While I'm sure you can find a "dictionary" definition that defines religion as a belief in supernatural or divine power, it usage and impacts on human society can be defined in a much broader fashion that doesn't necessarily require a higher power in your life in order to be slavishly devoted to a philosophy or movement. There are many movements, including environmentalism (to use a very classic example that is but one of a great many) where people have placed incredibly amounts of both time, money, and effort into developing philosophical movement.
That is why I get just as offended at seeing my children participating in Earth Day at the public school as I would with Christmas celebrations. Neither is appropriate, yet guess which one is more widely accepted?
Instead, I would more properly define religion as the often fanatical devotion to a philosophy or political movement. And that would fit with a great many Slashdot readers in a variety of ways that have nothing to do with a belief in God or some other higher power. BTW, the word "fan" is derived legitimately from the word "fanatic", as in "football fan", "soccer fan", or "Linux fan". Don't tell my that the typical SF convention has nothing to do with religion. I've been to enough of them to know differently.
I don't think this is even "watering down the definition of religion" here. I think people do "follow the prophet Jared to Subway" or "follow Steve Jobs" to buy an iPod. For crying out loud, there is a huge group of individuals that take a Sunday sacrament of turning on the television set and watch football games, with annual pilgrimages to things like the Super Bowl.
Yes, this isn't organized religion in a traditional sense, but it is a form of religious service from a more practical angle. BTW, for those who are of a more Christian philosophical background, this is even something that the Bible talks about directly and is even addressed by religious leaders who condemn their followers/congregationalists to stay away from those kinds of religions but to instead follow "the one true religion" and take up the cross.
So no, I don't think this makes religion meaningless, but rather forces you to examine much more closely those aspects of your life and should beg the question: What is your religion? I don't have a problem if you say that the NBA, NFL, NASCAR, FIFA, or other similar group is your religion... but be honest about it here. You may claim to be Christian, but in reality it is likely you place much more devotion to something else, like open source software.
Religion in some form is such a part of what makes us human at all that it isn't surprising that even those who blatantly profess atheism still have a religion of some sort that they still follow even if they don't admit it. Faith and belief are simply a part of what makes us human... even if you have faith and belief in something very different than what I place my faith and belief in.
Hard core atheists who claim that they believe in nobody and profess faith in nothing are likely deluding themselves and others by making this claim. That is the point I was trying to make here, and I would find it an exceptionally rare individual who doesn't place at least some faith in somebody or something other than themselves in some fashion... even if it is just the person they think ought to be the next leader of their country. Or even themselves as that can also be a religion unto itself.
I don't think an absolutely "pure" atheist really exists, but then again that is a religious belief too, as is the contradictory philosophy.
No.... you can profess a religion and still be a professional scientist. I know many very personally who do both.
Instead, I'm trying to come up with a word for true atheists who are also seem to adopt science as their religion... after a sort. In this case the language we are using is too limited to really express the thought completely, but there certainly is a philosophy that science can replace religion. It is an extremist position on a spectra of thought going from the philosophy that God reveals all knowledge through divine revelation to a philosophy that all knowledge can be obtained through scientific reasoning. Most actual scientists are somewhere along that spectra and have some sort of belief in a higher order or being of some sort.
This was mainly to point out that atheism isn't quite so one dimensional as the parent poster was trying to make it sound like.
It sounds like you know less about atheism than I do. Sure, I don't know your particular brand of atheism, nor am I trying here to tell you how you believe (or don't believe).
There are "prophets", but they aren't called prophets. There are "sacred books", but they tend to be things like "Principia Mathematica", "Origin of Species", or other such books. And here I'm not trying to say that you "believe" these books as "the word of God" or other such nonsense, but that there are some writings that are considered more relevant to modern society than others. Certainly in communist countries like the People's Republic of China or the USSR (when that country used to exist), atheism was an official state religion... as much as that went. Mao's "Little Red Book" certainly fits the role of religious scripture with a near deification of Mao's actions (less now in China than earlier, but one of the few "safe" religions in China at the moment).
I have observed "congregations" of atheists that have come together in terms of organizing a social network for the common good. One group in particular that I know gets together mainly to have a community meal (usually a bar-be-que or some other casual meal) on Sundays... not because of religious observances but because that is when most of them have the day off during the weekend. They realize that there is some positive good that can be created from organizing as a group, even though everybody involved is atheistic in their attitudes about religious thought. This same group even organizes fundraisers for community groups like a battered women's shelter and a children's hospital. This kind of activity formally organized by atheists is fairly new I'll admit, but it can and does happen.
As for dogmas and orthodoxy... I guess you haven't studied science enough to realize that this isn't exclusively the domain of religion. Some of the worst dogma fights I've ever seen have been in the Physics community. Just ask fusion researchers. There clearly are "orthodox" dogma advocates and others who are clearly branded heretics. You can be an atheist and still demand orthodoxy.
As much as it is, there are many different brands of atheism, so you professing that you "know the proper path of atheism" as much as you seem to be offering to be the "prophet of all atheists" here. I guess you haven't see Richard Stallman's "St. Richard" speech to see what a true atheistic prophet can actually look like (complete with holy robe and halo... I'm not kidding here either). Atheism is much broader and deeper than you are implying here, and takes on many different forms. And in many cases a push toward atheism does approach the status of a full-fledged religion unto itself.
What you have here does ring true... so far as I have expressed doubts that a Von Neumann architecture is even remotely reasonable for implementation of a artificial intelligence.
Count me in as one of those "nay-sayers" in terms of expressing extreme skepticism that any major breakthrough is possible... and for most of the AI researchers I believe that they are following dead ends of research. I am even more frustrated with researchers pushing avenues like Kismet, but I'll leave that one alone at the moment. At least they are identifying dead-ends even if the caution tape hasn't been put up at the moment.
If you are looking for hiring staff... well, I might be interested if you are looking for somebody who has a very different POV and can think outside of the box. Or if you feel comfortable about introducing these theories to somebody versed in the field... I'm willing to deal with legal BS like NDAs even if necessary. My specialty is more multi-media software development, so you may not be interested, but at least it may be worth a look.
In other words, I'm willing to admit that somebody could come up with genuinely usable AI, but understand that I have some extreme doubts about the process and consider that researchers in this field have promised many great and wonderful things, but have usually fallen short so many times in so many ways that there is a very good reason why there are so many "nay-sayers" about future progress.
BTW, I have considered massively parallel architectures to be one of the keys to solving this problem, and even re-thinking computer architecture down to its basic roots as a necessary step in the process of establishing genuine AI. So many computer science graduates have no clue as to what the operations of a CPU really are any more (assembly programming is nearly dead as a discipline) that I really wonder if future generations are capable of making the cognitive leaps necessary to genuinely advance the field in a necessary manner. Any real breakthroughs are also going to require a multi-disciplinary approach from a great many fields of human experience in order for this to work out. It certainly requires a holistic viewpoint on the universe in order to pull things together.
Something to consider in terms of the scope of human intelligence: You have about as many nerves in your torso as you have in your head, and it is unreasonable to assume that those nerves have nothing to do with cognition. For those people who are accused of "thinking with their stomach", there may be some truth behind that statement as a matter of fact. Or with other anatomical parts of your body.
No it's not, it's a lack of theism. Many religious people seem to find it really difficult to get their head around. Religion and gods have absolutely nothing to do with our lives. We don't sit down every morning and pray to the void. We simply accept reality for what it is and don't see anything in our every day lives that needs a special explanation.
I know this is very much off topic from the main point of the story, but I can't let this stay here unanswered.
I realize that those who are atheistic in nature don't have religion and gods in their lives, and it is reasonable to presume that somebody without "faith" in a higher being of any kind can still have guiding morals that govern their life.
Still, I have to argue here that there still is a "religion" of atheism, complete with "prophets/oracles", "priests", "congregations", "sacred literature" and other trappings of religion. That it takes other forms and is usually not so formally organized may be true, and even defining "orthodox atheism" can be a bit of a struggle, but all of these do exist. It certainly takes on a philosophical niche that often takes the place of other religious philosophies in terms of guiding principles in your life.
There are also multiple forms of atheism, ranging from "environmentalists" (devotion to environmental causes as a religion), "universalists" (that somehow the whole universe will make sense ultimately), "scientists" (a solid belief that science alone can solve life's problems), "anti-theologists" (opposing any form of organized religion of any kind), and many others. It is very difficult to take such an emotionally charged term like atheism and force any sort of hard stereotypes. But I do argue that you can identify atheism as a religion, including its establishment as a state religion in many cases, and concerns about how it has entered into public institutions forcing out other philosophical viewpoints.
To tie this back to artificial life/intelligence research, I do believe (there is that word somehow showing up) that some sort of religious philosophy will eventually show up in terms of identifying and working with a "soul". I'm defining that "soul" to be the consciousness or intelligence that has an independently operable sphere of influence that can relate with other intelligences, including at a human level of interaction. This isn't to say that such a "soul" can't have a purely scientific explanation either. I also believe that once such artificial intelligences are developed that it will have a tremendous impact on human religion in a large number of ways, including everything ranging from human fealty and devotion to an AI lifeform approaching god-like standing, modification of theological doctrines, to even a view that working with AI lifeforms is a type of blasphemy that should be rooted out of human society (and the source of future wars).
Talking here about predictions of Artificial Intelligence and its state 20 years from now... have you read any of the works by Marvin Minsky and his predictions in the early 1970's? He also made similar predictions that human-like intelligence would be achievable "20 years from now". The 1990's came and went without human-like AI, and here is yet again somebody making almost the same kind of prediction.
