If you tried claiming that the federal elections were being rigged, people would think you were mad unless you had some incredibly good
You can't say that in the USA. Rigged elections are incredibly commonplace... with it being an "open secret" that dead people voting in Chicago gave JFK the U.S. Presidency over Nixon. This is the land where "vote early and vote often" is an often heard mantra.
With illegal aliens voting and homeless people in Seattle turning out in record numbers (in fact... having more votes cast than registered voters), yeah, there are a few problem. I guess Australia is just a bit more tame in terms of the election process.
This isn't to say that there aren't very honorable election judges in America... there are, but in a country this big it is very difficult to root out all of the corruption.
By 'the last war' I was referring to the 'cold war', if you'd read the article I was talking about that would have been clear. In Britain what you call the 'Falkland Islands War' was called the 'Falkland Islands Conflict' at the time.
I did read the article, and the author did mention both various Cold War scenarios for conquest of the British Isles by Russia as well as explicit mention of the Falkland Islands campaign. While the Cold War may have been theoretically useful, it was the engagement in the Falkland Islands that naval doctrine was proven in open warfare.
I would have to agree with his conclusion that reliance upon hardened capital ships and ignoring other modalities of naval warfare (such as submarine and air attacks) is colossal ignorance on the top brass of navies throughout the world. Perhaps the U.S. Navy learned more from the Falkland Islands campaign than the UK Royal Navy. If that is so, that is truly unfortunate. I know for a fact that there were several capital ships that were either scrapped or massively redesigned after that particular "conflict" by the U.S. Navy, and the Russians also modified some of their naval doctrines after that war as well.
I was mainly pointing out that something the UK ought to be seriously looking at is to re-fight the Falkland Islands campaign (or "Conflict") at some point in the future... and that would not be foolish money spent into a black hole either. A similar task force would have been very useful in Iraq, and there are many UK territories throughout the world that might be vulnerable if neighbors thought they could get some easy additional territory without too much of a fight. Regardless of Argentine claims to the Falklands, it was a war that needed to be fought in order to keep other people's hands off of still more UK territories.
What you are saying here is so true that I wish I could frame your post here. The +3 moderation was very well deserved in this case.
If you think back to the 2000 U.S. Presidential election, one of the huge problems was that Al Gore originally conceded the election, then tried to "take back" his concession. Ignoring all of the minor squabbling in Florida and the embarrassing U.S. Supreme Court case that set an unconstitutional precedent, the real problem in that election was an issue of very close results between two men of very different visions for the future of a major political entity. The stakes couldn't have been higher, and there were fanatically loyal supporters for both major candidates (Bush and Gore). Fanaticism that would translate to bearing arms against one another if the opportunity provided itself.
It isn't even unknown in U.S. history for people to take up arms because of a disagreement in the results of a presidential election either. The most infamous of these elections was the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln, where South Carolina simply refused to accept the election of Lincoln as their President, and choose to take up arms as an act of defiance against the new "government" that Lincoln brought into Washington D.C. Not only that, but they were successful in convincing many of their neighbors to do the same thing. Yes, there were many issues that went into play here, but my point is that bearing arms because of a lack of confidence in the election process has a precedent and tradition in the USA. And one that shouldn't be dismissed and ignored thinking we are oh so much more civilized and better educated today than America was in the 1860's. Right.
It was a concern of mine that Al Gore was going to continue to fight and contest the election results... and that the end-game was either concession on the part of Bush or Gore... or simply open warfare over the issue. I have no idea what a President Thurmond (who would have technically become president if the election couldn't be decided between Gore and Bush) would have done in such an unusual situation, but I don't think it would have been pretty... and could have gone a whole bunch of different ways. It certainly wouldn't be useful. (An interesting alternative timeline story as well.)
I simply don't know what the results of a thrown election would be if there were widespread belief in America that one political group cooked the books on an election and threw out trust in the process. With massive riots in major U.S. cities over things like an unpopular jury verdict or simply winning a major sports championship, I can't even imagine what would happen over something so fundamental as deciding who the next President would be weren't accepted.
Change the location from a library to the local county clerk's office, and you have (more or less) what is currently being done in Utah. Well, except for the fact that the machine is designed and built by Diebold and runs on Microsoft Windows. There is early voting so you can vote whenever you want up until election day... when the machines are all moved out to individual voting precincts.
There are still several issues you haven't dealt with in this "proposal", and it isn't as simple as it seems. But this is a nice try. Keep up thinking along these lines, and you may have a proper solution.
I couldn't have said it better. Yes, I consider the Diebold machines to be nothing more than fancy and updated versions of those old tyme voting machines originally made in the 1930's. And subject to the same sorts of problems and voting irregularities that caused them to be removed in the first place.
In fact, using the traditional red handle and candidate levers might actually be an improvement over some of the variations of voting machines I've seen... at least in terms of a reasonable user interface.
While I understand number theory sufficiently to be able to grok what you are trying to suggest here... I think you are taking a minor problem in the election process and blowing it out of proportion. And you are undermining the confidence building process that comes from a democratic election process by scrambling data up through numerical algorithms.
The average voter really doesn't care... and is usually ignorant of mathematical processes. Yes, they have to rely upon a somewhat complicated mathematical algorithm that computes their wages each time they get a paycheck, but then again that is because a gun is pointed at their head if they refuse to go through the process... or they are told that they simply won't have employment if they refuse to have the deductions taken out of their paycheck. The average voter has difficulty adding and subtracting 4 digit numbers... so please take that into consideration when trying to complicate the process. I'm not trying to be snooty here, but rather realistic and look at the problems involved.
Voting is such a foundational principle of modern society that realistic solutions need to be found that can improve the confidence rather than make it worse. This proposal doesn't fill the problem domain, but rather expands the problem domain instead.
I agree that hand-counting of paper ballots introduces unnecessary errors into the process. But what is wrong with paper ballots that can be simultaneously human and machine readable? The machine readable part is for fast and accurate tabulation... which is what I thought was the primary goal of this whole process anyway. The human readable part is to instill confidence with the voter that they understand precisely how they voted and how their vote is going to count. Establishing ballot standards so equipment from multiple companies and completely different equipment design teams can achieve identical results in the tabulation should be the goal... not the preservation of the electronic version of the ballot.
I also agree that if the ballot is preserved electronically rather than on a physical medium like paper, that it simply must be stored cryptographically. Of that I am in agreement with you. But I think the fallacy you are ignoring here is that the electronic version of the ballot is the only possible means to efficiently count ballots. It is this premise that I disagree with you on, and consider the electronic version of the ballot to be merely a copy of the original, that can and should be on paper until our society becomes significantly more competent technologically than it currently is.
