One huge problem with proportional representation is that it tends to lead to huge instabilities in the governments that use this method of representative government.
It does allow minority voices (speaking politically, not just ethnic minorities) to be represented in a clear manner. In other words, if you and your friends can dig up enough votes with the capability of voting for one representative, you will be able to get that one seat.... no matter how far in the fringe your political philosophy may be.
Proportional representation also has huge problems with trying to "form a government". In other words, it is seldom that you will have a "majority party" that will be able to run the government, but rather there are dozens of political parties with none of them able to command a majority. So instead you see coalition government form out of several of these parties. Minor party represenatives (such as is the current situation with Joe Lieberman and Jim Jeffords in the current U.S. Senate) get disproportional attention in such governments... and the situation is very common instead of situationally unusual as it currently is in the U.S. Senate.
For many European governments, notably the Italian parliment and the pre-WWII French parliment, the coalition that governs the country is not unusual to be formed in the morning and by the afternoon of the same day will "collapse" and require a whole new coalition to form.
In the whole history of the USA (well over 200 years), the "government" has only changed hands a little more than a dozen times and has been in the hands of only three parties, the Whigs, the Republicans, and the Democrats.
The point that I'm trying to make here is that the concept of a congressional disrict has an ability to stabilize the government and force the voters to come to a concensus about who should run the country. It may be hard to "overthrow" the party in power (the Whigs certainly outlasted their popular support but still retained political power well after they fell out of favor), but once they are out of power it is very hard to get it back.... as the Democrats are discovering at the moment. My point here is that the two kinds of represenation are simply different, not better, and that there are positive beneifits (even with gerrymandering) in terms of the general governance of a country. You just have to look a little bit deeper.
Minnesota used to do it this way... in part because this was the way it was spelled out in the original state constitution. And until the 1970's, it was done this way. Senate districts were individual counties, and state house seats were proportional by population, and alloted on a county by county basis as federal seats are allocated by state. Congressional districts tended to also follow county lines as well at the time.
Unfortunately, when the U.S. Supreme Court introduced the "one person, one vote" philosophy (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_man,_one_vote) this whole system was destroyed and went to the current state-level gerrymandering system. In part because of the tradition of using counties as boundaries, the state redistricting in Minnesota has tried to used county boundaries as much as reasonably possible, but it may cover multiple counties in rural areas and several districts in the Twin Cities metro area. House seats are allocated as two per Senate seat, so there is a confluence between the state house and senate seats, but the proportional representation is still preserved. It is usually much harder to gerrymander just two seats.
In other words, this is a nice idea, and has even been tried, but there are some problems to the concept and constitutional law that prohibits it from being used in practice.
How about we get rid of this dated notion of democratic elections and a representative republic altogether?
All hail the Imperator Bob, may his dictatorship last 1,000 years!
BTW, this idea was tried very successfully in Germany in 1934. Redistricting was no longer needed and the German citizens were page to move on to other more important issues, like trying to figure out how to get more "Lebensraum".
When you discuss the concept of trying to perform major overhauls of a government, you have no idea what you will end up with. And sad experience in human history is that the resulting "new" government is often quite worse than what it replaced.
You also are presuming here that the only elective office that matters is the President of the United States. If that is your personal belief which is also shared with many others, no wonder why the USA is so screwed up and falling apart.
I agree that there are some presumptions here that I also don't necessarily agree with.
Most interestingly was the presumption that 3rd parties are completely meaningless, and that districting reform will have no impact upon them. And the idea that 3rd parties can be simultaneously "lumped into" undecideds as if they only help decide between the two major parties.
One other huge presumption is the idea that you will vote Democrat or Republican solely upon the basis of party affiliation, as if the personality of the candidate has absolutely no impact on a particular voter. Some candidates through sheer charisma can win over voters in what is arguably a district made primarily of voters from the "other" party. I can give very specific examples of this happening in the past, and surprisingly both times I was in districts where this happened, the district was "supposed to belong" to the other party when the redistricting took place. But very strong candidates prevailed of the "wrong" party and won the election... even if those same voters tended to vote for the "correct" party for the other races. Straight ticket voting is far less common than you would be led on to believe.
Still another huge presumption is that rural voters are identical to urban voters, with the only difference being the population density alone. Depending on the region of the country, a rural candidate from either party will get support over an urban candidate... particularly when you are talking about somebody running for the House. You could include other aspects including ethnic background or other factors.... and the ethnicity of the voter is not necessarily tied with the tendency to vote for a particular candidate. If that were true, we would have had only women as President of the USA since the passage of the 19th Ammendment.
The thing that struck me the most about the suggested "reform" proposal was after I made the supposedly "fair" districts (based exclusively on geometry and not taking any other issue under consideration including physical geography), was the process of submitting the proposal to the state legislature. The proposal that I submitted was flatly turned down by the legislature, yet the courts overruled the legislature. This to me is something very wrong, and a philosophy that I strongly disagree with. Why should I trust the judgement of a group of individuals who were put into their position by the body that they are overruling? This isn't just suggesting that the legislature can't have an act declared unconsitutional (so the courts will simply no longer enforce the law), but actively getting directly involved in politics in a way that is incredibly dangerous. And it misses the original concept of separation of powers, or what a legislative body is really supposed to be able to do. Or why legislative bodies ultimately wield nearly all government authority, and why the Bill of Rights has several clauses that start "Congress shall make no law...."
This is a fun game, and it does provide a good introduction to gerrymandering and why it happens, but it is at best a partial simulation missing some factors, and a political statement in the form of a game.
While this is responding to an AC post, it was modded up so I guess it deserves some credit.
What is being complained about here is not how "America" deals with stuff like this, but how something that has gone through the great money machine on Capitol Hill (aka the United States Congress) which has three important cycles: The Presidential election cycle (every 4 years), the Congressional election cycle (every 2 years), and Congressional re-apportionment (every 10 years). Of these, the most important is the Presidential election cycle, and that magic number, 4 years, seems to be the temporal horizon that most things get done.
In other words, if it can be accomplished in 4 years or less, and it is "popular", it will get done and money will be spent on the idea. If it seems to take longer than that time frame (especially if it takes longer than 8 years... i.e. into the next possible presidential administration), an idea almost never gets done. Even the Apollo project, going to the Moon, had to be done mostly within the window of what could be done while JFK was still in theory going to be president, and mostly took place during the Johnson administration. As soon as Nixon came into office and harder long term goals had to be set (like going to Mars), sure enough the program was cut and the agency was left to drift for the next 30 years until somebody else comes along with a goal that can be met in the next 8 years. Building the ISS was something that unfortunately needed more than 8 years to complete, which is one reason why it is in the sorry shape that it currently is in. Building the atomic bomb, however, was something that could be done within that precious 8 year time frame. Think about it carefully. Maintenance of the Pentagon (40 years after it was built) is something well outside of that time frame.... although major repairs to "improve" a nearly ruined structure are well within 8 years to completely renovate the building. So routine maintenance is out of the question, but expensive overhauls are perfectly fine.
You are also trying to compare Japan and (some) European governments to the U.S. government missing something very critical: representation is not done on a proportional basis by party affiliation, but on a geographic basis by congressional district. This means that any endeavor that requires large amounts of money must also be done across as large of a geographic range as possible. So if you want congressional approval over a multi-billion dollar program like the Space Shuttle, you must have not only the parts but even service centers for maintenance located in as many congressional districts as possible. And keep in mind that every 10 years (another cycle mentioned above) the districts change, so you want to make sure that these facilities are either near medium sized cities of a "safe" seat (too big to ignore when making districts but too small to break up into multiple districts), or in smaller population states where there are too few districts to do too much gerrymandering.
