I understand that there are all kinds of open source projects out there, and some better than others. But based on my personal experience with some of the more prominent ones, I seriously believe a government run by open source types would be as terrible as what we have now. The following thoughts are based just on those projects.
It would respond to complaints about the government with comments like "Go build your own government! Ours is done right! Anybody who is not a constitutional lawyer is an idiot who just doesn't know enough about government!"
People who want to report potholes, or suggest an amendment to the constitution, would have to check their clocks. Everybody whose name starts with A through K has to file their complaint in the morning, K through P in the afternoon, and the rest have to file their complaint in the evening. Because good user experience is second to efficiency and having the complaints partially sorted as they're filed will make the database sorting algorithm run faster.
It would have a stupid name. Probably something like UNITED, which is an acronym in which the U stands for "united".
NASA would get more than 70% of all federal funding. The N would stand for NASA. Eventually it would be replaced with another organization that is exactly the same, except it's called GNASA. And even though it's NASA, the N stands for "Not NASA". Nobody really knows what the ASA stands for. Probably the same thing the NITED stands for.
The national anthem would be forked into two songs because we'd never agree on whether it should say "O'er the land of the free (as in speech)" or "O'er the land of the free (as in beer)". The pledge of allegience would be the most forked project in the history of the earth.
Boundary lines would be drawn so that every state has exactly the same number of citizens, so they make a nice Beowulf cluster.
The military would be the drones from Star Wars. The guy who set them up insists we should not complain about their horrible inaccuracy because they're still in beta.
The drones would be running android, which is actually working pretty well but none of the drones have bluetooth capability.
Some guy will come up with the best amendment to the constitution in years but he'll get locked up for killing his wife, so we won't use it.
The Chewbacca defense will actually work.
And if it were run by Slashdotters, censorship would be guaranteed by the constitution. Because censorship is basically what moderation is. You take the comments you like and make them more prominent, while taking comments you don't like and making them disappear. So whoever was in power in the beginning will crush anybody who introduces new ideas, resulting in old-boy network groupthink. I'm pretty sure that 24 hours from the time of this post, either it will be at +5 Funny, or only people browsing at -1 will see it.
My BFF told me General Motors should get bailed out because the jobs of millions of employees are at stake. That's not the case with Tesla.
At the time I told him, when Obama becomes president, he should push for Tesla to get funding because he wants to support alternative energy. But that wouldn't help at all if Tesla can't produce a low-priced vehicle. What would stop them from taking the money and continuing to offer toys strictly for super rich people?
But that's like $12 for one channel. They used to promise for the cost of the cable subscription, you get all commercial free channels. The problem is regular TV has gotten so inadequate that they can charge just to show regular TV that actually works. And that's only going to get easier for them in the United States with DTV.
Very funny. Now think about how people who want to play the latest DirectX games can just spend their money on a second processor or more cores instead of buying a graphics card and bitching about how the drivers are terrible. Think about how, if OpenGL did this, there would be complete OpenGL support on Linux instead of just support for whatever cards got reverse engineered decently. And finally, think about how much this will push the graphics card manufacturers to actually update their drivers since they are now competing with hardware that has built-in support from the operating system.
There's no reason this should have been marked as a 'troll'. Google is the default search engine for every popular web browser except the one controlled by Microsoft, and their search bar is installed with tons of software, including the most installed plugins on the internet. It seems very much like when Internet Explorer was being installed with every software package on the planet.
The problem is not that people can't switch search engines. It's that they're unaware of their options. They're being fed Google. A lot of them don't know the search bar from the URL bar, and type addresses in the search engine to find the site. And even if they knew what a search engine was, and that other search engines existed, they wouldn't understand why it's worth the hassle of switching to another bar that has the same looks and specifications as the one they already have. So we have a situation in website makers have to follow Google's rules because Google is number 1, but most of the people using Google aren't in a position to choose any other as number 1.
Google took over in a time when people actually had to type in a website address to find a search engine, just as Netscape thrived in a time when people actually had to download a web browser. Now everything comes preinstalled, and if this situation existed when Yahoo or AltaVista was king, Google never would have had a chance even when it was remarkably better than the rest.
Have you considered the possibility that so much innovation comes out of space and military research because the government's spent so much money on them?
