly intricate work for them (look at some of their reports, they are amazing). Offices like the GAO are essential to an efficient government and require people trained in many areas of thinking, esp. how government is run.
*I know, this would be educating your self, and others in the world may not have read it, so it is counterproductive unless you can get everyone to read it at the same time.
You chose an ironic phrasing for your point. Corruption is often used to reffer to loss of integrity through bribery (i.e. buying votes). That said, your concern is a valid one (that the voting system does not have the integrity you desire). However, trading one form of possible corruption for another is hardly a good idea.
It looks like your unproven assumption is that the present system is a "horribly corrupt system." While corruption is both possibly in all cases an evident in some, there is also good evidence that it is not yet common.
Lets say you are correct, and corruption is extreamly common... then what would posting votes do? If changing votes is already common, how hard can silencing people be? If things are that bad, your best bet is to pack up and leave.
Sorry, this is something I learned in a political science class. It turns out that there are all these people who register one way and vote the other more than not. They describe them selves as "weak Republicans" or "weak Democrats." It is very suprising to learn (esp. for a "strong Republican" or a "strong Democrat" who has all friends who are also in the same classification).- For one, about 40% of people don't vote for the party they are registered for and probably only a few percent just vote the ticket....
I think that's way, way off, but feel free to back it up with a link or two. 40%?!? I have to see that to believe it.- Sure, we will lose a few votes that way, but what we gain in return is worth it. An election with integrity.
I guess the idea is to have a good election system that doesn't disenfranchise anyboyd. This idea blatantly disenfrachises a whole class of people and can therefore be taken off the table.- If you were to stack up all of the injustices experienced in our democracy and compare them, I'd wager that the outright buying of votes wouldn't even rate in the top ten.
That's because we have private voting. Lets keep it that way so this isn't the number one issue.I can see that you are concerned about voting accuracy but I assure you, there is no magic bullet. This problem is complex and multifacited, in the near future at least, its solution will not be complete. Diebold's machines were a magic bullet and look at how good they were. In light of that flop, the solution that we next impliment should have a good shot of not disenfranchising most voters.
Actually, I was asking about how you would verify that the random hash piece of paper you took home from the election is the same as what is on the screen. I imagine a vote would look very complex (if you look at how complex even a simple character looked in the paper when it was encripted). You may note that this paper does not propose a humanly readable vote, just a human readable id number. That way you can't prove who you voted for, but you can (if you try hard) verify your vote.
If anybody is interested in an unbiased (thought incomplete) overview of this area, here is congressional report on the topic
http://www.epic.org/privacy/voting/crsreport.pdf
A large number of people have not been able to vote in private given the present system (i.e. blind people and people with poor vision). Electronic voting allows these people to vote. Granted, they would be hard pressed to seperate paper in just the right way... much less to verify it.
The only way I can think of to keep vote you made readable would be to take into the booth a bogus second layer and then hand it to the poll worker to shred--leaving your vote intact and readable.
As far as not verifiable, you have to be able to tell if this random hash you have in your hands is the one on the screen--how would you do that? It's not like you can print it, all .pdf viewers are different and even if they weren't only a very few printers have the precision to print exactly to scale to the precision that would be required... Consider that even printing machines have errors on the scale that they would require.
http://www.vreceipt.com/article.pdf
Only a few need to check to make sure that this vote was tallied correctly.
For one, about 40% of people don't vote for the party they are registered for and probably only a few percent just vote the ticket....
For two, I'm not registered as any party for exactly the reason you point out.
For three, how can you buy a vote if you can't verify who it was for? I mean, buying a registration is very different. Don't forget vote purchasing is not the only problem, there is also social pressure (from a family member or work relation) that you could circumvent with registration but not with a published vote.
You need a new manufacturer.
Here is a BBC news story on the topic. NASA's canceld project is on the top.
The Quadra had a 68040, too! Nope, the quadra had a 68LC040 and was an all around dog.
You do realize that it is this CRT that is giving you the cataracts that is making your vision worse.
Yeah, or even comadore 64s. And the racks would have looked even cooler if they were filled with comadore 64s.
Yeah, like when the Prime Minister feed his daughter beef on TV to show that mad cow was not a danger in the country... Apparently the umpire was on a holiday.