BTW, I wouldn't point fingers here if I were European. The European Union is showing some of the same problems, and perhaps even worse as "national pride" is an even bigger factor than American states, and any major European project (aka Airbus and others) must also have facilities located in multiple countries throughout all of Europe in order to succeed. France would go nuts if a major multi-billion euro project was located in Italy and none of the action ended up in France at all. Or Germany for that matter. Tell me that this really isn't a problem, and I would say it is just because the EU is still immature politically instead with people not really understanding the full political implications of joining the EU. Not that it is necessarily bad, but the EU is not a 200+ year old institution either like the U.S. government.
This is hard to quantify. If you take the amount of change from 1900 to 1950, and then compare 1950 to 2000, you would find that the people from 1950 would largely recognize life at the beginning of the 21st Century much better than those from 1900 being able to comprehend and deal with life in 1950.
If you had to point out changes in technology over the past decade (1997-2007), I think you would be hard pressed to point out any major lifestyle changes that weren't already available in 1997. The internet is a bit more pervasive, computers have even more computing power, and some interesting social changes, but nothing that would have even surprised somebody from 1997 at all. Not even terrorists bombing the World Trade Center. About the only major new "technology" breakthrough that I can think of is private manned spaceflight, and that is only at its infancy and something which is still being debated as if it even really exists. But this might bring about as many changes as the introduction of self-propelled vehicles from around 1900 that did bring huge social changes to people in everyday life. Even so, I don't see any huge occupation shifts over the next 50 years as drastic as the shift in the first half of the 20th Century moving from a largely agrarian society that was the USA to something made up of mostly industrial workers by 1950. And a very similar shift that happened in Europe.
Charles Babbage's steam-powered computers certainly were within the realm of technology (barely) of 100 years ago, and in retrospect England did themselves a major disservice by not building the Analytical Machine over 100 years ago, and started Computer Science 50 years earlier.... with Alan Turing able to build real Turing machines before he died instead of just commenting about theoretical constructs.
The question that can be raised today is how many of this "blind paths" that have been abandoned in the past might turn out to be something that should have been looked at just a little bit longer. What would have manned spaceflight looked like had the X-15 program been allowed to naturally progress to sub-orbital spaceflight instead of going with ballistic missiles instead? Burt Rutan's spacecraft owes quite a bit of its design to the X-15, and not to the Apollo program, to point out a difference. Even NASA is going back to the Apollo II program, pretending that the Space Shuttle never happened in the first place.
These are clear examples where a technology presented itself, with only temporal hindsight allowing you to see or imagine what could have been. It is possible that we can take another one of these major turns down a completely different path that may prevent or allow technologies to be created... or at least take another generation to figure out what went wrong and to try and start over again.
While I agree with both of your points, that the universe doesn't care, and that ignorant project managers/engineering supervisors need to have a clue about basic raw physics when dictating project goals, you still havn't addressed the basic questions:
Is is possible that mankind can get to the stars?
I agree that physics is a significant issue here, and unless somebody can prove Einstein flat out wrong or at least introduce a new subset of mathematics to the laws of motion that refine Einstein's laws of relativity that allow superluminal velocities under some sort of extreme condition not recognized by Einstein previously, I don't see the classical "Star Trek" or "Star Wars" hyperspatial/warp drive ships ever becoming a reality. The USPTO notwithstanding (and the patents they have approved which supposedly claim this ability).
Still, there is much that can be done within the realm of current scientific knowledge that would suggest that travel to nearby stars is at least possible within a human lifetime. That it is right on the edge of the potential of what we understand about physics seems like an interesting proposition, and with many other very rich worlds begging for human exploration within our Solar System that are easily within the range of travel using today's technology that would be comparable to the ocean crossing voyages of the 17th Century, I don't see any pressing desire or even necessity to consider going to another star first. If mankind is already a well established multi-planet species who is well established on the Moon, Mars, Europa, and the Earth, not to mention O'Neill colonies and other such fanciful ideas and concepts; I don't see that it would be too much of a problem digging up the resources to consider going to other solar systems beside our own. But as a proposition to a society that debates if Virgin Galactic is even going to get out of the Earth's atmosphere at all, the question seems a fanciful academic exercise that is generations away from even being realistically asked in the first place.
This question is like asking King James I of England if descendants of his new colony at Plymouth is going to make a laptop computer cheap enough for 3rd world countries of Africa. Or if some of those same people are going to make it to the Moon. The question is premature and we simply don't know right now, nor is there any reason for going in the first place when there are so many inviting places to go at the moment that are much more accessible.
Since this is not linked to any other comment other than the main article, what is the 1000 or 10,000 year trip in reference to?
I would have to agree that any human endeavor that is going to take multiple generations is something that is purely the realm of fiction and not something that has anything resembling human experience. Even so, I do know of cities that have been able to maintain technological devices for well over 1000 years, including water delivery systems and sewage systems.
Yes, they do break down and often have substantial portions of them replaced.... often while in use. But barring a technological collapse where the individuals maintaining the systems are unable to understand the basic science and design philosophies of the systems they are trying to maintain, it is indeed possible to maintain such systems for multiple generations.... provided you have somebody there who is capable of fixing those systems.
This is one reason why I think manned, not robotic spaceflight, is not only desirable but necessary. Only a human with the ability to make leaps of logic and have the ability to improvise new solutions will have the ability to repair broken parts and be able to not only fix but improve upon existing systems over time. While robotic equipment like the Voyager and Magellan spacecraft did have problems that were overcome, it came at a cost of having a huge and expensive support system on the Earth that had some of the brightest minds of all mankind helping to come up with a solution, and in every case the "fix" left the spacecraft in a weaker position than it was before the problem happened. Magellan was particularly disappointing because the primary issue, the lack of a deployed main broadcast array, could have been fixed with a hammer by an astronaut before it left Earth orbit (it was on board the Space Shuttle right before it was launched into solar orbit).
Going back to the question at hand.... can we get to the stars in a reasonable amount of time? I think the answer is yes here as well. It doesn't take 1000 or 10,000 years in order to travel to a nearby planet (speaking on a universal or even galactic scale of thinking) that is capable of supporting human life. Even so, it will be a proposition that will take several years of flight and will likely only be done with ordinary extensions of human knowledge and technology. I just don't see Zephraim Cochraine coming up with a warp drive in the next 200 years giving us access to the galactic core or another galaxy in another 200 years after that.
You can access nearly all of the planets that have been discovered "recently" through the extra solar planet search in less than 50 years of travel going at an average acceleration of about 10 m/s^2. As my body has adjusted to that sort of acceleration demand for the past several decades (and I'm not in the best health either), I don't think this is something too far fetched if you can just solve the energy requirements to provide this level of acceleration. It won't be a combination of kerosene and liquid oxygen that does it, however. That is the real issue of this debate, not if people and equipment physically make the trip.
A little tidbit about Apple Computer and MECC history merging together happened in the Summer of 1977. Steve Jobs was then still a pauper and desperate for trying to sell his crazy idea of a personal computer, and was seeking to intentionally market the Apple ][ to the educational market. By an off chance, he heard about an educational computing conference being held at Utah State University, and decided to show up with a couple of demo models with dreams of orders coming from the conference.... or at least gaining a foothold in the then non-existant market of educational personal computers.
In attendance at this conference were some representatives from MECC, who were busy gathering information that would be used by the school districts in Minnesota. By Minnesota state law at the time, no school district could purchase computer equipment unless it had been explicitly authorized by MECC.
Notable enough was that Steve Jobs had impressed the MECC staff sufficiently that they returned home to Minneapolis and changed the computer purchasing orders for the entire state of Minnesota to include the Apple II and Commodore PET as "authorized" purchases... with a strong recommendation to purchase the Apple computers. All told, several hundred Apple computers were purchased by the Minnesota school districts at a very critical time in the history of Apple Computer, and Minnesota began their movement from their central timeshare system to having nearly everything on PCs (and the demise of the MECC timeshare computer).