And this isn't to completely mark as irrelevant anything that Minsky said about AI in the 1970s or what he has done since then, but to note that the study of intelligence, whether from the perspective of a nano-technology/biology perspective or from a software engineering approach, is still trying to uncover the basic ground rules and understand even the sheer domain of the problem.
If you don't understand the domain... or if the size of the domain keeps expanding... you really don't even know where to begin to solve the problem. I challenge any of the researchers in this field to clearly define even what it means to have human intelligence or what even the intelligence of an earthworm really is. Let's just say that Charles Darwin was sufficiently impressed at the intelligence of an earthworm that he choose to use that species as the foundation block for his study of intelligence. (Yes, I know there are multiple species of earthworms.) And only recently is this aspect of intelligence even being reconsidered.
I do think that a proclamation that we might be able to reach the computational processing level of an earthworm in the next 20 years is reasonable, but even then you had better be extra sure that you understand even the scope and domain of that problem before you claim it is "solved". I for one am still not convinced, in spite of some pretty incredible research about the issue.
Speaking here as a full-time software engineer who has been involved with the computer industry since 1977 (I guess not quite the 40 years you got.... but pretty close) and somebody who has studied artificial intelligence extensively, including reading most of the current literature, and having even implemented many of the algorithms related to current artificial intelligence research I can say one thing about what you just wrote:
You are completely clueless about the topic and this is utter bullshit!
I hate, I repeat, I hate, I hate, and I repeat one more time, I hate it when supposedly knowledgeable individuals like yourself try to pass off predictions in a field that has so often made predictions of achieving human-like intelligence for so long that normally I drown out such predictions and pure drivel and something akin to anti-gravity research and faster-than-light communications. Essentially something written by an individual who has not really read the literature, doesn't really understand the breadth and domain of the problem, and hasn't even a clue about the steps necessary to achieve even reasonable levels of intelligence.
I'm not saying here that the study of Artificial Intelligence isn't a useless field, and that some very remarkable tools have been developed in this quest. There have also been some incredible advances in the study of human intelligence, and even so much as questioning what intelligence really is. It used to mean a highly evolved sense of intelligence to be able to recite back volumes of information or to be able to calculate "massive" equations "in your head" quickly. I guess on this standard, computers have already achieved a huge level of intelligence... and did so in the 1940's I might add here with ENIAC. Even as late as the early 1940s, it was considered an honorable profession to be called a "computer"... meaning somebody who spent the day with paper and pencil making thousands of calculations each day... usually in the generation of mathematical tables like logarithm and sine tables, but sometimes other tasks as well.
What we know now is that genuine intelligence is far more complicated, and involves emotions and other states of being that simple haven't been achieved. While I have no doubt that eventually somebody will build something like A.L.I.C.E. that will pass the "Turing Test" for Artificial Intelligence in the next few years on a cursory level, it will only help to push back the frontiers of our knowledge of what intelligence really is and only lead us to a deeper understanding of the true complexities of human intelligence really are.
What my real pet peeve here is for somebody like yourself to spout off that true Artificial Intelligence "is just around the corner" and about to come true, and somebody who is not well versed in the field like some journalist starts to believe you. Or you start to post something like this where you claim knowledge about the topic when you really don't.
My own prediction: Fifty years from now, we will still be having "knowledgeable individuals" claiming that genuine artificial intelligence is only "20 years away". Just as it was predicted 30 years ago. I don't expect this to happen in my lifetime, or the lifetime of any of my grandchildren. Human civilization on Mars will happen first.
I don't hate all environmentalists, and in fact with your definition, I perhaps consider myself a "conservative environmentalist". More to the point, I am totally supportive of initiatives like the Nature Conservancy and other private groups who seek to preserve natural resources with private money, and admire other similar efforts. Interesting relationships can be found when seeking protection in this manner, including traditional groups like the National Rifle Association, Ducks Unlimited, and other more "right-wing" groups that do have legitimate interests in terms of preserving outdoor resources. Many hunting groups, through licensing fees and membership dues, have also purchased private land holdings that are less likely to be sold for development purposes than even government lands that are adjacent to those properties. Also, most hunting groups... especially on "their own land" that they have a vested interest in preserving, will not over-hunt those properties and will engage in legitimate conservation measures that help to maintain a natural setting for those properties... or even re-forest previous agricultural lands.
As for most commercial forestry (at least in North America), most of the land used by commercial logging companies is privately owned as well. In fact, private land tends to be much better maintained than public lands such as National Forests, and a properly managed forest can actually be more productive from an ecological standpoint by supporting more life forms, supply more wildlife food sources, and help reduce "greenhouse gasses" better by occasionally removing a part of the older growth forests and allowing a fresh start to younger seedlings. Yes, it can be overdone, but again if there is a vested interest in preserving the land, they won't be openly destroying huge swaths of forests to be left alone and ignored.
As for developing countries and their blatant destruction of forests, including in the Amazon basin of Brazil that is getting substantial attention, I believe that is something that will eventually be resolved in some fashion similar to what is happening in North America. The people living in that region of the world vitally depend upon those forests, and hopefully they will awaken to the need for balance and develop a sustainable method of using those forests without abusing them.
The key word here is stewardship, where you need to place people with a vested interest in preserving the land and the environment over specific parcels of land that are governed and managed by people tied to that land and not some government bureaucrat who is working and living in an urban environment thousands of miles away from the land that needs preservation and doesn't really understand the issues involved when new regulations are developed.
While I will agree that solar radiation flux temperatures (aka the heat that hits the Earth due to solar energy) is perhaps one of the major driving forces for what is causing temperature changes to the overall climate of this planet, I can't claim that it is the primary cause of global warming/cooling.
Nor can I suggest that anthroprogenic "greenhouse gas emissions" are the primary cause either.
There are so many different things that can cause a heating and/or cooling of the Earth's atmosphere and influence climate that to single out a specific cause is just a shot in the dark at best.
And just as there is a seasonal lag due to summer and winter (the winter and summer solstices are usually not the annual temperature extreme dates), there is also a lag in the environment due to overall global temperature changes that are impacted from various climatological influences.
Shy of the sun just "shutting off" altogether, I highly doubt that you notice any substantial changes in solar radiation for perhaps several years. And this isn't taking into consideration that the atmosphere of the Sun itself also is a huge energy sink that can dissipate energy and act as a moderator to the activities in the solar core.
The global climate is incredibly complex, and attempts to simplify the models and enact public policy or legislation based upon these models is incredibly naive on the part of environmental activists and simply can't be said to be based upon sound scientific foundations.
While I don't want to make light of what he did, nor show any approval over his actions that got him in trouble with the American legal system (which he was legitimately prosecuted over), I do admire the minimal lifestyle that Theodore Kaczynski lived while he was "evading" the police.
IMHO this is about the minimal lifestyle that is currently possible for anybody still even remotely connected to the U.S. economy. He lived in a rural part of a large state that has relatively low property taxes, lived without electricity and other "utilities" (being essentially "off the grid" as it is sometimes said), used "public" transportation (mainly inter-urban buses in his case), and grew his own food.
It could be argued that he lived this style because of some sort of psychosis or other mental disease, but I don't think that this has to be the case to live this sort of lifestyle. People, very sane and rational people, have been living like this for millenia throughout Europe... usually in monestaries. I will say, however, it is a lousy environment to raise children, who do need a certain amount of money in terms of being "plugged into society" a bit more in order to give them choices and options when they get older.
On the other side of the coin, I also think that those who are billionaires don't really need the money, and are really pushing their lifestyles to an extreme of excess. This isn't to say that I necessarily think they should have their wealth confiscated by some stupid bureaucrat who thinks they have a better way to spend that money, but at the same time, after sitting on a solid gold toilet and eating Italian food flown in fresh from Rome, and Chinese food from Beijing the next day... how much can you possibly spend to stay alive? There does reach a point that you are simply throwing money away just for fun... or instead are playing some sort of perverse game with other billionaires.
The one thing that wealth does provide that poverty doesn't is options... you can choose to live a lifestyle of meagerness and simplicity if you want to when you have wealth, but it is much harder to choose to live a lifestyle of unbounded freedoms that come with wealth if you don't have any. You also have the opportunity to do a whole lot of good in this world if you have wealth that otherwise you simply can't do if you are without access to resources otherwise.
I should also add here that in spite of the minimalistic lifestyle of Ted Kaczynski, he caused far more resources of nearly every kind you can think of (including oil extraction, strip mining, paper production, etc.) due to the sheer number of people involved by the FBI to try and identify and later prosecute him due to his criminal actions. In terms of his impact on the environment of the Earth, it certainly was a larger negative impact than your typical American citizen... or perhaps even that of most billionaires.
I dare you to name a major, fully industrialized country that has population growth at all.
Russia? USA? EU? All of them have substantial population declines. The USA has population growth only because of immigration, and even that is expected to end... even with uncontrolled immigration from Mexico... by 2030.
If you look at a list of countries by GDP and compare that to a list of country by birthrate, you can see a direct comparison between the two, with the lowest income countries having the highest birth rate. But that's not all! You also find that as countries industrialize and develop their economies, their birth rate drops as they go to higher income ranges for their population, and the urban and more highly paid workers tend to have substantially lower birth rates than rural and poorer regions of even the same country.
