UNIX Airways: everyone brings one piece of the plane along when they come to the airport. They all go out on the runway and put the plane together piece by piece, arguing non-stop about what kind of plane they are supposed to be building.
Mac Airlines: all the airline personnel look and act exactly the same. Every time you ask questions about details, you are gently but firmly told that you don't need to know, don't want to know, and everything will be done for you without your ever having to know, so just shut up and get on the plane.
Windows 9x Air: The plane leaks gas, doesn't fly straight, and engines fall off during the flight. To fix problems with the avionics, the pilots just land and take off again. However, each plane has the word "internet" painted crudely on the side, and so every flight is full.
Windows XP Air: the terminal is pretty and colorful, with friendly stewards, easy baggage check and boarding and a smooth take-off. After about 10 minutes in the air, the plane explodes with no warning whatsoever.
Windows Vista Air: the executives of Windows Air hold press conferences every three months to talk about their exciting new line of international service, but at every press conference, the list of cities they fly to gets shorter.
Windows Server Air: just like Windows XP Air, but costs more, uses much bigger planes, and takes out all other aircraft within a 40-mile radius when it explodes.
Windows Media Center Edition Air: Just like Windows XP air, except you get to watch the first ten minutes of an inflight movie before the plane explodes.
Linux Air: UNIX Airways employees who finally figure out what kind of plane they are building decide to start their own airline. They build the planes, ticket counters and pave the runways themselves. They charge a small fee to cover the cost of printing the ticket, but you can also download and print the ticket yourself, and otherwise the trip is free. When you board the plane, you are given a seat, four bolts, a wrench and a copy of the Seat-HOWTO.html. If anyone has trouble installing their seat, the other passengers are very happy to help out. Once settled, the fully adjustable seat is very comfortable, the plane leaves and arrives on time without a problem and the in-flight meal is wonderful. You try to tell customers of the other airlines about the great trip, but all they can say is, "You had to do WHAT with the seat?!''
GNU/Linux Air: Captain Stallman refuses to take off because of a panel on the flight deck that is not made out of a transparent material.
Server Linux Air: cargo only, but fast, reliable, and economical, if you can find a pilot who is also a mechanic.
Desktop Linux Air: just like Linux Air, except the flight never leaves because the pilots continually argue over whether the plane should be painted red or blue.
Debian Linux Air: just like Linux Air with pre-installed seats and a self-repairing plane, but their terminal is small and no one can find it.
Gentoo Linux Air: apon arriving at the airport, the stewardess hands you the plans to build an F-22 Raptor.
MacOSX Airlines: employees of Mac Airlines bought planes from Linux Air, and then designed their own style of very comfortable seats and a great terminal. The flight is incredibly smooth and comfortable with great service, you arrive ahead of schedule, and there is a live band on every flight. Tickets are incredibly expensive and you are only allowed to bring baggage if you use suitcases built by MacOSX Airlines.
I'm sure I can't be the only one here who finds the continual blurring of lines between "state"/"country" and "corporation" a bit unnerving.
Perhaps, but perhaps you're also reading too much into the name. Would you feel better if the position was exactly the same, with the same person in it, but the title was Secretary of Technology? Or Minister of Administration? Or Almighty King And Ruler Of All That Is Digital And Government Owned?
The blurring of lines between government and corporations is only problematic when the underlying motivations (working for the voters vs. maximization of profit) are blurred, or when the groups are both working together in exclusive mutual self-interest, leaving the rest of us in the dark about it.
I'm not saying this isn't happening, but calling someone in charge of technology a Chief Information Officer is hardly creating a corporate shill.
Even more awesome is the fact that the dude's name is "Mads Nipper". Now there's a name that will get a few double takes when you present your business card.
What I would really like to see is a more standard charging mechanism.
I'm with you on that one. I'd even like to see standard battery/power options across all devices, like the mythical "power pack" you see in games and sci-fi movies. These power packs work in just about anything: pull a few off the main environmental system circulating air and use it to power the radio to call for help. Then, just as the monster is crashing into the room, pop the same power pack into your plasma rifle to take that hellspawn down. Once the monster has been killed, put the power pack into your cell phone to order your victory pizza. Just remember to put it back into the environmental control system, or you might all die of oxygen deprevation before you even get to the free cinnamon sticks.
...Fox can finally kill off the dying cash cow that is the Simpsons and put it out of its misery.
Right, because it would be better if Fox cancelled the show that makes them the largest piles of cash.
The Simpsons may not be as good as it was in the glory years, but it's still averaging a healthy 10 million viewers a week. And it's also one of the most recognizable shows on television, which makes it attractive to advertisers.
The entire television situation can be boiled down to this: the people watching the shows are not the customers, they are the product. The advertisers are the customers. And whether or not a show stays on the air has everything to do with economics. If not enough people watch, then the show is pulled. Period. With the numbers the way they are, cancelling a show may piss off two or three million viewers, but that's ok; this other show we have gets FIFTEEN million a week!