Frankly I think that the U.S. Electoral College system protected America in 2000 from an even worse catastrophe had the presidential election been a direct vote. As it was, the hard review of the voting process was done in just a couple of counties in Florida, rather than trying to reopen (and recount) the votes in all 50 states simultaneously.
That would have been a nightmare of having to deal with lawsuits based on different issues for all 50 states simultaneously... and to get all of them resolved and decide upon a winner before the new president was to be sworn into office.
I guess you wanted Strom Thrumond to have been the U.S. President instead.... who was next in line in terms of presidential succession if George W. Bush wouldn't have been selected due to indecisions in the voting process with the 2000 election.
I will say there is a ring of truth to what you are saying. I ran for the position of a municipal counsel seat this past year, and I would have to say that the minimum for even being a viable candidate is about $2,000-$3000 that you have to spend. I had far less than that (actually, I spent about $50 total). I garnered about 20% of the vote for the office I was seeking, which IMHO was pretty dang good considering how much I spent.
Becoming a state representative would be in the realm of about $10,000-$50,000 where I live (a smallish state) which translates into about 50 cents to $1 per voter, or close to $5 per voter actually in the voting booth. I would have to say that is a comparable figure on the federal level as well, if you take into account larger numbers of people involved... and with about 100 million voters in the USA... spending 1/2 billion dollars on the presidential election seems to be pretty cheap on the whole. Most viable candidate for U.S. President tend to spend less than this amount, but I expect it to be pretty close to this figure by November.
I've said this before, I'll say it again, and I don't think most people will get it except perhaps among those here on Slashdot and other geek forums:
Electronic vote counting simply doesn't belong at the voting booth.
Instead, what should happen at the voting booth should be ballot preparation, not vote counting. I have absolutely no problem with a fancy machine that has cool graphics and touch screen voting options in a thousand different languages. If you want to go through the effort of putting that together for a somewhat reasonable price, knock your socks off. I don't even mind this end of it being completely closed and propritary.
But the vote counting part needs to be separated from the ballot preparation. The only thing all of this fancy hardware is really doing is to assist a voter in understanding the rules of the election. In other words, not vote for multiple people if multiple votes invalidate your ballot, remind you of races that you didn't vote in, allow you to clearly note who you are voting for (no missing chads or fuzzy and inconclusive ballots), and provide a very clean ballot that election judges can use later for the vote counting process. Ballots cast should be on some sort of physical medium that has irreversible marks (so an election judge can't modify the results afterward) and human readable so the voter can have clear confidence in how their vote was cast. Any computer scientist worthy of that title ought to be able to figure out how to make something simultaneously human and machine readable... we aren't talking rocket science here and this is a decades old solved problem in the field.
One of my largest problems with the Diebold machines is that they have the vote counting take place in the voting booth itself. This opens up not only the traditional forms of voting fraud, but it also opens up new vectors of attacking the system and requires far too much in the way of securing the machines in order to ensure the integrity of the data. Besides, most of the security protocols aren't followed anyway, and those that are followed are a joke in many cases and have multiple methods of being circumvented. By its very nature at least in America, voting is done in private and away from the eyes of election judges. This is also done to ensure the integrity of the vote cast (by stopping coercion). But this act, by its nature, means that the machines can be compromised during the act of voting itself.
Let's look at what problems these machines are trying to solve:
Mechanical Voting Machine - these are from the 1930's and a few from even earlier. You press a lever and the vote is counted through some mechanical process. These have been notorious for breaking down during the middle of an election, or have the results manipulated by voting judges through multiple means. All states got rid of these machines decades ago, and for a very good reasons... yet the current Diebold machines (and others like them) simply are identical to these sort of voting machines but remade in the era of modern electronics. Every problem associated with mechanical voting machines can be found on the Diebold machines... and more.
Punch-out Ballots - These received notoriety during the 2000 U.S. Presidential election when inconclusive ballots were cast, and rampant election judge tampering also took place. A common tactic in some areas where these were used was to punch through previously cast ballots to try and add some extra votes. Several methods of doing this were involved, and the "hanging chad" problem was actually a sign that such voting fraud occurred. This also suffered from mechanical break downs where a ballot could be cast, but a voter wouldn't necessarily know that their votes were invalid or inconclusive.
Pencil bubble fill ballots - If you have ever taken a college admission test of some sort, you are more than likely familiar with these sort of ballots. This is where you have a little bubble or circle that yo
Does the United Kingdom's Royal Navy (there is no "British Navy") prepare to re-fight the Falkland Islands War again? If that is the case, there may be something legitimate in terms of having UK ships be able to engage in a naval war on the other side of the world to defend its last remaining colonial outposts. There aren't that many of them (remaining colonies), but on occasion there are challenges both political and militarily to take them away from the UK by other governments. The UK does need to be able to bare its teeth against would-be aggressors and remind people that they are a nuclear power that shouldn't be screwed with.
As a side note, the Falkland Islands Campaign is one of the most recent naval engagements that involved large scale navies and ship to ship combat. I can't begin to count how many lessons were learned by naval engineers on ship design that have been accounted for in newer classes of ships in both the U.S. Navy and the Royal Navy. Capital ships were lost by both the UK (the HMS Sheffield) and Argentina (the ARA General Belgrano).
While naval technology certainly has changed a bit from this era of fighting ships, it wasn't really that long ago and most of the current naval combat doctrines can find significant examples both in support and against those theories in that conflict. It certainly is studied very closely at the U.S. Naval Academy and other naval colleges around the world. Even more recent changes to combat theory really do need to be tested in actual combat conditions before they are confirmed to work... and I'm glad that they haven't really been tested.
As to if the Royal Navy could put up a similar challenge to their territory in some far-flung place at the moment, I'll leave that up to military planners and UK citizens to debate that philosophy.
the price of sequencing a human genome has dropped from hundreds of millions of dollars to about $10,000
Wow, sign me up. Last time I check (today) it costs about $1,000,000 to sequence a human genome.
Is that the equipment and supplies, or does that include labor costs?
The costs for sequencing have certainly dropped significantly over the years, and can be compared to Moore's law at that. The rest is just extraction of data from a storage medium (DNA).
If you have the $1 million USD available, I'll help broker you to sequence your DNA today. For $10 K, I might still be able to find somebody, but it will take a bit longer. I don't think this figure is that far off as you are indicating here.
One mistake and we wipe out all life as we know it.
Oh, come off it. Don't you understand even the basics of genetics here?