Yeah, the population change in western countries is alarming... due to its negative growth rate! And I wouldn't worry about China or India as the overall trend of their birthrates is also declining at a substantial rate. Chinese birthrates have almost declined to a stable population right now, with admittedly draconian birth control measures in place to skew the picture on how much the wealth situation is impacting the birth rate. I believe that in time, China will be reversing their policies and be more like Russia that actually pays mothers to stay home and raise their children, with cash bonuses to bear children.
Check your facts before you post such drivel next time.
Are you sure? Why this very thread then? Why the two latest presidential elections have been "a bit" contested?
They were contested because they were incredibly close elections. Politically America is split into several different philosophical camps, and none of them have a strong and overwhelming command over the general population.
If you are thinking about the elections that George W. Bush were involved with.... in spite of some of the screamers on the internet and a few media outlets that would have you believe otherwise, Bush actually had some fairly widespread support across America to become President. He also had a huge number of people who didn't want him there, which I guess is a part of the problem.
If there is an overwhelmingly popular candidate, you don't need to worry about how to deal with splitting hairs to determine the final winner. But in the 2000 and 2004 elections, that is what was needed as the elections were close enough in terms of the vote count that you had to dive into the minutae of how elections actually counted votes and reliability issues in order to find the final answer in terms of who actually won and took control over the government. THAT is why the issue of electronic voting was brought up in the first place, as it was presumed that electronic voting machines would ensure more honesty and improve the counting accuracy over the previous methods of counting votes. You may be able to debate that issue, but "the powers that be" in America have made that decision and are looking at software and electrical engineers to help save the day. The rest of this is if perhaps an open source solution might be found and why or why not.
For myself, as an engineer, I would have to say that most "creation" is a combination of both hard work and a series of sometimes small and occasionally large scale eureka moments.
I like the term "grok" coined by Heinlein as a verb meaning "to comprehend a topic or concept completely". Sometimes it is very difficult to completely grok something in the problem domain you are working in. If you are at the frontier of human knowledge (in whatever endeavor that may be... science, engineering, theology, politics, art, etc.) it is very unlikely that there is anybody who completely understands some new theory or concept... which is where the intellectual "fun" of being a genuine scientist tends to be at.
I remember for myself when I was trying to work on a bit of multiplexor code for an MPEG video stream engine (it was actually stuff for DVD-Video, so a bit more complex still), I finally hit upon a eureka moment when I finally figured out how to put everything together and write a small bit of very elegant software to solve the problem. Much of this involved reading and pondering through the specifications and trying to understand the problem domain, and I did write some test code to try a few ideas out. But in the end I scrapped all of the old code and with a "clean sheet" started the whole process all over again from scratch with the core part of the software only being written in about 10 minutes. It took me about 4 months to get there, and to an outside observer (such as one of the investors of the company I was working for) it would appear as though I was just wasting time and money to get to that point. The only productivity for actual code written was in that 10 minutes after I finally got the whole concept down. A co-worker wrote a similar bit of software that was insanely buggy but kluged through in just six weeks (instead of 4 months... a concurrent effort here), but then again it was a never ending process of trying to fix one problem after another in that klugged code. My software didn't have to be touched again when I was through, and was incredibly easy to review for bugs as well (like I said... it only took about 10 minutes to write once I got the concept down).
I could give countless other examples ranging from simple to very complex problems, and I'll say from experience that such moments do happen. But it also takes a whole bunch of preparation that often goes unnoticed, and can tie together completely unrelated fields of knowledge. In the example of the multiplexor above, my "eureka moment" came while I was doing an engine repair in a ten year old car with a bad water pump. I was able to take that thought process of automotive repair and apply it to software development and a 400 page piece of very dry specification language.
Another analogy is watching a beaker of super-saturated chemical solution suddenly "precipitate" leaving a bunch of stuff at the bottom of the beaker. It may take some considerable preparation to get to that point, but once there, the "action" happens very quickly. The human mind often works in a very similar fashion with regards to "discovering" a new truth about the universe. For those who have never experienced something like this happen in their life, you are genuinely missing out on an experience that IMHO is better than sex.
I don't think you understand the problem domain here, nor the fact that regardless of how you cut it and even force people at gunpoint (what I think you are suggesting here with making it mandatory to participate in being an election judge... the rest is semantics on how it happens) to participate is mostly allocation of scarce resources, and encouraging citizen participation in the governance process.
America has had participatory citizen governance for well over 300 years.... back when it was likely your country was an absolute divine-right monarchy. I don't know specifics of your country as I don't even know what country you are referring to here, but that was the dominant governance form in the world at the end of the 17th Century when the American colonies of England (what became the USA) decided to genuinely involve citizens at nearly every level of government. And something surprisingly different than what was even the case in England, as every immigrant was desperately needed to help build a new country.
What you see now in America is the end result of those centuries of tradition. It works for us and in fact is part of what America is today. That there are people disillusioned by the process is true, and there are problems with the election process as well in America, but the problems you are trying to address here are not where the real issues lay. Whether you "draft" people as poll workers or offer financial incentives to take on the position (as is common in America) it is a costly process to hold an election. In many ways, the voting machines are in place to help make it cheaper and to concentrate labor to where the real problems are at: voting fraud detection and verification of voter status. Vote counting is something that can and should be automated, particularly for elections as complicated as those in America.
Keep in mind that many of the politicians who are currently in office were elected under the fraudulent system, so there isn't really a strong motivation to get the system fixed when fixing the election laws will get somebody else voted into office but leaving things broken will keep the current office holders in place.
And touching the voting process in any way is always a political act, where unfortunately many of those involved with the changes are not necessarily looking at ideals but rather how it will help their political party or themselves personally.
Having witnessed Brazilian elections first hand, this doesn't inspire too much confidence in me. I admire a great many things about Brazil (your banking system is decades ahead of America... seriously!) but corruption and election fraud, at least for São Paulo (where I witnessed some national elections first hand) has voting fraud that would make a Chicago politician turn white. It is much improved over problems Brazil has had in the past, but it isn't perfect by any means.
One thing to keep in mind is that American states are significantly more independent of the federal government than Brazilian states. The U.S. Federal Constitution is also limited in its authority to act in this situation, and the election process is done on a state by state basis. Yes, individual counties are sometimes given authority by their respective state governments to try different voting methods as well, but the ultimate authority rests on the state governments.
In the last U.S. Presidential general election, it took me about 5 minutes to cast my ballot. I'm telling you that the process to vote in America is at least an order of magnitude more complicated than a typical Brazilian experience, and most Americans don't vote "straight ticket" by voting for just one political party. The trend in America is also to push more stuff at the voters, not less, including some rather complicated legislation that normally would have been dealt with in the past by professional legislators. California tends to take this approach to an extreme, but other states are following this example as well.
I will say here in defense of other Brazilians who have made commentaries like this, that Brazil is perhaps the one country that has the best comparison in terms of multiple levels of governance and the size of the population that at least a reasonable comparison can be made between the two countries. Most Europeans don't even remotely comprehend the scope of the problems involved in such a broad election such as is done in the USA every two years.
There are OCR fonts that do a very good job with displaying information in a human-readable format that are also very legible in terms of having them machine-readable at the same time. IMHO I would have to agree that a bar code is the very wrong sort of thing to be putting onto machine-prepared ballots.
Of course I've been a strong advocate of machine-assisted ballot preparation and not for having the counting in the voting booth. The process of counting votes has a completely different domain challenge and simply shouldn't be merged in with the process of creating the ballot in the first place. I have no idea why these issues are muddled together... and one of the reasons I hate the Diebold machines.
While I'm not this poor schmuck, my wife sometimes gets stuck with the onerous task of hand-counting votes for elections that aren't quite so complicated as a Presidential general election. Most of these tend to be a contest for a small-town mayor or some other similar contest where there is only one or two races on the ballot, or something like a school bond election.
Keep in mind that most of the people who are voting judges tend to be senior citizens, who frankly suffer slightly from dementia and other ailments common with advancing age. They tend to be people with free time, and generally manning a polling location isn't that difficult of a task. So are you really trusting the voting results to a bunch of people who can barely remember your name five minutes after you told it to them? In saying this I'm not saying my wife is a senior citizen, as she is in her 30's, but most of the people who she does work with are quite grey and tend to be retirees. This job does tend to be skewed for the elderly.
A true story is how my wife (since she is young enough and has done this for some time, is even head judge) sat down with her crew and counted out the ballots for one of these hand count races for nearly three hours after the polling location closed. All of the judges were given the full stack of ballots (they tried to count different stacks of ballots in a rotation to try and speed up the process) and then tried to compare the counts when they were done. Out of five judges, all five got completely different counts for all candidates. There was a "statistical average" for that precinct, but that is all it was. After dealing with this for yet another hour, (it was after midnight by this point in time), she simply got the other judges to sort of compromise between a rough average of what the counts were at... as they finally got the count within 10 votes for each candidate. The judges agreed and then signed the "official results" with the compromise tally. It didn't seem to impact the results of the election by being off by 10 votes, but that isn't always the case. That really inspired confidence in me that my vote really counted for anything. I guess it does in the long run, but I certainly understand the real need for recount laws after seeing this whole thing.
This is a tough problem. I asked my wife.... "How long would it take for you to process a Presidential general election with your crew by hand counting?" She looked at me real funny like I was trying to crack a joke, and then simply said "I'd just burn the ballots and pretend it never happened in the first place." She really didn't even want to think about the problems she would face in such a situation. After pressing her, she finally admitted that it would take several days or even weeks to count the results, and she wouldn't really trust the results either from her own precinct. She and I get into arguments over the reliability and accuracy of the Diebold machines she uses now, but openly admits that they are much better than what a hand count could ever possibly be. On this point and seeing her fellow poll workers, I'd have to agree.