My own experience more directly in this incident was at Austin High School (Austin, MN) where the high school had a fairly well established Computer Science program (quite popular among the students), and the primary computer system in use for instruction simply crashed cold and hard with no way to repair it. BTW, that was a Wang minicomputer with a whole 32K of RAM shared between 4 terminals. Faced with the possibility of having to cancel the class and re-arrange the schedules of nearly 300 students, the Austin School District decided to check with MECC and see what was available for a replacement. Fresh from the trip to Utah, MECC recommended that they check out the Apple computers from Cupertino, and immediately ordered the computers. BTW, the serial numbers on those computers had only 3 digits when they arrived. I didn't even notice that until 4 years later right before I graduated from H.S., and well after Apple computer was well established and acknowledged as an industry leader.
Amen! That space combat game was years (decades?) ahead of its time in terms of game mechanics and AI, and other non visual aspects. The hardest part about playing that game was trying to keep track of the information (like team-mates when you could get on with them!) and trying to figure out how to evade the very good players. Especially when you were one "lucky" enough to score a hit on the current leader and "steal" their energy.
The "clans" were very informal (not really a part of the game) but certainly were a major part of the overall experience. Most of the "teams" or "clans" usually logged on with their team name as a part of their login name.
I had the rare privilege of playing this game on a 110 baud yellow "Teletype" machine, where the "bell" was an actual circular bell with a mechanical ringer. When I "upgraded" later on to a 300 baud modem with the old MECC computer system, it seemed as through everything was simply flying at me.... and gave you a distinct advantage playing COMBAT as well.
Even better than the BASIC manuals.... the Technical reference manual, that most dealers would give to you for free or nearly so if you asked for it.
The tech reference manual had a full schematic for the motherboard on a fold out 20" x 30" sheet that looked like a National Geographic map, included a fairly detailed memory map, pin out diagrams for the peripherial cards with expected voltage levels and even a physical diagram for making your own boards, I/O memory locations and signal levels, a complete 6502 opcode listing including byte codes for hand assembly, and frankly just about everything you needed in order to clone an Apple ][ from scratch, including the original source code for the ROM including comments. Sure, it had the Apple Computer copyright disclaimer, but nearly every thing you needed to know about that computer was very public and accessible.
Apple stopped doing this level of technical support for the hobbyist crowd when they started to go for business customers, and when it came to the Mac, their attitude was that you were a user unless you were a part of their "special" developer community with the appropriate large licensing fee. And technical information was on a "need to know" basis.
But at least for the original Apple ][ and II+, the company was very open about its equipment and strongly encouraged outsiders to experiment and add both software and hardware to their system.
GPLv2 already has an "anti-software patent" clause which effectively invalidates the GPL. GPLv3 expands on the simplistic terms of v2 and adds some extra meat to go after individuals who deliberately submit code that violates patents.
In both versions of the GPL, a corporation or individual could certainly maintain a portfolio of "stealth patents" (like the infamous LZW patent that nearly killed off the GIF standard), and bring it out to kill off an open source software project once they have established themselves. Of course any time that has been tried, the claimant to patent violations usually get a virutal "black eye" in the court of public opinion, just as the deCSS algorithm received huge attention just because some idiot decided to press legal felony chargest against the original author. I could give several other good examples.
In addition to the other comments to this post, I would like to mention that "the internet community" or the "open source fans" was a much, much smaller community than currently exists now. And the mere idea that could make some significant money off of open source wasn't nearly so obvious back in the day. Certainly the huge push for DRM garbage and issues related to patents weren't as huge of a deal.... or at least when I mentioned that it was a huge problem Richard Stallman himself in a one-to-one discussion I had about 10 years ago didn't think software patents were going to be that big of a deal and marginalized the problem. His thinking on this issue certainly has changed from that conversation I had with him oh so many years ago.
So quite a bit of this is due to the fact that the community of developers has grown up quite a bit in the years since GPLv2, and there are some very real problems with GPLv2 if you want to maintain the philosophy that software ought to be free... as in general freedom to make changes to software and "give it back" when you are done.
Get a grip and read what happened and stop being an armchair historian in this case.
Bush on 9/11 was doing what any U.S. President would have done in that position: Tried to continue to lead the government and not die in the process of doing that. Or try to ram a suspected terrorist airplane with Air Force One? That is just too stupid to think about.
While you can debate the orders he gave for the invasion of Iraq, what Bush did on 9/11 itself is what any outstanding person holding that office would have done, and perhaps even better than most. In the heat of battle, communications often do get garbled in both directions, and there was some concern that at least some of the plane impacts were of a more traditional accidental nature, and some confusion over what planes really were full of terrorists and what ones may simply be slightly off course. The U.S. Air Force had not even trained at all for the possibility that they would have to shoot down a civilian airplane for military purposes, and instead hitting a plane like that was considered an act of an incompetent coward within the military. Something that would only show up in jokes, and not a serious training exercise. While in theory a fighter like an F-16 could certainly take out a civilian airplane like a 747, the protocols for doing so simply weren't established including trying to define what exactly was considered a target.
Trying to blame Bush/Cheney for this supposed inaction when orders were being issued on the fly and trying to establish a new policy dealing with this situation while it was happening simply isn't dealing with reality for how things like this would be done. I hardly think that you, Catbeller, could have done any better and would likely have fared far worse if you were in the same situation.
What makes you think they will stop once the USA leaves Iraq?
The stated goal of these terrorists is not to kick America out of Iraq. Their goal is to kill every last man, woman, and child in America. And that has been stated on numerous occasions. If Al-Queida is in Iraq, it is only because of the ease of entry into that country and the ability to blend in with and recruit from the population in that country.
But if they want to kill me and my children, I don't have a problem of taking the war to their turf and killing them first. And I would gladly put on a uniform of the U.S. Army to do that. Or see my sons join the Army. Even if I end up losing a child as an unfortunate casualty of war. At least they have a chance to defend themselves in uniform as opposed to being an "innocent" bystander when a bomb goes off in America.
I like to point out what the "policy" of airlines and the U.S. government was regarding hijackers on September 10th, 2001:
If somebody tries to hijack the airplane, give them nearly everything they want and follow the S.O.P. for hostage takers. If you are in flight, take the hijacker to damn near any place they want to get to.... provided you have fuel to get there.
In fact, this policy was so old and pervasive that I saw a reference to it on an "I Love Lucy" re-run where Ricky Ricardo was on a plane that was hijacked and went to Cuba. The whole incident was portrayed on the episode as a sort of involuntary "vacation" to visit exotic locales for a few days while the hijacker quietly disappeared doing whatever it is that he was doing.
There is also the presumption in hostage negotiations that the hostage taker values his/her life in such a way that they don't want to die with the victim. The usual threat to the "criminal" in this case is that the police/military/security can lose their life if they screw up and kill the hostage. A good police negotiator usually tries to convince this person that they are better off staying alive even if they end up going to jail for a few years, and that they will feel guilt if they kill their hostages.
The difference with 9/11 was that the hijackers didn't care about their life. And it was demonstrated beyond doubt that the passengers and crew would lose their own lives anyway, as would the hijackers because they didn't care. So in that sort of situation, I certainly would take my chances in trying to kill the hijackers with damn near anything and everything I had at my disposal. And it would be in the best interest of the pilots to keep the door of the cockpit locked up and secure during the flight. As is now required by the FAA. I remember pre-9/11 flights where the cockpit door was left open for the entire flight. It was neat to see the pilots at work (kinda like a kid watching their parents drive a car), but it is a huge security risk.
For this reason and many more, I don't buy the "increased security" at airports as anything but a ruse and "closing the barndoors after the cows left". There will never be another massive 9/11 scale attack again on the USA, because most people won't permit it to ever happen again. Oh, there may be another attempt or two, and perhaps even a lone plane succeeding in hitting its intended target due to a bunch of cowards on board the aircraft, but the large scale coordinated attack simply will not happen, at least not without the expectation that many or most of the planes won't make it to their intended targets.