Almost all "mistakes" in genetics will result in a crippling nature to nearly any genome. Even if you succeed somehow in making a "mistake" that is going to be in the long run something beneficial to a particular genome, how is that any different than the billions or trillions of similar kinds of "genetic mistakes" that happen like this all of the time in nature every day?
In addition, this quest for a minimalistic genome is also going to be something that will be very easily killed outside of a laboratory. Assuming that you actually take this artificial genome and create a completely unique artificial prokaryote, it will still lack most of the genetic defenses that the rest of life on Earth has developed over billions of years. Or assuming that "God" created us in 7 "days", he still provided protections against this sort of thing happening and going amok.
In short, this is an overblown claim that simply won't happen, and is completely unjustified to even suggest in the first place.
I agree that some intelligence behind genetic manipulation may create a sort of monster like some of the very dangerous computer virii that have been developed... but even those have required some considerable thought about how they were put together and designed, and even in the case of computer virii a simple "mistake" will more than likely make it not work.
This is an exceedingly "safe" line of scientific research. Don't get your panties in a bunch here and certainly don't go alarmist on anybody unless you have really developed a rational argument against this sort of research.
Why is a minimal genome unproductive? I don't "get it" when you make such a blanket statement like this.
Yes, we do need to come up with understanding more of the structure of DNA sequences, but some significant work has already been done along those lines. We certainly understand what sequences of DNA are needed to produce a given amino acid in the protein building process, and have certainly identified specific proteins that are in a genetic sequence. While still "cutting edge science", it isn't exactly an "unsolved problem" in genetics.
Still, I would have to admit that there is some missing information in decyphering genetic sequences. And it will take somebody with strong cross-discipline skills to figure out the problem you are talking about here.
I expect that the quest to build a complete genome/artificial procaryote will eventually lead to understand much of this other genetic machinery that is needed. By comparing this simple genome with other more complex examples, we will be able to better understand why these "extra parts" you are discussing show up for different species.
To use another example.... can you possibly imagine what some 19th century engineer would think of an iPod if they tried to reverse engineer the device? That is the kind of problem facing geneticists at the moment, as a simple and basic model of a computer simply wouldn't be available to one of these engineers. They might be able to figure out what an LED does from breaking it apart, or be able to figure out some of the principles of electronics, but there is more than a century of engineering development that goes into an iPod that they would have to reproduce in order to really understand how it is all put together.
In the case of genetics.... we are dealing with billions of years of evolution and trying to understand why some genomes were able to succeed and others failed at reproducing or adapting to change. We are missing the original examples that caused the whole thing to get started in the first place... and so this is an attempt to try and do just that. It will be very interesting to see what the absolute minimal genome that still is "alive" could become.
Yes.... it is called a sequencer. Only good ones aren't so cheap.
I'm sure that eventually somebody will offer some open source designs that will eventually work for sequencing a genome, but we are still at the stage of designing the tools that will make the tools that will do the job.
Some "hackers" have also done a fairly good job of adding some comments to the source code as well, but you are free to try and add your own if you think you can make some headway in trying to figure out some of the functions as well.
If you dig through the documentation, it seems as though the lead administrator behind this request is very much aware of Orbiter. Heck, it wouldn't surprise me if the Orbiter dev team (there certainly is more than just one person who has been involved with writing that game, but like most FOSS projects one or two leaders really stand out) is on the "fast track" to getting the winning bid... if they decide to step forward.
All that NASA is looking for right now is a 5 page treatment of different ideas they can use for developing such a game, and suggestions like the one you just made is precisely what NASA is looking for. Even if you don't necessarily even desire to be involved in writing a game like this, presenting a whole bunch of excellent ideas that can be used by others who are willing to take it further can only be beneficial.
I certainly hope that by posting here on slashdot, that the potential talent pool can be substantially increased and give some excellent suggestions. Unfortunately, by posting here on slashdot it is also going to give a whole pile of trollish submissions as well, so I hope I haven't killed this poor NASA admin with a mountain of ideas.
I thought of not only trying to simulate the manned spaceflight missions for something like this, but also unmanned missions such as allowing players to send "probes" to various planets, moons, and asteroids.
You would have to contend with a budget, payload mass, various instruments that you may or may not be able to afford, computer architectures (we all know that there is more computing power in a PS/3 than a typical NASA probe.... show the kids why), ability to "program" the probe both before and "in flight", and in general show what the process is to get the thing built.
And all that more importantly.... show the kids how little we really do know about our Solar System, and provide through hard experience in actually playing the game why NASA is still an incredible value to our country.
While I've been a strong advocate for manned spaceflight and have been a dogged defender of the concept against those who would scrap manned activities in favor of exclusively doing robotic probes, I think such a game that ignores the robotic probes is also doing everybody a huge disservice. There is no way that the Apollo project could have successfully performed its goals and accomplished successful landings on the Moon without the eariler Ranger and Surveyor missions that paved the way in understanding the nature of the lunar surface, chemistry, and general environmental conditions that existed there. Sure, there was some conjecture before hand, but getting physical hardware to there made a huge difference.
There are so many possible options available to really accomplish something here along so many different lines of thought that I can't even begin to describe what could be put into a game like this.
As I hinted in my post I submitted to/., I have seen some incredible bombshells of games that have come from (generally) the academic community based on similar RfI/RfPs. All that NASA is looking for right now is a five page treatment that shows you know a thing or two about video games... and if all you accomplish is to get the folks at NASA to think outside of the box and come up with something more than they were originally considering and make it a really cool game, I would consider that alone to be a huge accomplishment.
I really want a game here that doesn't suck... regardless of whoever comes up with the idea.
I don't think you caught the point of my reply. I understand the scarcasm, but I also think you take too lightly those who believe different than you do. I'm not asking you to change your beliefs here (I don't think I could do that if I wanted), but my question is still a valid question never the less.
Deflecting the question with a veiled contemptuous response only begs the question further, and demonstrates a hypocritical attitude in you as well. Besides, you asked a pretty serious question that was in essence a short proof of the non-existence of God. Not that such a proof is necessarily original or unique, but it was phrased in a way that I have never seen such a sort of proof before.
This is assuming that the credit card companies will even accept charges from an on-line game company that is having problems even trying to identify those who would use their services fraudulently. There certainly is a very real risk that most electronic forms of payment may not work for game publishers who don't take aggressive actions to stop real-world item trade.
So yeah, these cards you buy in a retail store may be available... but what if that was the only way to play an on-line game? How many would keep playing?
Teleporting a player to a location that has no exit, nor can you exit from if you log out is nearly as effective as simply deleting the account. And it sends the message clearly that they have been caught.