The United States got by for over 200 years without electronic voting. We should not switch to electronic voting simply because there is no functional problem with older methods of counting and there are no compelling benefits to justify switching. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
I don't know how you can legitimately say such a thing. There clearly are some very compelling problems that come from the current voting process that the electronic voting methods are trying to address. Or more to the point, consider the current problem domain:
Number of contests - Be able to provide an efficient method of allowing for up to hundreds of different contests that take place on multiple levels of governance. For the USA, this means federal, state, county, municipal, and other levels of government jurisdiction. Each office must be treated as a separate contest (in most cases) and allow voters to cast their ballots independently from one race to the next.
Universal suffrage - Open up the voting process to allow everybody that can be considered a citizen to be able to cast their vote, without coersion, intimidation, or other methods of manipulating voters that would prevent them from being able to cast an honest ballot that genuinely represents their opinion at the voting booth
Privacy - Going back to the universal sufferage, all votes cast must be kept confidential and ultimately untraceable in terms of being able to tie the votes cast by a specific citizen to a particular candidate.
Restriction to Citizens - In spite of seeking universal suffrage, elections should be restricted to actual citizens and not non-citizen residents. Citizenship actually means something, including the right to vote.
Elimination of Fraud - Each person who casts a vote ought to be able to cast a vote, but they are entitled to only vote once. Any means that allows a person to vote more than once ought to be considered fraud, as well as voting when you are not eligible. Tracking when a voter casts a ballot (to ensure they vote only once) and elimination of voter records due to loss of citizenship, death, or commission of a felony (constitutionally permitted means of removing eligibility to vote) are a part of any voting system.
Voting Accuracy - Methods of tracking ballots cast as well as counting the votes for each canidate must be as accurate as reasonably possible. 100% accuracy is the ultimate goal based on legitimate ballots cast and reported results.
Speedy Results - While not the most important goal and arguably the least important of all of the requirements I'm listing, results from the election must be reported in a timely fashion in order to provide overall confidence in the results. Voting methods that delay election results are considered less desirable and raise questions in regards to fraud.
I don't know what you have been taught in your history classes, but voting methods to reach these goals have changed considerably in the past 200 years. I mention this requirement domain as it is what seems to be current goals sought after by most election clerks and policy makers in the USA... not that I'm necessarily mentioning any specific law here.
Off the top of my head I can name over a dozen different voting methods that have been used and discontinued over the years. Some form of electronic voting is certainly new, but it isn't even the first mechanical voting system used. What newer voting methods (including electronic voting ideas) provide is a chance to get closer to a "perfect" voting system... even if that isn't necessarily possible.
Back when voting was done by landed gentry in a public meeting where every voter would "announce" their votes verbally, I'm not so sure that they would even understand the current set of voting problems facing the USA today. But that isn't the method used any more, even though it was the voting method over 200 years ago. Surprisingly it is still done in some cases in the USA in some special but limited circumstances, but isn't the situation for a typical general election.
As far as dead people voting in elections.... well, they are on the election rolls. Their names just haven't been removed after they died. And of course this implies that somebody used the name and identity of this dead person in order to vote. Perhaps more than once and in more than one voting precinct. Yes this is illegal, but many precinct judges openly encouraged this practice for decades and is a common practice in the USA. Honest poll workers do remove these names and try to keep this fraud from happening, but with hundreds of thousands of voting precincts, some dishonesty does occur.
As for illegal aliens voting... the problem here is insane voting laws where you can register to vote but you aren't really required to prove citizenship... just residency of some sort. For some really weird reason, U.S. federal election laws specifically prohibit some sort of citizenship test and prohibit showing of national identification cards (like a driver's license) as proof of citizenship. This dates back to abuses in the "old south" where state election laws were written in such a way to prohibit blacks from voting and federal laws had to come in and reverse this blatant discrimination. If you have an American sounding name and have lived in the USA for more than 30 days, it is likely that you could at least bluff your way into actually voting in an American election, even if it is technicaly illegal.
Worse yet, the "motor voter" laws basically do the voter equivalent of an "opt-out" e-mail spam list. You have to essentially say you don't want to be registered to vote when you apply for a driver's license, and again citizenship isn't necessarily checked too closely. And of course once registered, who is going to question your right to vote? This is precisely why there is such a huge interest in illegal aliens right now in the USA, because they do represent a significant and growing block of voters... no kidding here. Many of the Mexican immigrants do become citizens legally as well, to really compound the situation and complicate the policing of this practice.
One other thing that is also openly encouraged in most American states is the ability to register to vote at the polling location on the day of the election. In fact, that is precisely how I registered to vote myself for the first time, as I signed my name and provided proof of residency (in the form of a college ID card without a picture, just my name). So yeah, you can have people vote who aren't on the election rolls. There are some procedures in many states with this policy to segregate these kind of votes (often called "provisional votes") to verify that the voter is in fact legal to vote, but stuff does come through that causes problems here as well.
There are some movements to try and reform election laws to require proof of citizenship and to help clean up some of this blatant fraud. But it takes time to make changes and the process of change isn't always pretty. Having officials sign everything doesn't necessarily fix any of these problems, and there is plausible denibility on the part of the judges on all of these issues if somebody here is committing voting fraud that make it so the judges haven't necessarily done anything illegal.
In terms of why this comment is marked as a troll.... that was the wrong mod mark to make. I hope the meta-mods fix that and kill the troll moderation. Or somebody else marks this up as at least interesting.
In response to your suggestion that NASA choose the weakest of all possible entries into the COTS-I competition, I don't think that is necessarily the case. The "big boys" (LockMart, Boeing) weren't really interested in the competition and all of the rest of the submissions were far and away weaker than even SpaceX or Kistler. It is a very recent phenomena that anybody other than the "big boys" even had anything capable of getting into space, as almost everybody else building rockets have been mainly hobbyists like John Carmack. And even Carmack is looking to turn his "hobby" into something more resembling a for-profit company eventually. There really is something interesting and unique about the current generation of new space-related companies, and something NASA wanted to tap into when they created the COTS program.
This said, the tone of what you are saying here is mostly correct. I do think there are some politically motivated individuals who would love to see the COTS program fall flat on its face. If Musk succeeds, he is ripping the profit margins out from under the major launching companies and will force a price war of some sort into the rocket launching business. If anything, however, the "big boys" would love to get Elon hooked on the government gravy train as well to keep the prices going down too much.
As for the Ares launcher.... I have deep reservations about it mainly based on NASA's track record. I know about at least five and perhaps as many as a dozen different lanuch systems that got at least as far as Ares is right now (even further along for many of them) and never performed a single manned launch into space. Since the Gemini spacecraft got into space (Apollo was actually pre-Gemini in terms of planning and development) NASA has been able to get precisely one manned launch system into space: The Space Shuttle. That that was pretty much a dismal failure due to a whole bunch of compromises that should have never happened in the first place, and even the Ares spacecraft doesn't build much off of the development of the Shuttle. It is more following on the lines of the Apollo-II and Gemini-II (also called Big Gemini) projects--- both examples of earlier failed efforts by NASA that had actual hardware built but never launched.
NASA certainly seems to be placing a huge bet on Ares, and it is following in the footsteps of every previously failed launcher that has been developed in the past 40 years. I know that there are some outstanding engineers who are working on it right now, so I don't want to completely deride it. But the management of that program does lead me to believe that all of the problems that the Shuttle is facing right now are being repeated again including the atmosphere of mission compromises and the desire to have a space-equivalent of a Swiss Army knife... something that does everything for everybody but not anything very well.
In spite of what you are suggesting here, I do think the COTS program is a poorly designed government program on many levels. There certainly is room to criticize NASA on the approach, and there are some additional methods/objectives that could have been done to help improve the whole program.
Even so, your comments about SpaceX being successful with COTS money are valid. Rocketplane Kistler and their financial model seemed to have been built around the idea that the NASA money would have been the payoff, and not simply some extra money to be earned along the way to a much larger goal. That is precisely what Elon Musk has been doing with SpaceX, as he looked at the NASA money earned this way as "free money" to help make his company even more profitable rather than the end goal of trying to make some money from the program. Rocket science is just too difficult to cut corners like Kistler was doing, and their financial resources simply weren't up to the task.
BTW, I'm curious about where you got the May date for the lanuch of the next Falcon 1? From what I understood, they were technically aiming for last December, but decided to give their engineers a much deserved and needed Christmas break, with the idea to pick up the pace in January for a 1st Quarter 2008 launch. I guess I missed the announcement that pushed this date back, unless you have some "inside" knowledge about SpaceX.
The "failed" launch they did earlier certainly got into space and even into orbit... much higher and faster than Scaled Composites' spacecraft and far and away much more reliable and better results than most of the early Redstone tests NASA did back in the 1950's. And Redstone eventually was a manned vehicle as well, I should add (look up Alan Sheppard and see what he flew in). I mention Scaled Composites simply because a valid criticism of Burton Rutan's spacecraft is that his technology in its current form is incapable of making a genuine leap into LEO due to raw energy requirement.
The earlier problems with the Falcon 1 were genuine engineering mistakes (forgetting some basic chemistry in regards to bolts/nuts on the first flight, and the problem with fuel sloshing in the tanks on the second flight), but those are also problems that can be refined and help to improve the manufacturing process. They are also engineering changes that can be adapted to Falcon 9, which also gives me some genuine hope. I have high confidence that if they can pull off a lanuch of the Falcon 1 successfully, that the Falcon 9 is also going to go up successfully as well. And it is the Falcon 9 that is going to have a much larger impact on the space launch business anyway, not to mention what will be the ultimate validation of the COTS program.