These television executives are not stupid; after all, they did get very rich off of a totally ad-supported revenue stream. The intelligence of the writers is still up for debate, but their job is only to get you to watch, not to create art*.
You can have art, or you can have business. But you can't have both.
*There are of course exceptions to this rule, when great writing and lots of people watching converge. But they are very very rare.
I don't get why you guys are coming off with this kind of response KNOWING how in Florida 2000 we all got to see how it did NOT work, and how people got confused or thrown off by their poor understanding of how it DID work. Through what may be deliberate fiddling, or more likely incompetence, the ballot paper in parts of Florida made it potentially unclear to some people who they were voting for, and unclear to those counting the votes who the voter had actually voted for. That is what I call a total farce, and it couldn't have happened if the election had been conducted using a simple sheet of paper with a handwritten X scrawled next to the chosen candidate.
I agree with you whole-heartedly, but there are several factors keeping things from being that simple.
The ballots here in the US usually contain a huge number of elections. In the last presidential election, we were asked not only to vote for the president, but also for congressmen, judges, city councilmen, county board members, and other various municipal elected officials, not to mention the three to five different local resolutions on each ballot. The butterfly ballot system (which became famous in Florida in 2000 for the Pat Buchanan situation) is simply a way to condense a large amount of information in an anonymous way onto a small ballot card. These things are literally books, usually with ten or more pages of elections to vote for. It's not a perfect system, certainly, but putting all the same information on a single sheet of paper with room for marking a candidate, clearly delimiting the various elections taking place, allowing for instructions in both English and Spanish, and making the text large enough to read makes for a rather large sheet of paper. And asking people to read candidates off one sheet and mark their choice on another sheet creates all the same confusion and problems people had with the butterfly ballots.
I think our best bet in the US for paper ballots is to create printed booklets with instructions and a single election on each page. The actual listed candidates and boxes for marking a vote would be contained on a perforated sheet like a coupon, which the voter rips out and stuffs in the ballot box. The voter would keep the booklet after voting. The creation of these booklets could be automated without much fuss; each municipality could retrieve their booklets as a PDF file and have them printed and stapled before the election. It's not like ballots are secret until the day of the election.
But truly, in any voting system, accuracy boils down to the skill of the people recording the votes. In paper voting, that means the people counting, the people recording the votes, the people calling in the numbers to state headquarters, and the people assisting voters with questions. In computerized voting, that means the people who designed and built the hardware, the people who wrote the firmware, the people who wrote the software, and the people in charge of the networks doing the reporting to a central agency. Mistakes will be made, and recounts will happen. If automation does not help fix the mistakes that are made, and in fact creates many more problems, then it is not worth the trouble.
Why is Congress and the FCC even bothering with what is obviously not within their powers as delegated to them by the Constitution? The 9th and 10th Amendments apply here.
Because we let them. They do not have any power that we as a people don't grant to them. Luckily for them, that granting of power can be passive, since voter apathy about issues that truly matter to our freedoms (not the abortion and gay-marriage shoutfests) is at an all time high.
First, setting a regulatory standard for television broadcasts and forcing the industry to adhere to them is no longer necessary -- when TV was new, I can understand government enforcing a standard. With technology changing monthly, letting the market figure out what is needed is the best solution.
The government only has a right to regulate those areas where there is a finite amount of space for competition, such as the radio spectrum. There are only so many radio bands, and companies have to share. Regulating ensures that the sharing is done fairly (at least in a perfect world, which this isn't). The FCC has no business regulating cable television, since there is no scarcity of bandwidth. Most cable television broadcasters self-censor in order to avoid public backlash. But there is no legal reason why Spike TV can't start broadcasting porn.
To me, this seems to be simple cronyism by the State. By creating these standards, they're creating a high cost to entry in the video broadcast market.
The quicker we see broadband hit the homes, the more I realize that broadcast television is a complete waste of space. Deregulating ALL broadcast television and letting the frequencies be used by wireless broadcasters would make much more sense to me. Can you imagine how cheap and how fast wireless would be if we gave up all those megahertz?
Fast? Certainly. Cheap? Not on your life. Keep in mind it would be sold by the same companies that charge $50 a month for basic cable that is completely ad supported.
Broadcasting isn't even important: people want video on demand (whether by cable, satellite, ThePirateBay, or PVR).
Hear, hear. The days of the "push medium" are coming to a middle.
Broadcasting isn't even efficient anymore: advertisers prefer knowing exact numbers rather than "we think we hit 700,000 with this show."
Absolutely. Unfortunately, if the advertisers knew exactly which ads were working and which were not, they would purchase less advertising, since they would be able to stop "wasting" money on advertising that is ineffectual. This worries the sellers of advertising space.
In the long run, Congress and the FCC are applying ideas from 1970 to technology that could change 20 times in the next 20 years.
Legislation is always years behind technology. Nothing new to see here.
Why restrict it?
Because their campaign financers are asking them to.