I know, it has been tried elsewhere nor is this really a new concept.
BTW, did this "wizard" get the information he was looking for?
For myself, I rarely got so invested in a MUD character that I couldn't just walk away from the game and move on elsewhere, nor did I really get into all of the hacks and gold farming. I was there to have fun, and hacking the interface just wasn't a big deal.
I played text-based MUDs that had the local server admin create a "God" character (often simply named GOD as well, interestingly enough) that would show up in-game and occasionally talk to players and give "gifts" of various items in-game as well from time to time. Or be able to zap players to a special "holding cell" that would then be a place for "God" to interview you about what was going on.
I got zapped once to "heaven" and talked about in-game issues on more than one occasion... usually on a friendly basis but on one occasion because the "god" was a total jerk. I do wish it was done more often with the MMORPGs, but sometimes I think they forget the rich heritage that proceeded them, and how often they have had to repeat the same mistakes that were discovered decades ago with similar games.
Having a "god" kill gold farmers with a single swipe of their "divine" weapon would certainly get some applause from many of those in-game. It would also drive home clearly what happens to rule breakers as vivid in-game examples.
One of the things that you miss here is the fact that many role-playing games (I'm including pencil and dice games here as well as stand-alone video games and MMORPGs) try to give you the simulation of being something which you decidedly are not. You may be a pencil-necked geek with a host of allergies (or in my case an over weight middle-aged software engineer), but you get into the games so that you can live out some sort of fantasy of being something you are not right now.
So the "skills" you acquire are something not entirely related to the activity you are doing "in game".
Still, the comment of a previous poster to your comment here is very appropriate: If you "cheated" your way into gaining a certain position/in game skill level by virtue of a gold farmer or some other hack, you really don't understand all of the subtle methods of using all of the options at your disposal. You certainly won't be able to take on even NPC monsters that would easily be defeated by somebody at your current "in-game" skill level. At the same time, even in a "grind" game (or even more so in those kind of games), you can take somebody with considerable experience in the game and see them excel at achieving in-game ranking even with a brand new character due to their advanced knowledge of techniques used to play the game, including knowledge of various locations and when to fall back and try again some other time.
Heck, I have actually enjoyed starting out all over again from scratch on a few occasions, just to get a little bit of a challenge back into the game. But I level up oh so much faster than my contemporaries who created brand new accounts with me that they just look puzzled when I walk by a couple of days later being twice or three times their "level". In game experience does matter, and it translates across in a whole bunch of ways.
Your suggestion that player rankings (combat levels are just another way for players to compare each other) bring about a desire to push their ranking up with real-world cash is certainly something worth mentioning. But in the long run those are artificially inflated rankings anyway. It doesn't deal with the other problems associated with real-world item trading, and IMHO there will always be those who try to find ways to "cheat" the system with cash. That can be through a faster network connection, better computer/graphics card, cheat program that let's you get an attack in 1/2 second earlier, or whatever means you can think of. This has always been the case, even for games like Doom and Quake that didn't even really have levels to compare against. And I knew people who did "cheat" at Quake and were proud of it.
One of the things that needs to be remembered here about all of this concern about game hacks, bot players, gold sellers, and other nefarious aspects of the MMORPG universe is that a considerable amount of what happens here is just sheer intellectual curiosity.
Face it, network packets are for many software developers hardly a mystery, and trying to reverse engineer the communications protocols between a game server and a client is hardly the most challenging task in computer science. If the game publisher decides to encrypt the communication in some way, that encryption is easy to reverse engineer as well... especially if you have the software for the client on your own machine. It may crack up the skill level a little bit if the "hacker" has to decompile the client in order to find the encryption mechanism, but that just makes it all that more of a prize to win and find out.
For several of the on-line games that I play, I'll admit that I've been tempted to try this myself just to see how it was done. And there are major communities who love to do this stuff. For example, the game Runescape has a fairly good group of people who have tried to reverse engineer the communications protocols, and have gone so far as to recreate the server software itself and re-implement a client using the same protocol. One excellent example is Moparscape (Warning: click on this link at your own risk... these are real hackers here!) This is not the only server like this, I should add.
That real-world cash is also injected into the need/demand for these sort of reverse engineering efforts is really just icing on the cake for many of these individuals who get into this activity.
How you can get rid of this "game about a game" effort in terms of an arms race between the software publisher and the hacker community trying to reverse engineer the communications protocol may be something worth investigating. I'm certain that, as usual, the game industry is probably far more secure in its communication protocols than most other "real-world" activities like bank transactions and electronic voting, perhaps even military communications. This would be as a result of the vested interested of those young enough to have the patience and determination in order to hack this communications system.
I'm also certain that even the software developers who write these games have a fun time trying to come up with strategies in order to thwart the hacker community. For them, it is a fun intellectual exercise as well, especially when you are going up against people brighter than you are. So in this sense, it is a sort of chess game with slightly higher stakes on the line. And once a "hacker" has obtained all of this arcane knowledge... what are they supposed to do with that hard-won knowledge? (besides give themselves the best equipment in the game.)
Different rules rightly apply to soldiers who are using government-issued equipment instead of personal devices... and even if this laptop/computer that you were using was purchased with your pay instead of something issued to you by your CO, they still have a "right" to try and determine if you are trying to conduct some sort of espionage with a foreign agent. Nearly everything you do in the military involves some secrets of some kind, and there are some very sound reasons why everybody including ordinary citizens should expect that those secrets are kept and not transmitted to somebody else.
Let's just say that in spite of the fact that you appear to be enlisted rather than an officer based on your comments, I would have done some kind of punishment detail at the very least if you had been in my command just for this very lax attitude toward state secrets.
As for obscene material... that is so commonly found with military units going back so many centuries even in the U.S. Army that I find it amazing that anybody even cares anymore, other than some political weenie who doesn't want to "upset the host country". I guess that is just a matter of perspective and how relatively "obscene" the material in question can be. Look up the history of the song "Battle Hymn of the Republic" and try to find the original lyrics if you don't believe me. Something about a brothel, George Washington doing "it" with Robert E. Lee, and it just gets worse from there. Let's just say that the current lyric to that song were penned because some senator's wife was offended when she heard the troops singing variations of the song while marching down Pennsylvania Avenue while enroute to join the Army of the Potomac.
Then Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney was one state political official that I know wanted to get the OLPC laptops to the youth of inner city Boston and other Massachusetts residents. He even had a pretty sizable bi-partisan group of legislators who were willing to provide the fiscal authorization to pay for the whole thing as well.