If you can make a human-portable nuclear reactor of any kind (including conventional reactors... or even a quality RTG that has sufficient shielding to be within inches of human reproductive organs), I would love to see it right now!
I just don't see how storage of any quantities of energy in a form denser than high explosive chemicals is going to be safe... and even that stretches the definition of something safe.
I think the concept of both mail-in ballots and e-mail ballots is something that simply horrifies me in terms of voter fraud and the ability to manipulate elections.
I know people from Oregon would strongly disagree with me on this point (they have mail-in ballots that have been used for several years now), but that still doesn't change my mind on the topic or concern me about legitimate issues of voter fraud that a central voting location can help combat.
The issues of voting over the internet involve all of the problems of simple electronic voting machines... compounded with a whole bunch of new issues that I don't even want to get into right now. Let's just say I refuse to accept the results of any election done "over the internet" for anything significant. And yes, I've participated in some successful elections that were done "on line".
Slashdot Mirror
While I'm sure you can find a "dictionary" definition that defines religion as a belief in supernatural or divine power, it usage and impacts on human society can be defined in a much broader fashion that doesn't necessarily require a higher power in your life in order to be slavishly devoted to a philosophy or movement. There are many movements, including environmentalism (to use a very classic example that is but one of a great many) where people have placed incredibly amounts of both time, money, and effort into developing philosophical movement.
That is why I get just as offended at seeing my children participating in Earth Day at the public school as I would with Christmas celebrations. Neither is appropriate, yet guess which one is more widely accepted?
Instead, I would more properly define religion as the often fanatical devotion to a philosophy or political movement. And that would fit with a great many Slashdot readers in a variety of ways that have nothing to do with a belief in God or some other higher power. BTW, the word "fan" is derived legitimately from the word "fanatic", as in "football fan", "soccer fan", or "Linux fan". Don't tell my that the typical SF convention has nothing to do with religion. I've been to enough of them to know differently.
I don't think this is even "watering down the definition of religion" here. I think people do "follow the prophet Jared to Subway" or "follow Steve Jobs" to buy an iPod. For crying out loud, there is a huge group of individuals that take a Sunday sacrament of turning on the television set and watch football games, with annual pilgrimages to things like the Super Bowl.
Yes, this isn't organized religion in a traditional sense, but it is a form of religious service from a more practical angle. BTW, for those who are of a more Christian philosophical background, this is even something that the Bible talks about directly and is even addressed by religious leaders who condemn their followers/congregationalists to stay away from those kinds of religions but to instead follow "the one true religion" and take up the cross.
So no, I don't think this makes religion meaningless, but rather forces you to examine much more closely those aspects of your life and should beg the question: What is your religion? I don't have a problem if you say that the NBA, NFL, NASCAR, FIFA, or other similar group is your religion... but be honest about it here. You may claim to be Christian, but in reality it is likely you place much more devotion to something else, like open source software.
Religion in some form is such a part of what makes us human at all that it isn't surprising that even those who blatantly profess atheism still have a religion of some sort that they still follow even if they don't admit it. Faith and belief are simply a part of what makes us human... even if you have faith and belief in something very different than what I place my faith and belief in.
Hard core atheists who claim that they believe in nobody and profess faith in nothing are likely deluding themselves and others by making this claim. That is the point I was trying to make here, and I would find it an exceptionally rare individual who doesn't place at least some faith in somebody or something other than themselves in some fashion... even if it is just the person they think ought to be the next leader of their country. Or even themselves as that can also be a religion unto itself.
I don't think an absolutely "pure" atheist really exists, but then again that is a religious belief too, as is the contradictory philosophy.
No.... you can profess a religion and still be a professional scientist. I know many very personally who do both.
Instead, I'm trying to come up with a word for true atheists who are also seem to adopt science as their religion... after a sort. In this case the language we are using is too limited to really express the thought completely, but there certainly is a philosophy that science can replace religion. It is an extremist position on a spectra of thought going from the philosophy that God reveals all knowledge through divine revelation to a philosophy that all knowledge can be obtained through scientific reasoning. Most actual scientists are somewhere along that spectra and have some sort of belief in a higher order or being of some sort.
This was mainly to point out that atheism isn't quite so one dimensional as the parent poster was trying to make it sound like.
It sounds like you know less about atheism than I do. Sure, I don't know your particular brand of atheism, nor am I trying here to tell you how you believe (or don't believe).
There are "prophets", but they aren't called prophets. There are "sacred books", but they tend to be things like "Principia Mathematica", "Origin of Species", or other such books. And here I'm not trying to say that you "believe" these books as "the word of God" or other such nonsense, but that there are some writings that are considered more relevant to modern society than others. Certainly in communist countries like the People's Republic of China or the USSR (when that country used to exist), atheism was an official state religion... as much as that went. Mao's "Little Red Book" certainly fits the role of religious scripture with a near deification of Mao's actions (less now in China than earlier, but one of the few "safe" religions in China at the moment).
I have observed "congregations" of atheists that have come together in terms of organizing a social network for the common good. One group in particular that I know gets together mainly to have a community meal (usually a bar-be-que or some other casual meal) on Sundays... not because of religious observances but because that is when most of them have the day off during the weekend. They realize that there is some positive good that can be created from organizing as a group, even though everybody involved is atheistic in their attitudes about religious thought. This same group even organizes fundraisers for community groups like a battered women's shelter and a children's hospital. This kind of activity formally organized by atheists is fairly new I'll admit, but it can and does happen.
As for dogmas and orthodoxy... I guess you haven't studied science enough to realize that this isn't exclusively the domain of religion. Some of the worst dogma fights I've ever seen have been in the Physics community. Just ask fusion researchers. There clearly are "orthodox" dogma advocates and others who are clearly branded heretics. You can be an atheist and still demand orthodoxy.
As much as it is, there are many different brands of atheism, so you professing that you "know the proper path of atheism" as much as you seem to be offering to be the "prophet of all atheists" here. I guess you haven't see Richard Stallman's "St. Richard" speech to see what a true atheistic prophet can actually look like (complete with holy robe and halo... I'm not kidding here either). Atheism is much broader and deeper than you are implying here, and takes on many different forms. And in many cases a push toward atheism does approach the status of a full-fledged religion unto itself.
What you have here does ring true... so far as I have expressed doubts that a Von Neumann architecture is even remotely reasonable for implementation of a artificial intelligence.
Count me in as one of those "nay-sayers" in terms of expressing extreme skepticism that any major breakthrough is possible... and for most of the AI researchers I believe that they are following dead ends of research. I am even more frustrated with researchers pushing avenues like Kismet, but I'll leave that one alone at the moment. At least they are identifying dead-ends even if the caution tape hasn't been put up at the moment.
If you are looking for hiring staff... well, I might be interested if you are looking for somebody who has a very different POV and can think outside of the box. Or if you feel comfortable about introducing these theories to somebody versed in the field... I'm willing to deal with legal BS like NDAs even if necessary. My specialty is more multi-media software development, so you may not be interested, but at least it may be worth a look.
In other words, I'm willing to admit that somebody could come up with genuinely usable AI, but understand that I have some extreme doubts about the process and consider that researchers in this field have promised many great and wonderful things, but have usually fallen short so many times in so many ways that there is a very good reason why there are so many "nay-sayers" about future progress.
BTW, I have considered massively parallel architectures to be one of the keys to solving this problem, and even re-thinking computer architecture down to its basic roots as a necessary step in the process of establishing genuine AI. So many computer science graduates have no clue as to what the operations of a CPU really are any more (assembly programming is nearly dead as a discipline) that I really wonder if future generations are capable of making the cognitive leaps necessary to genuinely advance the field in a necessary manner. Any real breakthroughs are also going to require a multi-disciplinary approach from a great many fields of human experience in order for this to work out. It certainly requires a holistic viewpoint on the universe in order to pull things together.
Something to consider in terms of the scope of human intelligence: You have about as many nerves in your torso as you have in your head, and it is unreasonable to assume that those nerves have nothing to do with cognition. For those people who are accused of "thinking with their stomach", there may be some truth behind that statement as a matter of fact. Or with other anatomical parts of your body.
I know this is very much off topic from the main point of the story, but I can't let this stay here unanswered.
I realize that those who are atheistic in nature don't have religion and gods in their lives, and it is reasonable to presume that somebody without "faith" in a higher being of any kind can still have guiding morals that govern their life.
Still, I have to argue here that there still is a "religion" of atheism, complete with "prophets/oracles", "priests", "congregations", "sacred literature" and other trappings of religion. That it takes other forms and is usually not so formally organized may be true, and even defining "orthodox atheism" can be a bit of a struggle, but all of these do exist. It certainly takes on a philosophical niche that often takes the place of other religious philosophies in terms of guiding principles in your life.
There are also multiple forms of atheism, ranging from "environmentalists" (devotion to environmental causes as a religion), "universalists" (that somehow the whole universe will make sense ultimately), "scientists" (a solid belief that science alone can solve life's problems), "anti-theologists" (opposing any form of organized religion of any kind), and many others. It is very difficult to take such an emotionally charged term like atheism and force any sort of hard stereotypes. But I do argue that you can identify atheism as a religion, including its establishment as a state religion in many cases, and concerns about how it has entered into public institutions forcing out other philosophical viewpoints.
