I've often thought about how obselete democracy is. Every four years,we get to put a cross on a piece of paper for some bloke I've never met, to represent me. Why do we still use this archaic system of governance we call democracy? Computer technology is such a powerful enabling technology that could revolutionise governance. Many fields (e.g. Banking) have been totally revolutionised by computerisation. We could have the same revolutionisation within governance, by applying our collective intellectual capital to governing a country.
What is possible today is a franchise based voting system based not on the old premis of land ownership, but on our participation in society. We could be rewarded for our qualifications, our age, our life experience, with voting points within our areas of expertise. We could continually vote within our fields of expertise on issues of governance, and be rewarded for this participation by having more voting points within our individual areas of expertise.
Participatory Governance is a totally feasable option today, which would prevent the type of misuse of power the parent article is about.
Actually Altruism has a much simpler and more primative basis. Our primary urge is to survive, and that includes our urge to survive in groups. Giving to other members of your group increases their ability to survive, and therefore your ability to survive. That is why we feel good when we are altruistic - because we are increasing both our own odds of survival, and our group's odds of survival.
Quite honestly, its the year 2007. In todays world where technology, and more specifically, the internet is so pervasive, and the judge does not know what a website is, is he really in a position to issue judgement in this case?
IF you carry a cell phone, Big Brother can locate you anyway, and track where you have been. Not to mention traffic cams that can ID number plates, or payments made via credit or debit cards, or Passports or numerous other technologies that timestamp your location.
The mark-of-the-beast thing is so out of date. Someone came up with this meme +- 2000 years ago and it seems to scare the vast majority of western civilization shitless. Many aspects of our civilization have changed since then, including the advent of Democracy which at least ensures some modicum of freedom for us. With the democratic process we can choose our own level of freedom as a nation.
> Natural selection selects who will die, not who will live.
I Think you are missing the point of Natural Selection. I am a living being. Every day I am faced with choices, and decisions that need to be taken. From the options available to me I select the option that I deem to be most valuable to my survival. This is fundamental Natural Selection. Over time, my choices or selections have a cumulative effect on my survival. For instance if I was faced with the choice to live in a cold or warmer climate, and I select the colder climate, over time I will adapt to the climate. Over generations, there will probably be physical changes to the genetic lineage that supercedes me, to adapt to the environment, and to increase the odds of survival within it. This is evolution.
There is no "Natural Selection" process that decides my fate for me. Apart from the choices I make in my own life, and the effect of the environment upon me, and how I co-exist in it, there is no greater power that decides whether I should live or die.
An important concept in evolutionary biology is natural selection. Natural selection does not always imply that the correct choice for survival has been made (evidence: all of the species that have become extinct), but rather that some selection has been made that the life form perceives to be beneficial. What you are describing is part of evolution. It may only be a VERY SMALL increment in evolution, but evolution it remains.
For those of you who don't know. Firebird is a fork of Borland Interbase. For a brief moment in time, Borland decided to open source Interbase, but quickly changed their minds about it. But, during the open source period, a group of developers siezed the moment, and created the fork.
Interbase has 20-25 years of development behind it (and therefore Firebird). It is stable, and used by many major corporations, including NASA, throughout the world. In terms of open source products, it probably has the MOST mature code base of ALL open source projects.
Interbase used to compete in the Oracle, Sybase marketspace, but lost considerable market share in the 1990's. What differentiates Firebird from most open source projects, is its history. Most open source databases have been built from the ground up, whereas, by the time Firbird came into existance, it already had 20-25 years of development in the source code base.
So while, the core dev team of Firebird is fairly small, poorly funded, and badly marketed, the potential still exists to turn this into a project that will compete strongly in the OSI DB arena.
...and in 2025 the Galactic publishing company, well known for their travel guide, The Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, bought Google to include their data as a subset of the entry of a little planet in the backwaters of the universe, called earth. Just in case someone wished to travel there....
Rob Mitchell is missing the point. You cannot run an election on beta software. You cannot use a real election as a beta testing process to debug your software.