One other reason why 9/11 didn't seem to have more than the four planes is that it seems as though Al-Queida forgot something far too important in their planning: The USA has multiple time zones. Apparently there were supposed to be a dozen or so airplanes to be hijacked, but the cells in the other time zones didn't get a chance to carry out the plans due to the grounding of the U.S. civilian air fleet after the first attacks happened. Los Angeles and Seattle were supposed to both be targets, as was the Sears Tower in Chicago. I don't know if that would have changed much of anything post 9/11 had they been smart enough to book flights that all took off at the same time (the L.A. cell didn't even make it into the airport before it was closed) but it does give some pause to think about the possibilities. 9/11 could have been and should have been much worse.
The lack of follow-through by Al-Queida is certainly something that shows the lack of additional planning as well, where they could have started a real terror campaign by blowing up highway bridges and passenger ships. I don't know what a sustained effort to take out the Interstate Highway System would have done to the morale of the ordinary citizens of the USA, but it certainly would have had a much more profound impact on the U.S. economy than destroying the World Trade Center.
While I will admit that Star Trek has inspired numerous engineers to not only enter the profession but to also try and come up with the some of the gee-whiz gadgets that they have seen on the show, I wouldn't give the show credit for all of the creature comforts that we enjoy today. Just as I wouldn't claim that NASA is responsible for spin-off technology like Velcro, Teflon, and integrated circuits. All were developed and even sold commercially prior to their use by NASA.
One of the real issues with the original TV series of Star Trek was that the network was missing completely the demographic group of 18-40 year olds, who made up the bulk of the original Star Trek audience. It was a case of NBC (in the case of Star Trek) relying on lousy marketing information and a huge failure to market the advertising to those companies who perhaps would have even paid a premium rate for advertising on that particular television show. If the current Nielson rating system were in place in the late 1960's, Star Trek would have been the highest rated television show of the era and perhaps even of all time.
Now the question in regards to Jericho is if this is also the case. I would argue that CBS isn't mis-managing the marketing of this particular television series, but that is a valid argument to make that would also make some sense to the executives of the entertainment division of CBS. The goal here is to convince the management of CBS that they should continue the series not because a bunch of nut cases that deserve long term mental health services have raised a stink about the cancellation, but because they are missing a golden opportunity to market their advertising to a group of companies they haven't considered before.
If you can make this case, I promise you that you will see Jericho on the air next year. I just don't think that case can be made. Prove me wrong, please.
And you think that the Nielsen ratings are an accurate gauge of the attitude of Americans toward individual television shows?
I hate to break the news here to you, but there are huge demographic groups (especially college-age individuals who don't tend to have a permanent address) that often get missed by the Nielson ratings, and groups like African-Americans who are substantially over-represented with the rating points. This is not quite as simple as the amount of ticket sales that is used to compare motion pictures, but a weighted sampling system that throws a whole bunch of assumptions into the mix when the rating points are determined.
This isn't to say that you can't judge relative gains or losses of audience share on the Nielson ratings, and they can be a rough point with decision making in regards to keeping or canceling a television show, but you need to understand the biases before you make those decisions. Networks have been substantially wrong in the past with the cancellation of some shows that simply shouldn't have been killed, because they didn't market their shows properly.
And keep in mind foremost that the #1 thing that networks look at is not Nielsen ratings (which is useful), but how much they can get in terms of advertising revenue. If the price of the ads have to be lowered because they can't attract companies to run those ads on a particular TV show, this is the business deicsion that has to be made. The network evening news shows have had their ratings in the toilet for decades, but the ad revenue is still there for some reason to keep those shows on the air. And the networks are therefore able to continue to make a (perhaps modest) profit.
Of course the real culprit here is not the ratings themselves, but those advertising agencies who make the decisions on what shows they are going to sponsor (and drive up the price of the ads for those shows), and which ones they decide to pull the ads from (with a corresponding drop in the price of ads on that show). That Nielsen ratings are are a factor in this decision is true, and in this case CBS made a financial decision based on what it could reasonably expect for income from Jericho vs. what it could potentially make off of even another mediocre television show that it is planning on putting in the place of Jericho next year.
And you don't think that current television producers take into account DVD sales?
It surprises me that for at least some of the series franchises, such as Stargate or Star Trek, that there hasn't been a "direct to video" TV series just for fans made of original material. Charging fans $10 per episode would not be unreasonable in a market like this, where the pressed discs, materials, and shipping costs are less than $1 per disc. For crying out loud, I can buy some DVD-Video discs for $1 per disc retail.... at the checkout counter.
So how much would somebody be willing to pay for a 1 hour direct-to-video Farscape episode? With the option that it may also be used "in syndication" at some point in the future and marketed to independent television stations?
It seems as though the budget (except for talent costs... which are debatable as always) for Jericho isn't too high to try this as at least an experiment and produce a few extra episodes just for fans to gague the viability of this model.
It's just too bad that people in a position in the movie industry to read crazy ideas like this won't read these posts.
This sounds like the tax that the state of Minnesota imposes (used to impose?) on income tax refund checks.
Re-read this again if you don't get it. You get an income tax refund check because you paid too much in taxes, yet that refund was taxed as if it was income. And of course you didn't get a rebate if you ended up having to pay taxes instead of getting a refund.
Governments will do anything and everything to try and get you to part with the money in your wallet, and often the only difference between a fraudulent schemer and a congressman is that the congressman has the ability to write laws so everything he is doing is legal... by definition. Double taxation, while it doesn't make sense, happens routinely and in more ways than you can possibly imagine. At best all you should do is point out the hypocrisy when you see it and let others know how absurd governments can get.
There is also a widespread problem within software development circles to think that the reference implementation of a software specification is the one and only solution, and that anybody attempting to re-implement that standard doesn't have a brain.
I have seen far too many bugs in the reference implementations (just like any other software) to trust them entirely, although the unfortunate aspect of that is the reference implementation *becomes* the standard instead of the documentation which is supposed to be the standard. Hence the reason most people simply use the reference implementation and pretend the formal specification doesn't even exist. If the standard says a byte ought to be "12" but the reference implementation produces an "08", guess which one is most frequently found in data files using the standard?
I should have been more specific here. All characters encoded with UTF-16 including the Latin alphabet will be at least 16 bits.
The point I'm making is that the lousy implementation of Unicode by Microsoft (and UTF-8 has been around for quite some time here to get this fixed and done properly since Windows '98 was released... possibly even an earlier service pack patch to Windows '95) to have two different character encoding standards for most of their API function calls when it wasn't really even necessary. The whole Win32 API treats Unicode as this perverted disease that needs to be avoided when at all possible, when it simply doesn't need to be dealt with that way.
There is the issue of diacritical marks and the code mapping to some Latin characters that normally use the 8th bit of modified ASCII instead of formal Unicode, but that is a problem anyway for these same documents. I guess it took too much effort on the part of the MS-Word development team to properly transition to Unicode as a standard, as they used the 8th bit of ASCII for document formatting characters as well. The Win32 API is in many places obviously designed by the MS-Office dev team. But that is another issue and thread entirely.
There is the option of using UTF-8 instead of UTF-16 for the encoding of Unicode characters. Most implementations of Unicode insist upon UTF-16 (meaning all characters including Latin alphabets use 16 bits per letter). If you have some software that your anticipated audience is primarily Latin alphabet users but you want to make Unicode available, you can use UTF-8 to keep mostly 8-bit characters but allow the full Unicode code points (including 32-bit characters as well) if you need those non-Latin characters.
I would have to agree here that this is not a failure of the Unicode encoding standard, but the software implementation of using the Unicode standard, trying to communicate to software not prepared (due to poor implementation of existing standards and very lazy software developers) to deal with this sort of content. Of course it was software developers like this that gave us the Y2K bugs as well.
Slashdot Mirror
One huge problem with proportional representation is that it tends to lead to huge instabilities in the governments that use this method of representative government.
