Re:Replacing the electoral college
on
Who won?
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· Score: 1
I would like to find anybody who is from California, Florida, Texas, or any other larger state who in all seriousness thinks that their vote for President of the United States has any less of an impact because of where they live over those from Wyoming, Alaska, Rhode Island, or Delaware.
On the contrary, it is the larger states that seem to get most of the attention from political candidates, while those from smaller states feel like their opinions are swept under the table and ignored. At least with the current electorial college they have somewhat of an influence
About the only major complaint that Californians have is that their polls close so late that the election has already been decided before they get a chance to vote. But it has nothing to do with electorial college practices and would be the same issue even if it were a direct popular vote election as well.
The whole problem is something that is a rough compromise between smaller states vs. larger states, and this point seems to keep playing itself out over and over again in issues just like this.
Getting rid of the electorial college to a direct vote would cause far more problems than you are implying here, and move the vote counting problems from being only in Ohio or Florida to something where every voting precent in the USA would get challenged legally, particularly for very close presidential elections like have happened the past couple of times.
For a church newsletter.... I would have to say that from time to time the answer would be:
Absolutely YES!
Churches do urge their members, quite often, to support very specific political philosophies and "causes". To note a few significant issues that involved direct lobbying of churches on behalf of their membership would include:
Civil Rights - Notably the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Alcohol regulation - and especially the passage of the Alcohol Prohibition Constitutional Ammendment
Gambling laws
Abortion "rights", both pro-life and pro-choice
Enforcement of 1st Ammendment religious rights
For crying out loud, almost all of the major presidential political candidates running for office (both Republican as well as Democratic) in 2004 gave "sermons" at several churches during the campaign. And these church bullitens certainly did publicize that these "events" were going to occur, often with the name of the candidate. And it isn't restricted to just presidential candidates either.
While the IRS does go after these churches occasionally for endorsing political candidates, it isn't always consistant nor does it seem to stop this sort of "free speech" that often occurs by church groups.
And to defend why this occurs, often these are very basic moral positions that fit squarely within the religious beliefs of these groups where they feel very compelled to make a formal stand on these issues. It is not something that is going to go away any time soon either.
The mission here is to give the 3rd world easy access to laptops. While it'd be cool for we well-off to have yet another cheap consumer electronics device, that's not the point and would distract resources and attention away from their mission.
How?
I don't see how this is really distracting substantial resources, as there are plenty of people willing to volunteer to help set up this "western" consumer edition. And the suggestion to add extra features to meet the needs of the western market IMHO is ludicrious as well.
There may be something to be said that while production is being ramped up, that sale of these computers is going to be delayed to people other than those ministries of education that have already paid for them. That is legitimate and reasonable. But to say that at the end of this production run that some other group couldn't come in and offer a similar $100 million to buy a lot for sale to western nations and keep the production line going for a few more months doesn't make sense at all.
Either that, or all of this is a pure scam to fleece some 3rd world governments. It certainly is beginning to sound that way to me more and more all of the time.
No, the honorable thing is to have the OLPC folks sell these computers at a price to western nations that would kill any grey market that might eventually develop.
If the demand is satisfied in the west, the price that can be asked for on Ebay will be so low that it won't be worth the effort.... and the governments who are buying these things will have an economic incentive to try and stop the wholesale theft (presuming they are spending their own money to buy these computers).
Yes, perhaps a marginal market may still develop from 3rd world countries, but it won't be nearly as big of a deal than if the current stance is held and they can sell them to western consumers at a huge mark-up over what the government is paying for them. At that point, these governments who recieve them will be directly involved with the sales of these devices on Ebay.... they won't even get into the hands of people to be stolen in the first place.
There was an on-line petition to try and demonstrate a demand for these things to propose something even more generous:
Buy three laptops and give two away... aka pay $300-$400 and make a donation to the OLPC effort at the same time.
It is precisely this sort of suggested fundraising that the OLPC supporters are rejecting flatly, and there is not a single shred of evidence that any other similar sort of financial arrangement is being made. If the BBC claims that such an effort is being done, it is a very sloppy reporter that has seen these on-line petitions that are gaining absolutely no traction at all.
The OLPC organizers have been very explicit: There will be no consumer version. Period. It will never even be sold in Europe nor North America, so don't even try.
Oh, I have no doubt that this will eventually happen.... perhaps even by the same Chinese manufacturer that is producing the current OLPC.
What is missing here is that if the OLPC group has the opportunity to nip all of that in the bud and be able to profit from this opportunity at the same time... turning this from a fleecing of 3rd world governments to a fleecing of western consumers with the "profits" being used to help get these laptops to the intended individuals.
Why they can't see that it would be cheaper for both the 3rd world and everybody else if these were mass produced on a very large scale for sale to western countries as well is beyond me. This doesn't mean that they need to cater to the latest consumer electronics fads and need a feature creep to make it easier for western students to use this platform, but it isn't like there aren't also poor kids in NYC, London, or Moscow either.
For crying out loud, the very much impoverished commonwealth of Massachusetts has explicitly requested that they be given the opportunity to purchase these laptops for use in their own schools. It will be interesting to see if even that 3rd world "nation" gets the opportunity to buy these computers as well.:)
I have been highly critical of the OLPC project since the beginning for precisely the very reasons you have given, and more, as it shows a sort of arrogance and complete lack of understanding of economics on the part of the major contributors to this project.
And while Ebay may be able to stop the sale of these particular computers explicitly in some sort of weird new policy specific to the OLPC project, they have no legal obligation to do so, nor is it going to stop a grey market of these computers coming from corrupt governments.
And as I've said repeatedly, if we can't possibly get an assurance that wheat, rice, and corn will actually get to the "struggling masses" due to diversions by corrupt governments and teeming gangsters using it for their own means, why do you possibly think that electronic equipment will end up in the hands of the same people (or not be subject to similar corruption)?
Many of these same governments that the OLPC project is targeted for have also shown repeated problems with similar kind of aid programs where instead of trying for a better education, these programs have a simplier goal: Simply feed the hungry and poor. Yet billions of dollars worth of aid (both private and direct government grants) get wasted or to even see the food get buried, burned, or fed to cattle in a deliberate attempt to make sure that it doesn't get to the intended target.
