I hate to be pedantic, but that's the difference between a goal and an outcome.
From JFK's Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs, May 25, 1961: "First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth." And the important bit: "I believe we possess all the resources and talents necessary. But the facts of the matter are that we have never made the national decisions or marshalled the national resources required for such leadership. We have never specified long-range goals on an urgent time schedule, or managed our resources and our time so as to insure their fulfillment."
The goal was to put a man on the Moon. Not twelve. Not twenty. Just one. JFK could have said "making six landings on the moon sometime in the next twenty years" or "a moon landing real soon now", as NASA is saying, but who would have cared?
Many companies don't run anything except for Windows on their desktops (mine included).
Many, but not all.
The company that I work for has some very important customers that don't, and I'd rather spend the time making sure that we worked without regard to operating system than being in the position of having to tell them that we're not interested enough in their business to make our site work for them.
Besides, who knows what the future will bring? Fifteen years ago, if someone told you that you should start developing for Microsoft NT/AS because Novell wouldn't be a factor in the NOS business, would you have believed them?
One of my roommates used to host Warhammer parties in the early 80's that started on Friday afternoon and ended late Sunday. Food and crash space were available, but if there was any downtime in the game during the weekend, I sure didn't hear it.
Internet voting has been pretty much dismissed for the near future until the security/availability/connectivity issues have been resolved. As it stands now, would you trust it?
The voting period could span several days or weeks, instead of hours.
I've never quite understood this. Between absentee voting, early polling at a central location, which most cities do, and the half-day or more that polls are open, how is it that people don't have the time to vote?
The federal government could fairly easily create a webserver with logins for 300 million people. Each person would be given a userid and password.
How can you be completely certain that everyone is who they say that they are and that they should be permitted to vote (not an ex-felon, etc)? And how would I know that the site I'm going to is actually an election site rather than a fraudulent one? It happens with banks now, do think that it'd be any less of a problem with voting sites?
Someone at the federal government could easily create an image of a simple secure OS and browser that could be put on any x86 PC owned by a local library or school.
Hmm, OS wars, anyone? Besides, almost all of the schools and libraries that I know of have a very limited number of computers available for use and generally don't have a whole lot of space for them. Do you propose that we deny students the ability to do work on school computers for a week while balloting takes place? Remember, if what you propose occurs, someone's going to have to come in ahead of time and reload all of the systems with the "secure OS" and voting software. Then they're going to have to come back to restore the systems to their previous configuration. Where do you think that they'll get the people/money to do this?
Now, the *best* would be if NASA left comments on these blogs explaining why these people were wrong, in a rude way, so that they'd shut up until they grokked.
Just as several decades of wasted effort has lessened the number Moon-landing-was-a-hoax wackos? Yes, it'd be moderately interesting, even humorous, but I'd prefer that the NASA engineers do what they they're there to do and not waste time and money trying to clue in the clueless.
All that may be true, but it's also easier to spread lies and disinformation.
In an environment where people are all too willing to believe everything that they read and nobody trusts politicians anyway, which do you think is going to spread farther, faster? The truth that disagrees with everyone's point of view or the lie that supports it? The boring truth or a salacious falsehood?
Episode 4 is a self-contained story. It introduced new characters, showed the universe that they lived in, related them to each other and then had a definite end. At the time Star Wars was made, serials hadn't been made for a very long time and SF movies weren't exactly looked upon highly. If Lucas went in trying to pitch a six-episode SF serial, he would have had exactly zero chance of having it made.
Nice answer, but wrong question. The OP wasn't asking why OSS is good, they were asking why someone would want to create something that they probably will never make any money from.
That there are new applications that have come about because of OSS is not disputed. Asking nothing for your work may be good for the karma, but it doesn't pay the rent. Is the "psychic benefit" (to use the term coined Jerry Brown when he was the of California Governor) enough?
Why not "Ferrari vs. Hundai, a side-by-side comparison?" It makes just about as much sense.