I say it is time to just ignore these guys -- if big TV broadcasters want to continue to make a mess and force the little guy out of the business, let them. We'll counter it with rebroadcaster [sic] their garbage over BitTorrent and through the sharing of information as it was meant to be: free. Take the infinite supply of data versus the finite demand and you end up with a cost of zero.
Ok, I was with you up until here.
Information may want to be free, but entertainment sure doesn't. It costs a lot of money to create that entertainment, and the people who made it naturally want that money back. The problem is that within the current system, the market forces are skewed, because people have to pay for bundled sets of entertainment or allow the advertisers to choose what they watch. Unfortunately for the consumers, a pull medium is simply not viable as an
In his universe, flight simulators aren't used to give people an idea of what it's like to fly a plane - it's used by terrorists to kill people.
Shouldn't he be out shutting down every damn pilot licensing school in existence then? I mean, if everyone who plays MS Flight Simulator is training to be a terrorist, then what the hell are all those PILOTS planning?! My God, every building in the country is going to be hit by a plane!
-----
"Flaps, check. Aelerons, check. Rudder, check. Tower, this is November Six Five Niner Whiskey Tango requesting clearence for jihad training on runway 2."
"Roger, November Six Five Niner. You are cleared for mass murder simulator."
I don't know why you guys (Americans) don't make this kind of legislative foolishness illegal.
You know, you're right. I'm going to head out and write my senator right now about how we need a law saying you can't attach bills to other bills just to get them passed.
Unfortunately, no one in the senate would ever vote for such a crazy idea. We better attach it to the Save The Children Act of 2005 to get it passed.
I gave him a crack Office 2003 CD and told him power point was there. He said he would never use software he didnt pay for, and gave it back. So I told him to goto openoffice.org, and get the free office suite.
You offered him an illegal copy of Microsoft trash before you pointed him to openoffice.org?
The people who are so insistent that the moon landings were a hoax simply re-interpret and filter what facts will fit their cospiracy theory; anything that disagrees with their conclusions are simply ignored or swept under the rug.
Exactly. These are people who don't "believe", they "insist". This, for me, defines the difference between a healthy skeptic and a conspiracy nutter. When presented with evidence that explicitly contradicts their stance, "believers" will change their position, having updated their worldview slightly. However, "insisters", when presented with the same contradictory evidence, will find some way to discredit the evidence, even to the point of making stuff up. They will steadfastly refuse to change their worldview in the slightest.
Jamie and I have done the research, and figured that the only way to end the debate about the "myth" of the Apollo moon landing is to go there, and bring back something that was left there during one of the Apollo moon landings.
No, the only way to end the "debate" over the moon landings is to silence all the conspiracy nutters, because they are the only ones having the "debate". (Of course, in this country, we have constitutional protections preventing that.) Having the Mythbusters try to debunk it would only give the "debate" credibility. The rest of us have actual critical reasoning skills, and don't entertain such nonsense.
If anyone on Slashdot still needs convincing why the debate over the moon landings is utterly ridiculous, please form an orderly line to your right, and I will personally beat each of you over the head with the 842 lb. of moon rocks brought back by the Apollo astronauts.
Gamers and people who listen to music are terrorists in the eyes of the ??AA.
You don't mean '??AA'. What you really mean is '[(RI)|(MP)|(GN)]AA'. The NCAA, AIAA, AAAA and NIAA kindly ask that you not lump them in with such filth.
No what really will happen...[i]s that some ISPs just won't do it, and they'll make all the money. I gaurentee that it'll become a big advertising point for ISPs that don't do this, and they'll be many. In fact I predict if the DSL provider starts doing it, the cable company choses not to and hammers them for it in ads.
How great it would be if the market worked like that. But it doesn't.
What happens when the [(RI)|(MP)]AA lobby congress to make it illegal for certain ports to be open, or certain services to be allowed on the network? After all, if you're not downloading your pay-for-play DRMed content over port 80 from a media conglomerate like a good little consumer, then you must be a filthy thief and pirate.
Of course the black hats will be able to work around any restrictions the telcos put in place, and the telcos will retaliate, leading to an all-out arms race. But I for one do not want to have to chase bleeding edge technology just to get reasonable download speeds on protocols other than HTTP.
If the music isn't any good, people won't buy it, and there will be a downturn in the music industry. Duh.
Aye, there's the rub. The music industry has long since abandoned all pretense that they are interested in producing a quality product. They are in it *strictly* for the money, and that means manufacturing low-risk music that they think people will buy.
If there is a downturn in music sales, the record company execs won't blame the music, they'll blame the customers. "We can't be losing money because our music sucks; we spent $X million on market research, the hottest jailbait talent, marketing tie-ins, promotion, and market saturation! It must be because of those evil file sharers! That's why they're not buying our music! It has to be! It's all their fault!"
Unfortunately, that means that before the music industry wakes up and discovers that its been digging its own grave (sleep-digging?) it will continue to punish all the law-abiding purchasers of legitimate music with increasingly restrictive DRM in a vain attempt to stop the "evil file sharers." Anyone with even a rudimentary grasp of good business practices knows that the fastest way to bankrupcy is to punish your own customers. The record companies, in their unique position as a near-monopoly, can probably get away with this for a little while longer before the backlash. But the backlash is coming, and it will be a lot messier than a "slight downturn in sales."