This isn't to say that the OLPC effort shouldn't necessarily be tried, but there is not legitimate reason not to have a western consumer version produced by perhaps a seperate group that also wants to help support financially the OLPC effort.
From what I can tell, the OLPC group has "sold their souls for 30 pieces of silver" to major manufacturers of electronic components just for a temporary price break. The only reason I can possibly see to justify this stance is that in order to get some of the parts for these computers, they had to sign a "3rd world only" agreement with computer equipment manufacturers in order to get parts. While this was talked about briefly at the very beginning of this project, I don't see that being used as an excuse currently. I also have no doubt that alternative suppliers could be found for any parts that have such an agreement if they really cared to look, even if it might result in a slight delay in production.
This is also why there desperately needs to be some sort of "open source" version of computer hardware, or based on similar freedom principles. But that is for another thread elsewhere.
Thanks for pointing this out. I was not implying that the term "wiki" was somehow a protected trademark (Ward Cunningham anybody?), even though the Wikimedia Foundation seems to feel that they own that particular trademark from time to time.
I've seen literally hundreds of these proposals posted on Foundation-l, including two this month alone, and a whole page of them on the Meta wiki. Every once in a blue moon one comes along that is a really outstanding idea, but that is a rare idea. This is one of those ideas that except for blasting all over here on/. that it would have died a slow and largely anonymous death.
I was on the committee to move one particular project to full Wikimedia sister project status, and it was hardly a cakewalk, so I can speak with a bit of authority on this topic. And I've been involved with encouraging some of the other more promising ideas.
There is a proposal to make a P2P client for Wikipedia that would help (in theory) reduce the bandwidth requirements that the WMF has to deal with for article display, but that is still a very long way from happening. In terms of making that same P2P client be able to also insert "uncensorable" content on top of Wikipedia is a pipe dream that IMHO will never happen, as it appears as though these guys are merely "talking out of their ass". They certainly don't have the fundimental clue about how to actually get any of these crazy ideas going, nor do they have any actual working software demo.
They may have these "documents", but even that I have some serious doubts and reservations. And I hope they have them in a very secure facility in a nation that is not a member of the United Nations. I can't imagine where you can go that you would avoid extradition from any one of the G-9 nations + Switzerland + China. If all these countries are argreeing that you are on the top of their hit list, you are sure to be screwed regardless of what anonymizing tools you are using.
It is right out of their FAQ that they intend to use Wikipedia for the delivery of this content. Or that they intend to "mirror" Wikipedia.
Frankly, I don't even see where the word "wiki" comes in for this project, as they aren't even going to be using HTML servers at all, but rather intend to use Freenet or something similar. Good luck! They are going to need it if they choose Freenet as the underlying technology. That is good for about 1000 pages total, if they are very, very lucky. There is no way you are going to deliver the "over 1 million" documents (assuming multiple pages and with photos).... roughly on the order of several GB of data.
No, these guys simply don't have a clue as to what they are talking about, and they certainly are not using a Wiki to help put this thing together. It is just a pipe dream on a e-mailing list, and that is hardly new. Nor even novel technology, let's get real.
Perhaps something will come from this, but at the moment it is pure, unadulturated vapourware. Nothing more.
This group, whomever they are, is improperly using the trademark "Wikipedia" as a buzz word to try and gin up support for this very dubious sort of project.
Say what you might about Wikipedia, but this does not involve either the Wikimedia Foundation, its employees, or frankly much of anybody even involved with the day to day running of Wikipedia either.
And slashdot is hardly the best place to announce something like this if you wanted to involve the Wikipedia user base. While this is a sort of "geek news" that might get some notice, it is disingenuious to suggest any association with Wikipedia.
Besides, on those Wikimedia projects where I have admin privileges, I would delete most of this content on the spot as unverifiable rumors and gossip, and expect the same on the other Wikimedia projects.
While this might be something rather interesting in terms of a web server to host this material, and invite some anonymous method of gathering these documents, I don't even see that they are going to be using a Wiki to gather this information.
In short, move along.... there is nothing here to see.
No, the US shouldn't swtich because the USA is already an industrialized country with existing infrastructure that doesn't need the Metric system. And provides a counter example to the dire necessity of having to use everyting in metric measurements.
This example here (the grandparent post) is more an example of how people from different cultures come to a cultural shock when having to deal with each other. The measurement system is just one more example of very different cultural backgrounds, where Texas is certainly not even remotely a future candidate for EU expansion.
The USA will never completely switch to the metric system. Ever. There is no pressing need to do so.
Costa Rica has its protection "guarenteed" by the USA. Or to put it more plain, if somebody else besides the USA tried to move into Costa Rica, you had better believe that a division or two of U.S. Marines and soldiers would appear nearly overnight inside of that country.
And unlike many other places around the world that the U.S. military is currently working at, the lines of supply trying to get personnel and logistical support into Costa Rica would be trivial in comparison, and a rather lengthy line of supply for anybody else who wants to engage in such a suicidal action.
Frankly, it sounds to me like a very smart idea for countries in Central America to follow a similar sort of policy for much of the very same reasons. Besides, without a significant military to muck things up, Costa Ricians also enjoy the comfort of knowing that a coup is highly unlikely, which seems to be the most common usage for a large military force in Latin America in general.
Yes, but Belgium and the Netherlands are in fact buffer states between England, Germany, and France.
The reason why England figures so strongly here is that the most natural avenue of invasion into England from continental Europe has almost always been through the "low countries", which is one of the reasons why both world wars ended up going through all three of these countries.
What is amazing is that these three countries still have a strong political role within the EU, where they continue to play off the three much larger countries against each other for their own mutual advantage.
We've been on this path for some time. All that has happened is that it is now painfully obvious that the government is hardly even reading the constitution that gives them legitimacy in the first place.
BTW, this is done with the approval and conscent of both major political parties in the USA.
Unfortunately, I don't think the administrative cost is necessarily as fixed as you imply. Yes, paying for singular things like the domain name and writing check out for the network bandwidth are comparatively trivial, but there is much more involved here. In addition to the rest of the issues that the Wikimedia Foundation is facing, they also now have a very substantial affiliate program (to use a term here that may be misleading) of national chapter associations that requires some substantial "staff" resources to work with.
