In 1996, I was an "election worker trainee" as part of a school program to get students interested in civics. My job was to be one of the people who helped out if people had trouble with the machine and reset the machine for the next voter after they were done.
My state had some very old mechanical voting booths with levers for each candidate or party lines and one big lever for closing and opening the curtain. When you were done voting you were supposed to pull the lever to open the curtain and your votes would be recorded. Anyway sometimes people would have problems and despite being told no fewer than THREE times not to pull the big lever until voting was complete they would use it to open the cutain and ask me a question, at which point the only thing I could say was that they had voted and i'm sorry but you can't vote again.
This is a problem with all current anonymous systems since you can't match the voter to the vote. The scary part about your post was that you pushed "cast ballot" while you were still uncertain about your vote BEFORE consulting the election worker, thereby ensuring that any mistakes will be uncorrectable. It seems to have worked out for you this time, but I can't stress enough that everyone must be sure of their ballot BEFORE casting. The election workers are there to help you.
What would you propose then? They had to certify somebody and Bush was ahead after 2 recounts (one was definately illegal, the other was questionable since it was not statewide) and ahead after several more recounts following the certification that were done on the whim of the various press agencies.
What were the other stated goals? More lifting capacity? More delta-V? staying up longer?
Was spreading tax-money around an actual stated goal of the program?
I'll conceed that the reusable premise has not been thoroughly tested, but maintain that the ostensible purpose for the space shuttle was to reduce the cost of space flight to an acceptable long-term level. The fact that it turned out to be a pork project is in fact a documented result of what i'll call the reusable experiment.
As it turned out the politics could not be overcome for such a large and long-term project. What we know to be lip service now was not as obviously so then.
You are definately correct in pointing out that with only one data point in the history of this country, and i think two overall -- USSR cancelled their reusable program before it really started though, there really isn't enough statistical evidance that a reusable program can't be cheaper, only that so far, 100% of the time they haven't been.
Every time there's a vote "problem" the principles try to find a way to make voting easier, which they usually interpret as more effortless. So in South Florida, they go from punch-card paper ballots to video terminals, which is supposed to require even less effort because the problem is incorrectly diagnosed as people being unable to punch a hole in a thin sheet of paper even under the circumstance that the hole was pre-weakened.
So now we start seeing problems with screen registration and we're suprised? Now it's even EASIER to vote WRONG! On a side note, after hundreds of people touching these things, they're gonna get really greasy and gross. Is someone going to wipe the screen after each user?
What we need is a system that makes voting deliberate. Maybe have people write the full name or something, spell out yes or no on referendums, etc. Maybe have some anonymous system for voters to check their own votes after the election to make sure they are recorded correctly.
What we don't need is more "easy voting" schemes that a light breeze could influnce.
The Media and Bush's opponants post facto made it about WMD's. They were part of the problem, but not the problem in its entirety. Also part of the problem was fact that planes patrolling the much vaunted no-fly zones were being shot at at an increasingly frequent rate.
The justification for going to war was and always was the repeated violation of UN resolutions including but not limited to the also-vaunted sanctions themselves.
The (possibly disputable in light of recent news) fact that we have not recovered any evidence of WMD's does not change the fact that Saddam for whatever reason was thwarting UN inspectors from discovering the existance/lack of existance of those weapons. A decade of violations of UN sanctions and resolutions with no repercussions deligitimizes those very resolutions and yet the UN still appears to have no desire of actually enforcing its own decisions.
Bush went to war to save the UN. He did not count on the UN kicking and screaming for its own irrelevance.
And yet there are some very good games out there that are written exclusively for windows, Do you suggest that the people who enjoy these games should give them up because the OS is better? the OS provides the framework for the applications to run. Ideally, you shouldn't even notice its there.
No. Your own eye makes the adjustment, kind of like when you look in a telescope or binocular.. as long as it's focused *enough* your eye accomodates to the image, though the goal with the telescopes and binoculars is to get so close as to work with the "unaccomodating eye" which means that your eye can relax and see a good image.
The problem is that the cost is so high that only governments and CEO's can afford it. When the Sir Edmond Hillary's can afford it, then mars will be explored without any public expense whatsoever.
It is important to note that there is no indication that "reusable" = cheaper, which was the primary reason for the Space Shuttle experiment. The space shuttle was a test to see if we could put stuff and people in orbit more cheaply and safely than before by using a reusable design. Almost 30 years later, the results of that experiment are being ignored: we can't. To be fair this answer was well supported after the Challenger disaster...