Diebold should be treating their voting machines with the same reverance as NASA treats their operational platforms because, like space flight, there is no second chance in an election. You cannot just restart the process and continue. If a voting platform fails, the entire election process effectively fails. Diebold needs to do the job properly the first time, and if they can't then they must be man enough to admit it, and get out of the game early.
When your dealing with printers with very specific PDF requirements, you need the customisability provided by Distiller
This is rubbish. I owned a small newspaper for a while. We used an free PDF renderer that used to print our final output in PDF format. This was perfect for our printing partners (a large national newspaper printer)
We also ran our entire operation (with the exception of layout and design on Apple) on Ubuntu Linux LTS with linux terminals serving most of the organisations IT requirements.
The parent poster should consider that there are alternatives. Krita replaces another piece in the puzzle, possibly initially replacing Freehand in our case, and even Quark in the future.
Components are not crap. Its really about how technology is implemented, and in this cycle, where components fit into the process. For instance if I want my app to send email, I am not going to re-implement SMTP, I would rather use an SMTP component that has been fully developed. for the rest, code re-use is sufficient.
Components really come to the fore, where bulk-reuse can be implemented. For instance, I wrote an app last year that needed a CAD interface. I bought a CAD component for +- US$ 150. For the rest of the app It was custom code. The app would not have come into existance without the CAD component, because it was not worth the cost for the owner of the app to pay for the full development of a full CAD interface.
I am primarily a Delphi developer. Having used Delphi for more than 10 years, I can honestly say that the principal of component reuse does work. Delphi has a vey mature component library available for it (over 10 years worth).
Where things fall down, are, that many managers dont really understand what a component model is, and consequently most programmers are not encouraged to use components and so never really learn how to program using the component based model.
Components are the core of RAD developement, and RAD does work. It is a proven model, although often frowned upon by the purists.
Slashdot Mirror
I've often thought about how obselete democracy is. Every four years,we get to put a cross on a piece of paper for some bloke I've never met, to represent me. Why do we still use this archaic system of governance we call democracy? Computer technology is such a powerful enabling technology that could revolutionise governance. Many fields (e.g. Banking) have been totally revolutionised by computerisation. We could have the same revolutionisation within governance, by applying our collective intellectual capital to governing a country.
What is possible today is a franchise based voting system based not on the old premis of land ownership, but on our participation in society. We could be rewarded for our qualifications, our age, our life experience, with voting points within our areas of expertise. We could continually vote within our fields of expertise on issues of governance, and be rewarded for this participation by having more voting points within our individual areas of expertise.
Participatory Governance is a totally feasable option today, which would prevent the type of misuse of power the parent article is about.
Install a urinal. The initial cost may be higher, but over time the investment will pay for itself.
Actually Altruism has a much simpler and more primative basis. Our primary urge is to survive, and that includes our urge to survive in groups. Giving to other members of your group increases their ability to survive, and therefore your ability to survive. That is why we feel good when we are altruistic - because we are increasing both our own odds of survival, and our group's odds of survival.
You related to Microsoft Bob?
Quite honestly, its the year 2007. In todays world where technology, and more specifically, the internet is so pervasive, and the judge does not know what a website is, is he really in a position to issue judgement in this case?
IF you carry a cell phone, Big Brother can locate you anyway, and track where you have been. Not to mention traffic cams that can ID number plates, or payments made via credit or debit cards, or Passports or numerous other technologies that timestamp your location.
The mark-of-the-beast thing is so out of date. Someone came up with this meme +- 2000 years ago and it seems to scare the vast majority of western civilization shitless. Many aspects of our civilization have changed since then, including the advent of Democracy which at least ensures some modicum of freedom for us. With the democratic process we can choose our own level of freedom as a nation.
> Natural selection selects who will die, not who will live.