The largest growth of this "administrative cost" that everybody is worried about is mainly the legal issues. It is precisely this point that lead Brad Patrick to be appointed as the "CEO" of the Wikimedia Foundation, as he is a full-time lawyer and mainly dealing with the legal problems of the WMF. There are several volunteer attorneys involved as well trying to take on the group of idiots who have now lead to a near constant barrage of pleas and complaints.
As for the rest of your reply here, I hope that you are correct that the additional resources will scale with the usage and donations to the WMF. If advertising is to be a source of revenue to keep all this going, it certainly is going to be a very tempting target if it isn't done.
Then again, PBS used to pride itself about being "commercial free", but has so much advertising of commercial products that I don't see how it even qualifies as a non-profit organization, except by congressional fiat that it is so. I don't think the WMF is going to be so lucky.
In reference to the bandwidth requirements for displaying rather than editing a web page via wiki as opposed to a simple ordinary webserver, I think Wikipedia does a pretty good job for those who just casually browse (and hit hyperlinks) to the content.
There are two huge issues here, somewhat related:
1) Bandwidth demands even for those who are doing read-only access to Wikipedia are absolutely huge. The Wikimedia Foundation is buying network bandwidth at industrial rates, being essentially a secondary peer for the most part with much of what they offer. It is almost impossible to comprehend the sheer bandwidth it takes to serve everything, especially considering Wikipedia is now in the top 10 servers in the world by several standards.
2) The number of pages being served by Wikipedia alone are absolutely huge. The raw HTML for just English Wikipedia is close to 7 GB of data. That does include talk pages and user pages, so that number can be modified somewhat for raw content.
I'm not convinced that a mere mailing list would work with the volume of changes that happen to Wikipedia every day, even if you confine it to completed work-overs of articles by legitimate scholars interested in updating the content. And even then you would have to come up with a way to redistribute the changes to everybody interested in the "current revision" (presumably just the people who have made changes recently or want to make some changes).
There have been some alternative systems proposed, including some sort of P2P content distribution system that would allow you to access Wikipedia content and send updated articles to a central server. While technically possible, the software do get something like that going is hardly trivial. Although admittedly it may be possible to spend some of the current $1 million+ budget on perhaps some software developers to work on some of those alternative distribution systems.
There is an effort going right now among the major volunteer software developers with Wikipedia to develop a more static version that would only get updated once those contributing feel like the article is ready to be "published". The reasons for doing this are more for quality purposes than monitary cost, as the network bandwidth savings doesn't appear to be all that significant. I could be mistaken on this point, however.
Most of the CPU bandwidth is mainly conducting information traffic flow rather than performing actions on the behalf of editor/contributors. There is some "page assembly" stuff that happens (converting the Wiki-markup text to HTML, for example), it doesn't appear as though currently the CPU bandwidth is a killer issue.
The reason why I suggested about $5 million per year is in part due to potential growth of other Wikimedia sister projects, and the growth of non-english Wikipedias. Chinese Wikipedia, for example, could potentially grow substantially over its current usage patterns, as can several other major languages including Indonesian and languages of the Indian Sub-continent. I've watched both bandwidth usage and page growth, and both seem to show exponential curves even now, with no "flatening" in sight. It would be interesting to perform some regression analysis on the data, which you can find at http://stats.wikimedia.org/ (regularly updated too!)
the $1.5m they are raising now becomes an annualized cost (I'm sure it's not)
Unfortunately, it is now an annualized cost. If the WMF wants to keep up and be able to pay for the server farm and bandwidth requirements just for en.wikipedia at the current usage level of activity, this $1.5 million is necessary as an annual cost. By all estimates, Wikipedia is going to continue to grow even well beyond the current usage levels, and it will be very interesting to see just how far this whole project can grow before it starts to collapse under its own weight.
Frankly, I would not want to be on the board of trustees of the WMF at the moment, in terms of trying to project what the project costs are going to be next year and the year after that, and trying to worry about where all that money might just come from. Assuming that the ordinary users are going to fork out enough money to cover the tab just doesn't, from this perspective, seem to be even remotely possible. Trying to raise $5 million for the 2009 budget year seems in a current context as an impossible goal.
I will say, however, that I had some serious doubts that they would be able to raise even the current $900,000 that they have recieved in this latest round of fundraising, so I may be surprised. Considering just a little over two years ago they had some problems even trying to come up with $50,000, this is very remarkable.
On top of the bandwidth issues, there is now a group of vultures who are pounding on the WMF with a boatload of lawsuits and other BS crap that is unfortunately requiring a full time professional staff to deal with those external forces that also want to derail the various projects. Having employees is going to simply cost money, even if they are doing it at nearly volunteer wage rates.
Can you point to any artist that has recieved any royalties paid into the RIAA/ASCAP? Perhaps some of the major labels have recieved some money, but I highly doubt that you can find even a single penny of money that has actually gone to the recording artists themselves for any of these actions.
I may be wrong here, but I would like somebody to prove me wrong.
This is simply absurd. Nations go to war in order to "kill people and break things". That is the last thing you want to do if you are seeking control over "intellectual property" of any kind.
It is creative minds that create this stuff in the first place, so when you talk about a war over intellectual resources, that means that you have to have a war that is explicitly designed to capture smart people who can create that sort of cool stuff.
It could be argued that after the collapse of the 3rd Reich that both Russia and the USA engaged in a sort of political war to recruit various German scientists over to their "side" during the Cold War. If a war over intellectual property does happen, it is precisely in this manner. Bullets don't (mostly) get fired but it does become an ideological battle that takes place trying to win the hearts and minds of everybody involved. And economic power plays where economies of entire countries get wacked due to international competition over this still. And all that is happening right now.
At the same time, you don't want to visit a juristiction even as a tourist afterward where a judgement has been made against you. Once you go there all hope is lost and you have to fight through the courts... even if there was a default judgement issued.
I hope the lawyers you mention also advise them of this as well, not that NYC is necessarily close to Russia as a place they would "accidentally" get to.
I'm not sure if the EU would honor an extradition request for a civil suit like this, but I've heard of worse. Particularly if the judge in this case decides to get cute and file a contempt charge that would turn it into a criminal matter, given the statement that they believe the court has no jurisdiction and is openly giving the finger to the judge from across the Atlantic.