Why Negroponte and the OLPC team told him to shove it is beyond me, but there has been genuine interest in the USA from legitimate educational institutions to use the OLPC for its main intended purpose: To help poor and disadvantaged students gain access to computing resources that can be used to help their educational development.
Why a poor student in Boston is considered to be somehow inferior to a student in Nairobi is beyond me... especially when there is far more money available to help out that student in Boston that can also be used to make it easier from an economy of scale perspective to also help out the student in Nairobi get that same laptop even cheaper.
Just out of curiosity.... if I was God (or if God were posting here to/. yeah that is a stretch, but for the sake of argument) what would you have me do to prove my existance to you?
I'm being serious here.
How could you be possibly convinced that there is a God that runs and maintains this universe?
I don't think God showing up at your doorstep and asking you for some advise would do the trick, but perhaps I'm mistaken.
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You can't say that in the USA. Rigged elections are incredibly commonplace... with it being an "open secret" that dead people voting in Chicago gave JFK the U.S. Presidency over Nixon. This is the land where "vote early and vote often" is an often heard mantra.
With illegal aliens voting and homeless people in Seattle turning out in record numbers (in fact... having more votes cast than registered voters), yeah, there are a few problem. I guess Australia is just a bit more tame in terms of the election process.
This isn't to say that there aren't very honorable election judges in America... there are, but in a country this big it is very difficult to root out all of the corruption.
I did read the article, and the author did mention both various Cold War scenarios for conquest of the British Isles by Russia as well as explicit mention of the Falkland Islands campaign. While the Cold War may have been theoretically useful, it was the engagement in the Falkland Islands that naval doctrine was proven in open warfare.
I would have to agree with his conclusion that reliance upon hardened capital ships and ignoring other modalities of naval warfare (such as submarine and air attacks) is colossal ignorance on the top brass of navies throughout the world. Perhaps the U.S. Navy learned more from the Falkland Islands campaign than the UK Royal Navy. If that is so, that is truly unfortunate. I know for a fact that there were several capital ships that were either scrapped or massively redesigned after that particular "conflict" by the U.S. Navy, and the Russians also modified some of their naval doctrines after that war as well.
I was mainly pointing out that something the UK ought to be seriously looking at is to re-fight the Falkland Islands campaign (or "Conflict") at some point in the future... and that would not be foolish money spent into a black hole either. A similar task force would have been very useful in Iraq, and there are many UK territories throughout the world that might be vulnerable if neighbors thought they could get some easy additional territory without too much of a fight. Regardless of Argentine claims to the Falklands, it was a war that needed to be fought in order to keep other people's hands off of still more UK territories.
What you are saying here is so true that I wish I could frame your post here. The +3 moderation was very well deserved in this case.
If you think back to the 2000 U.S. Presidential election, one of the huge problems was that Al Gore originally conceded the election, then tried to "take back" his concession. Ignoring all of the minor squabbling in Florida and the embarrassing U.S. Supreme Court case that set an unconstitutional precedent, the real problem in that election was an issue of very close results between two men of very different visions for the future of a major political entity. The stakes couldn't have been higher, and there were fanatically loyal supporters for both major candidates (Bush and Gore). Fanaticism that would translate to bearing arms against one another if the opportunity provided itself.
It isn't even unknown in U.S. history for people to take up arms because of a disagreement in the results of a presidential election either. The most infamous of these elections was the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln, where South Carolina simply refused to accept the election of Lincoln as their President, and choose to take up arms as an act of defiance against the new "government" that Lincoln brought into Washington D.C. Not only that, but they were successful in convincing many of their neighbors to do the same thing. Yes, there were many issues that went into play here, but my point is that bearing arms because of a lack of confidence in the election process has a precedent and tradition in the USA. And one that shouldn't be dismissed and ignored thinking we are oh so much more civilized and better educated today than America was in the 1860's. Right.
It was a concern of mine that Al Gore was going to continue to fight and contest the election results... and that the end-game was either concession on the part of Bush or Gore... or simply open warfare over the issue. I have no idea what a President Thurmond (who would have technically become president if the election couldn't be decided between Gore and Bush) would have done in such an unusual situation, but I don't think it would have been pretty... and could have gone a whole bunch of different ways. It certainly wouldn't be useful. (An interesting alternative timeline story as well.)
I simply don't know what the results of a thrown election would be if there were widespread belief in America that one political group cooked the books on an election and threw out trust in the process. With massive riots in major U.S. cities over things like an unpopular jury verdict or simply winning a major sports championship, I can't even imagine what would happen over something so fundamental as deciding who the next President would be weren't accepted.
Change the location from a library to the local county clerk's office, and you have (more or less) what is currently being done in Utah. Well, except for the fact that the machine is designed and built by Diebold and runs on Microsoft Windows. There is early voting so you can vote whenever you want up until election day... when the machines are all moved out to individual voting precincts.
There are still several issues you haven't dealt with in this "proposal", and it isn't as simple as it seems. But this is a nice try. Keep up thinking along these lines, and you may have a proper solution.
I couldn't have said it better. Yes, I consider the Diebold machines to be nothing more than fancy and updated versions of those old tyme voting machines originally made in the 1930's. And subject to the same sorts of problems and voting irregularities that caused them to be removed in the first place.
In fact, using the traditional red handle and candidate levers might actually be an improvement over some of the variations of voting machines I've seen... at least in terms of a reasonable user interface.
While I understand number theory sufficiently to be able to grok what you are trying to suggest here... I think you are taking a minor problem in the election process and blowing it out of proportion. And you are undermining the confidence building process that comes from a democratic election process by scrambling data up through numerical algorithms.
The average voter really doesn't care... and is usually ignorant of mathematical processes. Yes, they have to rely upon a somewhat complicated mathematical algorithm that computes their wages each time they get a paycheck, but then again that is because a gun is pointed at their head if they refuse to go through the process... or they are told that they simply won't have employment if they refuse to have the deductions taken out of their paycheck. The average voter has difficulty adding and subtracting 4 digit numbers... so please take that into consideration when trying to complicate the process. I'm not trying to be snooty here, but rather realistic and look at the problems involved.
Voting is such a foundational principle of modern society that realistic solutions need to be found that can improve the confidence rather than make it worse. This proposal doesn't fill the problem domain, but rather expands the problem domain instead.
I agree that hand-counting of paper ballots introduces unnecessary errors into the process. But what is wrong with paper ballots that can be simultaneously human and machine readable? The machine readable part is for fast and accurate tabulation... which is what I thought was the primary goal of this whole process anyway. The human readable part is to instill confidence with the voter that they understand precisely how they voted and how their vote is going to count. Establishing ballot standards so equipment from multiple companies and completely different equipment design teams can achieve identical results in the tabulation should be the goal... not the preservation of the electronic version of the ballot.