The PS3 and Wii are aimed at two different markets - the PS3 is definitely not aimed at the cost-conscious gamer (why buy an HD-ready system if you can't afford HDTV) and the Wii is never going to please the people who want high-end, graphic intensive games, so comparing them feature-for-feature is useless. People who can't afford a PS3 won't get one. People who aren't interested in a Nintendo won't get one. People who can afford a PS3 may also get a Wii. For most people, it isn't a binary decision, so why the illusion of controversy?
Are you talking about removing the party designation printed next to the candidate's name or the designation on the top of the ballot in partisan races? Removing the candidate's party only helps keep the voter from voting a straight party line by looking at the party. It won't help when they use a slate card given to them by their local political party or interest group to help them mark their ballot. A surprising number of people do this. Removing the name from the ballot in a primary election (it doesn't appear on general elections) would lead to some confusion as people wouldn't be certain whether they had gotten the correct ballot.
Randomizing the order of names would lead to confusion. A whole lot of people use their sample ballots to help them mark their ballot. If the real ballot is different than their sample ballot, it's going to take them longer to find the name. A surprising number of people are very nervous about voting - throwing additional confusion would make their job a lot harder.
Please, please, please don't give people a blank ballot. Have you ever had a job that required you to read people's handwriting? If you did, you'd know why this is a bad idea. Most people have terrible handwriting.
How would this lead to a reduction of ignorant votes? They'll have exactly the same information when entering the voting booths as they have today; forcing them through additional hoops will make them all the less likely to want to vote.
1. The state is required by law to provide accommodation for people with disabilities. We can offer to help them by reading the ballot and helping them to mark it, but if they refuse, there's not much we can do. A perfectly secure system would be flawed if someone was unable to vote because the system was unable to accommodate them.
2. Printing costs can't be amortized and, because of increasing cost for paper, inks and labor, it will never go down. I agree that a centralized system will lower costs, but the electoral system in the United States is highly decentralized - counties run their own elections and are pretty much free to do things as they please so long as they stay within the few national and state election laws.
3. Paper needs a humidity-controlled environment for long-term storage. Even when the ballots are to be destroyed, they can't just be tossed in the waste bin. They have to be shredded and burned under controlled conditions. This isn't cheap.
4. The people who man polling places are volunteers and the folks that do the counting are county employees. Once balloting is complete and the ballots are delivered to elections staff, no one other than the employees of the elections board are allowed to come anywhere near the ballots. Even in the case of a challenge, observers from the parties are allowed to watch the counting only. Handling ballots is not permitted. This may not be the optimal solution, but that's the way that it works in California.
5. Agreed, but people want to see the results of elections and tend to get rather cross if it takes too long to get them. Otherwise, why would there be exit polls? I personally have no problem with waiting until the next morning to find out, but I'm not one of the majority of people...
Our last election was on paper ballots (we previously used Diebold voting machines), and here's why I think that my county likes voting machines over paper ballots:
1. Handicapped access. In order to fit the 30 or so different races/items/etc on one piece of paper, the print on the paper ballot was very small - if you can't read the ballot, it makes it very hard to vote. The electronic machines can show larger text or can "read" ballots to a voter with vision problems.
2. Printing costs. There were 33 different ballots in the last election (which was a primary, so each party had a ballot). Our precinct had over 400 ballots. There are a whole lot more precincts in my county.
3. Storage costs. All that paper has to be stored somewhere after having been fed through the tabulator by:
4. People. It takes more people to tabulate paper ballots than electronic ones.
5. Quicker results. Paper ballots have to be tabulated at a central area. Electronic systems tally the votes on site. The previous election's results (electronic) were reported by midnight. The last election (paper) wasn't reported until the next morning.
But to be honest, most counties changed from Votamatic or mechanical (which was the good old-fashioned way for several decades) to electronic because they had to. "Hanging chads" aside, the system had worked well for quite some time - changing from that to electronic, paper or anything else just cost them money that they didn't have...
No, it isn't any less one-sided. History will still written by the "winners", but in this case, the winners are the people with the interest, time and skills rather than the conquerors. Minority and unpopular views will still disappear, or at the very least become difficult to find, based upon the whim of vox populi.
And, more to my original point, things that aren't naturally interesting to the majority of people, like how someone in the forests of the Amazon spends their day, will never be there in the first place. There'll be pages and pages filled with the minutiae of say, Battlestar Galactica or the latest incarnation of Star Trek, but very little of how people lead their lives on a daily basis - which is far more interesting to archaeologists.