Re:Building your own radio controlled flying sauce
on
UFOs In the News
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· Score: 1
This reminds me of a thing a very old friend of mine did back a few decades ago when UFO hysteria came up, cashing in on the craze as well:
He made a bunch of tissue paper "balloons" that used as fuel some melted parafin (candle wax) as the fuel source, and some kite string to attach the candle to the tissue paper. This is the same material that you use for older traditional kites, and in fact this buddy of mine said it was a canabalized kite kit as well with a little "engineering" to hack it into something else.
Some cloudless winter night in Minnesota, without much wind, he took a bunch of these and lit them up in the late evening, but when people would still be awake to see the things if they were doing some late-night driving or happened to be outside at the time. Think about it, what would a hot-air baloon powered by a candle look like at night? A big glowing ball of light that would float and hover as it caught random air currents, moving in erratic directions. Since these were comparatively small, they also tended to float just about house tops and other buildings.
Occasionally the wax "fuel" would run out, but the ballon woudn't necessarily land immediately afterward as it was still a very light weight object.
Needless to say, the next morning there were a bunch of UFO "sightings" in the local paper, and the local police department had a rather busy night trying to figure out what was going on, trying to calm down the local citizens. I can only imagine what the law enforcement thought of the whole mess, and what would have happened if my friend had been caught.
Re:Birth of an Island, Rise of a Nation...
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Birth of an Island
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· Score: 4, Insightful
In the early 1970's, there was a Las Vegas developer who ended up going to an atoll that was technically in unclaimed international waters and "built" an island by dumping extra material on this group of submerged rocks to the point that there was a portion that stayed above water during high tides, technically new territory just as you have suggested.
BTW, this was also near the Tongan islands, so this is also relevant in this situation.
What happened afterward was that a group of Tongan soldiers "invaded" the newly formed island and asserted sovereignty by "occupying" the island in the name of Tonga. Instead of formenting an international incident, the developer relented and gave up his attempt to build his own South Pacific version of Monaco.
I'm not sure what would have happened if this developer had his own "army" that would have defended the island, but it certainly seems like Tonga would consider it justifications for going to war if it happened near one of their islands. I'm curious what the Tongan government may have to say about this new island in their general domain.
Electric Voting is a bad idea. It presents very limited benefits and HUGE potential risks (not to mention huge COSTS, if security measures are to be deployed meaningfully).
I would have to agree completely that electronic voting is a painfully awful idea, and something that really does need to be eliminated. That said, there is a distinction here that needs to be made (and usually isn't):
There is electronic voting and electonic ballot preparation.
And to top it off, electronic vote counting, which can and ought to be independent of the above two issues that need to be distinguished seperately.
IMHO, what should be done for most of these voting precinct "upgrades" is some sort of system that produces a plain marked paper ballot that is prepared in the voting booth by the voter, but is then dropped into a box just like any other hand-written ballot. All the computer software really does is clean up what is written for write-in names, and makes sure that common mistakes like voting for multiple candidates when only one is allowed can be caught and fixed by the voter before it is counted. Or to notify you that you have "missed" a race and if you want to cast a vote for anybody in that race, with a clear "none of the above" as an option. Or to fix things like a "dimpled chad" or smeared pen mark where you don't quite know who gets the vote for a given race on hand written ballots.
If you have a consistant electronically "prepared" ballot, it would be trivial to set up a reliable OCR scanning system that would then be able to count these ballots. Indeed, you could even set up a system (and election laws) that would allow multiple systems by different vendors and different design teams to come up with identical counts (or provide justification to invalidate the results of one counting system). And more important, you can even do a "hand count" if you think everything is still broken, as the original data won't get tampered with regardless on how the votes are counted. Anonymity can be presered as well (the reason for the "secret ballot"), but that is besides the point.
If you try to combine all of these tasks into one huge machine, you are automatically asking for trouble. By seperating the counting from the ballot preparation, you also give a means for the voter to monitor exactly how their own vote is cast. It is clear and on legible paper exactly what their intent was... something most literate voters can and ought to be able to figure out without any additional technical training. You shouldn't have to have a BS degree in CS in order to verify that your vote has been cast (and counted) as you intended it.
Being an engineer who was given a pink slip and sent out the door after the successful completion of a 5-year major software engineering project, I can tell you that there was a huge amount of information that I had (still have) within my head that never was written down about the details of the computer system I worked on. We had a total of about 20 engineers from multiple discliplines (electrical, mechanical, civil, and myself being involved with software) on multi-million dollar installations.
Indeed you have seen some of our work, particularly if you ever watch television or go to any major sporting events, but that is besides the point.
What I'm getting at here is that for major crash engineering programs (and Apollo was clearly one of these), the goal is to get the job done. And in particular for Apollo, there was no consideration as to what the next generation of spacecraft was going to involve, nor were future engineers considered when trying to document and preserve information. One of the reasons I was laid off in particular was because I had successfully implemented a reliable documentation system for our software engineering group, and started to ask some hard questions that would force the company to reliably account for the actual profits that we as software developers made on behalf of the company I worked for.
Frankly, I am in awe of people like yourself who take the time to seriously consider what has happened to the Apollo guidance system and intend to build a full simulator. I can't imagine that you get much money for that kind of work. It is usually completely volunteer, or on a shoestring budget for some museum group with many "donated" hours above and beyond those actually paid for. Most simulators I've seen usually do some very hard abstractions and don't go down into those level of deails, but this is certainly something very interesting.
BTW, don't give up hope yet on some of this stuff. Many of the engineers and even operators of the control rooms and other stuff are still alive, although they are now very much senior citizens and heading very quickly to their graves. I had an old EE prof. who talked briefly about some of the control room circuits on the Apollo mission and had us as students "recreate" some of the (admittedly very simplified) circuits that were used. I'm sure more expertise is available if you really dig for it.
Also don't believe the polls that say a majority think that 9/11 was caused by Iraq we have those that think it was the Germans that bombed Pearl Harbor.
I would dare say that it is the very same people who believe both of these things. Together with the idea the JFK was the person who suggested to NASA that we ought to go to the Moon (even though JFK was a strong proponent and powerful ally on the concept).