To tie this back to artificial life/intelligence research, I do believe (there is that word somehow showing up) that some sort of religious philosophy will eventually show up in terms of identifying and working with a "soul". I'm defining that "soul" to be the consciousness or intelligence that has an independently operable sphere of influence that can relate with other intelligences, including at a human level of interaction. This isn't to say that such a "soul" can't have a purely scientific explanation either. I also believe that once such artificial intelligences are developed that it will have a tremendous impact on human religion in a large number of ways, including everything ranging from human fealty and devotion to an AI lifeform approaching god-like standing, modification of theological doctrines, to even a view that working with AI lifeforms is a type of blasphemy that should be rooted out of human society (and the source of future wars).
Talking here about predictions of Artificial Intelligence and its state 20 years from now... have you read any of the works by Marvin Minsky and his predictions in the early 1970's? He also made similar predictions that human-like intelligence would be achievable "20 years from now". The 1990's came and went without human-like AI, and here is yet again somebody making almost the same kind of prediction.
And this isn't to completely mark as irrelevant anything that Minsky said about AI in the 1970s or what he has done since then, but to note that the study of intelligence, whether from the perspective of a nano-technology/biology perspective or from a software engineering approach, is still trying to uncover the basic ground rules and understand even the sheer domain of the problem.
If you don't understand the domain... or if the size of the domain keeps expanding... you really don't even know where to begin to solve the problem. I challenge any of the researchers in this field to clearly define even what it means to have human intelligence or what even the intelligence of an earthworm really is. Let's just say that Charles Darwin was sufficiently impressed at the intelligence of an earthworm that he choose to use that species as the foundation block for his study of intelligence. (Yes, I know there are multiple species of earthworms.) And only recently is this aspect of intelligence even being reconsidered.
I do think that a proclamation that we might be able to reach the computational processing level of an earthworm in the next 20 years is reasonable, but even then you had better be extra sure that you understand even the scope and domain of that problem before you claim it is "solved". I for one am still not convinced, in spite of some pretty incredible research about the issue.
Speaking here as a full-time software engineer who has been involved with the computer industry since 1977 (I guess not quite the 40 years you got.... but pretty close) and somebody who has studied artificial intelligence extensively, including reading most of the current literature, and having even implemented many of the algorithms related to current artificial intelligence research I can say one thing about what you just wrote:
You are completely clueless about the topic and this is utter bullshit!
I hate, I repeat, I hate, I hate, and I repeat one more time, I hate it when supposedly knowledgeable individuals like yourself try to pass off predictions in a field that has so often made predictions of achieving human-like intelligence for so long that normally I drown out such predictions and pure drivel and something akin to anti-gravity research and faster-than-light communications. Essentially something written by an individual who has not really read the literature, doesn't really understand the breadth and domain of the problem, and hasn't even a clue about the steps necessary to achieve even reasonable levels of intelligence.
I'm not saying here that the study of Artificial Intelligence isn't a useless field, and that some very remarkable tools have been developed in this quest. There have also been some incredible advances in the study of human intelligence, and even so much as questioning what intelligence really is. It used to mean a highly evolved sense of intelligence to be able to recite back volumes of information or to be able to calculate "massive" equations "in your head" quickly. I guess on this standard, computers have already achieved a huge level of intelligence... and did so in the 1940's I might add here with ENIAC. Even as late as the early 1940s, it was considered an honorable profession to be called a "computer"... meaning somebody who spent the day with paper and pencil making thousands of calculations each day... usually in the generation of mathematical tables like logarithm and sine tables, but sometimes other tasks as well.
What we know now is that genuine intelligence is far more complicated, and involves emotions and other states of being that simple haven't been achieved. While I have no doubt that eventually somebody will build something like A.L.I.C.E. that will pass the "Turing Test" for Artificial Intelligence in the next few years on a cursory level, it will only help to push back the frontiers of our knowledge of what intelligence really is and only lead us to a deeper understanding of the true complexities of human intelligence really are.
What my real pet peeve here is for somebody like yourself to spout off that true Artificial Intelligence "is just around the corner" and about to come true, and somebody who is not well versed in the field like some journalist starts to believe you. Or you start to post something like this where you claim knowledge about the topic when you really don't.
My own prediction: Fifty years from now, we will still be having "knowledgeable individuals" claiming that genuine artificial intelligence is only "20 years away". Just as it was predicted 30 years ago. I don't expect this to happen in my lifetime, or the lifetime of any of my grandchildren. Human civilization on Mars will happen first.
I don't hate all environmentalists, and in fact with your definition, I perhaps consider myself a "conservative environmentalist". More to the point, I am totally supportive of initiatives like the Nature Conservancy and other private groups who seek to preserve natural resources with private money, and admire other similar efforts. Interesting relationships can be found when seeking protection in this manner, including traditional groups like the National Rifle Association, Ducks Unlimited, and other more "right-wing" groups that do have legitimate interests in terms of preserving outdoor resources. Many hunting groups, through licensing fees and membership dues, have also purchased private land holdings that are less likely to be sold for development purposes than even government lands that are adjacent to those properties. Also, most hunting groups... especially on "their own land" that they have a vested interest in preserving, will not over-hunt those properties and will engage in legitimate conservation measures that help to maintain a natural setting for those properties... or even re-forest previous agricultural lands.
As for most commercial forestry (at least in North America), most of the land used by commercial logging companies is privately owned as well. In fact, private land tends to be much better maintained than public lands such as National Forests, and a properly managed forest can actually be more productive from an ecological standpoint by supporting more life forms, supply more wildlife food sources, and help reduce "greenhouse gasses" better by occasionally removing a part of the older growth forests and allowing a fresh start to younger seedlings. Yes, it can be overdone, but again if there is a vested interest in preserving the land, they won't be openly destroying huge swaths of forests to be left alone and ignored.
As for developing countries and their blatant destruction of forests, including in the Amazon basin of Brazil that is getting substantial attention, I believe that is something that will eventually be resolved in some fashion similar to what is happening in North America. The people living in that region of the world vitally depend upon those forests, and hopefully they will awaken to the need for balance and develop a sustainable method of using those forests without abusing them.
The key word here is stewardship, where you need to place people with a vested interest in preserving the land and the environment over specific parcels of land that are governed and managed by people tied to that land and not some government bureaucrat who is working and living in an urban environment thousands of miles away from the land that needs preservation and doesn't really understand the issues involved when new regulations are developed.
While I will agree that solar radiation flux temperatures (aka the heat that hits the Earth due to solar energy) is perhaps one of the major driving forces for what is causing temperature changes to the overall climate of this planet, I can't claim that it is the primary cause of global warming/cooling.
Nor can I suggest that anthroprogenic "greenhouse gas emissions" are the primary cause either.
There are so many different things that can cause a heating and/or cooling of the Earth's atmosphere and influence climate that to single out a specific cause is just a shot in the dark at best.
And just as there is a seasonal lag due to summer and winter (the winter and summer solstices are usually not the annual temperature extreme dates), there is also a lag in the environment due to overall global temperature changes that are impacted from various climatological influences.
Shy of the sun just "shutting off" altogether, I highly doubt that you notice any substantial changes in solar radiation for perhaps several years. And this isn't taking into consideration that the atmosphere of the Sun itself also is a huge energy sink that can dissipate energy and act as a moderator to the activities in the solar core.
The global climate is incredibly complex, and attempts to simplify the models and enact public policy or legislation based upon these models is incredibly naive on the part of environmental activists and simply can't be said to be based upon sound scientific foundations.
While I don't want to make light of what he did, nor show any approval over his actions that got him in trouble with the American legal system (which he was legitimately prosecuted over), I do admire the minimal lifestyle that Theodore Kaczynski lived while he was "evading" the police.
IMHO this is about the minimal lifestyle that is currently possible for anybody still even remotely connected to the U.S. economy. He lived in a rural part of a large state that has relatively low property taxes, lived without electricity and other "utilities" (being essentially "off the grid" as it is sometimes said), used "public" transportation (mainly inter-urban buses in his case), and grew his own food.
It could be argued that he lived this style because of some sort of psychosis or other mental disease, but I don't think that this has to be the case to live this sort of lifestyle. People, very sane and rational people, have been living like this for millenia throughout Europe... usually in monestaries. I will say, however, it is a lousy environment to raise children, who do need a certain amount of money in terms of being "plugged into society" a bit more in order to give them choices and options when they get older.
On the other side of the coin, I also think that those who are billionaires don't really need the money, and are really pushing their lifestyles to an extreme of excess. This isn't to say that I necessarily think they should have their wealth confiscated by some stupid bureaucrat who thinks they have a better way to spend that money, but at the same time, after sitting on a solid gold toilet and eating Italian food flown in fresh from Rome, and Chinese food from Beijing the next day... how much can you possibly spend to stay alive? There does reach a point that you are simply throwing money away just for fun... or instead are playing some sort of perverse game with other billionaires.
The one thing that wealth does provide that poverty doesn't is options... you can choose to live a lifestyle of meagerness and simplicity if you want to when you have wealth, but it is much harder to choose to live a lifestyle of unbounded freedoms that come with wealth if you don't have any. You also have the opportunity to do a whole lot of good in this world if you have wealth that otherwise you simply can't do if you are without access to resources otherwise.
I should also add here that in spite of the minimalistic lifestyle of Ted Kaczynski, he caused far more resources of nearly every kind you can think of (including oil extraction, strip mining, paper production, etc.) due to the sheer number of people involved by the FBI to try and identify and later prosecute him due to his criminal actions. In terms of his impact on the environment of the Earth, it certainly was a larger negative impact than your typical American citizen... or perhaps even that of most billionaires.