I look forward to when "adult magazines" can magically display another cover, like, say, "wired" to give you some privacy.
Yes, because when you turn that copy of "Wired" on its side and three more leaves of the centerfold flip down, people will automatically assume, "Sure, he's just looking at a large wiring diagram."
This seems like a pretty predictable move to me. Microsoft's entire Office business model is based on vendor lock in; word processors in general are starting to plateau, since they have reached a point where new features are giving diminishing returns. Other than opening legacy documents, there is no reason for companies to use MS Office over one of the alternatives, so Microsoft is counting on vendor lock-in to keep selling licenses. Office currently represents one quarter of Microsoft's total revenue, and they will do anything to protect that.
Once open standards are prevelant, MS Office will simply become one of many alternatives, and seen in that light it doesn't really stand out. To protect their status, Microsoft has to convince the PHBs that "open" means "clear text storage format"... and then they embrace, extend, extinguish.
The ray of hope in all this is moves like the Massachussetts state government made, where they specified that "open" means what we (at Slashdot) all know it really means: fully documented, standardized, cross-platform, and format-frozen. Then they required that document formats used by the state conform to true openness. Microsoft can rant, rave, market, convince, and press-release until they are blue in the face, but if their format is not truly open, MA won't use it. Period. We need more initiatives like that, especially from some of the larger companies. Then maybe Microsoft will be forced to compete in the word processor market on the basis of product quality, and not vendor lock in. I think Microsoft could write an office suite that really kicks some serious ass and does it all with truly open formats, but they would have to change their focus quite a bit, and their inertia is currently preventing them from doing that.
If the orbits are correct then you can hide the companion from our view. Very unlikily but stranger things are seen in the galaxy.
No, you really can't. You see, everything in the universe that's made of matter has its own gravity, and this gravity tends to affect things in its vicinity. In fact, it could be said that everything in the universe affects everything else; luckily, most of these interactions are so tiny that they can be safely thrown out of the equations and the margin of error is on an order of magnitude so small that even an angel would have to pick up his robes and tread carefully to dance on it.
In a closer vicinity, such as the solar system, things affect each other with real-world measureable results. Distant suns wobble distinctly when they have planets orbiting them. The Earth's orbit is changed slightly by the presence of the other planets, and the planets' motions are changed slightly by the presence of ours, all in ways that people can predict, if they put enough variables in their equations (for the mathematically inclined: the orbit is no longer a single conic section at that point-- it becomes a very complex set of joined conic sections). If another sun, or even a planet, existed in our same orbit on the other side of the sun (actually in the L3 libration point, which is the only place it could orbit the sun and not allow us to see it, ever) we might not be able to directly observe it from Earth, but we would certainly be able to notice the effect it has on the other planets in the solar system. Jupiter would wobble just the wrong way, and Mars would not be quite where we thought it would be after factoring in the gravity of every known object in the solar system.
Come to think of it, perhaps the Mars Polar Lander was expecting the ground to be a few kilometers farther away than it really was...
But I digress. My point is that a mathematically closed two-body orbital system is a pipe dream. There is no such thing as a closed system in the universe when it comes to orbits, and we have become quite good at predicting the presence of objects just by watching how they affect the orbits of known objects.
I find it bizarre that you would assume he is guilty. What ever happened to "Innocent until proven guilty"?
Unfortunately for "Ohio Man", this is a civil case, not a criminal case. In such instances, the concept of "innocent until proven guilty" is a little de-emphasized. The prosecution does not need to convince anyone "without a shadow of a doubt", they only need to show a "preponderance of evidence", which I take to mean that if the judge is 51% conviced he's guilty, then he is. Any lawyers present may want to clarify.
I realize, of course, that this does not violate the *spirit* of "innocent until proven guilty", but given the state of the civil courts in this country, it doesn't seem to be a concept that is emphasized very heavily. At the very least, this guy will settle out of court to avoid the legal battle, because his chances of winning are very slim. I don't condone what he (allegedly) did, but it does seem like he doesn't have much recourse even if he IS innocent.
Slashdot Mirror
An updated version with more operating systems:
UNIX Airways: everyone brings one piece of the plane along when they come to the airport. They all go out on the runway and put the plane together piece by piece, arguing non-stop about what kind of plane they are supposed to be building.
Mac Airlines: all the airline personnel look and act exactly the same. Every time you ask questions about details, you are gently but firmly told that you don't need to know, don't want to know, and everything will be done for you without your ever having to know, so just shut up and get on the plane.
Windows 9x Air: The plane leaks gas, doesn't fly straight, and engines fall off during the flight. To fix problems with the avionics, the pilots just land and take off again. However, each plane has the word "internet" painted crudely on the side, and so every flight is full.
Windows XP Air: the terminal is pretty and colorful, with friendly stewards, easy baggage check and boarding and a smooth take-off. After about 10 minutes in the air, the plane explodes with no warning whatsoever.