It does allow minority voices (speaking politically, not just ethnic minorities) to be represented in a clear manner. In other words, if you and your friends can dig up enough votes with the capability of voting for one representative, you will be able to get that one seat.... no matter how far in the fringe your political philosophy may be.
Proportional representation also has huge problems with trying to "form a government". In other words, it is seldom that you will have a "majority party" that will be able to run the government, but rather there are dozens of political parties with none of them able to command a majority. So instead you see coalition government form out of several of these parties. Minor party represenatives (such as is the current situation with Joe Lieberman and Jim Jeffords in the current U.S. Senate) get disproportional attention in such governments... and the situation is very common instead of situationally unusual as it currently is in the U.S. Senate.
For many European governments, notably the Italian parliment and the pre-WWII French parliment, the coalition that governs the country is not unusual to be formed in the morning and by the afternoon of the same day will "collapse" and require a whole new coalition to form.
In the whole history of the USA (well over 200 years), the "government" has only changed hands a little more than a dozen times and has been in the hands of only three parties, the Whigs, the Republicans, and the Democrats.
The point that I'm trying to make here is that the concept of a congressional disrict has an ability to stabilize the government and force the voters to come to a concensus about who should run the country. It may be hard to "overthrow" the party in power (the Whigs certainly outlasted their popular support but still retained political power well after they fell out of favor), but once they are out of power it is very hard to get it back.... as the Democrats are discovering at the moment. My point here is that the two kinds of represenation are simply different, not better, and that there are positive beneifits (even with gerrymandering) in terms of the general governance of a country. You just have to look a little bit deeper.
Minnesota used to do it this way... in part because this was the way it was spelled out in the original state constitution. And until the 1970's, it was done this way. Senate districts were individual counties, and state house seats were proportional by population, and alloted on a county by county basis as federal seats are allocated by state. Congressional districts tended to also follow county lines as well at the time.
Unfortunately, when the U.S. Supreme Court introduced the "one person, one vote" philosophy (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_man,_one_vote) this whole system was destroyed and went to the current state-level gerrymandering system. In part because of the tradition of using counties as boundaries, the state redistricting in Minnesota has tried to used county boundaries as much as reasonably possible, but it may cover multiple counties in rural areas and several districts in the Twin Cities metro area. House seats are allocated as two per Senate seat, so there is a confluence between the state house and senate seats, but the proportional representation is still preserved. It is usually much harder to gerrymander just two seats.
In other words, this is a nice idea, and has even been tried, but there are some problems to the concept and constitutional law that prohibits it from being used in practice.
How about we get rid of this dated notion of democratic elections and a representative republic altogether?
All hail the Imperator Bob, may his dictatorship last 1,000 years!
BTW, this idea was tried very successfully in Germany in 1934. Redistricting was no longer needed and the German citizens were page to move on to other more important issues, like trying to figure out how to get more "Lebensraum".
When you discuss the concept of trying to perform major overhauls of a government, you have no idea what you will end up with. And sad experience in human history is that the resulting "new" government is often quite worse than what it replaced.
You also are presuming here that the only elective office that matters is the President of the United States. If that is your personal belief which is also shared with many others, no wonder why the USA is so screwed up and falling apart.
I agree that there are some presumptions here that I also don't necessarily agree with.
Most interestingly was the presumption that 3rd parties are completely meaningless, and that districting reform will have no impact upon them. And the idea that 3rd parties can be simultaneously "lumped into" undecideds as if they only help decide between the two major parties.
One other huge presumption is the idea that you will vote Democrat or Republican solely upon the basis of party affiliation, as if the personality of the candidate has absolutely no impact on a particular voter. Some candidates through sheer charisma can win over voters in what is arguably a district made primarily of voters from the "other" party. I can give very specific examples of this happening in the past, and surprisingly both times I was in districts where this happened, the district was "supposed to belong" to the other party when the redistricting took place. But very strong candidates prevailed of the "wrong" party and won the election... even if those same voters tended to vote for the "correct" party for the other races. Straight ticket voting is far less common than you would be led on to believe.
Still another huge presumption is that rural voters are identical to urban voters, with the only difference being the population density alone. Depending on the region of the country, a rural candidate from either party will get support over an urban candidate... particularly when you are talking about somebody running for the House. You could include other aspects including ethnic background or other factors.... and the ethnicity of the voter is not necessarily tied with the tendency to vote for a particular candidate. If that were true, we would have had only women as President of the USA since the passage of the 19th Ammendment.
The thing that struck me the most about the suggested "reform" proposal was after I made the supposedly "fair" districts (based exclusively on geometry and not taking any other issue under consideration including physical geography), was the process of submitting the proposal to the state legislature. The proposal that I submitted was flatly turned down by the legislature, yet the courts overruled the legislature. This to me is something very wrong, and a philosophy that I strongly disagree with. Why should I trust the judgement of a group of individuals who were put into their position by the body that they are overruling? This isn't just suggesting that the legislature can't have an act declared unconsitutional (so the courts will simply no longer enforce the law), but actively getting directly involved in politics in a way that is incredibly dangerous. And it misses the original concept of separation of powers, or what a legislative body is really supposed to be able to do. Or why legislative bodies ultimately wield nearly all government authority, and why the Bill of Rights has several clauses that start "Congress shall make no law...."
This is a fun game, and it does provide a good introduction to gerrymandering and why it happens, but it is at best a partial simulation missing some factors, and a political statement in the form of a game.
While this is responding to an AC post, it was modded up so I guess it deserves some credit.
What is being complained about here is not how "America" deals with stuff like this, but how something that has gone through the great money machine on Capitol Hill (aka the United States Congress) which has three important cycles: The Presidential election cycle (every 4 years), the Congressional election cycle (every 2 years), and Congressional re-apportionment (every 10 years). Of these, the most important is the Presidential election cycle, and that magic number, 4 years, seems to be the temporal horizon that most things get done.
In other words, if it can be accomplished in 4 years or less, and it is "popular", it will get done and money will be spent on the idea. If it seems to take longer than that time frame (especially if it takes longer than 8 years... i.e. into the next possible presidential administration), an idea almost never gets done. Even the Apollo project, going to the Moon, had to be done mostly within the window of what could be done while JFK was still in theory going to be president, and mostly took place during the Johnson administration. As soon as Nixon came into office and harder long term goals had to be set (like going to Mars), sure enough the program was cut and the agency was left to drift for the next 30 years until somebody else comes along with a goal that can be met in the next 8 years. Building the ISS was something that unfortunately needed more than 8 years to complete, which is one reason why it is in the sorry shape that it currently is in. Building the atomic bomb, however, was something that could be done within that precious 8 year time frame. Think about it carefully. Maintenance of the Pentagon (40 years after it was built) is something well outside of that time frame.... although major repairs to "improve" a nearly ruined structure are well within 8 years to completely renovate the building. So routine maintenance is out of the question, but expensive overhauls are perfectly fine.
You are also trying to compare Japan and (some) European governments to the U.S. government missing something very critical: representation is not done on a proportional basis by party affiliation, but on a geographic basis by congressional district. This means that any endeavor that requires large amounts of money must also be done across as large of a geographic range as possible. So if you want congressional approval over a multi-billion dollar program like the Space Shuttle, you must have not only the parts but even service centers for maintenance located in as many congressional districts as possible. And keep in mind that every 10 years (another cycle mentioned above) the districts change, so you want to make sure that these facilities are either near medium sized cities of a "safe" seat (too big to ignore when making districts but too small to break up into multiple districts), or in smaller population states where there are too few districts to do too much gerrymandering.
BTW, I wouldn't point fingers here if I were European. The European Union is showing some of the same problems, and perhaps even worse as "national pride" is an even bigger factor than American states, and any major European project (aka Airbus and others) must also have facilities located in multiple countries throughout all of Europe in order to succeed. France would go nuts if a major multi-billion euro project was located in Italy and none of the action ended up in France at all. Or Germany for that matter. Tell me that this really isn't a problem, and I would say it is just because the EU is still immature politically instead with people not really understanding the full political implications of joining the EU. Not that it is necessarily bad, but the EU is not a 200+ year old institution either like the U.S. government.