I dare you to name a major, fully industrialized country that has population growth at all.
Russia? USA? EU? All of them have substantial population declines. The USA has population growth only because of immigration, and even that is expected to end... even with uncontrolled immigration from Mexico... by 2030.
If you look at a list of countries by GDP and compare that to a list of country by birthrate, you can see a direct comparison between the two, with the lowest income countries having the highest birth rate. But that's not all! You also find that as countries industrialize and develop their economies, their birth rate drops as they go to higher income ranges for their population, and the urban and more highly paid workers tend to have substantially lower birth rates than rural and poorer regions of even the same country.
Yeah, the population change in western countries is alarming... due to its negative growth rate! And I wouldn't worry about China or India as the overall trend of their birthrates is also declining at a substantial rate. Chinese birthrates have almost declined to a stable population right now, with admittedly draconian birth control measures in place to skew the picture on how much the wealth situation is impacting the birth rate. I believe that in time, China will be reversing their policies and be more like Russia that actually pays mothers to stay home and raise their children, with cash bonuses to bear children.
Check your facts before you post such drivel next time.
They were contested because they were incredibly close elections. Politically America is split into several different philosophical camps, and none of them have a strong and overwhelming command over the general population.
If you are thinking about the elections that George W. Bush were involved with.... in spite of some of the screamers on the internet and a few media outlets that would have you believe otherwise, Bush actually had some fairly widespread support across America to become President. He also had a huge number of people who didn't want him there, which I guess is a part of the problem.
If there is an overwhelmingly popular candidate, you don't need to worry about how to deal with splitting hairs to determine the final winner. But in the 2000 and 2004 elections, that is what was needed as the elections were close enough in terms of the vote count that you had to dive into the minutae of how elections actually counted votes and reliability issues in order to find the final answer in terms of who actually won and took control over the government. THAT is why the issue of electronic voting was brought up in the first place, as it was presumed that electronic voting machines would ensure more honesty and improve the counting accuracy over the previous methods of counting votes. You may be able to debate that issue, but "the powers that be" in America have made that decision and are looking at software and electrical engineers to help save the day. The rest of this is if perhaps an open source solution might be found and why or why not.
For myself, as an engineer, I would have to say that most "creation" is a combination of both hard work and a series of sometimes small and occasionally large scale eureka moments.
I like the term "grok" coined by Heinlein as a verb meaning "to comprehend a topic or concept completely". Sometimes it is very difficult to completely grok something in the problem domain you are working in. If you are at the frontier of human knowledge (in whatever endeavor that may be... science, engineering, theology, politics, art, etc.) it is very unlikely that there is anybody who completely understands some new theory or concept... which is where the intellectual "fun" of being a genuine scientist tends to be at.
I remember for myself when I was trying to work on a bit of multiplexor code for an MPEG video stream engine (it was actually stuff for DVD-Video, so a bit more complex still), I finally hit upon a eureka moment when I finally figured out how to put everything together and write a small bit of very elegant software to solve the problem. Much of this involved reading and pondering through the specifications and trying to understand the problem domain, and I did write some test code to try a few ideas out. But in the end I scrapped all of the old code and with a "clean sheet" started the whole process all over again from scratch with the core part of the software only being written in about 10 minutes. It took me about 4 months to get there, and to an outside observer (such as one of the investors of the company I was working for) it would appear as though I was just wasting time and money to get to that point. The only productivity for actual code written was in that 10 minutes after I finally got the whole concept down. A co-worker wrote a similar bit of software that was insanely buggy but kluged through in just six weeks (instead of 4 months... a concurrent effort here), but then again it was a never ending process of trying to fix one problem after another in that klugged code. My software didn't have to be touched again when I was through, and was incredibly easy to review for bugs as well (like I said... it only took about 10 minutes to write once I got the concept down).
I could give countless other examples ranging from simple to very complex problems, and I'll say from experience that such moments do happen. But it also takes a whole bunch of preparation that often goes unnoticed, and can tie together completely unrelated fields of knowledge. In the example of the multiplexor above, my "eureka moment" came while I was doing an engine repair in a ten year old car with a bad water pump. I was able to take that thought process of automotive repair and apply it to software development and a 400 page piece of very dry specification language.
Another analogy is watching a beaker of super-saturated chemical solution suddenly "precipitate" leaving a bunch of stuff at the bottom of the beaker. It may take some considerable preparation to get to that point, but once there, the "action" happens very quickly. The human mind often works in a very similar fashion with regards to "discovering" a new truth about the universe. For those who have never experienced something like this happen in their life, you are genuinely missing out on an experience that IMHO is better than sex.
I don't think you understand the problem domain here, nor the fact that regardless of how you cut it and even force people at gunpoint (what I think you are suggesting here with making it mandatory to participate in being an election judge... the rest is semantics on how it happens) to participate is mostly allocation of scarce resources, and encouraging citizen participation in the governance process.
America has had participatory citizen governance for well over 300 years.... back when it was likely your country was an absolute divine-right monarchy. I don't know specifics of your country as I don't even know what country you are referring to here, but that was the dominant governance form in the world at the end of the 17th Century when the American colonies of England (what became the USA) decided to genuinely involve citizens at nearly every level of government. And something surprisingly different than what was even the case in England, as every immigrant was desperately needed to help build a new country.
What you see now in America is the end result of those centuries of tradition. It works for us and in fact is part of what America is today. That there are people disillusioned by the process is true, and there are problems with the election process as well in America, but the problems you are trying to address here are not where the real issues lay. Whether you "draft" people as poll workers or offer financial incentives to take on the position (as is common in America) it is a costly process to hold an election. In many ways, the voting machines are in place to help make it cheaper and to concentrate labor to where the real problems are at: voting fraud detection and verification of voter status. Vote counting is something that can and should be automated, particularly for elections as complicated as those in America.
Keep in mind that many of the politicians who are currently in office were elected under the fraudulent system, so there isn't really a strong motivation to get the system fixed when fixing the election laws will get somebody else voted into office but leaving things broken will keep the current office holders in place.
And touching the voting process in any way is always a political act, where unfortunately many of those involved with the changes are not necessarily looking at ideals but rather how it will help their political party or themselves personally.
Having witnessed Brazilian elections first hand, this doesn't inspire too much confidence in me. I admire a great many things about Brazil (your banking system is decades ahead of America... seriously!) but corruption and election fraud, at least for São Paulo (where I witnessed some national elections first hand) has voting fraud that would make a Chicago politician turn white. It is much improved over problems Brazil has had in the past, but it isn't perfect by any means.
One thing to keep in mind is that American states are significantly more independent of the federal government than Brazilian states. The U.S. Federal Constitution is also limited in its authority to act in this situation, and the election process is done on a state by state basis. Yes, individual counties are sometimes given authority by their respective state governments to try different voting methods as well, but the ultimate authority rests on the state governments.
In the last U.S. Presidential general election, it took me about 5 minutes to cast my ballot. I'm telling you that the process to vote in America is at least an order of magnitude more complicated than a typical Brazilian experience, and most Americans don't vote "straight ticket" by voting for just one political party. The trend in America is also to push more stuff at the voters, not less, including some rather complicated legislation that normally would have been dealt with in the past by professional legislators. California tends to take this approach to an extreme, but other states are following this example as well.
I will say here in defense of other Brazilians who have made commentaries like this, that Brazil is perhaps the one country that has the best comparison in terms of multiple levels of governance and the size of the population that at least a reasonable comparison can be made between the two countries. Most Europeans don't even remotely comprehend the scope of the problems involved in such a broad election such as is done in the USA every two years.
There are OCR fonts that do a very good job with displaying information in a human-readable format that are also very legible in terms of having them machine-readable at the same time. IMHO I would have to agree that a bar code is the very wrong sort of thing to be putting onto machine-prepared ballots.
Of course I've been a strong advocate of machine-assisted ballot preparation and not for having the counting in the voting booth. The process of counting votes has a completely different domain challenge and simply shouldn't be merged in with the process of creating the ballot in the first place. I have no idea why these issues are muddled together... and one of the reasons I hate the Diebold machines.
While I'm not this poor schmuck, my wife sometimes gets stuck with the onerous task of hand-counting votes for elections that aren't quite so complicated as a Presidential general election. Most of these tend to be a contest for a small-town mayor or some other similar contest where there is only one or two races on the ballot, or something like a school bond election.
Keep in mind that most of the people who are voting judges tend to be senior citizens, who frankly suffer slightly from dementia and other ailments common with advancing age. They tend to be people with free time, and generally manning a polling location isn't that difficult of a task. So are you really trusting the voting results to a bunch of people who can barely remember your name five minutes after you told it to them? In saying this I'm not saying my wife is a senior citizen, as she is in her 30's, but most of the people who she does work with are quite grey and tend to be retirees. This job does tend to be skewed for the elderly.
A true story is how my wife (since she is young enough and has done this for some time, is even head judge) sat down with her crew and counted out the ballots for one of these hand count races for nearly three hours after the polling location closed. All of the judges were given the full stack of ballots (they tried to count different stacks of ballots in a rotation to try and speed up the process) and then tried to compare the counts when they were done. Out of five judges, all five got completely different counts for all candidates. There was a "statistical average" for that precinct, but that is all it was. After dealing with this for yet another hour, (it was after midnight by this point in time), she simply got the other judges to sort of compromise between a rough average of what the counts were at... as they finally got the count within 10 votes for each candidate. The judges agreed and then signed the "official results" with the compromise tally. It didn't seem to impact the results of the election by being off by 10 votes, but that isn't always the case. That really inspired confidence in me that my vote really counted for anything. I guess it does in the long run, but I certainly understand the real need for recount laws after seeing this whole thing.