As far as the rest of your reply, I would have to agree mostly, although I think you can give a little more credit to 3rd party candidates than you have suggested here. As Ross Perot was able to demonstrate, somebody with a bit of cash to help fund 3rd parties in such a way to financially give them parity with the major parties can also win elections, given the equivalent political territory involved. That such individuals also tend to be weird fanatics with screwy ideas (George Sorros also comes to mind here) will also suggest that such efforts are nearly doomed to failure as well, just because of the flaky individual providing the money.
Slashdot Mirror
I would like to find anybody who is from California, Florida, Texas, or any other larger state who in all seriousness thinks that their vote for President of the United States has any less of an impact because of where they live over those from Wyoming, Alaska, Rhode Island, or Delaware.
On the contrary, it is the larger states that seem to get most of the attention from political candidates, while those from smaller states feel like their opinions are swept under the table and ignored. At least with the current electorial college they have somewhat of an influence
About the only major complaint that Californians have is that their polls close so late that the election has already been decided before they get a chance to vote. But it has nothing to do with electorial college practices and would be the same issue even if it were a direct popular vote election as well.
The whole problem is something that is a rough compromise between smaller states vs. larger states, and this point seems to keep playing itself out over and over again in issues just like this.
Getting rid of the electorial college to a direct vote would cause far more problems than you are implying here, and move the vote counting problems from being only in Ohio or Florida to something where every voting precent in the USA would get challenged legally, particularly for very close presidential elections like have happened the past couple of times.
Absolutely YES!
Churches do urge their members, quite often, to support very specific political philosophies and "causes". To note a few significant issues that involved direct lobbying of churches on behalf of their membership would include:
For crying out loud, almost all of the major presidential political candidates running for office (both Republican as well as Democratic) in 2004 gave "sermons" at several churches during the campaign. And these church bullitens certainly did publicize that these "events" were going to occur, often with the name of the candidate. And it isn't restricted to just presidential candidates either.
While the IRS does go after these churches occasionally for endorsing political candidates, it isn't always consistant nor does it seem to stop this sort of "free speech" that often occurs by church groups.
And to defend why this occurs, often these are very basic moral positions that fit squarely within the religious beliefs of these groups where they feel very compelled to make a formal stand on these issues. It is not something that is going to go away any time soon either.
How?
I don't see how this is really distracting substantial resources, as there are plenty of people willing to volunteer to help set up this "western" consumer edition. And the suggestion to add extra features to meet the needs of the western market IMHO is ludicrious as well.
There may be something to be said that while production is being ramped up, that sale of these computers is going to be delayed to people other than those ministries of education that have already paid for them. That is legitimate and reasonable. But to say that at the end of this production run that some other group couldn't come in and offer a similar $100 million to buy a lot for sale to western nations and keep the production line going for a few more months doesn't make sense at all.
Either that, or all of this is a pure scam to fleece some 3rd world governments. It certainly is beginning to sound that way to me more and more all of the time.
No, the honorable thing is to have the OLPC folks sell these computers at a price to western nations that would kill any grey market that might eventually develop.
If the demand is satisfied in the west, the price that can be asked for on Ebay will be so low that it won't be worth the effort.... and the governments who are buying these things will have an economic incentive to try and stop the wholesale theft (presuming they are spending their own money to buy these computers).
Yes, perhaps a marginal market may still develop from 3rd world countries, but it won't be nearly as big of a deal than if the current stance is held and they can sell them to western consumers at a huge mark-up over what the government is paying for them. At that point, these governments who recieve them will be directly involved with the sales of these devices on Ebay.... they won't even get into the hands of people to be stolen in the first place.
There was an on-line petition to try and demonstrate a demand for these things to propose something even more generous:
Buy three laptops and give two away... aka pay $300-$400 and make a donation to the OLPC effort at the same time.
It is precisely this sort of suggested fundraising that the OLPC supporters are rejecting flatly, and there is not a single shred of evidence that any other similar sort of financial arrangement is being made. If the BBC claims that such an effort is being done, it is a very sloppy reporter that has seen these on-line petitions that are gaining absolutely no traction at all.
The OLPC organizers have been very explicit: There will be no consumer version. Period. It will never even be sold in Europe nor North America, so don't even try.
Oh, I have no doubt that this will eventually happen.... perhaps even by the same Chinese manufacturer that is producing the current OLPC.
:)
What is missing here is that if the OLPC group has the opportunity to nip all of that in the bud and be able to profit from this opportunity at the same time... turning this from a fleecing of 3rd world governments to a fleecing of western consumers with the "profits" being used to help get these laptops to the intended individuals.
Why they can't see that it would be cheaper for both the 3rd world and everybody else if these were mass produced on a very large scale for sale to western countries as well is beyond me. This doesn't mean that they need to cater to the latest consumer electronics fads and need a feature creep to make it easier for western students to use this platform, but it isn't like there aren't also poor kids in NYC, London, or Moscow either.
For crying out loud, the very much impoverished commonwealth of Massachusetts has explicitly requested that they be given the opportunity to purchase these laptops for use in their own schools. It will be interesting to see if even that 3rd world "nation" gets the opportunity to buy these computers as well.
Simply put and very direct.
I have been highly critical of the OLPC project since the beginning for precisely the very reasons you have given, and more, as it shows a sort of arrogance and complete lack of understanding of economics on the part of the major contributors to this project.
And while Ebay may be able to stop the sale of these particular computers explicitly in some sort of weird new policy specific to the OLPC project, they have no legal obligation to do so, nor is it going to stop a grey market of these computers coming from corrupt governments.
And as I've said repeatedly, if we can't possibly get an assurance that wheat, rice, and corn will actually get to the "struggling masses" due to diversions by corrupt governments and teeming gangsters using it for their own means, why do you possibly think that electronic equipment will end up in the hands of the same people (or not be subject to similar corruption)?
Many of these same governments that the OLPC project is targeted for have also shown repeated problems with similar kind of aid programs where instead of trying for a better education, these programs have a simplier goal: Simply feed the hungry and poor. Yet billions of dollars worth of aid (both private and direct government grants) get wasted or to even see the food get buried, burned, or fed to cattle in a deliberate attempt to make sure that it doesn't get to the intended target.