This is hard to quantify. If you take the amount of change from 1900 to 1950, and then compare 1950 to 2000, you would find that the people from 1950 would largely recognize life at the beginning of the 21st Century much better than those from 1900 being able to comprehend and deal with life in 1950.
If you had to point out changes in technology over the past decade (1997-2007), I think you would be hard pressed to point out any major lifestyle changes that weren't already available in 1997. The internet is a bit more pervasive, computers have even more computing power, and some interesting social changes, but nothing that would have even surprised somebody from 1997 at all. Not even terrorists bombing the World Trade Center. About the only major new "technology" breakthrough that I can think of is private manned spaceflight, and that is only at its infancy and something which is still being debated as if it even really exists. But this might bring about as many changes as the introduction of self-propelled vehicles from around 1900 that did bring huge social changes to people in everyday life. Even so, I don't see any huge occupation shifts over the next 50 years as drastic as the shift in the first half of the 20th Century moving from a largely agrarian society that was the USA to something made up of mostly industrial workers by 1950. And a very similar shift that happened in Europe.
Charles Babbage's steam-powered computers certainly were within the realm of technology (barely) of 100 years ago, and in retrospect England did themselves a major disservice by not building the Analytical Machine over 100 years ago, and started Computer Science 50 years earlier.... with Alan Turing able to build real Turing machines before he died instead of just commenting about theoretical constructs.
The question that can be raised today is how many of this "blind paths" that have been abandoned in the past might turn out to be something that should have been looked at just a little bit longer. What would have manned spaceflight looked like had the X-15 program been allowed to naturally progress to sub-orbital spaceflight instead of going with ballistic missiles instead? Burt Rutan's spacecraft owes quite a bit of its design to the X-15, and not to the Apollo program, to point out a difference. Even NASA is going back to the Apollo II program, pretending that the Space Shuttle never happened in the first place.
These are clear examples where a technology presented itself, with only temporal hindsight allowing you to see or imagine what could have been. It is possible that we can take another one of these major turns down a completely different path that may prevent or allow technologies to be created... or at least take another generation to figure out what went wrong and to try and start over again.
While I agree with both of your points, that the universe doesn't care, and that ignorant project managers/engineering supervisors need to have a clue about basic raw physics when dictating project goals, you still havn't addressed the basic questions:
Is is possible that mankind can get to the stars?
I agree that physics is a significant issue here, and unless somebody can prove Einstein flat out wrong or at least introduce a new subset of mathematics to the laws of motion that refine Einstein's laws of relativity that allow superluminal velocities under some sort of extreme condition not recognized by Einstein previously, I don't see the classical "Star Trek" or "Star Wars" hyperspatial/warp drive ships ever becoming a reality. The USPTO notwithstanding (and the patents they have approved which supposedly claim this ability).
Still, there is much that can be done within the realm of current scientific knowledge that would suggest that travel to nearby stars is at least possible within a human lifetime. That it is right on the edge of the potential of what we understand about physics seems like an interesting proposition, and with many other very rich worlds begging for human exploration within our Solar System that are easily within the range of travel using today's technology that would be comparable to the ocean crossing voyages of the 17th Century, I don't see any pressing desire or even necessity to consider going to another star first. If mankind is already a well established multi-planet species who is well established on the Moon, Mars, Europa, and the Earth, not to mention O'Neill colonies and other such fanciful ideas and concepts; I don't see that it would be too much of a problem digging up the resources to consider going to other solar systems beside our own. But as a proposition to a society that debates if Virgin Galactic is even going to get out of the Earth's atmosphere at all, the question seems a fanciful academic exercise that is generations away from even being realistically asked in the first place.
This question is like asking King James I of England if descendants of his new colony at Plymouth is going to make a laptop computer cheap enough for 3rd world countries of Africa. Or if some of those same people are going to make it to the Moon. The question is premature and we simply don't know right now, nor is there any reason for going in the first place when there are so many inviting places to go at the moment that are much more accessible.
Since this is not linked to any other comment other than the main article, what is the 1000 or 10,000 year trip in reference to?
I would have to agree that any human endeavor that is going to take multiple generations is something that is purely the realm of fiction and not something that has anything resembling human experience. Even so, I do know of cities that have been able to maintain technological devices for well over 1000 years, including water delivery systems and sewage systems.
Yes, they do break down and often have substantial portions of them replaced.... often while in use. But barring a technological collapse where the individuals maintaining the systems are unable to understand the basic science and design philosophies of the systems they are trying to maintain, it is indeed possible to maintain such systems for multiple generations.... provided you have somebody there who is capable of fixing those systems.
This is one reason why I think manned, not robotic spaceflight, is not only desirable but necessary. Only a human with the ability to make leaps of logic and have the ability to improvise new solutions will have the ability to repair broken parts and be able to not only fix but improve upon existing systems over time. While robotic equipment like the Voyager and Magellan spacecraft did have problems that were overcome, it came at a cost of having a huge and expensive support system on the Earth that had some of the brightest minds of all mankind helping to come up with a solution, and in every case the "fix" left the spacecraft in a weaker position than it was before the problem happened. Magellan was particularly disappointing because the primary issue, the lack of a deployed main broadcast array, could have been fixed with a hammer by an astronaut before it left Earth orbit (it was on board the Space Shuttle right before it was launched into solar orbit).
Going back to the question at hand.... can we get to the stars in a reasonable amount of time? I think the answer is yes here as well. It doesn't take 1000 or 10,000 years in order to travel to a nearby planet (speaking on a universal or even galactic scale of thinking) that is capable of supporting human life. Even so, it will be a proposition that will take several years of flight and will likely only be done with ordinary extensions of human knowledge and technology. I just don't see Zephraim Cochraine coming up with a warp drive in the next 200 years giving us access to the galactic core or another galaxy in another 200 years after that.
You can access nearly all of the planets that have been discovered "recently" through the extra solar planet search in less than 50 years of travel going at an average acceleration of about 10 m/s^2. As my body has adjusted to that sort of acceleration demand for the past several decades (and I'm not in the best health either), I don't think this is something too far fetched if you can just solve the energy requirements to provide this level of acceleration. It won't be a combination of kerosene and liquid oxygen that does it, however. That is the real issue of this debate, not if people and equipment physically make the trip.
A little tidbit about Apple Computer and MECC history merging together happened in the Summer of 1977. Steve Jobs was then still a pauper and desperate for trying to sell his crazy idea of a personal computer, and was seeking to intentionally market the Apple ][ to the educational market. By an off chance, he heard about an educational computing conference being held at Utah State University, and decided to show up with a couple of demo models with dreams of orders coming from the conference.... or at least gaining a foothold in the then non-existant market of educational personal computers.
In attendance at this conference were some representatives from MECC, who were busy gathering information that would be used by the school districts in Minnesota. By Minnesota state law at the time, no school district could purchase computer equipment unless it had been explicitly authorized by MECC.
Notable enough was that Steve Jobs had impressed the MECC staff sufficiently that they returned home to Minneapolis and changed the computer purchasing orders for the entire state of Minnesota to include the Apple II and Commodore PET as "authorized" purchases... with a strong recommendation to purchase the Apple computers. All told, several hundred Apple computers were purchased by the Minnesota school districts at a very critical time in the history of Apple Computer, and Minnesota began their movement from their central timeshare system to having nearly everything on PCs (and the demise of the MECC timeshare computer).