The space shuttle is not only less functional than the saturn V -- can put 30,000 lbs into LEO vs. the saturn V's 200,000 lbs into LEO or 10,000 lbs to the MOON, it is more costly (Since you must average the fixed cost over a small number of launches and the per-launch costs were approaching saturn-V levels anyway).
It is also less safe. Although the two disasters during the past hundred or so launches mean a 2% failure rate for the program, both of those occured during production phase of the program rather than the development phase as in other systems.. i.e. Arianne has a dismal safety record compred to the shuttle, but its numbers are improving with every launch.
Furthermore, since the structural mass of any launch vehicle is about 10% (on a GOOD day), calling it reuseable in the same way as your car is reuseable is a bit of a stretch.
Factor in aerospace margin-o-safety of 1.1 compared to automobiles at about 2 and you begin to realize that a significant portion of the non-fuel part of a reusable launch vehicle will be replace during the necessary maintenance interval between each an every launch.
As long as the use of chemical rockets require systems to be built within a hair's breadth of their tolerances, I would personally prefer a fresh one each launch. I'd know that there were no fatigue problems since the rocket was new and, perhaps more importantly, every single one is an improvement over the last one.
I know it seems like I'm unfairly reaming the shuttle program, but it was necessary to have the program to shake out all of its difficulties. If it had gone the other way -- lots of cheap launches, then we'd have learned much also, so in a sense, failure is just a usefull as success would've been.
I think NASA is aware of the difficulties and i'm glad to hear that they are finally thinking of scrapping the program (even if it is just a rumor), but I seem to recall that the replacement for the shuttle was scrapped not because of technical problems but because the various pieces of the project could not be spread around enough States to make it feasable to enough congress people.
There's too much emphasis on making voting EASY, presumabably because people who can't figure out a voting form are much easier to manipulate than people who can oh.. say.. read.
We need to make voting more deliberate and accountable -- the votes need to be accountable not the voters, would it be so hard to create a system where the people can check their votes anonymously?
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In 1996, I was an "election worker trainee" as part of a school program to get students interested in civics. My job was to be one of the people who helped out if people had trouble with the machine and reset the machine for the next voter after they were done.
My state had some very old mechanical voting booths with levers for each candidate or party lines and one big lever for closing and opening the curtain. When you were done voting you were supposed to pull the lever to open the curtain and your votes would be recorded. Anyway sometimes people would have problems and despite being told no fewer than THREE times not to pull the big lever until voting was complete they would use it to open the cutain and ask me a question, at which point the only thing I could say was that they had voted and i'm sorry but you can't vote again.
This is a problem with all current anonymous systems since you can't match the voter to the vote. The scary part about your post was that you pushed "cast ballot" while you were still uncertain about your vote BEFORE consulting the election worker, thereby ensuring that any mistakes will be uncorrectable. It seems to have worked out for you this time, but I can't stress enough that everyone must be sure of their ballot BEFORE casting. The election workers are there to help you.
What would you propose then? They had to certify somebody and Bush was ahead after 2 recounts (one was definately illegal, the other was questionable since it was not statewide) and ahead after several more recounts following the certification that were done on the whim of the various press agencies.
What were the other stated goals? More lifting capacity? More delta-V? staying up longer?
Was spreading tax-money around an actual stated goal of the program?
I'll conceed that the reusable premise has not been thoroughly tested, but maintain that the ostensible purpose for the space shuttle was to reduce the cost of space flight to an acceptable long-term level. The fact that it turned out to be a pork project is in fact a documented result of what i'll call the reusable experiment.
As it turned out the politics could not be overcome for such a large and long-term project. What we know to be lip service now was not as obviously so then.
You are definately correct in pointing out that with only one data point in the history of this country, and i think two overall -- USSR cancelled their reusable program before it really started though, there really isn't enough statistical evidance that a reusable program can't be cheaper, only that so far, 100% of the time they haven't been.
Every time there's a vote "problem" the principles try to find a way to make voting easier, which they usually interpret as more effortless. So in South Florida, they go from punch-card paper ballots to video terminals, which is supposed to require even less effort because the problem is incorrectly diagnosed as people being unable to punch a hole in a thin sheet of paper even under the circumstance that the hole was pre-weakened.