Windows Vista Air: the executives of Windows Air hold press conferences every three months to talk about their exciting new line of international service, but at every press conference, the list of cities they fly to gets shorter.
Windows Server Air: just like Windows XP Air, but costs more, uses much bigger planes, and takes out all other aircraft within a 40-mile radius when it explodes.
Windows Media Center Edition Air: Just like Windows XP air, except you get to watch the first ten minutes of an inflight movie before the plane explodes.
Linux Air: UNIX Airways employees who finally figure out what kind of plane they are building decide to start their own airline. They build the planes, ticket counters and pave the runways themselves. They charge a small fee to cover the cost of printing the ticket, but you can also download and print the ticket yourself, and otherwise the trip is free. When you board the plane, you are given a seat, four bolts, a wrench and a copy of the Seat-HOWTO.html. If anyone has trouble installing their seat, the other passengers are very happy to help out. Once settled, the fully adjustable seat is very comfortable, the plane leaves and arrives on time without a problem and the in-flight meal is wonderful. You try to tell customers of the other airlines about the great trip, but all they can say is, "You had to do WHAT with the seat?!''
GNU/Linux Air: Captain Stallman refuses to take off because of a panel on the flight deck that is not made out of a transparent material.
Server Linux Air: cargo only, but fast, reliable, and economical, if you can find a pilot who is also a mechanic.
Desktop Linux Air: just like Linux Air, except the flight never leaves because the pilots continually argue over whether the plane should be painted red or blue.
Debian Linux Air: just like Linux Air with pre-installed seats and a self-repairing plane, but their terminal is small and no one can find it.
Gentoo Linux Air: apon arriving at the airport, the stewardess hands you the plans to build an F-22 Raptor.
MacOSX Airlines: employees of Mac Airlines bought planes from Linux Air, and then designed their own style of very comfortable seats and a great terminal. The flight is incredibly smooth and comfortable with great service, you arrive ahead of schedule, and there is a live band on every flight. Tickets are incredibly expensive and you are only allowed to bring baggage if you use suitcases built by MacOSX Airlines.
Again, apologies to Doc Searls and Linux Journal.
I'm sure I can't be the only one here who finds the continual blurring of lines between "state"/"country" and "corporation" a bit unnerving.
Perhaps, but perhaps you're also reading too much into the name. Would you feel better if the position was exactly the same, with the same person in it, but the title was Secretary of Technology? Or Minister of Administration? Or Almighty King And Ruler Of All That Is Digital And Government Owned?
The blurring of lines between government and corporations is only problematic when the underlying motivations (working for the voters vs. maximization of profit) are blurred, or when the groups are both working together in exclusive mutual self-interest, leaving the rest of us in the dark about it.
I'm not saying this isn't happening, but calling someone in charge of technology a Chief Information Officer is hardly creating a corporate shill.
Even more awesome is the fact that the dude's name is "Mads Nipper". Now there's a name that will get a few double takes when you present your business card.
I dictate that I were speaking in Krach42 dialect, which allows for the spelling "misspellt", along with "definately". ;)
:)
"Please descibe the effects of the American Revolution in your own words."
"Grabblet koonkie purtonony, viscolia trae blakknet ontor whazzmardlen."
d prob i c w dis sys: d msgs typd n2 yahoo msngr rnt typd n englihs, nyway. dey usu lok mch mre lk dis, an evn ppl av a hrd tym readn em.
You misspellt "neway"
You misspelt misspelt.
d prob i c w dis sys: d msgs typd n2 yahoo msngr rnt typd n englihs, nyway. dey usu lok mch mre lk dis, an evn ppl av a hrd tym readn em.
Translate that, suckers!
What I would really like to see is a more standard charging mechanism.
I'm with you on that one. I'd even like to see standard battery/power options across all devices, like the mythical "power pack" you see in games and sci-fi movies. These power packs work in just about anything: pull a few off the main environmental system circulating air and use it to power the radio to call for help. Then, just as the monster is crashing into the room, pop the same power pack into your plasma rifle to take that hellspawn down. Once the monster has been killed, put the power pack into your cell phone to order your victory pizza. Just remember to put it back into the environmental control system, or you might all die of oxygen deprevation before you even get to the free cinnamon sticks.
...Fox can finally kill off the dying cash cow that is the Simpsons and put it out of its misery.
Right, because it would be better if Fox cancelled the show that makes them the largest piles of cash.
The Simpsons may not be as good as it was in the glory years, but it's still averaging a healthy 10 million viewers a week. And it's also one of the most recognizable shows on television, which makes it attractive to advertisers.
The entire television situation can be boiled down to this: the people watching the shows are not the customers, they are the product. The advertisers are the customers. And whether or not a show stays on the air has everything to do with economics. If not enough people watch, then the show is pulled. Period. With the numbers the way they are, cancelling a show may piss off two or three million viewers, but that's ok; this other show we have gets FIFTEEN million a week!