My own experience more directly in this incident was at Austin High School (Austin, MN) where the high school had a fairly well established Computer Science program (quite popular among the students), and the primary computer system in use for instruction simply crashed cold and hard with no way to repair it. BTW, that was a Wang minicomputer with a whole 32K of RAM shared between 4 terminals. Faced with the possibility of having to cancel the class and re-arrange the schedules of nearly 300 students, the Austin School District decided to check with MECC and see what was available for a replacement. Fresh from the trip to Utah, MECC recommended that they check out the Apple computers from Cupertino, and immediately ordered the computers. BTW, the serial numbers on those computers had only 3 digits when they arrived. I didn't even notice that until 4 years later right before I graduated from H.S., and well after Apple computer was well established and acknowledged as an industry leader.
Amen! That space combat game was years (decades?) ahead of its time in terms of game mechanics and AI, and other non visual aspects. The hardest part about playing that game was trying to keep track of the information (like team-mates when you could get on with them!) and trying to figure out how to evade the very good players. Especially when you were one "lucky" enough to score a hit on the current leader and "steal" their energy.
The "clans" were very informal (not really a part of the game) but certainly were a major part of the overall experience. Most of the "teams" or "clans" usually logged on with their team name as a part of their login name.
I had the rare privilege of playing this game on a 110 baud yellow "Teletype" machine, where the "bell" was an actual circular bell with a mechanical ringer. When I "upgraded" later on to a 300 baud modem with the old MECC computer system, it seemed as through everything was simply flying at me.... and gave you a distinct advantage playing COMBAT as well.
Even better than the BASIC manuals.... the Technical reference manual, that most dealers would give to you for free or nearly so if you asked for it.
The tech reference manual had a full schematic for the motherboard on a fold out 20" x 30" sheet that looked like a National Geographic map, included a fairly detailed memory map, pin out diagrams for the peripherial cards with expected voltage levels and even a physical diagram for making your own boards, I/O memory locations and signal levels, a complete 6502 opcode listing including byte codes for hand assembly, and frankly just about everything you needed in order to clone an Apple ][ from scratch, including the original source code for the ROM including comments. Sure, it had the Apple Computer copyright disclaimer, but nearly every thing you needed to know about that computer was very public and accessible.
Apple stopped doing this level of technical support for the hobbyist crowd when they started to go for business customers, and when it came to the Mac, their attitude was that you were a user unless you were a part of their "special" developer community with the appropriate large licensing fee. And technical information was on a "need to know" basis.
But at least for the original Apple ][ and II+, the company was very open about its equipment and strongly encouraged outsiders to experiment and add both software and hardware to their system.
GPLv2 already has an "anti-software patent" clause which effectively invalidates the GPL. GPLv3 expands on the simplistic terms of v2 and adds some extra meat to go after individuals who deliberately submit code that violates patents.
In both versions of the GPL, a corporation or individual could certainly maintain a portfolio of "stealth patents" (like the infamous LZW patent that nearly killed off the GIF standard), and bring it out to kill off an open source software project once they have established themselves. Of course any time that has been tried, the claimant to patent violations usually get a virutal "black eye" in the court of public opinion, just as the deCSS algorithm received huge attention just because some idiot decided to press legal felony chargest against the original author. I could give several other good examples.
In addition to the other comments to this post, I would like to mention that "the internet community" or the "open source fans" was a much, much smaller community than currently exists now. And the mere idea that could make some significant money off of open source wasn't nearly so obvious back in the day. Certainly the huge push for DRM garbage and issues related to patents weren't as huge of a deal.... or at least when I mentioned that it was a huge problem Richard Stallman himself in a one-to-one discussion I had about 10 years ago didn't think software patents were going to be that big of a deal and marginalized the problem. His thinking on this issue certainly has changed from that conversation I had with him oh so many years ago.
So quite a bit of this is due to the fact that the community of developers has grown up quite a bit in the years since GPLv2, and there are some very real problems with GPLv2 if you want to maintain the philosophy that software ought to be free... as in general freedom to make changes to software and "give it back" when you are done.
Get a grip and read what happened and stop being an armchair historian in this case.
Bush on 9/11 was doing what any U.S. President would have done in that position: Tried to continue to lead the government and not die in the process of doing that. Or try to ram a suspected terrorist airplane with Air Force One? That is just too stupid to think about.
While you can debate the orders he gave for the invasion of Iraq, what Bush did on 9/11 itself is what any outstanding person holding that office would have done, and perhaps even better than most. In the heat of battle, communications often do get garbled in both directions, and there was some concern that at least some of the plane impacts were of a more traditional accidental nature, and some confusion over what planes really were full of terrorists and what ones may simply be slightly off course. The U.S. Air Force had not even trained at all for the possibility that they would have to shoot down a civilian airplane for military purposes, and instead hitting a plane like that was considered an act of an incompetent coward within the military. Something that would only show up in jokes, and not a serious training exercise. While in theory a fighter like an F-16 could certainly take out a civilian airplane like a 747, the protocols for doing so simply weren't established including trying to define what exactly was considered a target.
Trying to blame Bush/Cheney for this supposed inaction when orders were being issued on the fly and trying to establish a new policy dealing with this situation while it was happening simply isn't dealing with reality for how things like this would be done. I hardly think that you, Catbeller, could have done any better and would likely have fared far worse if you were in the same situation.
What makes you think they will stop once the USA leaves Iraq?
The stated goal of these terrorists is not to kick America out of Iraq. Their goal is to kill every last man, woman, and child in America. And that has been stated on numerous occasions. If Al-Queida is in Iraq, it is only because of the ease of entry into that country and the ability to blend in with and recruit from the population in that country.
But if they want to kill me and my children, I don't have a problem of taking the war to their turf and killing them first. And I would gladly put on a uniform of the U.S. Army to do that. Or see my sons join the Army. Even if I end up losing a child as an unfortunate casualty of war. At least they have a chance to defend themselves in uniform as opposed to being an "innocent" bystander when a bomb goes off in America.
I like to point out what the "policy" of airlines and the U.S. government was regarding hijackers on September 10th, 2001:
If somebody tries to hijack the airplane, give them nearly everything they want and follow the S.O.P. for hostage takers. If you are in flight, take the hijacker to damn near any place they want to get to.... provided you have fuel to get there.
In fact, this policy was so old and pervasive that I saw a reference to it on an "I Love Lucy" re-run where Ricky Ricardo was on a plane that was hijacked and went to Cuba. The whole incident was portrayed on the episode as a sort of involuntary "vacation" to visit exotic locales for a few days while the hijacker quietly disappeared doing whatever it is that he was doing.
There is also the presumption in hostage negotiations that the hostage taker values his/her life in such a way that they don't want to die with the victim. The usual threat to the "criminal" in this case is that the police/military/security can lose their life if they screw up and kill the hostage. A good police negotiator usually tries to convince this person that they are better off staying alive even if they end up going to jail for a few years, and that they will feel guilt if they kill their hostages.
The difference with 9/11 was that the hijackers didn't care about their life. And it was demonstrated beyond doubt that the passengers and crew would lose their own lives anyway, as would the hijackers because they didn't care. So in that sort of situation, I certainly would take my chances in trying to kill the hijackers with damn near anything and everything I had at my disposal. And it would be in the best interest of the pilots to keep the door of the cockpit locked up and secure during the flight. As is now required by the FAA. I remember pre-9/11 flights where the cockpit door was left open for the entire flight. It was neat to see the pilots at work (kinda like a kid watching their parents drive a car), but it is a huge security risk.
For this reason and many more, I don't buy the "increased security" at airports as anything but a ruse and "closing the barndoors after the cows left". There will never be another massive 9/11 scale attack again on the USA, because most people won't permit it to ever happen again. Oh, there may be another attempt or two, and perhaps even a lone plane succeeding in hitting its intended target due to a bunch of cowards on board the aircraft, but the large scale coordinated attack simply will not happen, at least not without the expectation that many or most of the planes won't make it to their intended targets.