So now we start seeing problems with screen registration and we're suprised? Now it's even EASIER to vote WRONG! On a side note, after hundreds of people touching these things, they're gonna get really greasy and gross. Is someone going to wipe the screen after each user?
What we need is a system that makes voting deliberate. Maybe have people write the full name or something, spell out yes or no on referendums, etc. Maybe have some anonymous system for voters to check their own votes after the election to make sure they are recorded correctly.
What we don't need is more "easy voting" schemes that a light breeze could influnce.
The Media and Bush's opponants post facto made it about WMD's. They were part of the problem, but not the problem in its entirety. Also part of the problem was fact that planes patrolling the much vaunted no-fly zones were being shot at at an increasingly frequent rate.
The justification for going to war was and always was the repeated violation of UN resolutions including but not limited to the also-vaunted sanctions themselves.
The (possibly disputable in light of recent news) fact that we have not recovered any evidence of WMD's does not change the fact that Saddam for whatever reason was thwarting UN inspectors from discovering the existance/lack of existance of those weapons. A decade of violations of UN sanctions and resolutions with no repercussions deligitimizes those very resolutions and yet the UN still appears to have no desire of actually enforcing its own decisions.
Bush went to war to save the UN. He did not count on the UN kicking and screaming for its own irrelevance.
I'd say the real question is this: If Kerry wins the election, what's he going to do without Bush around for him to do the opposite of?
haha, their CORE product eh.
it never gets old.
And yet there are some very good games out there that are written exclusively for windows, Do you suggest that the people who enjoy these games should give them up because the OS is better? the OS provides the framework for the applications to run. Ideally, you shouldn't even notice its there.
No. Your own eye makes the adjustment, kind of like when you look in a telescope or binocular.. as long as it's focused *enough* your eye accomodates to the image, though the goal with the telescopes and binoculars is to get so close as to work with the "unaccomodating eye" which means that your eye can relax and see a good image.
The problem is that the cost is so high that only governments and CEO's can afford it. When the Sir Edmond Hillary's can afford it, then mars will be explored without any public expense whatsoever.
It is important to note that there is no indication that "reusable" = cheaper, which was the primary reason for the Space Shuttle experiment. The space shuttle was a test to see if we could put stuff and people in orbit more cheaply and safely than before by using a reusable design. Almost 30 years later, the results of that experiment are being ignored: we can't. To be fair this answer was well supported after the Challenger disaster...
The space shuttle is not only less functional than the saturn V -- can put 30,000 lbs into LEO vs. the saturn V's 200,000 lbs into LEO or 10,000 lbs to the MOON, it is more costly (Since you must average the fixed cost over a small number of launches and the per-launch costs were approaching saturn-V levels anyway).
It is also less safe. Although the two disasters during the past hundred or so launches mean a 2% failure rate for the program, both of those occured during production phase of the program rather than the development phase as in other systems.. i.e. Arianne has a dismal safety record compred to the shuttle, but its numbers are improving with every launch.
Furthermore, since the structural mass of any launch vehicle is about 10% (on a GOOD day), calling it reuseable in the same way as your car is reuseable is a bit of a stretch.
Factor in aerospace margin-o-safety of 1.1 compared to automobiles at about 2 and you begin to realize that a significant portion of the non-fuel part of a reusable launch vehicle will be replace during the necessary maintenance interval between each an every launch.
As long as the use of chemical rockets require systems to be built within a hair's breadth of their tolerances, I would personally prefer a fresh one each launch. I'd know that there were no fatigue problems since the rocket was new and, perhaps more importantly, every single one is an improvement over the last one.
I know it seems like I'm unfairly reaming the shuttle program, but it was necessary to have the program to shake out all of its difficulties. If it had gone the other way -- lots of cheap launches, then we'd have learned much also, so in a sense, failure is just a usefull as success would've been.
I think NASA is aware of the difficulties and i'm glad to hear that they are finally thinking of scrapping the program (even if it is just a rumor), but I seem to recall that the replacement for the shuttle was scrapped not because of technical problems but because the various pieces of the project could not be spread around enough States to make it feasable to enough congress people.
There's too much emphasis on making voting EASY, presumabably because people who can't figure out a voting form are much easier to manipulate than people who can oh.. say.. read.
We need to make voting more deliberate and accountable -- the votes need to be accountable not the voters, would it be so hard to create a system where the people can check their votes anonymously?