I Think you are missing the point of Natural Selection. I am a living being. Every day I am faced with choices, and decisions that need to be taken. From the options available to me I select the option that I deem to be most valuable to my survival. This is fundamental Natural Selection. Over time, my choices or selections have a cumulative effect on my survival. For instance if I was faced with the choice to live in a cold or warmer climate, and I select the colder climate, over time I will adapt to the climate. Over generations, there will probably be physical changes to the genetic lineage that supercedes me, to adapt to the environment, and to increase the odds of survival within it. This is evolution.
There is no "Natural Selection" process that decides my fate for me. Apart from the choices I make in my own life, and the effect of the environment upon me, and how I co-exist in it, there is no greater power that decides whether I should live or die.
An important concept in evolutionary biology is natural selection. Natural selection does not always imply that the correct choice for survival has been made (evidence: all of the species that have become extinct), but rather that some selection has been made that the life form perceives to be beneficial. What you are describing is part of evolution. It may only be a VERY SMALL increment in evolution, but evolution it remains.
For those of you who don't know. Firebird is a fork of Borland Interbase. For a brief moment in time, Borland decided to open source Interbase, but quickly changed their minds about it. But, during the open source period, a group of developers siezed the moment, and created the fork.
Interbase has 20-25 years of development behind it (and therefore Firebird). It is stable, and used by many major corporations, including NASA, throughout the world. In terms of open source products, it probably has the MOST mature code base of ALL open source projects.
Interbase used to compete in the Oracle, Sybase marketspace, but lost considerable market share in the 1990's. What differentiates Firebird from most open source projects, is its history. Most open source databases have been built from the ground up, whereas, by the time Firbird came into existance, it already had 20-25 years of development in the source code base.
So while, the core dev team of Firebird is fairly small, poorly funded, and badly marketed, the potential still exists to turn this into a project that will compete strongly in the OSI DB arena.
...and in 2025 the Galactic publishing company, well known for their travel guide, The Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, bought Google to include their data as a subset of the entry of a little planet in the backwaters of the universe, called earth. Just in case someone wished to travel there ....
Rob Mitchell is missing the point. You cannot run an election on beta software. You cannot use a real election as a beta testing process to debug your software.
Diebold should be treating their voting machines with the same reverance as NASA treats their operational platforms because, like space flight, there is no second chance in an election. You cannot just restart the process and continue. If a voting platform fails, the entire election process effectively fails. Diebold needs to do the job properly the first time, and if they can't then they must be man enough to admit it, and get out of the game early.
When your dealing with printers with very specific PDF requirements, you need the customisability provided by Distiller
This is rubbish. I owned a small newspaper for a while. We used an free PDF renderer that used to print our final output in PDF format. This was perfect for our printing partners (a large national newspaper printer)
We also ran our entire operation (with the exception of layout and design on Apple) on Ubuntu Linux LTS with linux terminals serving most of the organisations IT requirements.
The parent poster should consider that there are alternatives. Krita replaces another piece in the puzzle, possibly initially replacing Freehand in our case, and even Quark in the future.
Components are not crap. Its really about how technology is implemented, and in this cycle, where components fit into the process. For instance if I want my app to send email, I am not going to re-implement SMTP, I would rather use an SMTP component that has been fully developed. for the rest, code re-use is sufficient.
Components really come to the fore, where bulk-reuse can be implemented. For instance, I wrote an app last year that needed a CAD interface. I bought a CAD component for +- US$ 150. For the rest of the app It was custom code. The app would not have come into existance without the CAD component, because it was not worth the cost for the owner of the app to pay for the full development of a full CAD interface.
I am primarily a Delphi developer. Having used Delphi for more than 10 years, I can honestly say that the principal of component reuse does work. Delphi has a vey mature component library available for it (over 10 years worth).
Where things fall down, are, that many managers dont really understand what a component model is, and consequently most programmers are not encouraged to use components and so never really learn how to program using the component based model.
Components are the core of RAD developement, and RAD does work. It is a proven model, although often frowned upon by the purists.
It just goes to show, how seriously hotels' take their mini-bar security ;-)