This is more a question of the military spending than space exploration, but it applies to both. I'm not saying they're bad for innovation. Spending on those projects indirectly fuels technological advancement. But before I get modded down for not being a NASA fanperson, shouldn't you at least consider what might happen if the middleman were eliminated and the money was spent directly on technological advancement?
$5 was about half a percent of my uncle's monthly social security check. And the entire check really wasn't enough money to sustain him. But you're saying take money from it to fund a project you like. Now imagine somebody says you could take half a percent of NASA's money and give it to her to fund her project completely, and the government actually gives her the money. That's how I feel about your suggestion.
Before the iPhone came out, I used a fancy Japanese phone to play music and video. As soon as Linux is available for the iPhone, I will give my old phone to my wife. Then I will install Linux on the iPhone and use it for music and video, as well as games.
I think what Malekin is saying is, things have leaned so far in one side's favor that we need somebody to lean things heavily in the other side's favor in order to get back in the middle again.
I hope I don't get whooshed by a jackass for this, but I think it's worth mentioning that turntables are actually being manufactured and sold right now, and people actually use records.
I am, to say the least, a strong Obama supporter. But I think this is very relevant. It is true, there is a difference between snooping out of curiosity and snooping due to national security concerns. But the security freaks didn't have enough merit to their case to get a warrant, which meant there was no reason to consider this a national security issue, in my legally clueless opinion. So both cases are a matter of violating privacy for no reason. The only difference is in the FISA case, the telco employees may have been acting in fear.
Maybe they don't want the laptop running the cellphone operating system because, to this point, the cellphone operating systems have been crap. But the iPhone system may not be crap. Maybe it is time.
Slashdot Mirror
I understand that there are all kinds of open source projects out there, and some better than others. But based on my personal experience with some of the more prominent ones, I seriously believe a government run by open source types would be as terrible as what we have now. The following thoughts are based just on those projects.
It would respond to complaints about the government with comments like "Go build your own government! Ours is done right! Anybody who is not a constitutional lawyer is an idiot who just doesn't know enough about government!"
People who want to report potholes, or suggest an amendment to the constitution, would have to check their clocks. Everybody whose name starts with A through K has to file their complaint in the morning, K through P in the afternoon, and the rest have to file their complaint in the evening. Because good user experience is second to efficiency and having the complaints partially sorted as they're filed will make the database sorting algorithm run faster.
It would have a stupid name. Probably something like UNITED, which is an acronym in which the U stands for "united".
NASA would get more than 70% of all federal funding. The N would stand for NASA. Eventually it would be replaced with another organization that is exactly the same, except it's called GNASA. And even though it's NASA, the N stands for "Not NASA". Nobody really knows what the ASA stands for. Probably the same thing the NITED stands for.
The national anthem would be forked into two songs because we'd never agree on whether it should say "O'er the land of the free (as in speech)" or "O'er the land of the free (as in beer)". The pledge of allegience would be the most forked project in the history of the earth.
Boundary lines would be drawn so that every state has exactly the same number of citizens, so they make a nice Beowulf cluster.
The military would be the drones from Star Wars. The guy who set them up insists we should not complain about their horrible inaccuracy because they're still in beta.
The drones would be running android, which is actually working pretty well but none of the drones have bluetooth capability.
Some guy will come up with the best amendment to the constitution in years but he'll get locked up for killing his wife, so we won't use it.
The Chewbacca defense will actually work.
And if it were run by Slashdotters, censorship would be guaranteed by the constitution. Because censorship is basically what moderation is. You take the comments you like and make them more prominent, while taking comments you don't like and making them disappear. So whoever was in power in the beginning will crush anybody who introduces new ideas, resulting in old-boy network groupthink. I'm pretty sure that 24 hours from the time of this post, either it will be at +5 Funny, or only people browsing at -1 will see it.
Do you mean Google beta quality like gMail, Or Google beta quality like Android on the G1?
Somewhere there's a squirrel who was ridiculed by all the other squirrels for stockpiling acorns last year... but who's laughing now?????
My BFF told me General Motors should get bailed out because the jobs of millions of employees are at stake. That's not the case with Tesla.
At the time I told him, when Obama becomes president, he should push for Tesla to get funding because he wants to support alternative energy. But that wouldn't help at all if Tesla can't produce a low-priced vehicle. What would stop them from taking the money and continuing to offer toys strictly for super rich people?