These television executives are not stupid; after all, they did get very rich off of a totally ad-supported revenue stream. The intelligence of the writers is still up for debate, but their job is only to get you to watch, not to create art*.
You can have art, or you can have business. But you can't have both.
*There are of course exceptions to this rule, when great writing and lots of people watching converge. But they are very very rare.
I don't get why you guys are coming off with this kind of response KNOWING how in Florida 2000 we all got to see how it did NOT work, and how people got confused or thrown off by their poor understanding of how it DID work. Through what may be deliberate fiddling, or more likely incompetence, the ballot paper in parts of Florida made it potentially unclear to some people who they were voting for, and unclear to those counting the votes who the voter had actually voted for. That is what I call a total farce, and it couldn't have happened if the election had been conducted using a simple sheet of paper with a handwritten X scrawled next to the chosen candidate.
I agree with you whole-heartedly, but there are several factors keeping things from being that simple.
The ballots here in the US usually contain a huge number of elections. In the last presidential election, we were asked not only to vote for the president, but also for congressmen, judges, city councilmen, county board members, and other various municipal elected officials, not to mention the three to five different local resolutions on each ballot. The butterfly ballot system (which became famous in Florida in 2000 for the Pat Buchanan situation) is simply a way to condense a large amount of information in an anonymous way onto a small ballot card. These things are literally books, usually with ten or more pages of elections to vote for. It's not a perfect system, certainly, but putting all the same information on a single sheet of paper with room for marking a candidate, clearly delimiting the various elections taking place, allowing for instructions in both English and Spanish, and making the text large enough to read makes for a rather large sheet of paper. And asking people to read candidates off one sheet and mark their choice on another sheet creates all the same confusion and problems people had with the butterfly ballots.
I think our best bet in the US for paper ballots is to create printed booklets with instructions and a single election on each page. The actual listed candidates and boxes for marking a vote would be contained on a perforated sheet like a coupon, which the voter rips out and stuffs in the ballot box. The voter would keep the booklet after voting. The creation of these booklets could be automated without much fuss; each municipality could retrieve their booklets as a PDF file and have them printed and stapled before the election. It's not like ballots are secret until the day of the election.
But truly, in any voting system, accuracy boils down to the skill of the people recording the votes. In paper voting, that means the people counting, the people recording the votes, the people calling in the numbers to state headquarters, and the people assisting voters with questions. In computerized voting, that means the people who designed and built the hardware, the people who wrote the firmware, the people who wrote the software, and the people in charge of the networks doing the reporting to a central agency. Mistakes will be made, and recounts will happen. If automation does not help fix the mistakes that are made, and in fact creates many more problems, then it is not worth the trouble.
Why is Congress and the FCC even bothering with what is obviously not within their powers as delegated to them by the Constitution? The 9th and 10th Amendments apply here.
Because we let them. They do not have any power that we as a people don't grant to them. Luckily for them, that granting of power can be passive, since voter apathy about issues that truly matter to our freedoms (not the abortion and gay-marriage shoutfests) is at an all time high.
First, setting a regulatory standard for television broadcasts and forcing the industry to adhere to them is no longer necessary -- when TV was new, I can understand government enforcing a standard. With technology changing monthly, letting the market figure out what is needed is the best solution.
The government only has a right to regulate those areas where there is a finite amount of space for competition, such as the radio spectrum. There are only so many radio bands, and companies have to share. Regulating ensures that the sharing is done fairly (at least in a perfect world, which this isn't). The FCC has no business regulating cable television, since there is no scarcity of bandwidth. Most cable television broadcasters self-censor in order to avoid public backlash. But there is no legal reason why Spike TV can't start broadcasting porn.
To me, this seems to be simple cronyism by the State. By creating these standards, they're creating a high cost to entry in the video broadcast market.
Politicians always try to protect those who give them money. Media companies contributed $26 million in the 2000 and 2002 election cycles.
The quicker we see broadband hit the homes, the more I realize that broadcast television is a complete waste of space. Deregulating ALL broadcast television and letting the frequencies be used by wireless broadcasters would make much more sense to me. Can you imagine how cheap and how fast wireless would be if we gave up all those megahertz?
Fast? Certainly. Cheap? Not on your life. Keep in mind it would be sold by the same companies that charge $50 a month for basic cable that is completely ad supported.
Broadcasting isn't even important: people want video on demand (whether by cable, satellite, ThePirateBay, or PVR).
Hear, hear. The days of the "push medium" are coming to a middle.
Broadcasting isn't even efficient anymore: advertisers prefer knowing exact numbers rather than "we think we hit 700,000 with this show."
Absolutely. Unfortunately, if the advertisers knew exactly which ads were working and which were not, they would purchase less advertising, since they would be able to stop "wasting" money on advertising that is ineffectual. This worries the sellers of advertising space.
In the long run, Congress and the FCC are applying ideas from 1970 to technology that could change 20 times in the next 20 years.
Legislation is always years behind technology. Nothing new to see here.
Why restrict it?
Because their campaign financers are asking them to.