I agree with this. The majority of people don't have the ability, for one reason or another, to contribute. Wikipedia is a one-sided view because it is built by people who have both the interest, the time and the ability to contribute to it. If, in the future, one is interested in how the Internet grew and the thinking behind its users, yes, Wikipedia may be useful. For the knowledge of how the majority of the human population lived their lives, Wikipedia simply has no relevance.
If anything, it will be a just another resource for future archaeologists, not a replacement.
At least in California, it is impossible to vote for a single party all at once - there simply isn't an option to do so. You have to place a vote for each individual race.
By working for a company, you express your approval of its policies and actions.
So, unless you're working for yourself, you're pretty much screwed, right? EVERY company makes decisions that somebody somewhere won't like. Every company has policies that will negatively affect someone. Am I, personally, responsible for all of them, regardless of whether I know of them or not? Am I complicit even though I did not actively participate in their enforcement?
If one of the Board of Directors of the company that I work for decides to relocate half the workers, making the Board, and, by extension, the company "evil" (a word that has no practical meaning on Slashdot), am I responsible because I run the systems? Should I commit seppuku, or would just quitting be sufficient to expiate my sins?
Antiquated? Really? I can get both AM and FM just about everywhere in the US using a $10 Radio Shack radio. I don't have to have an expensive casting setup, don't have to worry about mobile service blind spots, don't have Wi-Fi or don't have EDGE service.
I can hear content that nobody else wants to carry because the audience is too small. I travel a lot by car, and enjoy listening to local radio stations because they are the only evidence left that not all of the US sounds like New York or California. I once listened to a Navajo radio station while on a long trip. Can I get that on XM? Right.
Radio is still the great equalizer because it is relatively inexpensive to broadcast and the listening devices can be as cheap as a couple of bucks or as expensive as thousands of dollars.
Yes, it may be eventually supplanted by newer technologies, but it is far from antiquated.
The Iraq war has absolutely nothing to do with reductions in NASA's budget. Pubic interest has. Nobody has really cared about NASA or what it does since the Moon landing.
Their budget has been dropping since the mid-70s - you might as well blame it on Vietnam.
I mean it's not like two nations make up 40% of the UN's funding (*ahem I'm looking at you US and Japan*)
And the point you're trying to make here is what, exactly? That Japan and the US have control over the UN because they "pay" for it? Right. UN funding isn't a particularly popular subject here in the US and I'm certain that there are people in Japan that could find other things to do with the money that they donate.
All you have to do is find someone to pick up the slack. The EU? Russia? China? We don't exactly see them rushing to donate more, do we?
They did this in the US too. It was my understanding that mark was there to indicate when a commercial break was coming to the affiliates so they could insert local commercials.
There were a couple of VCRs that "looked" for the mark and would pause the tape if they saw it. They didn't work very well. More often than not, the VCR would miss the signal that indicated that the program was starting again and stay on pause.
Slashdot Mirror
From JFK's Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs, May 25, 1961: "First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth." And the important bit: "I believe we possess all the resources and talents necessary. But the facts of the matter are that we have never made the national decisions or marshalled the national resources required for such leadership. We have never specified long-range goals on an urgent time schedule, or managed our resources and our time so as to insure their fulfillment."
The goal was to put a man on the Moon. Not twelve. Not twenty. Just one. JFK could have said "making six landings on the moon sometime in the next twenty years" or "a moon landing real soon now", as NASA is saying, but who would have cared?
Many, but not all.
The company that I work for has some very important customers that don't, and I'd rather spend the time making sure that we worked without regard to operating system than being in the position of having to tell them that we're not interested enough in their business to make our site work for them.
Besides, who knows what the future will bring? Fifteen years ago, if someone told you that you should start developing for Microsoft NT/AS because Novell wouldn't be a factor in the NOS business, would you have believed them?
One of my roommates used to host Warhammer parties in the early 80's that started on Friday afternoon and ended late Sunday. Food and crash space were available, but if there was any downtime in the game during the weekend, I sure didn't hear it.