This isn't to say that the OLPC effort shouldn't necessarily be tried, but there is not legitimate reason not to have a western consumer version produced by perhaps a seperate group that also wants to help support financially the OLPC effort.
From what I can tell, the OLPC group has "sold their souls for 30 pieces of silver" to major manufacturers of electronic components just for a temporary price break. The only reason I can possibly see to justify this stance is that in order to get some of the parts for these computers, they had to sign a "3rd world only" agreement with computer equipment manufacturers in order to get parts. While this was talked about briefly at the very beginning of this project, I don't see that being used as an excuse currently. I also have no doubt that alternative suppliers could be found for any parts that have such an agreement if they really cared to look, even if it might result in a slight delay in production.
This is also why there desperately needs to be some sort of "open source" version of computer hardware, or based on similar freedom principles. But that is for another thread elsewhere.
Thanks for pointing this out. I was not implying that the term "wiki" was somehow a protected trademark (Ward Cunningham anybody?), even though the Wikimedia Foundation seems to feel that they own that particular trademark from time to time.
/. that it would have died a slow and largely anonymous death.
I've seen literally hundreds of these proposals posted on Foundation-l, including two this month alone, and a whole page of them on the Meta wiki. Every once in a blue moon one comes along that is a really outstanding idea, but that is a rare idea. This is one of those ideas that except for blasting all over here on
I was on the committee to move one particular project to full Wikimedia sister project status, and it was hardly a cakewalk, so I can speak with a bit of authority on this topic. And I've been involved with encouraging some of the other more promising ideas.
There is a proposal to make a P2P client for Wikipedia that would help (in theory) reduce the bandwidth requirements that the WMF has to deal with for article display, but that is still a very long way from happening. In terms of making that same P2P client be able to also insert "uncensorable" content on top of Wikipedia is a pipe dream that IMHO will never happen, as it appears as though these guys are merely "talking out of their ass". They certainly don't have the fundimental clue about how to actually get any of these crazy ideas going, nor do they have any actual working software demo.
They may have these "documents", but even that I have some serious doubts and reservations. And I hope they have them in a very secure facility in a nation that is not a member of the United Nations. I can't imagine where you can go that you would avoid extradition from any one of the G-9 nations + Switzerland + China. If all these countries are argreeing that you are on the top of their hit list, you are sure to be screwed regardless of what anonymizing tools you are using.
It is right out of their FAQ that they intend to use Wikipedia for the delivery of this content. Or that they intend to "mirror" Wikipedia.
Frankly, I don't even see where the word "wiki" comes in for this project, as they aren't even going to be using HTML servers at all, but rather intend to use Freenet or something similar. Good luck! They are going to need it if they choose Freenet as the underlying technology. That is good for about 1000 pages total, if they are very, very lucky. There is no way you are going to deliver the "over 1 million" documents (assuming multiple pages and with photos).... roughly on the order of several GB of data.
No, these guys simply don't have a clue as to what they are talking about, and they certainly are not using a Wiki to help put this thing together. It is just a pipe dream on a e-mailing list, and that is hardly new. Nor even novel technology, let's get real.
Perhaps something will come from this, but at the moment it is pure, unadulturated vapourware. Nothing more.
This group, whomever they are, is improperly using the trademark "Wikipedia" as a buzz word to try and gin up support for this very dubious sort of project.
Say what you might about Wikipedia, but this does not involve either the Wikimedia Foundation, its employees, or frankly much of anybody even involved with the day to day running of Wikipedia either.
And slashdot is hardly the best place to announce something like this if you wanted to involve the Wikipedia user base. While this is a sort of "geek news" that might get some notice, it is disingenuious to suggest any association with Wikipedia.
Besides, on those Wikimedia projects where I have admin privileges, I would delete most of this content on the spot as unverifiable rumors and gossip, and expect the same on the other Wikimedia projects.
While this might be something rather interesting in terms of a web server to host this material, and invite some anonymous method of gathering these documents, I don't even see that they are going to be using a Wiki to gather this information.
In short, move along.... there is nothing here to see.
I'll answer this one.
No, the US shouldn't swtich because the USA is already an industrialized country with existing infrastructure that doesn't need the Metric system. And provides a counter example to the dire necessity of having to use everyting in metric measurements.
This example here (the grandparent post) is more an example of how people from different cultures come to a cultural shock when having to deal with each other. The measurement system is just one more example of very different cultural backgrounds, where Texas is certainly not even remotely a future candidate for EU expansion.
The USA will never completely switch to the metric system. Ever. There is no pressing need to do so.
Costa Rica has its protection "guarenteed" by the USA. Or to put it more plain, if somebody else besides the USA tried to move into Costa Rica, you had better believe that a division or two of U.S. Marines and soldiers would appear nearly overnight inside of that country.
And unlike many other places around the world that the U.S. military is currently working at, the lines of supply trying to get personnel and logistical support into Costa Rica would be trivial in comparison, and a rather lengthy line of supply for anybody else who wants to engage in such a suicidal action.
Frankly, it sounds to me like a very smart idea for countries in Central America to follow a similar sort of policy for much of the very same reasons. Besides, without a significant military to muck things up, Costa Ricians also enjoy the comfort of knowing that a coup is highly unlikely, which seems to be the most common usage for a large military force in Latin America in general.
Yes, but Belgium and the Netherlands are in fact buffer states between England, Germany, and France.
The reason why England figures so strongly here is that the most natural avenue of invasion into England from continental Europe has almost always been through the "low countries", which is one of the reasons why both world wars ended up going through all three of these countries.
What is amazing is that these three countries still have a strong political role within the EU, where they continue to play off the three much larger countries against each other for their own mutual advantage.
We've been on this path for some time. All that has happened is that it is now painfully obvious that the government is hardly even reading the constitution that gives them legitimacy in the first place.
BTW, this is done with the approval and conscent of both major political parties in the USA.
Unfortunately, I don't think the administrative cost is necessarily as fixed as you imply. Yes, paying for singular things like the domain name and writing check out for the network bandwidth are comparatively trivial, but there is much more involved here. In addition to the rest of the issues that the Wikimedia Foundation is facing, they also now have a very substantial affiliate program (to use a term here that may be misleading) of national chapter associations that requires some substantial "staff" resources to work with.