One other reason why 9/11 didn't seem to have more than the four planes is that it seems as though Al-Queida forgot something far too important in their planning: The USA has multiple time zones. Apparently there were supposed to be a dozen or so airplanes to be hijacked, but the cells in the other time zones didn't get a chance to carry out the plans due to the grounding of the U.S. civilian air fleet after the first attacks happened. Los Angeles and Seattle were supposed to both be targets, as was the Sears Tower in Chicago. I don't know if that would have changed much of anything post 9/11 had they been smart enough to book flights that all took off at the same time (the L.A. cell didn't even make it into the airport before it was closed) but it does give some pause to think about the possibilities. 9/11 could have been and should have been much worse.
The lack of follow-through by Al-Queida is certainly something that shows the lack of additional planning as well, where they could have started a real terror campaign by blowing up highway bridges and passenger ships. I don't know what a sustained effort to take out the Interstate Highway System would have done to the morale of the ordinary citizens of the USA, but it certainly would have had a much more profound impact on the U.S. economy than destroying the World Trade Center.
This "In Soviet Russia" joke actually make sense and is somewhat based on reality.
It is a bunch of nut cases with mental health problems that are sending CBS to me every day.
Thanks... this one fits in more ways than one.
While I will admit that Star Trek has inspired numerous engineers to not only enter the profession but to also try and come up with the some of the gee-whiz gadgets that they have seen on the show, I wouldn't give the show credit for all of the creature comforts that we enjoy today. Just as I wouldn't claim that NASA is responsible for spin-off technology like Velcro, Teflon, and integrated circuits. All were developed and even sold commercially prior to their use by NASA.
One of the real issues with the original TV series of Star Trek was that the network was missing completely the demographic group of 18-40 year olds, who made up the bulk of the original Star Trek audience. It was a case of NBC (in the case of Star Trek) relying on lousy marketing information and a huge failure to market the advertising to those companies who perhaps would have even paid a premium rate for advertising on that particular television show. If the current Nielson rating system were in place in the late 1960's, Star Trek would have been the highest rated television show of the era and perhaps even of all time.
Now the question in regards to Jericho is if this is also the case. I would argue that CBS isn't mis-managing the marketing of this particular television series, but that is a valid argument to make that would also make some sense to the executives of the entertainment division of CBS. The goal here is to convince the management of CBS that they should continue the series not because a bunch of nut cases that deserve long term mental health services have raised a stink about the cancellation, but because they are missing a golden opportunity to market their advertising to a group of companies they haven't considered before.
If you can make this case, I promise you that you will see Jericho on the air next year. I just don't think that case can be made. Prove me wrong, please.
And you think that the Nielsen ratings are an accurate gauge of the attitude of Americans toward individual television shows?
I hate to break the news here to you, but there are huge demographic groups (especially college-age individuals who don't tend to have a permanent address) that often get missed by the Nielson ratings, and groups like African-Americans who are substantially over-represented with the rating points. This is not quite as simple as the amount of ticket sales that is used to compare motion pictures, but a weighted sampling system that throws a whole bunch of assumptions into the mix when the rating points are determined.
This isn't to say that you can't judge relative gains or losses of audience share on the Nielson ratings, and they can be a rough point with decision making in regards to keeping or canceling a television show, but you need to understand the biases before you make those decisions. Networks have been substantially wrong in the past with the cancellation of some shows that simply shouldn't have been killed, because they didn't market their shows properly.
And keep in mind foremost that the #1 thing that networks look at is not Nielsen ratings (which is useful), but how much they can get in terms of advertising revenue. If the price of the ads have to be lowered because they can't attract companies to run those ads on a particular TV show, this is the business deicsion that has to be made. The network evening news shows have had their ratings in the toilet for decades, but the ad revenue is still there for some reason to keep those shows on the air. And the networks are therefore able to continue to make a (perhaps modest) profit.
Of course the real culprit here is not the ratings themselves, but those advertising agencies who make the decisions on what shows they are going to sponsor (and drive up the price of the ads for those shows), and which ones they decide to pull the ads from (with a corresponding drop in the price of ads on that show). That Nielsen ratings are are a factor in this decision is true, and in this case CBS made a financial decision based on what it could reasonably expect for income from Jericho vs. what it could potentially make off of even another mediocre television show that it is planning on putting in the place of Jericho next year.
It all comes down to money in the long run.
And you don't think that current television producers take into account DVD sales?
It surprises me that for at least some of the series franchises, such as Stargate or Star Trek, that there hasn't been a "direct to video" TV series just for fans made of original material. Charging fans $10 per episode would not be unreasonable in a market like this, where the pressed discs, materials, and shipping costs are less than $1 per disc. For crying out loud, I can buy some DVD-Video discs for $1 per disc retail.... at the checkout counter.
So how much would somebody be willing to pay for a 1 hour direct-to-video Farscape episode? With the option that it may also be used "in syndication" at some point in the future and marketed to independent television stations?
It seems as though the budget (except for talent costs... which are debatable as always) for Jericho isn't too high to try this as at least an experiment and produce a few extra episodes just for fans to gague the viability of this model.
It's just too bad that people in a position in the movie industry to read crazy ideas like this won't read these posts.
This sounds like the tax that the state of Minnesota imposes (used to impose?) on income tax refund checks.
Re-read this again if you don't get it. You get an income tax refund check because you paid too much in taxes, yet that refund was taxed as if it was income. And of course you didn't get a rebate if you ended up having to pay taxes instead of getting a refund.
Governments will do anything and everything to try and get you to part with the money in your wallet, and often the only difference between a fraudulent schemer and a congressman is that the congressman has the ability to write laws so everything he is doing is legal... by definition. Double taxation, while it doesn't make sense, happens routinely and in more ways than you can possibly imagine. At best all you should do is point out the hypocrisy when you see it and let others know how absurd governments can get.
There is also a widespread problem within software development circles to think that the reference implementation of a software specification is the one and only solution, and that anybody attempting to re-implement that standard doesn't have a brain.
I have seen far too many bugs in the reference implementations (just like any other software) to trust them entirely, although the unfortunate aspect of that is the reference implementation *becomes* the standard instead of the documentation which is supposed to be the standard. Hence the reason most people simply use the reference implementation and pretend the formal specification doesn't even exist. If the standard says a byte ought to be "12" but the reference implementation produces an "08", guess which one is most frequently found in data files using the standard?
I should have been more specific here. All characters encoded with UTF-16 including the Latin alphabet will be at least 16 bits.
The point I'm making is that the lousy implementation of Unicode by Microsoft (and UTF-8 has been around for quite some time here to get this fixed and done properly since Windows '98 was released... possibly even an earlier service pack patch to Windows '95) to have two different character encoding standards for most of their API function calls when it wasn't really even necessary. The whole Win32 API treats Unicode as this perverted disease that needs to be avoided when at all possible, when it simply doesn't need to be dealt with that way.
There is the issue of diacritical marks and the code mapping to some Latin characters that normally use the 8th bit of modified ASCII instead of formal Unicode, but that is a problem anyway for these same documents. I guess it took too much effort on the part of the MS-Word development team to properly transition to Unicode as a standard, as they used the 8th bit of ASCII for document formatting characters as well. The Win32 API is in many places obviously designed by the MS-Office dev team. But that is another issue and thread entirely.
There is the option of using UTF-8 instead of UTF-16 for the encoding of Unicode characters. Most implementations of Unicode insist upon UTF-16 (meaning all characters including Latin alphabets use 16 bits per letter). If you have some software that your anticipated audience is primarily Latin alphabet users but you want to make Unicode available, you can use UTF-8 to keep mostly 8-bit characters but allow the full Unicode code points (including 32-bit characters as well) if you need those non-Latin characters.
I would have to agree here that this is not a failure of the Unicode encoding standard, but the software implementation of using the Unicode standard, trying to communicate to software not prepared (due to poor implementation of existing standards and very lazy software developers) to deal with this sort of content. Of course it was software developers like this that gave us the Y2K bugs as well.