I say it is time to just ignore these guys -- if big TV broadcasters want to continue to make a mess and force the little guy out of the business, let them. We'll counter it with rebroadcaster [sic] their garbage over BitTorrent and through the sharing of information as it was meant to be: free. Take the infinite supply of data versus the finite demand and you end up with a cost of zero.
Ok, I was with you up until here.
Information may want to be free, but entertainment sure doesn't. It costs a lot of money to create that entertainment, and the people who made it naturally want that money back. The problem is that within the current system, the market forces are skewed, because people have to pay for bundled sets of entertainment or allow the advertisers to choose what they watch. Unfortunately for the consumers, a pull medium is simply not viable as an
In his universe, flight simulators aren't used to give people an idea of what it's like to fly a plane - it's used by terrorists to kill people.
Shouldn't he be out shutting down every damn pilot licensing school in existence then? I mean, if everyone who plays MS Flight Simulator is training to be a terrorist, then what the hell are all those PILOTS planning?! My God, every building in the country is going to be hit by a plane!
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"Flaps, check. Aelerons, check. Rudder, check. Tower, this is November Six Five Niner Whiskey Tango requesting clearence for jihad training on runway 2."
"Roger, November Six Five Niner. You are cleared for mass murder simulator."
It never ceases to amaze me how little people I talk to seem to know about our political process...
"Laws are like sausages. It is better not to see them being made."
- Otto von Bismark
I don't know why you guys (Americans) don't make this kind of legislative foolishness illegal.
You know, you're right. I'm going to head out and write my senator right now about how we need a law saying you can't attach bills to other bills just to get them passed.
Unfortunately, no one in the senate would ever vote for such a crazy idea. We better attach it to the Save The Children Act of 2005 to get it passed.
I gave him a crack Office 2003 CD and told him power point was there. He said he would never use software he didnt pay for, and gave it back. So I told him to goto openoffice.org, and get the free office suite.
You offered him an illegal copy of Microsoft trash before you pointed him to openoffice.org?
What are you, new?
Doesn't look like "Because it would be really geeky to own one" is going to cut it.
Probably not. However, it might be fairly geeky to own a copy of Lunar Sourcebook: A User's Guide to the Moon (the definitive volume housing all the geological data collected by the US and Russia on lunar samples returned to the Earth), and not just because copies of it are expensive and fairly difficult to find.
You have access to the moon rocks? Sweet! Can I have just a little one please?
Request one yourself.
The people who are so insistent that the moon landings were a hoax simply re-interpret and filter what facts will fit their cospiracy theory; anything that disagrees with their conclusions are simply ignored or swept under the rug.
Exactly. These are people who don't "believe", they "insist". This, for me, defines the difference between a healthy skeptic and a conspiracy nutter. When presented with evidence that explicitly contradicts their stance, "believers" will change their position, having updated their worldview slightly. However, "insisters", when presented with the same contradictory evidence, will find some way to discredit the evidence, even to the point of making stuff up. They will steadfastly refuse to change their worldview in the slightest.
Jamie and I have done the research, and figured that the only way to end the debate about the "myth" of the Apollo moon landing is to go there, and bring back something that was left there during one of the Apollo moon landings.
No, the only way to end the "debate" over the moon landings is to silence all the conspiracy nutters, because they are the only ones having the "debate". (Of course, in this country, we have constitutional protections preventing that.) Having the Mythbusters try to debunk it would only give the "debate" credibility. The rest of us have actual critical reasoning skills, and don't entertain such nonsense.
If anyone on Slashdot still needs convincing why the debate over the moon landings is utterly ridiculous, please form an orderly line to your right, and I will personally beat each of you over the head with the 842 lb. of moon rocks brought back by the Apollo astronauts.
Gamers and people who listen to music are terrorists in the eyes of the ??AA.
You don't mean '??AA'. What you really mean is '[(RI)|(MP)|(GN)]AA'. The NCAA, AIAA, AAAA and NIAA kindly ask that you not lump them in with such filth.
No what really will happen...[i]s that some ISPs just won't do it, and they'll make all the money. I gaurentee that it'll become a big advertising point for ISPs that don't do this, and they'll be many. In fact I predict if the DSL provider starts doing it, the cable company choses not to and hammers them for it in ads.
How great it would be if the market worked like that. But it doesn't.
What happens when the [(RI)|(MP)]AA lobby congress to make it illegal for certain ports to be open, or certain services to be allowed on the network? After all, if you're not downloading your pay-for-play DRMed content over port 80 from a media conglomerate like a good little consumer, then you must be a filthy thief and pirate.
Of course the black hats will be able to work around any restrictions the telcos put in place, and the telcos will retaliate, leading to an all-out arms race. But I for one do not want to have to chase bleeding edge technology just to get reasonable download speeds on protocols other than HTTP.
If the music isn't any good, people won't buy it, and there will be a downturn in the music industry. Duh.
Aye, there's the rub. The music industry has long since abandoned all pretense that they are interested in producing a quality product. They are in it *strictly* for the money, and that means manufacturing low-risk music that they think people will buy.