The largest growth of this "administrative cost" that everybody is worried about is mainly the legal issues. It is precisely this point that lead Brad Patrick to be appointed as the "CEO" of the Wikimedia Foundation, as he is a full-time lawyer and mainly dealing with the legal problems of the WMF. There are several volunteer attorneys involved as well trying to take on the group of idiots who have now lead to a near constant barrage of pleas and complaints.
As for the rest of your reply here, I hope that you are correct that the additional resources will scale with the usage and donations to the WMF. If advertising is to be a source of revenue to keep all this going, it certainly is going to be a very tempting target if it isn't done.
Then again, PBS used to pride itself about being "commercial free", but has so much advertising of commercial products that I don't see how it even qualifies as a non-profit organization, except by congressional fiat that it is so. I don't think the WMF is going to be so lucky.
In reference to the bandwidth requirements for displaying rather than editing a web page via wiki as opposed to a simple ordinary webserver, I think Wikipedia does a pretty good job for those who just casually browse (and hit hyperlinks) to the content.
There are two huge issues here, somewhat related:
1) Bandwidth demands even for those who are doing read-only access to Wikipedia are absolutely huge. The Wikimedia Foundation is buying network bandwidth at industrial rates, being essentially a secondary peer for the most part with much of what they offer. It is almost impossible to comprehend the sheer bandwidth it takes to serve everything, especially considering Wikipedia is now in the top 10 servers in the world by several standards.
2) The number of pages being served by Wikipedia alone are absolutely huge. The raw HTML for just English Wikipedia is close to 7 GB of data. That does include talk pages and user pages, so that number can be modified somewhat for raw content.
I'm not convinced that a mere mailing list would work with the volume of changes that happen to Wikipedia every day, even if you confine it to completed work-overs of articles by legitimate scholars interested in updating the content. And even then you would have to come up with a way to redistribute the changes to everybody interested in the "current revision" (presumably just the people who have made changes recently or want to make some changes).
There have been some alternative systems proposed, including some sort of P2P content distribution system that would allow you to access Wikipedia content and send updated articles to a central server. While technically possible, the software do get something like that going is hardly trivial. Although admittedly it may be possible to spend some of the current $1 million+ budget on perhaps some software developers to work on some of those alternative distribution systems.
There is an effort going right now among the major volunteer software developers with Wikipedia to develop a more static version that would only get updated once those contributing feel like the article is ready to be "published". The reasons for doing this are more for quality purposes than monitary cost, as the network bandwidth savings doesn't appear to be all that significant. I could be mistaken on this point, however.
Most of the CPU bandwidth is mainly conducting information traffic flow rather than performing actions on the behalf of editor/contributors. There is some "page assembly" stuff that happens (converting the Wiki-markup text to HTML, for example), it doesn't appear as though currently the CPU bandwidth is a killer issue.
The reason why I suggested about $5 million per year is in part due to potential growth of other Wikimedia sister projects, and the growth of non-english Wikipedias. Chinese Wikipedia, for example, could potentially grow substantially over its current usage patterns, as can several other major languages including Indonesian and languages of the Indian Sub-continent. I've watched both bandwidth usage and page growth, and both seem to show exponential curves even now, with no "flatening" in sight. It would be interesting to perform some regression analysis on the data, which you can find at http://stats.wikimedia.org/ (regularly updated too!)
Unfortunately, it is now an annualized cost. If the WMF wants to keep up and be able to pay for the server farm and bandwidth requirements just for en.wikipedia at the current usage level of activity, this $1.5 million is necessary as an annual cost. By all estimates, Wikipedia is going to continue to grow even well beyond the current usage levels, and it will be very interesting to see just how far this whole project can grow before it starts to collapse under its own weight.
Frankly, I would not want to be on the board of trustees of the WMF at the moment, in terms of trying to project what the project costs are going to be next year and the year after that, and trying to worry about where all that money might just come from. Assuming that the ordinary users are going to fork out enough money to cover the tab just doesn't, from this perspective, seem to be even remotely possible. Trying to raise $5 million for the 2009 budget year seems in a current context as an impossible goal.
I will say, however, that I had some serious doubts that they would be able to raise even the current $900,000 that they have recieved in this latest round of fundraising, so I may be surprised. Considering just a little over two years ago they had some problems even trying to come up with $50,000, this is very remarkable.
On top of the bandwidth issues, there is now a group of vultures who are pounding on the WMF with a boatload of lawsuits and other BS crap that is unfortunately requiring a full time professional staff to deal with those external forces that also want to derail the various projects. Having employees is going to simply cost money, even if they are doing it at nearly volunteer wage rates.
Can you point to any artist that has recieved any royalties paid into the RIAA/ASCAP? Perhaps some of the major labels have recieved some money, but I highly doubt that you can find even a single penny of money that has actually gone to the recording artists themselves for any of these actions.
I may be wrong here, but I would like somebody to prove me wrong.
This is simply absurd. Nations go to war in order to "kill people and break things". That is the last thing you want to do if you are seeking control over "intellectual property" of any kind.
It is creative minds that create this stuff in the first place, so when you talk about a war over intellectual resources, that means that you have to have a war that is explicitly designed to capture smart people who can create that sort of cool stuff.
It could be argued that after the collapse of the 3rd Reich that both Russia and the USA engaged in a sort of political war to recruit various German scientists over to their "side" during the Cold War. If a war over intellectual property does happen, it is precisely in this manner. Bullets don't (mostly) get fired but it does become an ideological battle that takes place trying to win the hearts and minds of everybody involved. And economic power plays where economies of entire countries get wacked due to international competition over this still. And all that is happening right now.
At the same time, you don't want to visit a juristiction even as a tourist afterward where a judgement has been made against you. Once you go there all hope is lost and you have to fight through the courts... even if there was a default judgement issued.
I hope the lawyers you mention also advise them of this as well, not that NYC is necessarily close to Russia as a place they would "accidentally" get to.
I'm not sure if the EU would honor an extradition request for a civil suit like this, but I've heard of worse. Particularly if the judge in this case decides to get cute and file a contempt charge that would turn it into a criminal matter, given the statement that they believe the court has no jurisdiction and is openly giving the finger to the judge from across the Atlantic.