But that's like $12 for one channel. They used to promise for the cost of the cable subscription, you get all commercial free channels. The problem is regular TV has gotten so inadequate that they can charge just to show regular TV that actually works. And that's only going to get easier for them in the United States with DTV.
He got the point. He's just hoping enough other people miss the point to get him modded insightful.
How long will it take for true 3D acceleration to become an expected standard feature on PC's?
When it no longer adds over $100 to the cost of the computer, and most users actually care.
Very funny. Now think about how people who want to play the latest DirectX games can just spend their money on a second processor or more cores instead of buying a graphics card and bitching about how the drivers are terrible. Think about how, if OpenGL did this, there would be complete OpenGL support on Linux instead of just support for whatever cards got reverse engineered decently. And finally, think about how much this will push the graphics card manufacturers to actually update their drivers since they are now competing with hardware that has built-in support from the operating system.
There's no reason this should have been marked as a 'troll'. Google is the default search engine for every popular web browser except the one controlled by Microsoft, and their search bar is installed with tons of software, including the most installed plugins on the internet. It seems very much like when Internet Explorer was being installed with every software package on the planet.
The problem is not that people can't switch search engines. It's that they're unaware of their options. They're being fed Google. A lot of them don't know the search bar from the URL bar, and type addresses in the search engine to find the site. And even if they knew what a search engine was, and that other search engines existed, they wouldn't understand why it's worth the hassle of switching to another bar that has the same looks and specifications as the one they already have. So we have a situation in website makers have to follow Google's rules because Google is number 1, but most of the people using Google aren't in a position to choose any other as number 1.
Google took over in a time when people actually had to type in a website address to find a search engine, just as Netscape thrived in a time when people actually had to download a web browser. Now everything comes preinstalled, and if this situation existed when Yahoo or AltaVista was king, Google never would have had a chance even when it was remarkably better than the rest.
Have you considered the possibility that so much innovation comes out of space and military research because the government's spent so much money on them?
This is more a question of the military spending than space exploration, but it applies to both. I'm not saying they're bad for innovation. Spending on those projects indirectly fuels technological advancement. But before I get modded down for not being a NASA fanperson, shouldn't you at least consider what might happen if the middleman were eliminated and the money was spent directly on technological advancement?
$5 was about half a percent of my uncle's monthly social security check. And the entire check really wasn't enough money to sustain him. But you're saying take money from it to fund a project you like. Now imagine somebody says you could take half a percent of NASA's money and give it to her to fund her project completely, and the government actually gives her the money. That's how I feel about your suggestion.
can somebody translate this to english?
This is my best effort:
Before the iPhone came out, I used a fancy Japanese phone to play music and video. As soon as Linux is available for the iPhone, I will give my old phone to my wife. Then I will install Linux on the iPhone and use it for music and video, as well as games.
Android is for programmers. iPhone is for people who want an iPod phone. Both products are friendly to the people their makers give a damn about.
Are you going to wait until Android can use every piece of the G1 hardware before you get one of those?
Now imagine you've spent a couple of hours trying to get the system going and you get an out of cheese error.
I think what Malekin is saying is, things have leaned so far in one side's favor that we need somebody to lean things heavily in the other side's favor in order to get back in the middle again.
Maybe Apple can really show the PC Pro guys to be idiots by doing the whole thing live. Or any iPhone user can do it live and post it on YouTube.
I hope I don't get whooshed by a jackass for this, but I think it's worth mentioning that turntables are actually being manufactured and sold right now, and people actually use records.
I think it would help the CD sales if they'd stop shipping CD's that won't play in a computer.
Having Mel B as a spokesmodel would probably gain quite a bit of support for the memristors.
Maybe the money's going toward Package Shaping software...
My mammoth is already calculating prime numbers.
I am, to say the least, a strong Obama supporter. But I think this is very relevant. It is true, there is a difference between snooping out of curiosity and snooping due to national security concerns. But the security freaks didn't have enough merit to their case to get a warrant, which meant there was no reason to consider this a national security issue, in my legally clueless opinion. So both cases are a matter of violating privacy for no reason. The only difference is in the FISA case, the telco employees may have been acting in fear.
Maybe they don't want the laptop running the cellphone operating system because, to this point, the cellphone operating systems have been crap. But the iPhone system may not be crap. Maybe it is time.
You think that's bad? Just wait till somebody's out walking their mammoth past your giant bowl and the mammoth has had too much water...