If there is a downturn in music sales, the record company execs won't blame the music, they'll blame the customers. "We can't be losing money because our music sucks; we spent $X million on market research, the hottest jailbait talent, marketing tie-ins, promotion, and market saturation! It must be because of those evil file sharers! That's why they're not buying our music! It has to be! It's all their fault!"
Unfortunately, that means that before the music industry wakes up and discovers that its been digging its own grave (sleep-digging?) it will continue to punish all the law-abiding purchasers of legitimate music with increasingly restrictive DRM in a vain attempt to stop the "evil file sharers." Anyone with even a rudimentary grasp of good business practices knows that the fastest way to bankrupcy is to punish your own customers. The record companies, in their unique position as a near-monopoly, can probably get away with this for a little while longer before the backlash. But the backlash is coming, and it will be a lot messier than a "slight downturn in sales."
I look forward to when "adult magazines" can magically display another cover, like, say, "wired" to give you some privacy.
Yes, because when you turn that copy of "Wired" on its side and three more leaves of the centerfold flip down, people will automatically assume, "Sure, he's just looking at a large wiring diagram."
This seems like a pretty predictable move to me. Microsoft's entire Office business model is based on vendor lock in; word processors in general are starting to plateau, since they have reached a point where new features are giving diminishing returns. Other than opening legacy documents, there is no reason for companies to use MS Office over one of the alternatives, so Microsoft is counting on vendor lock-in to keep selling licenses. Office currently represents one quarter of Microsoft's total revenue, and they will do anything to protect that.
Once open standards are prevelant, MS Office will simply become one of many alternatives, and seen in that light it doesn't really stand out. To protect their status, Microsoft has to convince the PHBs that "open" means "clear text storage format"... and then they embrace, extend, extinguish.
The ray of hope in all this is moves like the Massachussetts state government made, where they specified that "open" means what we (at Slashdot) all know it really means: fully documented, standardized, cross-platform, and format-frozen. Then they required that document formats used by the state conform to true openness. Microsoft can rant, rave, market, convince, and press-release until they are blue in the face, but if their format is not truly open, MA won't use it. Period. We need more initiatives like that, especially from some of the larger companies. Then maybe Microsoft will be forced to compete in the word processor market on the basis of product quality, and not vendor lock in. I think Microsoft could write an office suite that really kicks some serious ass and does it all with truly open formats, but they would have to change their focus quite a bit, and their inertia is currently preventing them from doing that.
If the orbits are correct then you can hide the companion from our view. Very unlikily but stranger things are seen in the galaxy.
No, you really can't. You see, everything in the universe that's made of matter has its own gravity, and this gravity tends to affect things in its vicinity. In fact, it could be said that everything in the universe affects everything else; luckily, most of these interactions are so tiny that they can be safely thrown out of the equations and the margin of error is on an order of magnitude so small that even an angel would have to pick up his robes and tread carefully to dance on it.
In a closer vicinity, such as the solar system, things affect each other with real-world measureable results. Distant suns wobble distinctly when they have planets orbiting them. The Earth's orbit is changed slightly by the presence of the other planets, and the planets' motions are changed slightly by the presence of ours, all in ways that people can predict, if they put enough variables in their equations (for the mathematically inclined: the orbit is no longer a single conic section at that point-- it becomes a very complex set of joined conic sections). If another sun, or even a planet, existed in our same orbit on the other side of the sun (actually in the L3 libration point, which is the only place it could orbit the sun and not allow us to see it, ever) we might not be able to directly observe it from Earth, but we would certainly be able to notice the effect it has on the other planets in the solar system. Jupiter would wobble just the wrong way, and Mars would not be quite where we thought it would be after factoring in the gravity of every known object in the solar system.
Come to think of it, perhaps the Mars Polar Lander was expecting the ground to be a few kilometers farther away than it really was...
But I digress. My point is that a mathematically closed two-body orbital system is a pipe dream. There is no such thing as a closed system in the universe when it comes to orbits, and we have become quite good at predicting the presence of objects just by watching how they affect the orbits of known objects.
I find it bizarre that you would assume he is guilty. What ever happened to "Innocent until proven guilty"?
Unfortunately for "Ohio Man", this is a civil case, not a criminal case. In such instances, the concept of "innocent until proven guilty" is a little de-emphasized. The prosecution does not need to convince anyone "without a shadow of a doubt", they only need to show a "preponderance of evidence", which I take to mean that if the judge is 51% conviced he's guilty, then he is. Any lawyers present may want to clarify.
I realize, of course, that this does not violate the *spirit* of "innocent until proven guilty", but given the state of the civil courts in this country, it doesn't seem to be a concept that is emphasized very heavily. At the very least, this guy will settle out of court to avoid the legal battle, because his chances of winning are very slim. I don't condone what he (allegedly) did, but it does seem like he doesn't have much recourse even if he IS innocent.
I've been reading for a few years and I still don't know what IANAL means
n g
I Am Not A Lawyer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_sla