This reminds me of a thing a very old friend of mine did back a few decades ago when UFO hysteria came up, cashing in on the craze as well:
He made a bunch of tissue paper "balloons" that used as fuel some melted parafin (candle wax) as the fuel source, and some kite string to attach the candle to the tissue paper. This is the same material that you use for older traditional kites, and in fact this buddy of mine said it was a canabalized kite kit as well with a little "engineering" to hack it into something else.
Some cloudless winter night in Minnesota, without much wind, he took a bunch of these and lit them up in the late evening, but when people would still be awake to see the things if they were doing some late-night driving or happened to be outside at the time. Think about it, what would a hot-air baloon powered by a candle look like at night? A big glowing ball of light that would float and hover as it caught random air currents, moving in erratic directions. Since these were comparatively small, they also tended to float just about house tops and other buildings.
Occasionally the wax "fuel" would run out, but the ballon woudn't necessarily land immediately afterward as it was still a very light weight object.
Needless to say, the next morning there were a bunch of UFO "sightings" in the local paper, and the local police department had a rather busy night trying to figure out what was going on, trying to calm down the local citizens. I can only imagine what the law enforcement thought of the whole mess, and what would have happened if my friend had been caught.
Please look at http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Making_an_Island for some further information and sources.
In the early 1970's, there was a Las Vegas developer who ended up going to an atoll that was technically in unclaimed international waters and "built" an island by dumping extra material on this group of submerged rocks to the point that there was a portion that stayed above water during high tides, technically new territory just as you have suggested.
BTW, this was also near the Tongan islands, so this is also relevant in this situation.
What happened afterward was that a group of Tongan soldiers "invaded" the newly formed island and asserted sovereignty by "occupying" the island in the name of Tonga. Instead of formenting an international incident, the developer relented and gave up his attempt to build his own South Pacific version of Monaco.
I'm not sure what would have happened if this developer had his own "army" that would have defended the island, but it certainly seems like Tonga would consider it justifications for going to war if it happened near one of their islands. I'm curious what the Tongan government may have to say about this new island in their general domain.
I would have to agree completely that electronic voting is a painfully awful idea, and something that really does need to be eliminated. That said, there is a distinction here that needs to be made (and usually isn't):
There is electronic voting and electonic ballot preparation.
And to top it off, electronic vote counting, which can and ought to be independent of the above two issues that need to be distinguished seperately.
IMHO, what should be done for most of these voting precinct "upgrades" is some sort of system that produces a plain marked paper ballot that is prepared in the voting booth by the voter, but is then dropped into a box just like any other hand-written ballot. All the computer software really does is clean up what is written for write-in names, and makes sure that common mistakes like voting for multiple candidates when only one is allowed can be caught and fixed by the voter before it is counted. Or to notify you that you have "missed" a race and if you want to cast a vote for anybody in that race, with a clear "none of the above" as an option. Or to fix things like a "dimpled chad" or smeared pen mark where you don't quite know who gets the vote for a given race on hand written ballots.
If you have a consistant electronically "prepared" ballot, it would be trivial to set up a reliable OCR scanning system that would then be able to count these ballots. Indeed, you could even set up a system (and election laws) that would allow multiple systems by different vendors and different design teams to come up with identical counts (or provide justification to invalidate the results of one counting system). And more important, you can even do a "hand count" if you think everything is still broken, as the original data won't get tampered with regardless on how the votes are counted. Anonymity can be presered as well (the reason for the "secret ballot"), but that is besides the point.
If you try to combine all of these tasks into one huge machine, you are automatically asking for trouble. By seperating the counting from the ballot preparation, you also give a means for the voter to monitor exactly how their own vote is cast. It is clear and on legible paper exactly what their intent was... something most literate voters can and ought to be able to figure out without any additional technical training. You shouldn't have to have a BS degree in CS in order to verify that your vote has been cast (and counted) as you intended it.
Being an engineer who was given a pink slip and sent out the door after the successful completion of a 5-year major software engineering project, I can tell you that there was a huge amount of information that I had (still have) within my head that never was written down about the details of the computer system I worked on. We had a total of about 20 engineers from multiple discliplines (electrical, mechanical, civil, and myself being involved with software) on multi-million dollar installations.
Indeed you have seen some of our work, particularly if you ever watch television or go to any major sporting events, but that is besides the point.
What I'm getting at here is that for major crash engineering programs (and Apollo was clearly one of these), the goal is to get the job done. And in particular for Apollo, there was no consideration as to what the next generation of spacecraft was going to involve, nor were future engineers considered when trying to document and preserve information. One of the reasons I was laid off in particular was because I had successfully implemented a reliable documentation system for our software engineering group, and started to ask some hard questions that would force the company to reliably account for the actual profits that we as software developers made on behalf of the company I worked for.
Frankly, I am in awe of people like yourself who take the time to seriously consider what has happened to the Apollo guidance system and intend to build a full simulator. I can't imagine that you get much money for that kind of work. It is usually completely volunteer, or on a shoestring budget for some museum group with many "donated" hours above and beyond those actually paid for. Most simulators I've seen usually do some very hard abstractions and don't go down into those level of deails, but this is certainly something very interesting.
BTW, don't give up hope yet on some of this stuff. Many of the engineers and even operators of the control rooms and other stuff are still alive, although they are now very much senior citizens and heading very quickly to their graves. I had an old EE prof. who talked briefly about some of the control room circuits on the Apollo mission and had us as students "recreate" some of the (admittedly very simplified) circuits that were used. I'm sure more expertise is available if you really dig for it.
I would dare say that it is the very same people who believe both of these things. Together with the idea the JFK was the person who suggested to NASA that we ought to go to the Moon (even though JFK was a strong proponent and powerful ally on the concept).
As far as the rest of your reply, I would have to agree mostly, although I think you can give a little more credit to 3rd party candidates than you have suggested here. As Ross Perot was able to demonstrate, somebody with a bit of cash to help fund 3rd parties in such a way to financially give them parity with the major parties can also win elections, given the equivalent political territory involved. That such individuals also tend to be weird fanatics with screwy ideas (George Sorros also comes to mind here) will also suggest that such efforts are nearly doomed to failure as well, just because of the flaky individual providing the money.