This is a tough problem. I asked my wife.... "How long would it take for you to process a Presidential general election with your crew by hand counting?" She looked at me real funny like I was trying to crack a joke, and then simply said "I'd just burn the ballots and pretend it never happened in the first place." She really didn't even want to think about the problems she would face in such a situation. After pressing her, she finally admitted that it would take several days or even weeks to count the results, and she wouldn't really trust the results either from her own precinct. She and I get into arguments over the reliability and accuracy of the Diebold machines she uses now, but openly admits that they are much better than what a hand count could ever possibly be. On this point and seeing her fellow poll workers, I'd have to agree.
I don't know how you can legitimately say such a thing. There clearly are some very compelling problems that come from the current voting process that the electronic voting methods are trying to address. Or more to the point, consider the current problem domain:
I don't know what you have been taught in your history classes, but voting methods to reach these goals have changed considerably in the past 200 years. I mention this requirement domain as it is what seems to be current goals sought after by most election clerks and policy makers in the USA... not that I'm necessarily mentioning any specific law here.
Off the top of my head I can name over a dozen different voting methods that have been used and discontinued over the years. Some form of electronic voting is certainly new, but it isn't even the first mechanical voting system used. What newer voting methods (including electronic voting ideas) provide is a chance to get closer to a "perfect" voting system... even if that isn't necessarily possible.
Back when voting was done by landed gentry in a public meeting where every voter would "announce" their votes verbally, I'm not so sure that they would even understand the current set of voting problems facing the USA today. But that isn't the method used any more, even though it was the voting method over 200 years ago. Surprisingly it is still done in some cases in the USA in some special but limited circumstances, but isn't the situation for a typical general election.
As far as dead people voting in elections.... well, they are on the election rolls. Their names just haven't been removed after they died. And of course this implies that somebody used the name and identity of this dead person in order to vote. Perhaps more than once and in more than one voting precinct. Yes this is illegal, but many precinct judges openly encouraged this practice for decades and is a common practice in the USA. Honest poll workers do remove these names and try to keep this fraud from happening, but with hundreds of thousands of voting precincts, some dishonesty does occur.
As for illegal aliens voting... the problem here is insane voting laws where you can register to vote but you aren't really required to prove citizenship... just residency of some sort. For some really weird reason, U.S. federal election laws specifically prohibit some sort of citizenship test and prohibit showing of national identification cards (like a driver's license) as proof of citizenship. This dates back to abuses in the "old south" where state election laws were written in such a way to prohibit blacks from voting and federal laws had to come in and reverse this blatant discrimination. If you have an American sounding name and have lived in the USA for more than 30 days, it is likely that you could at least bluff your way into actually voting in an American election, even if it is technicaly illegal.
Worse yet, the "motor voter" laws basically do the voter equivalent of an "opt-out" e-mail spam list. You have to essentially say you don't want to be registered to vote when you apply for a driver's license, and again citizenship isn't necessarily checked too closely. And of course once registered, who is going to question your right to vote? This is precisely why there is such a huge interest in illegal aliens right now in the USA, because they do represent a significant and growing block of voters... no kidding here. Many of the Mexican immigrants do become citizens legally as well, to really compound the situation and complicate the policing of this practice.
One other thing that is also openly encouraged in most American states is the ability to register to vote at the polling location on the day of the election. In fact, that is precisely how I registered to vote myself for the first time, as I signed my name and provided proof of residency (in the form of a college ID card without a picture, just my name). So yeah, you can have people vote who aren't on the election rolls. There are some procedures in many states with this policy to segregate these kind of votes (often called "provisional votes") to verify that the voter is in fact legal to vote, but stuff does come through that causes problems here as well.
There are some movements to try and reform election laws to require proof of citizenship and to help clean up some of this blatant fraud. But it takes time to make changes and the process of change isn't always pretty. Having officials sign everything doesn't necessarily fix any of these problems, and there is plausible denibility on the part of the judges on all of these issues if somebody here is committing voting fraud that make it so the judges haven't necessarily done anything illegal.
In terms of why this comment is marked as a troll.... that was the wrong mod mark to make. I hope the meta-mods fix that and kill the troll moderation. Or somebody else marks this up as at least interesting.
In response to your suggestion that NASA choose the weakest of all possible entries into the COTS-I competition, I don't think that is necessarily the case. The "big boys" (LockMart, Boeing) weren't really interested in the competition and all of the rest of the submissions were far and away weaker than even SpaceX or Kistler. It is a very recent phenomena that anybody other than the "big boys" even had anything capable of getting into space, as almost everybody else building rockets have been mainly hobbyists like John Carmack. And even Carmack is looking to turn his "hobby" into something more resembling a for-profit company eventually. There really is something interesting and unique about the current generation of new space-related companies, and something NASA wanted to tap into when they created the COTS program.
This said, the tone of what you are saying here is mostly correct. I do think there are some politically motivated individuals who would love to see the COTS program fall flat on its face. If Musk succeeds, he is ripping the profit margins out from under the major launching companies and will force a price war of some sort into the rocket launching business. If anything, however, the "big boys" would love to get Elon hooked on the government gravy train as well to keep the prices going down too much.
As for the Ares launcher.... I have deep reservations about it mainly based on NASA's track record. I know about at least five and perhaps as many as a dozen different lanuch systems that got at least as far as Ares is right now (even further along for many of them) and never performed a single manned launch into space. Since the Gemini spacecraft got into space (Apollo was actually pre-Gemini in terms of planning and development) NASA has been able to get precisely one manned launch system into space: The Space Shuttle. That that was pretty much a dismal failure due to a whole bunch of compromises that should have never happened in the first place, and even the Ares spacecraft doesn't build much off of the development of the Shuttle. It is more following on the lines of the Apollo-II and Gemini-II (also called Big Gemini) projects--- both examples of earlier failed efforts by NASA that had actual hardware built but never launched.
NASA certainly seems to be placing a huge bet on Ares, and it is following in the footsteps of every previously failed launcher that has been developed in the past 40 years. I know that there are some outstanding engineers who are working on it right now, so I don't want to completely deride it. But the management of that program does lead me to believe that all of the problems that the Shuttle is facing right now are being repeated again including the atmosphere of mission compromises and the desire to have a space-equivalent of a Swiss Army knife... something that does everything for everybody but not anything very well.
In spite of what you are suggesting here, I do think the COTS program is a poorly designed government program on many levels. There certainly is room to criticize NASA on the approach, and there are some additional methods/objectives that could have been done to help improve the whole program.
Even so, your comments about SpaceX being successful with COTS money are valid. Rocketplane Kistler and their financial model seemed to have been built around the idea that the NASA money would have been the payoff, and not simply some extra money to be earned along the way to a much larger goal. That is precisely what Elon Musk has been doing with SpaceX, as he looked at the NASA money earned this way as "free money" to help make his company even more profitable rather than the end goal of trying to make some money from the program. Rocket science is just too difficult to cut corners like Kistler was doing, and their financial resources simply weren't up to the task.
BTW, I'm curious about where you got the May date for the lanuch of the next Falcon 1? From what I understood, they were technically aiming for last December, but decided to give their engineers a much deserved and needed Christmas break, with the idea to pick up the pace in January for a 1st Quarter 2008 launch. I guess I missed the announcement that pushed this date back, unless you have some "inside" knowledge about SpaceX.
The "failed" launch they did earlier certainly got into space and even into orbit... much higher and faster than Scaled Composites' spacecraft and far and away much more reliable and better results than most of the early Redstone tests NASA did back in the 1950's. And Redstone eventually was a manned vehicle as well, I should add (look up Alan Sheppard and see what he flew in). I mention Scaled Composites simply because a valid criticism of Burton Rutan's spacecraft is that his technology in its current form is incapable of making a genuine leap into LEO due to raw energy requirement.
The earlier problems with the Falcon 1 were genuine engineering mistakes (forgetting some basic chemistry in regards to bolts/nuts on the first flight, and the problem with fuel sloshing in the tanks on the second flight), but those are also problems that can be refined and help to improve the manufacturing process. They are also engineering changes that can be adapted to Falcon 9, which also gives me some genuine hope. I have high confidence that if they can pull off a lanuch of the Falcon 1 successfully, that the Falcon 9 is also going to go up successfully as well. And it is the Falcon 9 that is going to have a much larger impact on the space launch business anyway, not to mention what will be the ultimate validation of the COTS program.
If you can make a human-portable nuclear reactor of any kind (including conventional reactors... or even a quality RTG that has sufficient shielding to be within inches of human reproductive organs), I would love to see it right now!
I just don't see how storage of any quantities of energy in a form denser than high explosive chemicals is going to be safe... and even that stretches the definition of something safe.
I think the concept of both mail-in ballots and e-mail ballots is something that simply horrifies me in terms of voter fraud and the ability to manipulate elections.
I know people from Oregon would strongly disagree with me on this point (they have mail-in ballots that have been used for several years now), but that still doesn't change my mind on the topic or concern me about legitimate issues of voter fraud that a central voting location can help combat.
The issues of voting over the internet involve all of the problems of simple electronic voting machines... compounded with a whole bunch of new issues that I don't even want to get into right now. Let's just say I refuse to accept the results of any election done "over the internet" for anything significant. And yes, I've participated in some successful elections that were done "on line".