I also agree that if the ballot is preserved electronically rather than on a physical medium like paper, that it simply must be stored cryptographically. Of that I am in agreement with you. But I think the fallacy you are ignoring here is that the electronic version of the ballot is the only possible means to efficiently count ballots. It is this premise that I disagree with you on, and consider the electronic version of the ballot to be merely a copy of the original, that can and should be on paper until our society becomes significantly more competent technologically than it currently is.
Frankly I think that the U.S. Electoral College system protected America in 2000 from an even worse catastrophe had the presidential election been a direct vote. As it was, the hard review of the voting process was done in just a couple of counties in Florida, rather than trying to reopen (and recount) the votes in all 50 states simultaneously.
That would have been a nightmare of having to deal with lawsuits based on different issues for all 50 states simultaneously... and to get all of them resolved and decide upon a winner before the new president was to be sworn into office.
I guess you wanted Strom Thrumond to have been the U.S. President instead.... who was next in line in terms of presidential succession if George W. Bush wouldn't have been selected due to indecisions in the voting process with the 2000 election.
I will say there is a ring of truth to what you are saying. I ran for the position of a municipal counsel seat this past year, and I would have to say that the minimum for even being a viable candidate is about $2,000-$3000 that you have to spend. I had far less than that (actually, I spent about $50 total). I garnered about 20% of the vote for the office I was seeking, which IMHO was pretty dang good considering how much I spent.
Becoming a state representative would be in the realm of about $10,000-$50,000 where I live (a smallish state) which translates into about 50 cents to $1 per voter, or close to $5 per voter actually in the voting booth. I would have to say that is a comparable figure on the federal level as well, if you take into account larger numbers of people involved... and with about 100 million voters in the USA... spending 1/2 billion dollars on the presidential election seems to be pretty cheap on the whole. Most viable candidate for U.S. President tend to spend less than this amount, but I expect it to be pretty close to this figure by November.
So what is your complaint here?
Electronic vote counting simply doesn't belong at the voting booth.
Instead, what should happen at the voting booth should be ballot preparation, not vote counting. I have absolutely no problem with a fancy machine that has cool graphics and touch screen voting options in a thousand different languages. If you want to go through the effort of putting that together for a somewhat reasonable price, knock your socks off. I don't even mind this end of it being completely closed and propritary.
But the vote counting part needs to be separated from the ballot preparation. The only thing all of this fancy hardware is really doing is to assist a voter in understanding the rules of the election. In other words, not vote for multiple people if multiple votes invalidate your ballot, remind you of races that you didn't vote in, allow you to clearly note who you are voting for (no missing chads or fuzzy and inconclusive ballots), and provide a very clean ballot that election judges can use later for the vote counting process. Ballots cast should be on some sort of physical medium that has irreversible marks (so an election judge can't modify the results afterward) and human readable so the voter can have clear confidence in how their vote was cast. Any computer scientist worthy of that title ought to be able to figure out how to make something simultaneously human and machine readable... we aren't talking rocket science here and this is a decades old solved problem in the field.
One of my largest problems with the Diebold machines is that they have the vote counting take place in the voting booth itself. This opens up not only the traditional forms of voting fraud, but it also opens up new vectors of attacking the system and requires far too much in the way of securing the machines in order to ensure the integrity of the data. Besides, most of the security protocols aren't followed anyway, and those that are followed are a joke in many cases and have multiple methods of being circumvented. By its very nature at least in America, voting is done in private and away from the eyes of election judges. This is also done to ensure the integrity of the vote cast (by stopping coercion). But this act, by its nature, means that the machines can be compromised during the act of voting itself.
Let's look at what problems these machines are trying to solve:
Does the United Kingdom's Royal Navy (there is no "British Navy") prepare to re-fight the Falkland Islands War again? If that is the case, there may be something legitimate in terms of having UK ships be able to engage in a naval war on the other side of the world to defend its last remaining colonial outposts. There aren't that many of them (remaining colonies), but on occasion there are challenges both political and militarily to take them away from the UK by other governments. The UK does need to be able to bare its teeth against would-be aggressors and remind people that they are a nuclear power that shouldn't be screwed with.
As a side note, the Falkland Islands Campaign is one of the most recent naval engagements that involved large scale navies and ship to ship combat. I can't begin to count how many lessons were learned by naval engineers on ship design that have been accounted for in newer classes of ships in both the U.S. Navy and the Royal Navy. Capital ships were lost by both the UK (the HMS Sheffield) and Argentina (the ARA General Belgrano).
While naval technology certainly has changed a bit from this era of fighting ships, it wasn't really that long ago and most of the current naval combat doctrines can find significant examples both in support and against those theories in that conflict. It certainly is studied very closely at the U.S. Naval Academy and other naval colleges around the world. Even more recent changes to combat theory really do need to be tested in actual combat conditions before they are confirmed to work... and I'm glad that they haven't really been tested.
As to if the Royal Navy could put up a similar challenge to their territory in some far-flung place at the moment, I'll leave that up to military planners and UK citizens to debate that philosophy.
Is that the equipment and supplies, or does that include labor costs?
The costs for sequencing have certainly dropped significantly over the years, and can be compared to Moore's law at that. The rest is just extraction of data from a storage medium (DNA).
If you have the $1 million USD available, I'll help broker you to sequence your DNA today. For $10 K, I might still be able to find somebody, but it will take a bit longer. I don't think this figure is that far off as you are indicating here.
Oh, come off it. Don't you understand even the basics of genetics here?
Almost all "mistakes" in genetics will result in a crippling nature to nearly any genome. Even if you succeed somehow in making a "mistake" that is going to be in the long run something beneficial to a particular genome, how is that any different than the billions or trillions of similar kinds of "genetic mistakes" that happen like this all of the time in nature every day?
In addition, this quest for a minimalistic genome is also going to be something that will be very easily killed outside of a laboratory. Assuming that you actually take this artificial genome and create a completely unique artificial prokaryote, it will still lack most of the genetic defenses that the rest of life on Earth has developed over billions of years. Or assuming that "God" created us in 7 "days", he still provided protections against this sort of thing happening and going amok.
In short, this is an overblown claim that simply won't happen, and is completely unjustified to even suggest in the first place.