Please. We had this same discussion in the 70's when people were playing D&D "too much". It was every much as much BS then as it is now.
Congratulations. You've now done one. The article was talking about 1500 systems. You have 1499 to go.
Internet voting has been pretty much dismissed for the near future until the security/availability/connectivity issues have been resolved. As it stands now, would you trust it?
The voting period could span several days or weeks, instead of hours.
I've never quite understood this. Between absentee voting, early polling at a central location, which most cities do, and the half-day or more that polls are open, how is it that people don't have the time to vote?
The federal government could fairly easily create a webserver with logins for 300 million people. Each person would be given a userid and password.
How can you be completely certain that everyone is who they say that they are and that they should be permitted to vote (not an ex-felon, etc)? And how would I know that the site I'm going to is actually an election site rather than a fraudulent one? It happens with banks now, do think that it'd be any less of a problem with voting sites?
Someone at the federal government could easily create an image of a simple secure OS and browser that could be put on any x86 PC owned by a local library or school.
Hmm, OS wars, anyone? Besides, almost all of the schools and libraries that I know of have a very limited number of computers available for use and generally don't have a whole lot of space for them. Do you propose that we deny students the ability to do work on school computers for a week while balloting takes place? Remember, if what you propose occurs, someone's going to have to come in ahead of time and reload all of the systems with the "secure OS" and voting software. Then they're going to have to come back to restore the systems to their previous configuration. Where do you think that they'll get the people/money to do this?
Just as several decades of wasted effort has lessened the number Moon-landing-was-a-hoax wackos? Yes, it'd be moderately interesting, even humorous, but I'd prefer that the NASA engineers do what they they're there to do and not waste time and money trying to clue in the clueless.
In an environment where people are all too willing to believe everything that they read and nobody trusts politicians anyway, which do you think is going to spread farther, faster? The truth that disagrees with everyone's point of view or the lie that supports it? The boring truth or a salacious falsehood?
Episode 4 is a self-contained story. It introduced new characters, showed the universe that they lived in, related them to each other and then had a definite end. At the time Star Wars was made, serials hadn't been made for a very long time and SF movies weren't exactly looked upon highly. If Lucas went in trying to pitch a six-episode SF serial, he would have had exactly zero chance of having it made.
That there are new applications that have come about because of OSS is not disputed. Asking nothing for your work may be good for the karma, but it doesn't pay the rent. Is the "psychic benefit" (to use the term coined Jerry Brown when he was the of California Governor) enough?
The PS3 and Wii are aimed at two different markets - the PS3 is definitely not aimed at the cost-conscious gamer (why buy an HD-ready system if you can't afford HDTV) and the Wii is never going to please the people who want high-end, graphic intensive games, so comparing them feature-for-feature is useless. People who can't afford a PS3 won't get one. People who aren't interested in a Nintendo won't get one. People who can afford a PS3 may also get a Wii. For most people, it isn't a binary decision, so why the illusion of controversy?
Informative? It deserves a +5 ultra Scifi nerd for the reference to the movie and the short story.
Randomizing the order of names would lead to confusion. A whole lot of people use their sample ballots to help them mark their ballot. If the real ballot is different than their sample ballot, it's going to take them longer to find the name. A surprising number of people are very nervous about voting - throwing additional confusion would make their job a lot harder.
Please, please, please don't give people a blank ballot. Have you ever had a job that required you to read people's handwriting? If you did, you'd know why this is a bad idea. Most people have terrible handwriting.
How would this lead to a reduction of ignorant votes? They'll have exactly the same information when entering the voting booths as they have today; forcing them through additional hoops will make them all the less likely to want to vote.
