I guess the other thing that I like about it is, if the power goes out, or the machines all suddenly don't work, or if there aren't enough machines, or if a vulnerability in the machines is discovered and cannot be corrected, the voter can still vote in the same way. It becomes the election office's job to figure out how to count the votes in that set of circumstances, but it's still possible to have the election.

I wonder if a mixed-gender crew could really handle a long space mission without being set up to be intentionally polyamorous or hedonistic, assuming that sex in such an environment is possible. Let's face it, the people we'd send on a long-term mission need to be in the best shape of their lives when the leave and need to have the kind of physique that remains healthy and wiry without a whole lot of exercise, so it'll be filled with sexually-desirable people. If the crew factionalizes on sexual lines or finds members fighting or ostracized then it could fail in its mission.

The only solution that I see is to recruit people that will be polyamorous without developing excessive jealousy. Our society officially doesn't approve of such an arrangement, though popular culture fantasizes about it more than society wants to admit.

I vote we use the entire discographies of Tiffany, Yoko Ono, and Hansen. And by entire discographies, I mean all of the discs minted.

I don't mind listening to AC/DC from time to time, and power conversion aside, there are much worse acts whose work could be destroyed^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hused for this.

Yeah, I think that the answer is, "yes, we should go back to paper ballots."

I like optical-scan. You mark the paper ballot with a pen with indelible ink, connecting the two marks next to the candidate's name, then put the ballot into the input hopper and watch it go through the machine and get deposited in the locked output hopper. Granted, you don't get a display to confirm that your markings were read right, but if the system is designed right then a subset of polling stations at random is audited by hand, and if the results are too far out of line then the entire election is audited by hand. Plus, you can actually perform the audit without anything more complex than a desk with an inbox, an outbox, a pencil, and some paper. Some light might help so one can work at night.

Even optical-scan isn't foolproof; the ballot can be messed up if someone is an idiot or the machine that does the counting could malfunction or be tampered with, but at least there's a fairly easy way to recount if needed.

I think that now that the craziness that was building it so incredibly slowly is over, it's actually doing something useful in that it's teaching us what it takes to live in space, and giving us means by which to test living in space where the consequences of screwing up are relatively minor. We've already learned the full-Russian approach and gained insight from their moments, and ISS is allowing us to see if we've learned from those mistakes.

I look at it along similar lines to Biosphere II down near Tucson, Arizona. It was the first major attempt to build a self-sufficient (within the scope of allowing for the ambient conditions in the local climate to influence heat) habitat that was supposed to be independent of outside assistance. It failed, but why it failed is important and can be learned from. Unfortunately I don't think that those lessons are being applied to the original facility, so we're not continuing to learn in ways that we should, but hopefully all of the studies of what happened will inform future scientists and engineers of the pitfalls in their plans and designs.

I should add, I'm no fan of 3d printers for mass-market goods. Niche market products or niche markets themselves are an entirely different situation though.

it's that you can't stock Digikey on the space station, but can "print" all of the knobs, buttons, and switches you need when one breaks. It reduces the number of spare parts needed in inventory and might offer a solution for a broken part that was not anticipated for, or to make something new when otherwise macguyvering a temporary solution.

think of the cheese spacer from the pizza box scenario as the eggheads are prototyping a solution.

bad choice of term. Sounds like the license is really unfavorable.

Gettin' jiggy w'it!

With apologies, however slight, to Will Smith.

Oh, believe me, the smartphone has been an extremely useful tool. I've gone from pager and carrying a palm pilot (technically a USR Pilot 5000), to an alphapager and palm (a newer one), to a semi-dumb phone with a few capabilities (Moto Razr V3), to a T-Mobile G1 (HTC Dream), to a Samsung Galaxy SII. My wife has followed a similar path but without the pagers and with an analog cell phone in the mix. Neither of us would voluntarily give up our smartphones.

The crux of it is, we don't have our lives revolve around the smartphones. We use them as a means, not an end, and they're far from the only means at our disposal.

If someone took the time and effort needed to correspond in a meaningful way by way of personal letter then I'd probably consider them a friend, but I don't really expect that to ever be the case again.

Considering that companies have been abusing the H1B process for some time now, perhaps we're just seeing a correction in-part inspired by greater success in potential migrants' home countries.

Salary is a supply/demand characteristic. The more people capable of doing a job, generally the less it pays. This holds true across the entire spectrum of employment until one reaches those that control the market in which they are paid from (ie, corporate executives). Desirability of a job is often not much of a deciding factor in the worth of that job either; janitorial services employees have awful jobs sometimes, but nearly every able-bodied worker could do those jobs, so the wages are particularly low because no individual worker is much in-demand.

This applies to H1B skilled-worker visas since more techncial workers means less demand per-worker, so wages fall. It's further excerbated by the H1B worker not being as free to exercise the free-market due to a real risk of deportation, so they can be paid less than the market average, which further helps to pull down the market average.

I expect the situation isn't as dire as the article makes it out to be.

I'm so sorry for you.

My friends are the ones I call and speak with in real-time or visit with. Do those that aren't willing to make the effort to communicate in real-time deserve to be called friends?

I'll have to give the Youtube link a try when I get home. Only time I saw the film it was on a multigeneration VHS tape, so who knows how awful it looked compared to its initial release...

There's a whole series of books starting with this one too, been meaning to read 'em.

Wow.

At the time I was into seti@home. I had a 486 Microchannel box running it, it took a very, very long time to do packets. If there even was a seti@home client that could run on that IIci I wonder how long it would have taken to do a single packet...

So long as they're a talented artist, yes. If they're like me, it'd look like something drawn on a kids' menu at a sit-down restaurant with the provided four crayons.