I agree that some intelligence behind genetic manipulation may create a sort of monster like some of the very dangerous computer virii that have been developed... but even those have required some considerable thought about how they were put together and designed, and even in the case of computer virii a simple "mistake" will more than likely make it not work.
This is an exceedingly "safe" line of scientific research. Don't get your panties in a bunch here and certainly don't go alarmist on anybody unless you have really developed a rational argument against this sort of research.
Why is a minimal genome unproductive? I don't "get it" when you make such a blanket statement like this.
Yes, we do need to come up with understanding more of the structure of DNA sequences, but some significant work has already been done along those lines. We certainly understand what sequences of DNA are needed to produce a given amino acid in the protein building process, and have certainly identified specific proteins that are in a genetic sequence. While still "cutting edge science", it isn't exactly an "unsolved problem" in genetics.
Still, I would have to admit that there is some missing information in decyphering genetic sequences. And it will take somebody with strong cross-discipline skills to figure out the problem you are talking about here.
I expect that the quest to build a complete genome/artificial procaryote will eventually lead to understand much of this other genetic machinery that is needed. By comparing this simple genome with other more complex examples, we will be able to better understand why these "extra parts" you are discussing show up for different species.
To use another example.... can you possibly imagine what some 19th century engineer would think of an iPod if they tried to reverse engineer the device? That is the kind of problem facing geneticists at the moment, as a simple and basic model of a computer simply wouldn't be available to one of these engineers. They might be able to figure out what an LED does from breaking it apart, or be able to figure out some of the principles of electronics, but there is more than a century of engineering development that goes into an iPod that they would have to reproduce in order to really understand how it is all put together.
In the case of genetics.... we are dealing with billions of years of evolution and trying to understand why some genomes were able to succeed and others failed at reproducing or adapting to change. We are missing the original examples that caused the whole thing to get started in the first place... and so this is an attempt to try and do just that. It will be very interesting to see what the absolute minimal genome that still is "alive" could become.
Yes.... it is called a sequencer. Only good ones aren't so cheap.
I'm sure that eventually somebody will offer some open source designs that will eventually work for sequencing a genome, but we are still at the stage of designing the tools that will make the tools that will do the job.
Some "hackers" have also done a fairly good job of adding some comments to the source code as well, but you are free to try and add your own if you think you can make some headway in trying to figure out some of the functions as well.
If you dig through the documentation, it seems as though the lead administrator behind this request is very much aware of Orbiter. Heck, it wouldn't surprise me if the Orbiter dev team (there certainly is more than just one person who has been involved with writing that game, but like most FOSS projects one or two leaders really stand out) is on the "fast track" to getting the winning bid... if they decide to step forward.
All that NASA is looking for right now is a 5 page treatment of different ideas they can use for developing such a game, and suggestions like the one you just made is precisely what NASA is looking for. Even if you don't necessarily even desire to be involved in writing a game like this, presenting a whole bunch of excellent ideas that can be used by others who are willing to take it further can only be beneficial.
I certainly hope that by posting here on slashdot, that the potential talent pool can be substantially increased and give some excellent suggestions. Unfortunately, by posting here on slashdot it is also going to give a whole pile of trollish submissions as well, so I hope I haven't killed this poor NASA admin with a mountain of ideas.
I thought of not only trying to simulate the manned spaceflight missions for something like this, but also unmanned missions such as allowing players to send "probes" to various planets, moons, and asteroids.
/., I have seen some incredible bombshells of games that have come from (generally) the academic community based on similar RfI/RfPs. All that NASA is looking for right now is a five page treatment that shows you know a thing or two about video games... and if all you accomplish is to get the folks at NASA to think outside of the box and come up with something more than they were originally considering and make it a really cool game, I would consider that alone to be a huge accomplishment.
You would have to contend with a budget, payload mass, various instruments that you may or may not be able to afford, computer architectures (we all know that there is more computing power in a PS/3 than a typical NASA probe.... show the kids why), ability to "program" the probe both before and "in flight", and in general show what the process is to get the thing built.
And all that more importantly.... show the kids how little we really do know about our Solar System, and provide through hard experience in actually playing the game why NASA is still an incredible value to our country.
While I've been a strong advocate for manned spaceflight and have been a dogged defender of the concept against those who would scrap manned activities in favor of exclusively doing robotic probes, I think such a game that ignores the robotic probes is also doing everybody a huge disservice. There is no way that the Apollo project could have successfully performed its goals and accomplished successful landings on the Moon without the eariler Ranger and Surveyor missions that paved the way in understanding the nature of the lunar surface, chemistry, and general environmental conditions that existed there. Sure, there was some conjecture before hand, but getting physical hardware to there made a huge difference.
There are so many possible options available to really accomplish something here along so many different lines of thought that I can't even begin to describe what could be put into a game like this.
As I hinted in my post I submitted to
I really want a game here that doesn't suck... regardless of whoever comes up with the idea.
I don't think you caught the point of my reply. I understand the scarcasm, but I also think you take too lightly those who believe different than you do. I'm not asking you to change your beliefs here (I don't think I could do that if I wanted), but my question is still a valid question never the less.
Deflecting the question with a veiled contemptuous response only begs the question further, and demonstrates a hypocritical attitude in you as well. Besides, you asked a pretty serious question that was in essence a short proof of the non-existence of God. Not that such a proof is necessarily original or unique, but it was phrased in a way that I have never seen such a sort of proof before.
This is assuming that the credit card companies will even accept charges from an on-line game company that is having problems even trying to identify those who would use their services fraudulently. There certainly is a very real risk that most electronic forms of payment may not work for game publishers who don't take aggressive actions to stop real-world item trade.
So yeah, these cards you buy in a retail store may be available... but what if that was the only way to play an on-line game? How many would keep playing?
Teleporting a player to a location that has no exit, nor can you exit from if you log out is nearly as effective as simply deleting the account. And it sends the message clearly that they have been caught.
I know, it has been tried elsewhere nor is this really a new concept.
BTW, did this "wizard" get the information he was looking for?
For myself, I rarely got so invested in a MUD character that I couldn't just walk away from the game and move on elsewhere, nor did I really get into all of the hacks and gold farming. I was there to have fun, and hacking the interface just wasn't a big deal.
I played text-based MUDs that had the local server admin create a "God" character (often simply named GOD as well, interestingly enough) that would show up in-game and occasionally talk to players and give "gifts" of various items in-game as well from time to time. Or be able to zap players to a special "holding cell" that would then be a place for "God" to interview you about what was going on.
I got zapped once to "heaven" and talked about in-game issues on more than one occasion... usually on a friendly basis but on one occasion because the "god" was a total jerk. I do wish it was done more often with the MMORPGs, but sometimes I think they forget the rich heritage that proceeded them, and how often they have had to repeat the same mistakes that were discovered decades ago with similar games.