1. The state is required by law to provide accommodation for people with disabilities. We can offer to help them by reading the ballot and helping them to mark it, but if they refuse, there's not much we can do. A perfectly secure system would be flawed if someone was unable to vote because the system was unable to accommodate them. 2. Printing costs can't be amortized and, because of increasing cost for paper, inks and labor, it will never go down. I agree that a centralized system will lower costs, but the electoral system in the United States is highly decentralized - counties run their own elections and are pretty much free to do things as they please so long as they stay within the few national and state election laws. 3. Paper needs a humidity-controlled environment for long-term storage. Even when the ballots are to be destroyed, they can't just be tossed in the waste bin. They have to be shredded and burned under controlled conditions. This isn't cheap. 4. The people who man polling places are volunteers and the folks that do the counting are county employees. Once balloting is complete and the ballots are delivered to elections staff, no one other than the employees of the elections board are allowed to come anywhere near the ballots. Even in the case of a challenge, observers from the parties are allowed to watch the counting only. Handling ballots is not permitted. This may not be the optimal solution, but that's the way that it works in California. 5. Agreed, but people want to see the results of elections and tend to get rather cross if it takes too long to get them. Otherwise, why would there be exit polls? I personally have no problem with waiting until the next morning to find out, but I'm not one of the majority of people...
1. Handicapped access. In order to fit the 30 or so different races/items/etc on one piece of paper, the print on the paper ballot was very small - if you can't read the ballot, it makes it very hard to vote. The electronic machines can show larger text or can "read" ballots to a voter with vision problems.
2. Printing costs. There were 33 different ballots in the last election (which was a primary, so each party had a ballot). Our precinct had over 400 ballots. There are a whole lot more precincts in my county.
3. Storage costs. All that paper has to be stored somewhere after having been fed through the tabulator by:
4. People. It takes more people to tabulate paper ballots than electronic ones.
5. Quicker results. Paper ballots have to be tabulated at a central area. Electronic systems tally the votes on site. The previous election's results (electronic) were reported by midnight. The last election (paper) wasn't reported until the next morning.
But to be honest, most counties changed from Votamatic or mechanical (which was the good old-fashioned way for several decades) to electronic because they had to. "Hanging chads" aside, the system had worked well for quite some time - changing from that to electronic, paper or anything else just cost them money that they didn't have...
And, more to my original point, things that aren't naturally interesting to the majority of people, like how someone in the forests of the Amazon spends their day, will never be there in the first place. There'll be pages and pages filled with the minutiae of say, Battlestar Galactica or the latest incarnation of Star Trek, but very little of how people lead their lives on a daily basis - which is far more interesting to archaeologists.
In light of the continued success of iTunes and the iPod, I would say that most consumers don't have a problem with the DRM that Apple uses.
If anything, it will be a just another resource for future archaeologists, not a replacement.
It is your civic duty to place a camera in Every House! Each citizen must carry a USID!
We CAN NOT have a Surveillance Gap!
At least in California, it is impossible to vote for a single party all at once - there simply isn't an option to do so. You have to place a vote for each individual race.
So, unless you're working for yourself, you're pretty much screwed, right? EVERY company makes decisions that somebody somewhere won't like. Every company has policies that will negatively affect someone. Am I, personally, responsible for all of them, regardless of whether I know of them or not? Am I complicit even though I did not actively participate in their enforcement?
If one of the Board of Directors of the company that I work for decides to relocate half the workers, making the Board, and, by extension, the company "evil" (a word that has no practical meaning on Slashdot), am I responsible because I run the systems? Should I commit seppuku, or would just quitting be sufficient to expiate my sins?
I can hear content that nobody else wants to carry because the audience is too small. I travel a lot by car, and enjoy listening to local radio stations because they are the only evidence left that not all of the US sounds like New York or California. I once listened to a Navajo radio station while on a long trip. Can I get that on XM? Right.
Radio is still the great equalizer because it is relatively inexpensive to broadcast and the listening devices can be as cheap as a couple of bucks or as expensive as thousands of dollars.
Yes, it may be eventually supplanted by newer technologies, but it is far from antiquated.
Their budget has been dropping since the mid-70s - you might as well blame it on Vietnam.
And the point you're trying to make here is what, exactly? That Japan and the US have control over the UN because they "pay" for it? Right. UN funding isn't a particularly popular subject here in the US and I'm certain that there are people in Japan that could find other things to do with the money that they donate.
All you have to do is find someone to pick up the slack. The EU? Russia? China? We don't exactly see them rushing to donate more, do we?
There were a couple of VCRs that "looked" for the mark and would pause the tape if they saw it. They didn't work very well. More often than not, the VCR would miss the signal that indicated that the program was starting again and stay on pause.