Having a "god" kill gold farmers with a single swipe of their "divine" weapon would certainly get some applause from many of those in-game. It would also drive home clearly what happens to rule breakers as vivid in-game examples.
One of the things that you miss here is the fact that many role-playing games (I'm including pencil and dice games here as well as stand-alone video games and MMORPGs) try to give you the simulation of being something which you decidedly are not. You may be a pencil-necked geek with a host of allergies (or in my case an over weight middle-aged software engineer), but you get into the games so that you can live out some sort of fantasy of being something you are not right now.
So the "skills" you acquire are something not entirely related to the activity you are doing "in game".
Still, the comment of a previous poster to your comment here is very appropriate: If you "cheated" your way into gaining a certain position/in game skill level by virtue of a gold farmer or some other hack, you really don't understand all of the subtle methods of using all of the options at your disposal. You certainly won't be able to take on even NPC monsters that would easily be defeated by somebody at your current "in-game" skill level. At the same time, even in a "grind" game (or even more so in those kind of games), you can take somebody with considerable experience in the game and see them excel at achieving in-game ranking even with a brand new character due to their advanced knowledge of techniques used to play the game, including knowledge of various locations and when to fall back and try again some other time.
Heck, I have actually enjoyed starting out all over again from scratch on a few occasions, just to get a little bit of a challenge back into the game. But I level up oh so much faster than my contemporaries who created brand new accounts with me that they just look puzzled when I walk by a couple of days later being twice or three times their "level". In game experience does matter, and it translates across in a whole bunch of ways.
Your suggestion that player rankings (combat levels are just another way for players to compare each other) bring about a desire to push their ranking up with real-world cash is certainly something worth mentioning. But in the long run those are artificially inflated rankings anyway. It doesn't deal with the other problems associated with real-world item trading, and IMHO there will always be those who try to find ways to "cheat" the system with cash. That can be through a faster network connection, better computer/graphics card, cheat program that let's you get an attack in 1/2 second earlier, or whatever means you can think of. This has always been the case, even for games like Doom and Quake that didn't even really have levels to compare against. And I knew people who did "cheat" at Quake and were proud of it.
One of the things that needs to be remembered here about all of this concern about game hacks, bot players, gold sellers, and other nefarious aspects of the MMORPG universe is that a considerable amount of what happens here is just sheer intellectual curiosity.
Face it, network packets are for many software developers hardly a mystery, and trying to reverse engineer the communications protocols between a game server and a client is hardly the most challenging task in computer science. If the game publisher decides to encrypt the communication in some way, that encryption is easy to reverse engineer as well... especially if you have the software for the client on your own machine. It may crack up the skill level a little bit if the "hacker" has to decompile the client in order to find the encryption mechanism, but that just makes it all that more of a prize to win and find out.
For several of the on-line games that I play, I'll admit that I've been tempted to try this myself just to see how it was done. And there are major communities who love to do this stuff. For example, the game Runescape has a fairly good group of people who have tried to reverse engineer the communications protocols, and have gone so far as to recreate the server software itself and re-implement a client using the same protocol. One excellent example is Moparscape (Warning: click on this link at your own risk... these are real hackers here!) This is not the only server like this, I should add.
That real-world cash is also injected into the need/demand for these sort of reverse engineering efforts is really just icing on the cake for many of these individuals who get into this activity.
How you can get rid of this "game about a game" effort in terms of an arms race between the software publisher and the hacker community trying to reverse engineer the communications protocol may be something worth investigating. I'm certain that, as usual, the game industry is probably far more secure in its communication protocols than most other "real-world" activities like bank transactions and electronic voting, perhaps even military communications. This would be as a result of the vested interested of those young enough to have the patience and determination in order to hack this communications system.
I'm also certain that even the software developers who write these games have a fun time trying to come up with strategies in order to thwart the hacker community. For them, it is a fun intellectual exercise as well, especially when you are going up against people brighter than you are. So in this sense, it is a sort of chess game with slightly higher stakes on the line. And once a "hacker" has obtained all of this arcane knowledge... what are they supposed to do with that hard-won knowledge? (besides give themselves the best equipment in the game.)
Different rules rightly apply to soldiers who are using government-issued equipment instead of personal devices... and even if this laptop/computer that you were using was purchased with your pay instead of something issued to you by your CO, they still have a "right" to try and determine if you are trying to conduct some sort of espionage with a foreign agent. Nearly everything you do in the military involves some secrets of some kind, and there are some very sound reasons why everybody including ordinary citizens should expect that those secrets are kept and not transmitted to somebody else.
Let's just say that in spite of the fact that you appear to be enlisted rather than an officer based on your comments, I would have done some kind of punishment detail at the very least if you had been in my command just for this very lax attitude toward state secrets.
As for obscene material... that is so commonly found with military units going back so many centuries even in the U.S. Army that I find it amazing that anybody even cares anymore, other than some political weenie who doesn't want to "upset the host country". I guess that is just a matter of perspective and how relatively "obscene" the material in question can be. Look up the history of the song "Battle Hymn of the Republic" and try to find the original lyrics if you don't believe me. Something about a brothel, George Washington doing "it" with Robert E. Lee, and it just gets worse from there. Let's just say that the current lyric to that song were penned because some senator's wife was offended when she heard the troops singing variations of the song while marching down Pennsylvania Avenue while enroute to join the Army of the Potomac.
Then Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney was one state political official that I know wanted to get the OLPC laptops to the youth of inner city Boston and other Massachusetts residents. He even had a pretty sizable bi-partisan group of legislators who were willing to provide the fiscal authorization to pay for the whole thing as well.
Why Negroponte and the OLPC team told him to shove it is beyond me, but there has been genuine interest in the USA from legitimate educational institutions to use the OLPC for its main intended purpose: To help poor and disadvantaged students gain access to computing resources that can be used to help their educational development.
Why a poor student in Boston is considered to be somehow inferior to a student in Nairobi is beyond me... especially when there is far more money available to help out that student in Boston that can also be used to make it easier from an economy of scale perspective to also help out the student in Nairobi get that same laptop even cheaper.
Just out of curiosity.... if I was God (or if God were posting here to /. yeah that is a stretch, but for the sake of argument) what would you have me do to prove my existance to you?
I'm being serious here.
How could you be possibly convinced that there is a God that runs and maintains this universe?
I don't think God showing up at your doorstep and asking you for some advise would do the trick, but perhaps I'm mistaken.